Gender Role Socialization

The term socialization refers to how individuals learn about the roles and expectations that they play within a society and the way in which they develop a sense of self. The process of socialization occurs throughout the life span and involves virtually all areas of our lives. Whenever we encounter new situations, we learn about the roles associated with these situations and develop views of how we fit within them.
Sex role socialization, also termed gender socialization, involves developing beliefs about gender roles, the expectations associated with each sex group, and, also, gender identity, an understanding of what it means to be a male or female. Gender socialization is probably one of the most basic aspects of the general socialization process. Research suggests that children learn that the world is gendered at a very young age and, soon after, develop a sense of their own gender identity.
Theoretical understandings of gender socialization have become more sophisticated over the years as empirical data have accumulated. Early approaches tended to emphasize the role of a child as a target of socialization and adult and media influences as agents that influenced the child’s development. More recent approaches have emphasized children’s cognitive awareness and active involvement in the development of their gender roles and understandings as well as the centrality of peer groups. Biological differences between the sex groups that influence temperament, behaviors, aptitudes, and interests have been increasingly documented.
While much popular writing regarding gender and education suggests that teacher behaviors and school curricula disadvantage females, empirical evidence does not support this view. Instead, children’s experiences with teachers and other adults in schools appear to counter detrimental aspects of peer group interactions, especially for boys. In addition, substantial data suggest that girls have more positive experiences within the educational system than boys through all levels of education. The differences between males and females appear to be stronger with minorities than the White majority, and the advantage of females in educational attainment has widened in recent years. Some scholarly work is addressing the role of gender socialization in these differential patterns of achievement.

