Gender and narratives

How may gender play a role in the narratives people tell? Past research has indicated that females generally provide longer, more coherent, and more detailed narratives than males. Females are also more likely to provide social details and use themes of affiliation than males. Why is this? While biological processes may have an impact on gendered behavior, cultural expectations and the guidance of parents also seem to play an important role.  Our research focuses on examining the socialization of gendered narratives, as well as individual differences in adult gender identity in relation to how females and males tell the stories of their lives.

Socialization of gendered narratives.

Over multiple studies, we have examined how mothers and fathers reminisce about past experiences with their young daughters and sons. In general, mothers are more elaborate, reminiscing in more detail, and more emotionally expressive when reminiscing than are fathers. However, both mothers and fathers reminisce differently with daughters than with sons. Mothers and fathers are more elaborate, and especially more emotionally expressive when reminiscing with their young daughters than with their young sons. These patterns suggest that daughters are being socialized to remember their past experiences in more elaborate and emotional ways. Indeed, some longitudinal data, following families over time, support this interpretation.

Interestingly, parents especially focus on the emotion of sadness with daughters as compared to sons. Parents mention sadness more often, elaborate on how it feels to be sad, what causes sadness and how the child can cope with sadness more with daughters than with sons. The focus on sadness with girls suggest that girls are learning to focus on sadness more than boys from very early in development. This can have multiple consequences, both good and bad. Focusing on emotion may help girls understand and regulate their emotional experiences better than boys, and perhaps even to empathize with others emotional experiences more. But it may also focus girls more on feelings of sadness, and lead to rumination. More research is needed to explore these developmental pathways.

Gender identity and gendered narratives

Although we do see overall differences in how females and males narrate the events of their lives, there are large individual differences among females and males as well. Part of this may have to do with different ways in which families socialize females and males to reminisce, and part may be due to other aspects of identity, especially gender identity. Gender identity is the extent to which the individual thinks of themselves as having particular gender-stereotyped characteristics, and feels that these characteristics are important for defining who they are. For example, a female who describes herself as very nurturing, a stereotypically female trait, and further believes that being nurturing is an important and valuable part of her identity, is showing a more culturally typical gender identity than a female who does not think of herself as nurturing. With Azriel Grysman, we have been exploring if and how gender identity may play a role in whether individuals narrate their past experiences in gender typical ways. Surprisingly, we do not find much evidence for this! Although individuals differ in the extent to which they ascribe certain gender typical characteristics to themselves or not, this does not have much effect on how they narrate. Rather we find that females generally narrate in more elaborated, emotionally expressive ways than do males. This suggest that narratives may express deeply embedded socialized ways of using language that we are not even aware of as we speak!