Gender Wars: A Peace Plan

Do you and your mate argue (covertly) over who is right? Do you have unspoken expectations about how affection should be expressed? Say hello to the Gendergram. It's not something you send. It's a way to uncover the hidden beliefs that make you struggle as you do.

It's 6:00 P.M. in the Barnett household. Alex and Susan have been home from work for about 15 minutes. It's Alex's turn to cook dinner. But the only thing steaming in the kitchen is Susan.

Alex has just hung up from ordering a pizza--for the third time this month. When it's her turn for dinner, Susan tries to prepare something nutritious, varied, and low in fat. She wants their five-year-old daughter, Eliza, to learn to eat healthy at a young age. Alex scoffs at her concern: "Eating pizza for dinner is not going to warp her for life!"

After arguing the point for minutes, Susan realizes there is more to it than meets the eye. "It's not the pizza--it's just that you always take the easy way out when you have to help out around here."

Alex snaps back: "Why are you always criticizing how I do things? Practically all I ever hear from you is that I never do enough around here and the things I do do are never good enough. I do plenty around here that I never get any credit for!"

More than likely, this interchange sounds familiar. We live in a time where gender-based roles are changing and few pathways are marked as we try to figure out the right way to make our lives work in relationships. What complicates gender relations is that the world we inhabit today would have been almost impossible to envision even as recently as the 1950s.

Gender relations in contemporary society present a seemingly paradoxical picture. On one hand, we are told that women and men are rapidly becoming equal partners at home and in the workplace. With women and men moving into each other's traditional spheres, it would seem logical that we would finally be able to understand each other's experiences. Women have now had to compete day in and day out to financially support their family. They have set their sights on many of the same goals as their male counterparts; today there are, for example, more women than men in many university professional schools. Surely women can now understand the societal pressures to succeed that have always burdened their husbands.

As wives have moved in even greater numbers into the workforce, husbands have had to take on more of women's traditional responsibilities for child care and homemaking. It would seem they can now understand the magnitude of these responsibilities, the never-ending routine of care and crisis.

On the other hand, we are told that our social experiences are separated by light years and we need a manual to decode what we say to one another. At the same time, the media delivers daily body counts in the gender wars in stories of spouse abuse, divorce, child custody battles, and disputes over affirmative action.

What has not changed, apparently, since the 50s is the desire of men and women to figure out what is appropriate for their own and the other gender--and to find ways to live together. What has changed is that we are now less sure about what is the right way to be a man or a woman.

And so you, both of us, and Alex and Susan all wrestle with gender issues on a daily basis. At the end of last year, Susan was promoted to vice president of the bank for which she works. She now makes more money than Alex, who is a chemist with a large producer of agricultural products. Under intense pressure to maintain the profitability of the bank's investments, Susan often works long hours. She drives herself hard to exceed expectations for her. Alex has had to pick up the slack at home. When he was under considerable pressure in the first few years of his career, Susan pulled the heavier load at home. Accordingly, both he and Susan have greater empathy for each other's worlds, although at times empathy isn't enough to bridge the gulf between reality and expectations.

To a large degree, the ambiguity everyone's feeling about gender is part of a greater uncertainty about what is real, true, and right in general. Human relations and the search for identity, which translates into ways of believing and being, have grown particularly complicated courtesy of the technological explosion and information saturation we all now experience. Through it, we are exposed to much information and many people in fragmented contexts. As Kenneth Gergen points out in The Saturated Self (Basic Books, 1992), we each have multiple selves--the person we are with our boss, the person we are with our peers or subordinates, the roles we play at home, the image we communicate over the telephone, or via anonymous contacts on the Internet.

This process is further compounded by the challenges in society to many of the beliefs that we have held as self-evident for so long about gender differences, religion, boundaries between the races, to name a few. As Gergen observes, "Gender is but one of the traditional categories of self-identification that now deteriorates." That encompasses not only the belief in two genders but in notions of masculinity and femininity. Result: rampant confusion about how men and women are supposed to act.

Recently, the Barnetts went shopping for a new car for Susan. Once it became clear who would be driving the car, the salesperson spoke almost exclusively with her. Although it made perfect sense to Alex, it irritated him to no end. He was fuming as they left the dealership but couldn't really give Susan a good reason why. For him, the act of buying a car has gender-role expectations attached to it that he did not even recognize.

HOW ROLES ARE BRED

What we call "gender" encompasses biological sex but goes beyond it to the socially prescribed roles deemed appropriate for each sex by the culture in which we live. Complicating the issue is that only the broad outlines of gender roles are drawn by the larger society. The gender roles we each carry out are highly individualistic, built on our biological and physical makeup, appearance and personality, life experiences such as work and education, and history of sexual and romantic interactions. Each element influences how others perceive us as a man or a woman and how we perceive others' intentions and expectations for us.