A Model Of Growth And Healing In Life And Therapy

According to RCT, therapeutic goals should focus on expanding one’s ability to create, participate, and sustain growth-fostering relationships over the life span. Based on their earliest work, psychological well-being and emotional maturity involve an increasing capacity to be authentic and fully present in relationships along with a growing capacity to be responsive to others who are struggling to represent their experiences in the relationship.As such, the therapeutic process is about developing relational competence or, more simply stated, therapy is about getting better at relationships.
RCT posits that the process of becoming relationally competent involves the ability to become increasingly able to fully represent oneself both honestly and authentically in relationships. It also involves feeling “effective” in relationships by being able to impact the other (Miller & Stiver, 1997). Ideally, there is a mutually empathic responsiveness, characteristic of the reciprocal responsiveness between mothers and their infants. In adulthood, this translates to each person feeling as if they have been heard and that their experiences matter. This experience, which is referred to as mutual empathy in growthfostering relationships, leads to a sense of connection, which is experienced as what has been referred to as the “five good things.”
These five good things are (a) a greater sense of zest, energy, or vitality; (b) an increased sense of effectiveness or agency in relationships; © a feeling that we clearly understand ourselves, others, and our relationships with others; (d) an experience in which each person in the relationship shares a sense of feeling valued and worthy; and (e) a feeling that one’s relational capacities have grown and, as such, there is a desire to expand one’s relational networks with others (Miller & Stiver, 1997). RCT also posits that experiences of connections are very powerful and impact one’s ability for creativity and productivity, for example, and energize individuals even when they are not necessarily with another person.
In reality, relationships are characterized by periods of connection and disconnection.
In fact, RCT emphasizes that disconnections are inevitable in even the healthiest relationships. Disconnections can result from a myriad of circumstances that include everything from simple misunderstandings to abuses and violations and can be periodic or chronic, the worst of which begin in early childhood when individuals feel most vulnerable and helpless. Disconnections are also experienced in relationships as the opposite of the five good things. In a disconnection people feel (a) depleted of energy; (b) helpless; (c) confused and unclear; (d) unworthy and bad; and (e) forced to turn away from relationships (Miller & Stiver, 1997). Much as connections fuel the ability to be fully present in one’s own life, disconnections can feel nearly debilitating and make handling the responsibilities in one’s life feel burdensome. At worst, disconnection will drive people toward isolating themselves, an emotional state referred to as “condemned isolation” in which people are vulnerable to self-destructiveness and self-blame. Disconnection is more common among women than men because women carry more responsibility for the well-being of their relationships.
In the face of a disconnection, it takes a certain type of courage and vulnerability for individuals to authentically express their hurt, disappointment, or needs, especially if they
are the less powerful (subordinate) one in the relationship. This capacity is directly affected by sex role socialization, making it more difficult for men to express their hurt, for example, which is often masked by anger, and to also respond to others when traditional models have encouraged unresponsiveness as a means of asserting one’s strength and autonomy. On the other hand, women are often “over responsible,” which makes them vulnerable to being emotionally exploited in relationships. When people are responded to empathically, then a sense of connection can be restored, and both parties grow and experience a sense of relational competence/confidence (the feeling that “Hey, I’m pretty good at this!”) and transformation. If, on the other hand, individuals are responded to in a way that is injurious or somehow denies their experience, they will begin to leave aspects of themselves out of the relationship in order to play by the relational rules. In RCT, this is referred to as the central relational paradox, which plays itself out when, in the face of yearning for connection, individuals leave authentic parts of their experiences out of the relationship in order to somehow “keep” or “fit” into the relationship and to avoid repeated injurious consequences (Miller & Stiver, 1997).
The efforts made to play by relational rules in order to maintain the relationship and to avoid injurious consequences are thought of as a process by which one exercises strategies of disconnection. Individuals exercise strategies of disconnection leaving parts of themselves out of relationships in order to avoid potential pain or, at worse, a complete relational rupture. What is left is only an illusion of a connection. RCT posits that people develop certain patterns of disconnection that are developmental in nature. In other words, many strategies of disconnection are guided by a person’s relational images or expectations of how others will respond to him or her based on his or her familial experiences and personal experiences in the larger culture (Miller & Stiver, 1997). If developmentally one has had to repeatedly exercise strategies of disconnection to avoid being abused or to avoid random acts of racism, for example, then these strategies of disconnection become strategies for survival. In this context, one’s yearning for connection is experienced as a heightened and frightening experience and, in order to restore a sense of safety, one ultimately and paradoxically turns away from relationships and possibilities to heal and into isolation, a dynamic in response to past relational violations captured in the characteristics of borderline personality disorder, for example. It is important to remember that the degree of safety one feels to express one’s authentic feelings is directly related to how much power or mutuality one experiences or expects, and often these expectations come from family experiences or from one’s sense of being marginalized from the larger culture. As such, individuals feel varying degrees of freedom to express themselves and have varying expectations they will be heard, both of which are directly related to the degree of privilege or marginalization one experiences. Feelings of privilege and marginalization are the result of the stratification that occurs around “difference” in our culture and include the degree to which one might experience ableism, ageism, classism, heterosexism, racism, or sexism, for example.
RCT has been influenced by feminist scholars including Peggy McIntosh, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. For therapists who train in this model, creating connection and mutual empathy requires a degree of thoughtful responsiveness to clients, a stance that is not advocated by most approaches to therapy. The notion of mutual empathy and connection as healing forces in relationships have been incorporated into the fields of counseling, education, medicine, nursing, social work, theology, and psychotherapy as a model for psychological growth and well-being of individuals of all walks of life.

