Shared Expectations Help Relationships

Gender roles, like most social conventions, can be helpful for both shaping identity and managing expectations. Our society (and most of our families) have mutually agreed-upon practices that are neither good nor bad in themselves yet produce cooperative, complementary and beneficial environments for everyone (like driving on the right side of the road).

Jesus clearly contradicted some of the gender expectations of his time when they impeded discipleship or missionary witness (see Jesus’ interaction with women in public settings and his sending of women to be the first witnesses of the resurrection).

While familial and societal gender roles may change from one group to the next, a common acceptance of roles better facilitates the complementary gift of one person to another as their individual actions contribute to the good of the whole. It is in this mutual self-giving that we actualize our human dignity and fulfill our God-given identity.