Investigating Gender and Gender Identity; Views of Undergraduate Students on Gender Roles and their Value System

Abstract

Social interactions often lead to conflicts between individuals’ perceptions of themselves, identity, rights, and potential, and how others perceive and treat them. However, due to deeply internalized gender perceptions, it often seems that gender is not present in social relations. The objective of this article is to inquire into the relationship between value orientation and attitudes towards gender roles among undergraduates. During the 2023–2024 academic year, 253 undergraduate students from two major universities in Kerala, the Kerala and M G University, participated in the study. Two measures were used to gather data: the Social “Gender Roles Attitude” Scale and the “Portrait Value Scale.” The article analyzed its data using Product-Moment Correlation (Pearson’s) and a non-random sampling technique. Multiple regression analysis was carried out in order to examine the relationship between the variables. The analysis revealed a statistically momentous and positive correlation between meaning orientations and attitudes towards gender roles subscales. Positively significant correlations were found between meaning orientations and the conventional gender roles and its varied dimension of attitude towards gender roles. Undergraduate students’ justifiable preference for “traditional gender roles” was widely accepted as an explanation. The findings in this article are constrained by the limited sample size and local context in which it was conducted, making generalization impossible.