Women Development and Relationship in Education

The founding scholars’ initial work in the area of women’s identity formation and relational development was published as a collection of “Works in Progress” in a book published in 1991 titled Women’s Growth in Connection: Writing from the Stone Center. This early scholarship was well received and provided answers to some crucial questions about the complexities of women’s lives and relationships it seemed no one had ever bothered to ask including: What kinds of vulnerabilities do women incur as a result of being assigned a role essential to the survival of the human species that involves facilitating and supporting the psychological growth and emotional well-being of others, and having their “life’s work” devalued, invisibilized, and pathologized by the larger culture, the field of mental health and, sadly, often by those in whom they have invested a lifetime of support and care?
This collection of works addressed these complex issues by providing (a) an exploration of the mother/daughter relationship as a key relational context in which women learn accurate empathy; (b) a description of the processes of women’s identity formation termed “Self-in-Relational” theory; © a description of the processes in sex role socialization that discourage mutual empathy, mask underlying processes of support that foster an illusion of independence and autonomy, and encourage the devaluation of women; and (d) an alternative model of development termed “Relationship-Differentiation.” In traditional models of development and psychotherapy, relationships were often cited as sources of pathology and were sometimes framed as dangerous to healthy development. Simply put, women’s ways of being and relating were often viewed as “fundamentally flawed,” while paradoxically being essential to the survival of the human species. Women and their behavior, examined through a traditional lens, were often labeled as too “emotional,” “needy,” “dependent,” and “enmeshed,” all of which cast a negative light on relationships, and women. Most of the scholarship that had addressed the necessity of relationships to development was found in the early childhood and parenting literature, most readily as it applied to “mothering.”
The founding scholars’ initial work illuminated that women, including mothers, are designated as the “keepers of connection” in our culture and that participating in relationships is an organizing feature of women’s lives and development. Mothers, as those most often responsible for fostering the psychological growth and well-being of infants and children, are the individuals with whom humans seek their first connections, a desire that gradually comes to include other adults present in the earliest stages of life. They observed that while girls are encouraged and taught to engage in a continued interest in the feeling states of others, beginning with those of their mothers or primary caregivers, boys are “disencouraged” from doing so and pushed to pursue their self-interests, a task that involves a gradual disattunement and disconnection from others beginning with their mothers or other primary caregivers. These patterns of engagement, which serve as the foundation for empathy skill in girls and independence in boys, are reinforced over the life span.
Mothers, and their feeling states, are the persons and feelings with which infants are
first attuned. The mothers’ mirroring of the feelings states of infants serves to emotionally regulate their affect in a reciprocal process that is refined over time. Interestingly, for over 25 years (Coll, Surrey, & Weingarten, 1998), mothers have been nominated five times more frequently in the mental health literature than fathers as the root cause of mental illnesses in their children, including poor body image, eating disorders, violence, psychosis, developmental disorders, compulsions, and addictions, to name just a few. Scholars have only recently begun to consider the father’s role in the development of pathology in their children (Maine, 2004), but the majority of such scholarship is based on the assumption of heterosexual partnered parenting contexts. In any case, bad mothers are often described as being overinvolved, uninvolved, enmeshed, unable to “cut the cord,” unreasonably critical, all of which suggest flawed relational styles.
The founding scholars made the point that, in essence, the field of mental health has perpetuated the idea that the very individuals on whom the continuation of our species depends are, in fact, our greatest threat. They also suggested that perhaps the mental health field’s obsession with the impact of “bad mothering” was an indicator of the importance of relationships. With no map for understanding relational competencies over the life span within traditional theories of development and mental health, the only option was to “write them out” of development needs as soon as humans could conceivably do without them until, of course, it came time to develop a heterosexual relationship in early adulthood.
