Research Paper on:
Gender Stereotypes/ Effect on Female Development

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Development ? May, 2000 ? properly! Biologically, gender dictates that only men can be fathers and only  women can give birth; however, each culture throughout history has developed its own concepts as to certain behaviors that are ascribed either to men or women, which are over and  above the biological difference between the sexes. Each culture has tended to look on these concepts of gender as being "natural" for men and !women?i.e., as being a quality that  is inherent to their biological sex. However, even a brief survey of other cultures shows that these concepts can differ widely. If, indeed, there were "natural" roles for men and  women, it would be logical to expect for them to remain consistent from culture to culture and this is not the case. For example, in the US, it is  generally believed that women are more emotional then men. The societal concept of the female gender assigns girls and women this attribute. However, in Iran, it is the men  who are considered to be "naturally" more emotionally. Iran is a patriarchal country?men are definitely the dominant gender?yet in this culture women are considered to be the coldly practical sex,  while emotionality is considered to be a trait of the masculine gender (Holme, 1972). The people of this culture inevitably live up to their concept of the gender roles, with  men expressing their emotions freely, and wome!n being taught to suppress theirs. In other words, how we act as "men" and "women" has been largely shaped by how societies have  perceived these roles. Since the 1970s, historians have been investigating the origins of our ideas relative to gender roles?how we expect men and women to react,. Merlin Stone (1976),