Gender Role Development
A gender role is a certain behavior that is thought to be fitting of a particular gender depending on cultural norms. These gender roles shape the way that humans live their everyday lives in all different parts of the world. This section will cover the Social Learning Theory's perspective of gender roles.
Albert Bandura & Jerome Kagan
Albert Bandora theorized that modeling played the biggest role in gender role development. Social learning theorists believed that gender roles are learned by children through watching others and peers or authority figures of the same gender so that they know what is "proper" for a boy or girl to do. Kagan suggested that gender role development is separated into 4 phases. The first phase being the child identifying the model and when the child believes that because they share external characteristics with their role model, they must share internal characteristics as well which prompts the child to continue to copy the models actions which is the second phase. The third phase is the child's environment treating the child as it treats the model. The fourth phase ends with the child believing that they have become the model and acting as an example to others looking for a model.
Self-Connection
Gender role development has played a part in my life for as long as I can remember and continues to to this day. Since I was a child, I've been told and heard others in my age group be told "stop acting like a little boy/girl!" This caused me to center everything that I do around the thought "what would a girl do ?" I watched my older female family members live their lives and found myself copying their every behavior. Now I see myself as the model, just as the Social Learning Theory suggested.
Application to Nursing
When you think about a nurse, what comes to mind? I bet you thought of a woman. Gender roles in nursing stem from a point in history when women weren't allowed to become doctors but they were allowed to practice nursing so it was a field primarily dominated by women. This has caused the extremely outdated stereotype that female nurses are favored over male nurses or that nursing is a "feminine" profession. More and more men are becoming nurses every year so hopefully that stereotype ceases to exist in the near future.