INTERRELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PARENTING STYLES AND THE GENDER ATTITUDES OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

The influence of family on the establishing of gender attitudes of high school students is
discussed in the article. It is stated that development of gender representations, in terms of
concepts,points of view, experiences, thoughts regarding the distribution of social roles and positions of
men and women in the society, take place under the strong influence of social rules. Obtained resuls
showed that among the boys and girls, participating in the study, individuals with an androgynous
personality type predominated, since their masculine and feminine features were presented harmoniously
and complementarily. It was found that the majority of high school students had egalitarian gender
perceptions, which suggest equal opportunities for personal and professional self-realization of men and
women in different spheres of life. Students believed that despite gender differences, they, as
representatives of social groups, are very similar. Therefore, the social roles of men and women are
interchangeable. At the same time, parents of high school students were significantly more likely to follow
traditional gender rules. Such gender ideas are based on the principle of strict differentiation of male and
female roles, due to the existing of objective biological sex differences. Further, we examined
combination of students gender types and their attitudes regarding the social roles of men and women.We
found that the majority of participants had an androgynous type of gender combined with egalitarian
gender attitudes.
It has been empirically proven that high school students whose parents use an authoritative
parenting style were significantly more often characterized by egalitarian gender perceptions. Young
people, whose parents use authoritarian and indifferent parenting styles had proneness to follow
traditional or indefenite gender perceptions. We also found the close relationship between the parents’
gender attitudes and their style of parenting: the more progressive the parents’ attitudes were, the more
harmonious preferred styles they had.