Gender Performativity

Butler (1999)

In her book Gender Trouble (1990), Butler explored the possibility that gender can be 'performed', in retrospect of her book, she said this:
In the first instance, the performativity of gender revolves around... the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself. Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalisation in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration

This denotes that people 'perform' as one gender (act in a way the gender is supposed to) because it is assumed that they would act that way. And the second point denotes that gender performativity isn't just acting like a gender is expected to, but someone becoming accustomed to acting that way to the point that it becomes the norm.


Hall (1995)

In the book Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Hall noted that stereotypes regarding gender, specifically the stereotype that women perform poorly in maths, resulted in a self fulfilling prophecy when it the stereotype was high - called stereotype threat:
In Study 1 we demonstrated that the pattern observed in the literature that women underperform on difficult (but not easy) math tests was observed among a highly selected sample of men and women. In Study 2 we demonstrated that this difference in performance could be eliminated when we lowered stereotype threat by describing the test as not producing gender differences. However, when the test was described as producing gender differences and stereotype threat was high, women performed substantially worse than equally qualified men did. A third experiment replicated this finding with a less highly selected population and explored the mediation of the effect. The implication that stereotype threat may underlie gender differences in advanced math performance, even those that have been attributed to genetically rooted sex differences, is discussed.

So although only tested in one context - performance in an academic test, this theory can apply to society as a whole, in that stereotypes can effect the way people perform, creating a self fulfilling prophecy, and although not shown, this is assumed to apply to all genders.