What's more, the religious beliefs we do--or do not--espouse, our ethnic inheritances, the degree to which experiences with peers affect us, and the role models to which we are exposed, as well as personal factors, are all filtered through and shaped by our experiences in the most complex club to which we each belong, our family of origin. If we ever hope to untangle the gender-role beliefs that today tie our relationships in knots, we must examine our experiences in the primary context of socialization, the nuclear family.

One of the first things we ask when a child is born is "Is it a girl or a boy?" Most of us find it extremely difficult to talk about another person--even an infant--without referring to "he" or "she." Gender is one of the first things each of us learns about ourself as a young child, and the gender roles that we learn in our families continue to develop as we grow. 'We begin taking in elements' of gender roles from significant others from the time we're born. These ideas are incorporated into our individual sense of self and assumptions about how men and women--both ourself and others--ought to believe and behave. We learn what is expected of each of us not only from what others teach us directly but also from how we are treated, disciplined, nurtured, and loved.

What we learn about gender organizes our behavior, our beliefs, and our relationships, including our expectations of how our partner should behave. We judge whether or not we are loved by whether our partners love us in the way we believe love ought to be shown, which is based on what we experienced in our family of origin. In a recent marital therapy session, Susan remarked that she was unsure some days whether Alex really loved her. He shot back, "Of course I do, I'm here, aren't I?" "Yes," Susan said, "but you don't seem to enjoy being with me unless you want sex." Hurt and frustrated, Alex sighed, "I go to work, I help with the house and Eliza, I'm faithful to you--all that means I love you!" Life experiences given each of them unspoken scripts, highly idiosyncratic, defining how men and women should, and do, express love to their partners.

Solving the Barnett's problems would be easier if all men behaved one way and all women another. But no one can predict how any two people will react to each other's ideas about gender until they interact with each other. It is the interaction of roles and expectations that creates all the heat.

Despite their struggles over housework, Susan and Alex are compatible in their approach to parenting. They each had nurturing adults of both genders in their life. Each provides Eliza with ample expressions of love and affection. Their gender-role expectations for fathers and mothers fit.

TOO CLOSE TO SEE

Gender is so basic to our assumptions about who we are and how we and others should behave that we are seldom aware that gender-related experiences influence and shape the ways we think about others and ourselves. Our beliefs--typically experienced as "oughts" and "shoulds"--nevertheless guide our behavior, establishing the nature of the interaction in intimate relationships without our conscious awareness.

Into our basic sense of ourself as man or woman, our so-called gender-role identity, we also incorporate boundaries, experienced as "dos" and "don'ts," as in "I could never do that." The oughts and shoulds and the dos and don'ts of gender beliefs are played out as hidden forces in intimate relationships, invisible because they are so central to our sense of who we are. Yet they typically act up in emotionally volatile situations--those times when what we are really doing is fighting to enforce our role beliefs in the relationship. The heat is intense because to give up the fight is to give up a part of the self. We look to our partners to meet our needs in the ways we each think they should be met because that is what each of us feels we need to have our perception of self validated.

Gender beliefs carry special power because couples don't talk about the assumptions that fuel arguments. To a large degree, we may not really understand what the passion is all about. As therapists, we believe it crucial that couples do understand what the passion is all about. That allows partners to discuss the deeper issues--rarely the content of arguments but the process, the patterns by which they air or do not air mismatched gender beliefs.

Of course, not all the issues that arise between partners are gender-related. But gender-role beliefs, being so primary to our identity, are the axis along which we organize what we perceive about our own and our partners behavior. Gender is typically such an obvious characteristic, and one so basic to the ways we interact with others, that we not only look at our partner as an individual but, at times, as a prototypical member of the Other Gender; we attach to the individual what we have come to believe about the group.

As the intimate representative of the Other Gender in our lives, our partners routinely ignite in us old loves, desires, hurts, fears, and traumas. These surface especially in issues rented to who is in control, who makes decisions about sex, money, children, and housework, and whether or not we are each loved by the other. But they could show up anywhere, depending on the unique gender-socialization histories of the two parties. Any issue, for a particular couple, could be a gender issue--say, who cleans up after dinner--while that same problem would not be a gender issue for another couple.

We typically don't ask what it means to our partner that the dishes aren't done or that one earns more money than the other or that one is responsible for finding baby-sitters. But even if we did, our partner might not know how to respond, so embedded are gender influences in a sense of self. A woman may assume that because she is the mother, and therefore primarily responsible for the children, she will need to find a baby-sitter if neither spouse is available to take care of the children. A man may not share his fears about financial problems because he assumes that the man is the person who should solve financial problems.