As a part of the ongoing socialization of girls, emotional attunement with their mother’s feeling states marked the beginning of their training in empathy skills. In Women’s Growth in Connection, the founding scholars elaborate on the complexities of accurate empathy and state that empathy involves both affective and cognitive functioning and is a far more complex, developmentally advanced, and interactive process that we might have ever understood it to be. They also point out that both male and female infants are born with empathic capacities, but the ongoing refinement of this skill is nurtured in girls. A facet of developing empathic capacities involves a fluid process of responsiveness between individuals, one that they describe as involving a “mutual” interest between people and requiring an ability to build on the experience of identification with the other person to form a cognitive assimilation of this experience as a basis for response, a process that requires “practice, modeling, and feedback in relationships.” As a part of their socialization training, girls are also encouraged to identify with their mothers, a process that has the potential to be wrought with complexities and ambivalence. The complexities of the mother-daughter relationship are most often framed as stemming from “bad mothering” rather than from the “catch 22” sociopolitical context in which mothers and daughters are challenged to develop a positive sense of self-worth and an appreciation for each other and for their relationship in a context of ongoing devaluation and invisibility. The devaluation of women and/or feminine ways of being is part and parcel of our cultural education and sex role socialization, which unfolds under the guise of compulsory heterosexuality and homophobia.
“Manhood,” which Miller noted in her book had come to mean “mankind,” as defined in the context of individualism, begins with boys’ early separation from their mothers; comes to be characterized by competitiveness, toughness, aggressiveness, and emotional control; and is generally thought of in opposition to femininity. Young boys, for example, are subject to ridicule, rejection, humiliation, shame, or, at worst, violence and bullying if they are accused of being a “sissy” or of doing anything “like a girl” (or like their mothers). These social mandates serve as early lessons in the devaluation of anything feminine, which, in full form, are referred to as “misogyny.”
In adolescence and adulthood, feminine, “sissy boys” and gay men are vulnerable to victimization through hate crimes, physical violence, even murder as are many others marginalized by their sexual orientation. The founding scholars noted that women are socialized to anticipate the needs of men and, in doing so, they covertly protect their undesirable vulnerabilities and needs from expression or exposure. Through this process, men and women learn relational dynamics based on dominance, subordination, power-over, entitlement, access, and privilege with the support flow coming from women, to and for men.
While boys’ separation from their mothers is an expected outcome on their path to independence, girls and women experience relationships, including their relationship with their mothers and other primary caregivers, as central organizing features of their identity, a phenomenon, which is the heart of “Self-in-Relation” developmental theory. “Self-in-Relation” theory suggests that, over the life span, women become increasingly relationally competent or, simply put, “better at relationships” and that “growth-fostering relationships,” those in which women feel understood, cared for, respected, and heard, are the context in which they experience psychological growth, self-confidence, maturity, and a sense of groundedness throughout their lives. On a related note, contemporary scholars on male development have named the early separation from mother as a source of trauma in the lives of men (Pollack, 1998) for which they blame mothers and, in doing so, neglect the idea that it is the relationships in men’s lives, which are often nonmutual due to socialization mandates, that are the real source of their psychological distress. In Women’s Growth in Connection, the challenges of relationships across the life span are described in a new development model that founding scholar Janet Surrey termed “Relationship-Differentiation,” which expounds on the notion that we grow in and through relationships. By “differentiation” the scholars do not imply a gradual “cutting off” from relationships but rather suggest that relationships are fluid versus stuck or static throughout our lives, meaning they grow and change for many different reasons. In order for relationships to grow and change, people are challenged to adapt and respond to the ways in which they change and grow in their lives. There will be times in their lives that people need more or less support from others, particularly during the times in which they feel most vulnerable. As people take on more varied roles, their relational networks will expand, their relational responsibilities will vary from one context to another, and developmental traumas, hardships, and other challenges unique to their lives will impact their relational capacities and tolerance for closeness and vulnerability. Through the years, the founding scholars began a more in-depth analysis of relationships to answer such questions as: What differentiates relationships that foster growth versus those that impede growth? What kinds of relational dynamics lead to connections and disconnections in relationships? How do experiences of connections and disconnections in relationships contribute to one’s sense of agency in relationships or to experiences of chronic disconnections or condemned isolation? What does growth in connection really feel like? How do social, cultural, and political contexts play into all of this? And, lastly, and probably most importantly, how can the therapeutic relationship be constructed to foster relational competence and growth?

