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For week six, Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll focus on the effect of

cultural beliefs in gender and their being part of the ³rules of the game.´ According to

them, theses cultural beliefs can change or even maintain the gender system. One of the

things I was somewhat confused about was whether or not cultural beliefs can be defined

as stereotypes and if the effects tend to be more polarized or balanced. In the second

article by Barbara Risman, ½
    

        

 


 

, she argues that in order to better understand gender in the different levels of

society, you have to ³conceptualize´ gender. One of the things I found interesting was

that she mentions that you have to understand other structures such as the race structure

to see how things all work out. In the last article,   ½
    


 

 


 , Paula England focuses on something a bit different than the others. She writes

about the changes that are happening in the gender system and why women tend to work

harder or have bigger incentives to achieve more male oriented jobs, but things do not

happen vice-verse.

One of the things someone mentioned in class was that ³guys¶ tasks count more.´

I don¶t think that that¶s the case unless we¶re weighting tasks based on income. I think

mothers have hard tasks and men sometimes overlook those things. Trish mentioned that

once she tried to be funny around her guy friends but instead of thinking it was funny,

they kind of just overlooked it. Because of that, she picks on herself to be funny. I¶ve

noticed that when it comes to guys because they tend to dominate usually. Another thing

that was mentioned was ³bounded rationality,´ which is making rational choices with

limited information. I learned in an economics class that sometimes people tend to just

make choices without knowing everything because it is cheaper to make a decision not


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knowing everything because information is pricey. I found that England¶s claim that

women tend to have greater incentives to be involved in men¶s jobs because I don¶t think

that I want to work harder to be involved in male dominated jobs because I don¶t see the

difference within the jobs anymore. I don¶t really think that there are clear distinctions

anymore. A woman can run a company the same way a man can, or men are involved in

the culinary arts, which could be perceived as feminine, either way, times are changing

rapidly and perhaps gender roles are becoming blurry.