Even harder to discuss are gender-related experiences that have more to do with emotions than behavior. Couples often fight about who does what, but the fights may really be about feelings--what doing or not doing the tasks, spending time together or not spending time together, making love or not making love means to each partner emotionally.

Susan and Alex struggle with communicating affection and love. Alex is sometimes insecure in the relationship, requiring lots of verbal and physical expressions of affection. His parents did not have a good marriage and his romantic relationships prior to marriage were not very satisfying. Although Susan has no problem being expressive, she has come to realize that she expects men in relationships not to be so emotionally needy; she is in fact irritated when Alex acts this way. But the minute they try to talk about it, they usually end up fighting about the proper way to show affection, rather than discussing what giving and affection means to them.

Indeed, gender beliefs--dos and don'ts, oughts and shoulds--may actively prevent us from expressing what we want. A man who feels sad and lonely may hesitate to ask his partner to hold and comfort him because he may fear she will see him as less of a man. And he may be right; she may hold beliefs dictating that a man does not require comforting. Still, because of his fears he may be cutting himself off from needed nurturance that is readily available.

A woman may be angry with her partner but fear that he will see her as offensive if she expresses that anger directly. He might, but he also might be relieved to know precisely what he did to upset her rather than feel he has done something wrong--if only he could figure out what it is.

ENTER THE GENDERGRAM

As family therapists facing couples with seemingly insurmountable differences, and as individuals dealing with colleagues, friends, and our own intimate partnerships, we have struggled with these issues. No matter the content or the setting, what we have come to call the "bloody gender wars" always seemed to involve beliefs and expectations about what men and women should do.

We came to believe that what we needed was not only to find a way to identify gender beliefs that influenced interaction but to create awareness of why these beliefs were so important to the person who held them. That is, by making gender influences overt and therefore open to scrutiny we could be more objective about the struggles of both genders and pass this attitude or understanding on to our clients. Instead of arguing covertly over who was right, we wanted our clients to understand the process through which deeply held, but often latent, beliefs drove arguments about the way things ought to be.

To do this, we needed to find a way each panner could explore personal beliefs without fearing judgment. We wanted to help people understand the role of these beliefs in their lives, not debate the validity of these beliefs. We developed the Gendergram, a do-it-yourself exercise for making overt the hidden values, beliefs, role expectations, and assumptions about gender that we absorb during life and deploy in intimate relationships.

In the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart's character, George Bailey, gets the opportunity to observe how other's lives would have been had he not been there. The Gendergram allows the reverse: you examine the impact significant others have had on you and your gender identity,

Your Life

A look at the Gendergrams of Alex and Susan suggest how to complete your own.

Step One: Divide a blank sheet of paper into three columns:

Relevant Information

Life Cycle Stage

Roles/Patterns/Themes.

Step Two: Separate your life into meaningful stages: childhood, adolescence, and one or more adult stages. The number of stages is entirely personal, depending on the events of your life.

Step Three: Beginning with the first stage of your life, write your name in the center of the middle column. Next, place around you the names of significant same-sex individuals in your life at that stage (it's important to examine relationships with people of the same gender before those of the other gender). You can represent their importance to you by how close to your name you put them.

Connect each of these people to you with a line. Place a plus sign (+) by the connecting line if the person had a positive influence on you, a negative sign (-) if the person had a negative influence, both signs (+/-) by the line if the person's influence on you was essentially neutral.

When Alex filled out the same-sex Gendergram for his childhood, he identified four significant males: his father, grandfather Barnett, uncle Karl, and cousin Micheal. The latter three had a more positive effect on him; his father's impact he cited as essentially neutral.

Step Four: Under Relevant Information, list the significant life events that occurred during that stage of your life. What happened to you and your family--births, deaths, moves, divorce?

Briefly describe the nature of your relationship with each of the key people named in the center column.

Step Five: Reflect on what each of the significant people in your life at this stage taught you about being a woman or a man. Responding to the following questions about each person should help:

What explicit "gendered" rules did this person share with you ("Good girls act like this. . . ", "Boys don't do that!", "Young ladies don't do that!")?

What did you learn about men and women from watching this person (men do this, women do that, men don't do this, etc.)?

By observing how this person functioned in relationships, what did you learn about men and women (such as, who takes greater emotional responsibility for the relationship, who initiates activities, who has the final say in mutual decisions)?

How did the way this person treated you influence your beliefs about men and women (for example, men are noncommunicative, women are nurturing, women are seductive, men are playful and boisterous)?

