Should Gender Stereotypes be challenged?

[Clueless Morgan]

Yes, gender stereotypes should be challenged.

Personality traits —
For example, women are often expected to be passive, loving and caring, while men are usually expected to be aggressive, protective and dominant.

I could make a case for myself qualifying as much in the "male" personality traits as the "female" personality traits.  It's entirely situational as to when I aggressively defend something and when I'm passive.

Domestic behaviors —
For example, caring for children is often considered best done by women because of their caring feminine nature, while household repairs are often considered best done by men because of their masculine trait such as strength.

I do the majority of my own household repairs and improvements simply because there's no one else around to do them - and they can be fuckin' fun and rewarding.  I also do all my own cooking and cleaning for the exact same reason.  If I had a live-in partner and I had to do all the domestic shit like cooking, cleaning and laundry, it would not be but a matter of weeks before I went on strike and refused to do any of it until he started pitching in.

Occupations —
For example, most nurses and secretaries are usually women, and most construction workers and engineers are usually men.

True, but not necessary.  I think working construction would be fun (and would be a valuable thing for me professionally); I just wouldn't personally want to do it for a living.  But there are some women who might.

Physical appearance —
For example, women are usually cute, graceful and lovable while men are to be tall, broad-shouldered and have a strong pose.

I, myself, am tall (for a woman) and broad-shouldered. So I guess that makes me not stereotypically female or feminine?

Personality traits —

For example, women are often expected to be passive, loving and caring, while men are usually expected to be aggressive, protective and dominant.

The reason women are inherently passive is because of their relative physical weakness when compared with men, in an world without laws a women being blunt to a man will usually end bad.

That is ENTIRELY dependent on the man in question.  Not all men, even in aggressively patriarchal societies, are blithering assholes who will beat or rape a woman for the slightest cultural infraction.

And I also take issue with the statement that women are "inherently passive." We may go about getting what we want differently than men might, but that doesn't make us "inherently passive."

Anyway, this was on an episode of SGU recently:
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index...le-brains/

Male and Female Brains

The problem with trying to argue that men and women are the same, or that race is just a social construct with no biological reality, is that such absolute positions are difficult to rectify with our common experience. This can lead to rejection by some of the underlying point because it sounds like political correctness rather than a scientific conclusion.

A better approach is to ask several more specific questions. The first is, are there objective categorical differences between two or among three or more alleged groups? A categorical difference is a characteristic that is present in all of one group and none of the other, without any overlap. You can also ask, how frequent are exceptions to apparent categorical differences?
...
They [the researchers] found that the differences [between male and female brains] were statistical, and not categorical. If you look at any one region or pathway in the brain, there were statistical differences between male and female. However, there was a tremendous amount of overlap. Further, as with height, knowing a person’s sex does not allow you to predict any one trait.