In the pursuit of discovering how our society defines male and female gender types, my classmates and I created surveys. In the process of creating mine I had difficulty deciding how I was going to word my questions. After deliberation, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to see how our society's stereotypes of men and women are reflected and possibly if they can be proven not true. I decided to use well known stereotypes like: men don't listen, women are neat, men are tactile, women notice changes, etc... After having 8 teenagers fill out this survey (4 women, 4 men) I was not surprised by the results I received.
The results show that for many of the stereotypical characteristics of males and females that I tested only 3 showed any significance (please note this survey was not analyzed statistically, the sample group was too small). The following were trends that I observed in the results:
Q2. Males vary in their ability to notice a change; females almost always notice a change.
Q3. Females like romantic comedies, males like thrillers.
Q4. Males generally don't like the mall.
My lack of surprise in the results most likely stems from my hypothesis that I formulated prior to making the survey. When looking at social constructs, especially stereotypical ones, there should be some sort of trend mimicking that construct, or else it would not exist in the first place. However, in looking at these trends I could not help but notice that many of the responses reflected the participant's personalities (I know all of the people that responded to my survey). This begs the question, are survey's like this one accurate in determining a person's gender? I would say no. I believe these surveys or quizzes show how an individual's personality "fits" within a specified gender construct. For an example, 3 of the participants got a score of zero, which I classified as "androgynous." Also, one of the females that I surveyed received a classification of "masculine," when in fact she is female. These results represent how stereotypes are nothing more than just that, stereotypes. I feel they are necessary in creating culture-wide interpretations of a characteristic, like being male or female, which allows for gender constructs to exist. However, these constructs should not be taken as an over-branching classification, individual personalities must be accounted for.
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I like the idea that you used stereotypes to create your quiz, and I would agree that it doesn't really reflect the gender of the person who took it but more the personality of the person who took it. I had a similar issue, the guys who took my quiz simply kinder and more open than the stereotypical guys...and thus they scored more feminine than masculine. I found it interesting, like you, that gender stereotypes do not really follow "the rules." Why do we have stereotypes then if they aren't even true any more??
ReplyDeleteMy quiz actually had the same results (in regards to the guys results). I also used a lot of stereotypes in my quiz. I was thinking about, basically, "stereotypical" teenagers, especially for the questions regarding masculinity. Obviously gender stereotypes aren't completely true anymore and, as Allie said, they are a better judge of personality than actual gender.
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