Mind Definition of Terms

model proposes that, children develop schemas for “boy” and “girl”. These schemas result principally from two factors. One is the child‟s inborn tendency to organize and classi fy information from the environment. The other is our culture‟s heavy emphasis on providing gender distinguishing cues such as clothing, names, and occupations, which make these concepts easily identifiable. Bem‟s 1985, in Harter, 2006 gender schema theory describes how the initial labeling of one‟s gender leads the young child to look to the culture where they learn that gender distinctions are very important. It causes them to attend to the content of gender roles for males and females p.516. While learning that boys are expected to be strong, brave, and assertive but girls are expected to be good, nice, and quiet, boys and girls acquire gender schemas. They adopt the characteristics that the culture considers appropriate for their gender. Bem also comes up with gender schema theory, which changed gender from being seen as individual traits, but instead shows how society tended to measure gender in a bipolar way as either more masculine or feminine depending upon such things as clothes, body movements, hobbies, employment, etc. which she termed „cultural fictions‟ as cited in Kilvington Wood, 2016, p. 24. This theory is about sex typing between boys and girls that happen in their childhood. Hendrix Wei 2009 explains that : The early gender bias experiences that children encounter can shape their attitudes and beliefs related to their development of interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, access to education equality, participation in the corporate work world, as well as stifling their physical and psychological well being as cited in Aina, 2011, p.11. This explanation shows that experiences have strong influence to boys and girls‟ attitudes and beliefs. The attitudes and beliefs are related to their roles in the society, especially to the access to get education equally. Martin Halverson 1981 states that gender schemas are interrelated networks of mental associations representing information about the sexes. Schemas are not passive copies of the environment, but instead they are active constructions, prone to errors and distortions. Two types of schemas are initially formulated as the superordinate schema and the own-sex schema. The superordinate schema contains listlike information about the sexes. The own-sex schema is defined as a narrow schema containing detailed action plans for self- relevant information as cited in Lamb, 2015. Golombok 2002 states that gender schemas refer to organized bodies of knowledge about gender, and are functionally similar to gender stereotypes. Gender schemas influence the way we perceive and remember information about everything around us. As a result, we pay greater attention and are more likely to remember information that is in line with our gender schemas than the opposing information p. 130. This gender schema has a relation to gender stereotypes and it influences our way of thinking towards everything around us. Valian 2005 assumes that one way that gender schemas affect women is in women‟s perception of themselves as worth less and entitled to less. The schemas conversely affect men by leading them to see themselves as worth more and entitled to more. Also, through the chores they are given to do in childhood, w omen become accustomed to act for others‟ good and to labor for love; while