Gender Roles

I liked Christi Raia's project on Gender Roles. It stuck out to me because even though the gender roles of males and females are supposed to be equal, and over the years they have gotten a lot better, there are still stereotypes and "social norms" in our society today. The stereotypical women, is one who stays home, takes care of the kids, cooks dinner, cleans the house, and has all this ready for her husband when he gets home. The stereotypical man, is one who goes to work and provides for his wife and kids. Not that this is necessarily true for all households, but the "social norm", as people say it, is still that the wife is a stay at home mom, and the husband goes to work. In her project, Christi said that still today, the salary of a male is higher then the salary of a female, and females earn less the 60 percent of what males earn, and that is because still in our society the males are the ones who go to work. But why is that? Why do we think that boys wear blue and girls wear pink? Why is it that sports is a guy thing and dance and cheerleading is a girl thing? And why is it, when girls play sports, they get called a "tom boy"? Like Christi said, this is all traced back to the Roman times, and no we think that that is our "social norm", and who males and females have to be in our society. Men can do anything that women can do, and women can do anything men can do. If the women want to be the one to provide for the family and the man wants to be the one to stay home and take care of the house and kids, they should go for it. If girls want to play football or guys want to be on the cheerleading team they should go for it. I think that males and females should go out and be and do whatever they want to do, and shouldn't let any "social norms" stop them.