The technological revolution is redefining gender norms into the 21st century. – Psychology Today

There’s been a fundamental shift in how we define adulthood—and at what pace it occurs. PT’s authors consider how a once iron-clad construct is now up for grabs—and what it means for young people’s mental health today.
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In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the unwritten rules, expectations and norms (RENs) that shape boys and girls differently during childhood.
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As a psychologist and a student of history, I am hard-pressed to recall a time when gender relations were more contentious than they are now. Although writing about gender issues today can be extremely tricky, I feel compelled to offer a few observations from the socialization experiences I’ve had in groups that were governed by both men and women, respectively, throughout my life.
Like most boys, growing up I was socialized in environments governed by the norms of traditional masculinity. I was on countless sports teams, including my high school’s championship varsity football team, and in college, I played baseball on an athletic scholarship. I was also part of numerous male social groups and spent most of my adolescence working at the local lumber yard.
The male-dominated environments of my youth were disproportionately physical, they demanded toughness, and they helped me integrate into the brotherhood of traditional masculinity.
In the second part of my life, however, I was socialized in environments governed primarily by women. Being educated and trained for a career in psychology in the late 1990s meant that the overwhelming majority of my peers and supervisors were women. I was the only man in my doctoral class, and in most of the professional venues I’ve worked, men comprised a small minority of staff.
In my present work as a psychologist, I have a private practice where more than half of my patients are women (most of whom are either second-wave or fourth-wave feminists) and I’ve facilitated numerous women’s therapy groups. In addition, having coached my daughter and her friends in several different sports over the years, I’ve gotten an education from the next generation of female leaders about what’s cool and what’s not. In contrast to the male social groups of my youth, the abilities upon which success is most dependent in these majority-female environments are emotional sensitivity and communication skills.
What I’ve learned from spending considerable time in both traditionally masculine and feminine environments is that they each have their own implicit rules, expectations, and norms (RENs). In a companion post to this one, The Unwritten Rules of Boyhood and Girlhood, I explained the differences (as I see them) in RENs of traditionally masculine and feminine environments and I discuss how this shapes boys and girls, respectively, into men and women.
In my experience, when the RENs of a particular environment are obvious and understood, most people readily conform, whether or not they agree with them. For instance, when women join a traditionally masculine group, like a police department, or men join a traditionally feminine group, like a yoga studio, they usually do so with the attitude, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and they accept the RENs of that respective environment without complaint.
However, problems begin to arise in environments where it is not fully clear whether traditionally masculine or feminine RENs should prevail. In these domains, like schools, white-collar workplaces, and mixed social groups, men and women tend to project their own RENs onto each environment, which often leads to conflict and resentment. This resentment then gets filtered through the meta-narratives of each gender group with statements like “Steve is just another male privileged a**hole trying to drag us back to the stone age,” or“Women like Beth are responsible for the ‘wussification’ of America.”
From there, the meta-narratives of each gender group get exploited through various media prisms, culminating in contentious imbroglios like Gamergate.
But how did we get here?
For most of recorded history, a disproportionate number of survival activities were not only physical but arduous. Whether it was hunting, farming, mining, shipbuilding, fishing, or the construction trades, most of our species’ survival tasks were delegated to men because men have bigger bodies and greater muscle mass, on average. According to the US Dept. of Health and Human Services, men, on average, are about 15% taller than women and weigh about 20% more (Ogden et al., 2004). Men also have greater total muscle mass relative to women (Jansen et al, 2000), giving them advantages on most tasks of physical strength (Miller et al., 1993; Frontera et al., 1991; Leyk et al., 2007). Therefore, it stands to reason that during times in our collective history when the overwhelming majority of survival tasks required physical strength, men were charged with the responsibility to perform those tasks because, relative to women, their bodies were more capable.
Whether this physical advantage has been a blessing or a curse for men is debatable. On the one hand, with men being trusted with the majority of our species’ physically-demanding survival tasks, men have had the inside track on positions of power within their respective social groups, relegating women to “the reproduction of mothering,” as renowned feminist sociologist Nancy Chodorow suggests. On the other hand, the physical advantages men possess have made them the most obvious candidates for our civilization’s most physically demanding, stressful, and dangerous jobs. It has also meant that men have disproportionately been the ones forced to fight, kill, and die in our species’ countless wars. For these reasons and others, men worldwide have a shorter average lifespan than women by about four years (United Nations, 2015).
But things began to change with the Technological Revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries. Building upon the advances of the initial Industrial Revolution, particularly regarding the development of metal alloys, the Technological Revolution initiated a major shift in the means of production, with heavy machinery replacing men for our civilization’s most laborious and dangerous tasks.
