Gender and profession

Even though it seems like genders are completely equal nowadays, stereotypical gender roles still exist. For example women tend to choose professions that include communicating and collaborating with others or where they can have a positive effect on them. Even in school, girls do better in social sciences and languages while boys are better in physics or math. From an early age environment and parents influence their children. It is shown in one of the studies that looked at nine-month old babies that had to choose toys. After completing this study, researchers concluded that girls did choose pink toys, while boys chose the blue ones. However it's not correct to assume that children know their gender right away, they usually are influenced by parents buying them toys that are stereotypical.  A better study that shows gender differences in an early age is a study where researchers examined  babies that were just few months old and had to look at a picture of a face or a mechanical objects. Girls looked at faces longer and boys looked at mechanical objects longer, which kind of explains why today different genders choose different kinds of jobs. 


Image 1

Image 1 is a diagram that shows number of female and male employees in the UK in 2008. It is clear that males tend to choose career paths that are more technical such as Engineering, while females tend to choose to be nurses or teachers. 

Gender roles are constantly being influenced by nature vs. nurture.  Biologically,  these influences are usually genes that are inherited from parents and evolution. Psychologically, these influences are stereotypical gender roles surrounding us. When a child is little, he looks at the gender that he thinks he is and starts acting in the same way which influences his behaviour as a boy or a girl. 

It's strange how some researchers state that gender differences are caused in an early age and are completely biological and that male and female brains don't have any differences. I think that that is completely wrong because gender is influenced by both biological and sociological factors and we can't just say that genders are different just because of their genes. That's because society shapes gender roles too as well as influence what profession a person may choose.