Gender Role Stress And Health Research Paper

Gender-role socialization refers to the processes through which individuals acquire attributes appropriate to males and females. Examination of gender roles indicates differences in the content of roles seen as appropriate for men and women. Men are socialized more often than women to be active and to ignore their feelings of weakness. Men are expected to be more independent, autonomous, and strong. It is more acceptable for women to express a wide range of emotions, to pay attention to their moods, and to seek out others for help. While men may be encouraged to be independent, women are taught to be more interdependent. The term interdependence refers to the ability to express interpersonal needs, particularly in emotional relationships, and to relate meaningfully to others in relationships (Greenglass 1982).

2. The Term ‘Stress’

Stress is often used to refer to the perception that the demands of the environment exceed the resources of the person, resulting in a threat to well-being. These may emanate from work, family, and daily hassles, as well as significant life events, and include time pressures, conflicts, and frustration in meeting one’s goals.

2.1 Stress And Health

The way individuals cope with their stress is important for mental health. To the extent that individuals have resources to handle their pressures, they are less likely to suffer deleterious effects of stress. However, when individuals have difficulties in managing demands and stressors, they experience strain. Strain is a consequence of insufficient personal resources to meet demands. To the extent that individuals experience strain, they are more likely to experience deterioration in their physical and/or mental health. Some of the psychological effects of uncontrollable stress are depression, anxiety, panic attacks, hostility, and anger. High levels of stress may also result in physical symptoms including insomnia, headaches, muscular aches and pains, digestion disturbance, and difficulty in carrying out day-to-day activities.

2.2 Stress And The Feminine Gender Role

Research indicates that women are exposed to more stressful life events than are men and, as a result, have higher rates of psychological distress. Women experience depression, anxiety, and mood disorders more than men. Women may appear to be more distressed as a result of the kind of outcome measures typically used in this research. These studies tend to employ self-report measures of symptomatology. Some argue that women appear more distressed because they are more likely than men to report symptoms of all kinds. Gender-role factors contribute to the degree to which individuals report symptoms and seek help. Traditional masculine and feminine gender roles differ in the amount of vulnerability and permissibility in seeking help from others. Traditionally, men are seen as strong and invulnerable, thus restraining men from showing symptoms of mental illness or seeking help. The traditional feminine gender role allows and even encourages vulnerability to problems, thus resulting in greater reporting of symptomatology in women. It is assumed generally that if an individual is coping reasonably well, she he is free from anxiety and depression. This conceptualization of effective coping leads to a bias in research findings given that women, more than men, often express distress (Greenglass and Noguchi 1996).

Notwithstanding women’s greater ‘openness’ regarding their psychological symptomatology, research indicates many reasons for women’s greater distress. Reproductive life events including menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause are stressful life events for women. Within the employment sphere, women tend to be concentrated in low-paying ‘female’ occupational spheres, including education, healthcare, clerical, domestic, and service industries. Women have fewer promotional opportunities, make less money, and often do not have access to membership of the ‘old boys’ network,’ all of which restricts their advancement in the employment sphere. Women professionals and managers are subject to negative stereotyped attitudes that portray women as doing a poor job fitting into the masculine work world. Sex discrimination and harassment are ubiquitous in the workplace. Such attitudes not only harm women’s salary and promotion prospects, they are also detrimental to their mental health. Women in the labor force also perform most of the domestic work, and on average spend more hours in housework and childcare than men. Employed married women manifest higher rates of distress than employed married men. Employed married women with young children experience higher rates of psychological distress than their female childless counterparts or comparable men. Given the demands on women when combining employment and familial roles, many women experience inter-role conflict and/or role overload (Barnett and Marshall 1991, Baruch et al. 1987).

Women’s roles are inherently stressful in that they obligate them to respond to others, including the very young as well as the elderly. Informal care for elderly parents and relatives generally is provided primarily by women. These demands are a significant source of stress, thus playing an important role in women’s mental health. Elements of the feminine gender role endanger women’s mental health, since provision of care for their families and friends is often emotionally and physically draining, particularly given the relative lack of men’s participation in work at home.

2.3 Stress And The Masculine Gender Role

Men have been diagnosed more than women with antisocial personality disorders in which there is a pervasive pattern of disregard for others’ rights. Men are also diagnosed more as having schizoid personality disorders, characterized by detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings. These diagnoses may be seen as exaggerations of the traditional masculine gender role that stresses independence, separation, strength, and invulnerability (Greenglass 1982).

