“Gender roles and Stereotypes in Puerto Rico’s Society”

            Puerto Rican culture, have many types of gender roles and stereotypes for men and women.  These are characteristics created by the Puerto Rican society throughout the years.  One from many gender roles is the types of work.  In addition, there is the stereotype of cleaning.  Moreover, another gender role is who supposed to earn more money.  As well as the moneymaker, the types of work are usual in our society.

            The type of work gender role is which work should do which gender.  The society had educate people with this gender role who states that the hard and leading works are just for men, and that easy jobs are for women.  For example in our community there are many men working on construction, piloting airplanes, driving trucks, governors, cooks.   Otherwise, women are working as teachers in schools, secretaries, janitors, cashiers, assistants.  However, this is just a thought because if we analyze each job some of women works are hard too.  Yet not everybody leads their lives by these gender roles, and it is see when the Puerto Rican society has a man professor or an architect working on her project.

            The cleaning stereotype is one of the oldest stereotypes in our society.  In addition, of course is dedicated to women.  Since the stereotype exists, has not only been in the Puerto Rican culture but also in many cultures around the world.  In some of them, it could be seeing more than in others.  The stereotype says that only women are for cleaning and men do not do it.  Besides, it could be attached with the concept that women are more organized and clean than men.  Again, there are many exceptions in the Puerto Rican society when a man is more organized and clean than a woman, or when the dad is who do almost all the house chores and the mom is always resting. 

            The “supposed to earn more money” gender role is also one of the biggest in our society.  This gender role says that the men are for working hard and sustain the family.  That is not enough; it is also that the man has to make more money than woman does.  This gender role has existed since women began to take some power in our society, like been a leader or an executive for examples.  In addition, when women began to earn equally or more sum of money than men.  The problem with this gender role is that some people in our society do not change their thoughts.  That is what brings, as others gender roles and stereotypes, the break of personal and work relationships.

            The gender roles and stereotype presented before fit with professor Doloff’s essay “The Opposite Sex”, when he mentioned what his students wrote for him in their assignment.  As some of them mentioned that as women, they would stay all day at home, or go to work.  Just like these gender roles or stereotype, our society is full of them.  Some of them are bad for the profit our society.  At the end, our society will always have gender roles and stereotypes, and with the advance of the years there will be more of them,  the only thing that is left to do is to become open minded.