Normative statements about women's roles and girls' and women's behaviour being appropriately feminine were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as naked facts of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour.
~ Rebecca M. Jordan-Young