Research in the area of stress and burnout shows that men experience higher levels of depersonalization than women. Burnout at work commonly is measured using a scale (the Maslach Burnout Inventory) (Maslach and Jackson 1986) which yields three subscales: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment. Depersonalization refers to an attitude characterized by being impersonal, callous, and distant from others (Maslach and Jackson 1986). In this context, depersonalization may be regarded as a reflection of men’s repressed emotionality and an ineffective coping form which allows men to continue their work with people yet remain untouched by the others’ suffering.

The strict prohibition against emotional expressiveness in men (except perhaps anger) is one of the most powerful cognitive masculine mandates influencing men and their behavior. Male inexpressiveness is the result of gender role socialization that begins early in childhood. Men are taught that emotional expressiveness is a feminine trait and they learn to distance themselves from femininity. Masculine socialization contributes to and encourages aggressive behavior in men. Men are more involved than women in violent crime, including armed robbery, spouse and child abuse, and rape. While aggression in sports and the military is approved and rewarded socially, the social program associated with masculinity also includes competitiveness and aggression that are socially sanctioned as masculine coping styles.

While women more often express distress in internalized and depressive symptomatology (Chesney and Ozer 1995), men often cope with their feelings differently, since they are more likely to externalize their feelings such as becoming physically aggressive or by distracting themselves from their feelings by engaging in a variety of activities. The violence committed by men against women in its many forms is in part an outcome of a patriarchal society which is dominated by men who see themselves as controlling women in many different contexts. Research suggests that power, sexual control, and aggression are amplified in men in a patriarchal society. The mental health costs of male violence justify re-examination of the prescriptions of the masculine gender role (Greenglass and Noguchi 1996).

Masculine prohibitions and difficulties with emotional expressiveness make it difficult for men to maintain mutually supportive relationships. When under stress, men seem to be less flexible in their coping than women, since they have difficulty expressing positive feelings.

3. Stress, Coping, And Gender Roles

Research shows that the ways people cope with stress differ according to their gender role. Some argue that men are more problem-focused in their coping, and women are more emotion-focused (Folkman et al. 1986). For example, men have been reported to engage more in coping that alters a stressful situation. Some assert that men more often possess psychological attributes, i.e., self-esteem and mastery, which influence their coping. However, gender differences in mastery or self-efficacy are likely to be linked to differences in social experiences rather than to gender per se. A consistently unresponsive or negative environment has been found to affect a person’s sense of self-efficacy, which in turn leads to anxiety and depression. Studies of gender differences in psychological characteristics have pointed out that models of stress and coping were developed primarily on men without consideration of women’s roles and experiences, and may not encompass other aspects of coping including relationship-focused coping techniques.

In research on coping, findings indicate that when education, occupation, and/or position are controlled for, few gender differences are found in coping strategies (Greenglass et al. 1990). The type of coping an individual employs when dealing with stress is often related to the status, resources, and power associated with one’s position. Many more women than men hold lower level jobs with less scope for the use of problem-solving and direct action strategies. Women are also more likely to experience high levels of demands, with low control over demands in the workplace (Greenglass 1985).

In coping research, the focus tends to be on individual behavior as the unit of analysis, and often, autonomous, agentic, and independent behavior is seen as synonymous with effective coping. But research shows that coping is highly specific to both the individual and the context. The social milieu in which a particular stressor is experienced should be incorporated into research paradigms that inquire into the relationship between gender and coping. Women may behave in a more passive way in groups with men, where stereotyped roles and social norms may be more strictly enforced. Women may appear different when acting alone or in a group of women.

3.1 Gender, Social Support, And Mental Health

There is a close relationship between positive health outcomes and social support. Close relationships can help a person cope with psychological distress. In such relationships people can disclose and discuss problems, share concerns, and receive advice keyed to their psychological needs. These relationships can also provide useful information, practical advice and morale boosting, all of which can assist individuals in dealing with their stressors (Cohen and Syme 1985). Both men and women benefit from supportive social interactions, especially intimate ones.

Women are more emotionally involved in others’ lives and serve a nurturing role for a wider network of people. In general, women give and receive more social support than men. Women have more close friends, and emphasize intimacy and disclosure in their friendships. Women’s friendships are more involving and emotionally supportive. Social relationships with women are more health promoting than those with men. Wives are better providers of both instrumental and emotional support than husbands. Men tend to benefit from relationships with women; women generally benefit from relationships with their friends of the same sex (Belle 1982).

Research shows that the connection between social support and coping is stronger in women. Women employ more coping forms involving interpersonal relationships. Other research findings suggest that women use support from others through talking with one another. Women are able to make more effective use of their support networks, since they talk more as a way of coping with stress.

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