Furthermore, with machines diminishing the need for brute strength for physically-demanding tasks, these jobs could be completed by women and children just as efficiently as men.
As a result of these developments (and the loss of male workers during two world wars), the percentage of women in the workforce has steadily grown over the past 120 years. Moreover, the tasks to be completed by our workforce have changed dramatically as well, with an increasing percentage of jobs requiring intellectual prowess over brute strength, and it is here that women have proven themselves to be at least as capable as men. Apropos of this, women now outnumber men in American colleges (NBER, 2020), medical schools (Glicksman, 2017) and law schools (Pisarcik, 2019) for the first time in history.
In the early part of the 20th century, virtually all work environments were dominated by men, and thus, the majority of public workplaces and social environments were governed by the implicit RENs of traditional masculinity. Since then, however, women have entered the workforce in larger numbers, and accordingly, an increasingly loud chorus of women has expressed discomfort with the traditionally masculine RENs of their workplaces, with calls for the RENs of traditional femininity to replace them.
We now find ourselves at a watershed moment in history, where, for the first time, women represent nearly half of the overall workforce and in many careers, women comprise upwards of 98% of the workforce. Given the new reality of women participating in the workforce at such high levels, is it any wonder why there is so much disagreement about whose RENs should govern those respective environments? On the one hand, men in these environments feel justified in arguing that since their industries and workplaces prospered for many years with the prevailing RENs of traditional masculinity, those RENs should continue to reign. However, with women comprising the overwhelming majority of the workforce in certain industries, it is they who feel justified in calling for a change to RENs that are fairer to them and consistent with the RENs with which they were socialized.
This tug of war over traditionally masculine and feminine RENs has been escalating for the past century and it has become the frontline battle of most of our culture wars, extending into every part of our culture and our politics.
The 2016 presidential election, the first between a woman and a man, was considered by many to be the most bitter election in our history. The winner of that election, Donald Trump, seems to have taken his victory as a mandate to govern with a tone of hypermasculinity, but rather than pulling America back to a time when traditionally masculine RENs governed all public spaces, his election has only emboldened women’s groups and the #MeToo movement to pull even harder in the opposite direction. Hence, there is no end in sight to the gender tug of wars we’ve endured since the start of the Technological Revolution. Unfortunately, these battles of the sexes will continue to escalate unless we are able to coalesce around a new set of RENs that combines the best of traditional masculinity and traditional femininity.
Your voice will shape the future of this conversation: how will you use it?
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For more articles by John Cottone at Psychology Today, click here, or send an email to [email protected] to be notified when new articles are posted.
References
Ogden, et al (2004). Mean Body Weight, Height, and Body Mass Index, United States 1960–2002. Advance Data from Vital and Health Statistics, 347.
Janssen, I., Heymsfield, S., Wang, Z., Ross, R. (2000). Skeletal muscle mass and distribution in 468 men and women aged 18–88 yr. Journal of Applied Physiology, 89 (1): 81–88
Miller, A.E., MacDougall, J.D., Tarnopolsky, M.A., Sale, D.G. (1993). Gender differences in strength and muscle fiber characteristics. European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology, 66 (3): 254–62.
Frontera, W.R., Hughes, V.A. Lutz, K.J., Evans, W.J. (1991). A cross-sectional study of muscle strength and mass in 45- to 78-yr-old men and women. Journal of Applied Physiology, 71 (2): 644–50.
Leyk D, Gorges W, Ridder D, et al. (March 2007). “Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes”. European Journal of Applied Physiology. 99 (4): 415–21
Leyk, D., Gorges, W., Ridder, D., et al. (2007). Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 99 (4): 415–21
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2015). United Nations World Population Prospects: 2015 revision. UN.
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). (2020). Why do women outnumber men in college. https://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html
Glicksman, E. (Ed.) (2017). A First: Women Outnumber Men in 2017 Entering Medical School Class. Association of American Medical Colleges News, December 18, 2017, https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/first-women-outnumber-men-2017-enter…
Pisarcik, I. (2019). Women Outnumber Men in Law School Classrooms for Third Year in a Row, but Statistics Don’t Tell the Full Story, Jurist, March 5, 2019, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2019/03/pisarcik-women-outnumber-men-…
John G. Cottone, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, and the author of Who Are You?
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There’s been a fundamental shift in how we define adulthood—and at what pace it occurs. PT’s authors consider how a once iron-clad construct is now up for grabs—and what it means for young people’s mental health today.

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