Gender roles is a fascinating area of study in psychology. Several people have given opinions expressing their awareness of different gender roles.
Generally, men are raised to be agentic - to view their role outside the home. Women are raised to be communal - to view their chief role as home oriented.
Now the object relations of sex basically looks at how early emotional experience and interpersonal relationships (especially with mom) shapes our psyche. Our ideas of sex and sex roles are formed by internalization based on people we deal with and how they relate to us.
Despite the fact that much progress has been made on this front, parents and others treat boy children and girl children differently. (There have been many fascinating, creative experiments to show this, but I won't get into it b/c the explanation would take too long.)
Significant progress has been made by women in terms of being more accepted in the workforce, but they are still more likely to have "caring" professions, such as a therapist or teacher or doctor, than political aspirations. Of course, this is a generalization. There have been many female world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, who thought in terms of a national or even global direction. In the United States, (which lags far behind most industrial countries in terms of gender equality,) male politicians outnumber female politicians by a large factor, just as male CEO's outnumber female CEO's.
Part of this is based on women having less oportunity to advance than men. Gender Role theorists posit that it has more to do with the gender roles instilled in a child from birth on. A person raised to be a caregiver and to be primarily concerned with internal family affairs is less likely to have political interests than a person raised to go out into the world and take action.
It's been a semester since I taught the psychology of gender roles, and it's one of the most interesting and important ways of understanding relationships b/w men and women, men and men, and women and women.
One of the most important concepts in this field of study is that there are far more differences withing the group of men and within the group of women, than there are b/w men and women. What differences there are (aside from the obvious biological anatomical differences) is a product of their upbringing and their exposure to their gender role filtered through their "cultural lens."
Women are not programmed to be nurturers any more than men are programmed to be breadwinners. It is not a "natural" state of being, but rather a product of indoctrination from birth, when the new baby is assigned a blue or pink hospital card based on gender.
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