Gender Schema Explained
The theory suggests that children adjust their behavior to align with their culture's gender norms from the earliest stages of social development.
Marisa Floro: Gender socialization occurs very early on. We even call it gender reveals when a woman is pregnant with the child, but it's actually, you're revealing the sex. Just to some degree, but now some will say, no, I'm revealing what I am going to teach the gender of my child, which is, you have that right too.
Gender is a set of roles and values and rules. We're really teaching children based on the sex that they're born with their reproductive system that they're born with. We're absolutely affected by those roles on top of that, those roles impact how other people treat. The gender schemas that they fall into, or that the other falls into, we know that women who speak in higher level of tone are often taken less seriously, that men who are feminine are often seen as a different sexuality when they haven't even expressed what their sexuality is.
So we're constantly making snap judgments based on what we are seeing in terms of gender schema, if it's catcalling, if it's early menstruation to the point where they develop curves earlier than their peers and they're hyper-sexualized at a young age. If it's being touched on the job when their male counterpart is not. It's these events that end up being cumulative over time.
And I think that's hard to then treat. People think that you come to someone for depression and then you're treated for that and then it's gone. That's not really how it works, we do know that people can recover from a major depressive disorder, for example, from an episode. But if you have it again and again, you're less likely to recover from it in a shorter period of time.
There are different presentations of depression, not just with the sexes, but identities. So race, class, gender, all of it. Unfortunately though, we also find that people who present with depression or any type of mental health issue, depending on how they look, how they speak, the type of money that they have, or do not have, they will be treated differently.
And we just know this based off of qualitative research or patient reports or when we actually identify our own biases. So, what do I mean by that? If I'm a white woman comes in, who's angry compared to a black woman, sometimes the stereotypes that exist can often delineate which diagnosis they receive.
Well, one might get an adjustment disorder where the other might get a bipolar disorder.
Gabriella Deyi: I personal experience with my mother having bipolar disorder and really seeing her go through a lot of the cycles of misdiagnosis that you speak of for over five years. And you can't help, but think, did that have something to do with her race or her gender or was it both?
Marisa Floro: My belief is this. It comes with education. It comes with having difficult conversations. How are we raising our children? Are we allowing for this flexibility in gender identity and who am I and how do I want to treat other people? And also mental health professionals, lawyers, reporters need to be educated on the laws that were, and the laws that are, and the laws that are yet to be passed.
