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The Norms of Power and the Power of Norms
Norms around gender stem from a society’s ideals and values of what it means to be a woman or a man. Failure to conform to these dictates can trigger strong social sanctions, such as ridiculing men for being emotional or scorning women who dress inappropriately. These norms include everything from cultural beliefs to expected behaviors and practices. Gender norms, in particular, have not changed greatly partly because they are widely held and practiced in daily life, because they often represent the interests of power holders, and because they instill unconscious learned biases about gender differences that make it easier to conform to long-standing norms than to new ones.19 Social norms of gender are in constant dialogue with women’s agency and may determine women’s capacity to act. As such, they operate as social determinants that interact with an individual’s will in the form of a belief system around women and men. It is with this understanding that we observed social norms in the data collected in the 20 countries, as they appeared over and over again in women’s and men’s accounts of their daily lives in their communities.
Norms and Roles For the purpose of this study, the main characteristics that define social norms are the following: (a) They regulate individual behavior in a society. (b) They specifically prescribe what behavior is expected and what is not allowed in specific circumstances. (c) They tell a person what to believe others expect of her behavior and tell others what to expect from that person. (d) There is an expected agreement, or belief that the agreement exists, on the content of the norm and an enforcement of such agreement or belief by whoever holds power. Social norms are powerful forces; they are prescriptions or dictates reflected in the formal structures of society, in its informal rules; its gender role divisions; and permeating beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. They hold power via emotional control (Elster 1989), social expectations (Bicchieri 2006), and prescription (Akerlof and Kranton 2000), as well as internal commitment (Alexander 2003). In many cases, particularly with gender norms, the joint presence of at least two of these forces makes the norm more binding. As Bicchieri (2006) suggests, individuals prefer to conform to the norm due to the belief that other people will also conform, to the point that a collective agreement is created between normative beliefs and behavior.20 How people believe they should behave, what their behavior is, and how society expects them to behave are all faces of the same system that enforces a norm. Although being a mother, a husband, or a student can be performed differently by different people, specific behaviors are associated with each. We expect mothers to care for their children and students to attend school and take exams. These behavioral regularities are what make them social roles. Gender roles are part of these expected behaviors and, particularly, are sex-typed behaviors (Eagly, Beall, and Sternberg 2004). Gender-ascribed roles define the ideal expected behaviors for men and women in any position they occupy in society or in any activity, overlapping with other expected role behavior. In other words, gender roles define what is deemed appropriate for women On Norms and Agency • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9862-3