Summarize the information in the Roles/Themes/Patterns column. Based on your experiences with these people at this stage of life, what did you learn about the roles of men and women? What themes were present in your beliefs about men and women? What patterns were present in your significant relationships at that time?

In childhood, Alex had pretty traditional male role models and thus was exposed to predictable themes and patterns: men's work absorbs their time and attention; men are not actively involved in their children's lives; men are rough, fun to be with, daring. Such roles can be dangerous, as Alex learned through the death of his cousin. But through his relationship with his grandfather, he experienced a caring, nurturing man. He has relied on what he learned in that relationship for his role as a father.

Step Six: Repeat steps three through five for the remaining stages of your life, again focusing only on same-sex individuals. Use additional sheets of paper as necessary.

Step Seven: Complete steps one through six for the significant other-sex individuals in your life. In Susans other-sex Gendergram, the somewhat nontraditional arrangement between her parents had an impact on her expectations for the division of labor in the home. She expected that her husband would take an active role in household tasks and child care.

Step Eight: This is likely the single most important step. Examine the Roles/Patterns/Themes column for both your same-sex and other-sex Gendergrams. As you reflect on the gendered messages you learned across the stages of your life, note those roles, patterns, and themes that are operating in your life and relationships today What are the consequences of each for your own well-being and for your relationship(s)? Which aspects of your gender identity and functioning in relationships do you want to continue? Which aspects do you want to modify or discontinue? How will you do so? Make a plan of action today.

As we developed the Gendergram, one of our basic assumptions was that we were not the experts on other people's gender-role expectations and behavior in relationships, they are. However, we did want people to examine the benefits and costs of the beliefs they hold and the behaviors they demonstrate.

GENDER MENDING

The bottom line is really: What is working for you, and what isn't? What changes will you need to make so that your relationship works for you? As Alex completed his Gendergram, he was more aware of the impact of his significant relationships on his gender-role behaviors and expectations. He and Susan have tried to create a marital relationship that is very different from the one his parents had. Lacking close experience with an egalitarian partnership, he struggles at times to do his share. The Barnetts have a part-time housekeeper for the deep cleaning, but they share the light housework, cooking, and laundry.

Alex has since agreed to do all the grocery shopping and to prepare healthy meals when it's his turn to cook. He has also struggled to do his part in the emotional maintenance of the relationship. His usual response to conflict is to take distance and then wait for Susan to seek reconciliation. He set a goal to take more responsibility for making up after arguments and to nurture the relationship by not allowing conflicts to drag on into the next day, initiating two dates a month, and spending more time with Susan by watching one less television program each evening.

After examining her Gendergram, Susan realized that her drive to excel at work was in part a vestige of trying to please her father. Her brother James has not been successful in his chosen career, and it seems as if her father has transferred his aspirations for the success of his children onto her. He was extremely pleased when she was promoted to VP. Susan has begun to wonder if she is driving herself harder than necessary to succeed. She is feeling physically stressed and believes it is compromising the quality of her marriage and her parenting. Accordingly, she has decided to begin an exercise program two days a week, to leave work one hour early whenever possible, to take a couple of afternoons off per month to spend with Eliza, and to plan a weekend getaway with Alex as soon as possible.

TWO CAN PLAY

If you are currently in a relationship, then the critical portion of the Gendergram exercise involves discussion of the results with your partner. We know from our clinical experience that couples find the Gendergram very useful. As partners discuss each other's Gendergram, they gain a better understanding of why their partner acts as he or she does.

Much research on marital interaction focuses on the role of attribution--our personal theories or explanations for why our panner does as he or she does. Couples who make neutral or positive attributions about each other's behavior generally enjoy greater marital satisfaction than those who make negative attributions. The Gendergram can aid and abet this process. Understanding the messages our partner received while growing up and their lasting impact allows us to make more benign attributions of their behavior.

Take, for example, a situation marital therapists commonly encounter. Suppose that your partner frequently pursues you when you "need space." You may think he or she is overly needy, insecure, a "control freak." But if the Gendergram reveals that your partner has been abandoned by several significant people in life and believes that "men/women get close to you and then abandon you," he or she is probably experiencing distressing feelings that have been associated with abandonment in the past. The next time your partner pursues, you may want to ask him/her what he/she is feeling at the time and how the two of you can handle it differently.

