Sociology Gender Roles

Gender roles differ from society to society, culture to culture and change through time. Our understanding of this subject is important, because it helps us understand the development processes impact differently on men and women roles. While boys and girls are born with biological differences, we find other differences that appear in our communities, linked to the expected roles portrayed by society and the community that enforces these roles on us. The concept “gender roles” describe the relationships and social roles and values determined by the community for both sexes (men and women); these roles, values and relationships are changing through time and place, also other social relation overlap and interrelate such as religion, social class

The role of men and women is almost equal in this community, and since subsistence work like hunting and gathering is the main type of work the San Bushmen do, I will address the men and women roles in terms of dividing the workload of producing and bringing food, also including other duties like manufacturing and maintenance of their tools, clothing and housing. According to Richard B. Lee, where he collected the time it took the San Bushmen of the Dobe camp to hunt and gather food that last for a week, and the result was that the adults worked about two and half days a week. So food hunting and gathering occupies a small proportion of the San Bushmen working hours. Where men are mainly the hunters of the community, their work is frequent but uneven comparing to women work, because since hunting is an unpredictable mission and face a lot of dangers with wild animals; hunters (men) sometimes hunt regularly in a certain week, then the other week, or even the rest of the month stops hunting, if he faced some problems, or it is just bad luck. On the other hand, the women are responsible for gathering the food; for example one day of gathering food is enough to feed her family for the next three days, and spend the rest of her days resting in the camp and doing other tasks like doing embroidery, entertaining visitors from other camps or she visits other camps. Also, “ for each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure is maintained throughout the year” (lee, n.d). Over then 60% of this community subsistence comes from gathering, which means that women do much work than men, despite that men do gather with women. However as we mentioned before the roles of both men and women of