Origins of Relational-Cultural Theory

RCT was conceived after the publication in 1976 of Towards a New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller, MD, a traditionally trained psychiatrist. As Miller began her clinical work with women, she began to realize that what she was learning about their lives did not fit into the traditional models of development she had been taught in medical school.
These early observations prompted the ideas in her revolutionary book, including her point that our understanding of much of life had been skewed and was biased because the way we had come to understand “the nature of things” reflected only the stereotypical experiences and developmental patterns of privileged White men, which precluded our potential for understanding the other half of the human species—namely, women—and all the other experiences along the gender continuum including those of marginalized men and people of color.
Miller also named sex role socialization, power, dominance, marginalization, and subordination as overlooked yet essential guiding principles of relationships and traditional models of development and mental health. After the publication of her groundbreaking book, Western psychology was challenged to understand women’s “ways of being” contextually, as well as to understand the impact of privilege, oppression, and marginalization on human development in general in order to deepen and expand our understanding of the nature of all of our lives and our relationship(s) to and with each other. After the publication of her book, Miller, who was residing in the Boston area, decided to meet this challenge by inviting a group of local psychologists—namely, Dr. Judith Jordan, Dr. Alexandra Kaplan, Dr. Irene Stiver, and Dr. Janet Surrey—to begin meeting on Monday nights at her home. The purpose of those Monday night meetings was to collectively begin rethinking how traditional models of human development failed to capture, understand, and articulate the relational experiences of their female clients and to begin constructing an alternative model of women’s development and a new approach to therapy that fit their needs. This small group of women eventually came to be known as the “founding scholars of RCT.”
During this time, Miller was invited to be the first director of a new counseling center, the Stone Center, on the Wellesley College campus, which was named after the parents and family who founded the center to help students like their daughter who had tragically committed suicide. Under Miller’s directorship, the Stone Center became the source of many scholarly works that have been published through the years, the earliest of which were the fruits of those Monday night meetings. Because the development of their ideas was framed as “a growing understanding” of relationships, their writings emerged into a collection of papers called “Works in Progress” to which nearly 100 diverse scholars and clinicians have contributed over the years.
At the time the founding scholars began their Monday night meetings, the most prevalent theme in theories of human development in Western psychology was that of individualism demonstrated through a consistent focus on the “self.” Ideal self-development and emotional maturity were characterized by individuation, separation, autonomy, rationality, and independence and also required a practice of resisting the influence of others through a degree of unresponsiveness. Being responsive indicated a lack of control of one’s self and of others and signified weakness and a loss of power-over by having “given in” to dependency needs.
From the perspective of “self-development,” it appeared that men had been doing a much better job at achieving developmental milestones than women, who seemed to struggle with definitive self-interests and their personal identities, which they could not seem to manage independent of “relationships.” Miller had elaborated in her book that many of the activities central to a woman’s life and to her identity involved tending to the needs and to the psychological growth and development of others, including men. Along those same lines, traditional models of development failed to address the relational and emotional support men received in pursuit of individual accomplishments and, in turn, neglected the reality of this aspect of their development. As a result, the founding scholars found that a contextual and relational conceptualization of human development would enable a deeper understanding of all of life and laid the foundation for a new approach to therapy, now known as “relational-cultural theory.”

The Relational-Cultural Theory

Relational-cultural theory (RCT) offers that those activities essential to the survival of the human species—namely, fostering the growth and development of others in a relational context—are misunderstood, devalued, and pathologized within traditional models of development and mental health. As a result, individuals yearning to establish and to participate in growth-fostering relationships over the life span are seen as “defective” or “dependent” in that they are not following the approved path of separation and individuation indicative of emotional maturity in Western psychology. In reframing relationships as the context in which we experience optimal psychological development and emotional well-being throughout our lives, RCT articulates a means by which we can create and nourish mutually empathic growth-fostering relationships in therapy and in life. Creating the kinds of relationships in which we can experience psychological growth, healing, and mutual empathy involves naming and deconstructing interpersonal and sociopolitical obstacles that serve to keep us disconnected from each other, such as ableism, ageism, classism, heterosexism, racism, and sexism. Relational obstacles include all the sources of stratification in our culture whereby individuals feel more or less important, visible, heard, and able to promote and seek justice for their individual and collective interests.