When Susan and Alex sat down to discuss their Gendergrams, they were able to point to several sources of current difficulties. They each had different role expectations for husbands and fathers that crept into their struggle over the division of labor. The men and women in their respective families of origin expressed emotion and affection in differing ways. Yet in both of their families the emotional management of relationships was a task for the women--something Susan and Alex wanted to change in their own house. As a result of their discussion, they were less hostile to each other the next time they hit a snag on household tasks or making up after a fight. They agreed to view each other as having had different life experiences and different expectations. This helped them refrain from viewing the other as being difficult and negative on purpose. They divided up the household chores and agreed on standards of completion.

They settled on creating a role of "conflict manager," whose job it was to call time out when arguments heated up and ask what the other was thinking--without attacking the conflict manager. It was awkward at first, but they decided to alternate this role. Alex was conflict manager on even-numbered days, Susan on odd days.

The Gendergram lets spouses work as a team at deciding what roles/patterns/themes are good for the relationship and which are destructive. This helps a couple address difficult issues proactively, when they are calm, rather than react in the middle of an argument.

Of course, knowledge alone is insufficient to change behavior; otherwise no one would smoke and we'd all exercise and eat a healthy diet. More often than not it takes a pivotal experience to convince us to change. Nevertheless, gaining knowledge about our behavior is an important first step. The Gendergram gives couples information about their gender-related assumptions and behavior that they can examine, poke and prod, and make decisions about.

AFTERPLAY

We hope that after completing the Gendergram, people probe each gender-related assumption, value, and behavior and ask: Do I want to continue believing and/or acting this way? If not, what will I do to change? If so, how can I enhance this part of my life?

We should make clear that, despite the current ambiguity about gender roles--and their pervasiveness in our lives--clashing gender-role expectations are not the only underlying factor in marital strife, and each couple's assortment of gender-related challenges is unique. Nor can the Gendergram help individuals or couples up against forces of the larger society--like sexual harassment at the workplace. Nevertheless, we believe there is room for optimism. If men and women are willing to invest in their own personal growth and in their relationships, things will get better. We introduced the Gendergram as a means to this end.

QUESTIONS FOR THE GENDERGRAM

1. In what ways have these people had a lasting influence on how you view yourself as a woman or man?

2. How did changes in your physical appearance, whether due to maturation, accidents, or illness, influence how you felt about yourself as a man or woman?

3. What did you learn about your sexuality during this time? How did you learn it?

4. In what ways did what you learn impact your definition of yourself as a woman or man?

5. What spiritual/religious influences were important to you at this time and how have they informed your feelings about yourself as a man or woman?

6. Describe the emotional climate of your home during this time?

7. How was affection expressed between women? Between men? Between women and men? Between parents/adults and children?

8. How was conflict handled?

9. Did men and women express the same emotions differently?

10. How secure did you feel when you were at home?

11. How was conformity to your family's gender norms rewarded? How was nonconformity punished?

12. What did men/women in your family do at this time in the family? At work? In the community? For recreation? As disciplinarians? In general?

The Gendergram Form

NAME: SUSAN BARNETT DATE:/1/30/95 SAME/OTHER

RELEVANT INFORMATION

* Born in Sacramento, CA.

* Morn worked part-time three evenings/week; Dad managed house then.

* Both parents took care of house and yard. Dad taught me to cook.

* Loved brother, James, four years older; nice to me most of time.

* Grandpa Richards lived across the country; he and Grandma visited every year; he spoiled me.

* Had good friend, Ricky. After age eight, other kids teased us for spending time together; we stopped doing things together.

* Took private trumpet lessons. Teacher, Mr. Cosini, was very strict, really pushed me to excel. I did.

* My parents, especially Dad, were proud of me when I did well, disappointed when I didn't. So I tried to do my best to please him.

ROLES/PATTERNS/THEMES

* Men share in managing household responsibilities and child care.

* Men are nurturing.

* Men treat women as equals and with. respect.

* Beyond a certain age, boys and girls tend not to get along.

* Men encourage women to do their best.

NAME: ALEX BARNETT DATE: 11/30/95 SAME/OTHER

RELEVANT INFORMATION

* Born in Columbus, OH.

* Family moves soon after to Cleveland because of Dad's new job.

* Spent a lot of time with Grandpa Barnett as we lived just down the street from them. We were very close.

* Dad very busy with his new job, didn't see him much.

* Enjoyed visits by Uncle Karl; he was so crazy, although i didn't get to spend as much time with him as I would have liked.

* My cousin Michael was my hero; he died when I was nine in an automobile accident. He tried to outrun a train in his sports car.

ROLES/PATTERNS/THEMES

* Men aren't home much.

* Men contribute to their family by working hard and providing for them.

* Men don't do housework.

* Older men are free to be nurturant and care for children.

* Men take risks.

* Sometimes men's risk taking is fun, other times stupid and dangerous.

* Men are often rowdy, loud, and fun to be with.