Differences in socialization of males and females offer insight into the factors fostering differences in behavior between the genders and across cultures within the same gender. There is a deeply rooted social belief in U.S. society that there are certain roles, attitudes, behaviors and traits that are distinctly associated with gender or biology. While male and female are terms that describe a person’s biological sex, masculine and feminine notions are socially constructed “genders” in which ascribed traits like sex and achieved characteristics such as femininity and masculinity are highly variable from one culture to another. In Mexican culture, women are socialized to be much more submissive to men than American women. As Kulis et al. report on the results from a study of Mexican women living in the American Southwest, “Less acculturated Mexican American girls reported both the lowest masculinity scores and the highest submissive femininity scores.”
