Conventional gender roles basically assign women to the home and men to work. Consequently, there are many fewer women in top-level jobs (there are only 15 female CEO's in the FTSE 100) as they are presumed to want to take maternity leave and are generally less aggressive than men so would find it harder to survive in the harsh business world. OK, I'll be honest, Google hasn't helped with the images- this is what came up when I Googled 'acceptance of gender roles':
What I found from my little bit of research is that actually gender roles are getting more hazy and less well-defined. While it is true that there is still a huge difference in some areas- particularly in the workplace where the pay gap between men and women is a rather large 19.9%- we are starting to become more accustomed to finding men and women in non-traditional gender roles, such as the increasing number of 'stay-at-home dads' and women being involved in professions previously dominated by men, such as the law and medicine.
Second wave feminism wanted women to be treated on an equal basis with men- it had the slogan 'feminism is the radical notion that women are people'. Therefore, it wanted women to have the same opportunities as men regarding work and lifestyle choices (they were particularly vocal on the issue of abortion).
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