In discussions on gender roles, the "fact" that gender roles have been pretty constant across cultures and throughout time is inevitably brought up. The opposite "fact" is also often cited: that gender roles are diverse and varied. However, I have rarely if ever seen this claim linked to evidence and usually the evidence that is cited is flawed either by being too exclusive (Only western societies or only societies that are widely known an talked about) or based on too few cultures. So I'm interested in whether or not this has been explored broadly and in depth and quantified over many cultures.
What do you consider to be gender roles? The difficulty in even defining them speaks to how constantly dynamic they are, I think. Just about everything we ascribe gender specificity to has changed over time, often pretty recently. Pink used to be associated with boys and masculinity in the Victorian era (and I think is making a comeback), with blue being the softer, girly color. High heels originated in men's fashion, a derivation from heeled riding boots as I understand it. For much of the last 500 years in European fashion, men wore tons of lace. There were notable periods in which stylish upperclass males used ridiculous amounts of make-up. Jewelry, "dresses", skirts, tights, all have examples in male fashion. And note all this is Eurocentric. Look at any Asian culture and you see an entirely different stream of traditions about gender-appropriate stylizations, not to mention Africa or the Americas. It's enough to completely dissolve the thought that gender roles are anything but highly variable social trappings.
But maybe you didn't mean fashion and style, maybe you're referring to gender roles as things like "Men should be manly, brusque, unemotional, physical". That holds up even less to cursory inspection. The Han Chinese ideal of masculinity involved an appreciation for art and philosophy, cultivation of refined taste, and immaculate social etiquette. Sengoku-era Japanese samurai valued talented poetry as much as marital prowess. Classical greco-roman orators would sob in public and display immense emotion.
The list is endless and as diverse as you care to make it with further inspection, because literally every unique society has had a unique conception of what a given gender role consists of. The idea that current western values (as if that's even a single homogenous set!) are a constant across history is one that should evaporate with no more than an honest glance at any other culture.
The most you can say is that there might be a few biological predispositions that are expressed uniformly, but even that is bound to be problematic and contentious.
I agree with the other commenter. However, there has just been a fantastic and superbly researched documentary series on the BBC on a very similar topic. 'The Ascent of Women ' presented by Dr. Amanda Foreman explores the changing role of women from the beginning of civilization and right across the world. If you are based in the UK you will also be able to access the free open university resources that accompany it. I'm interested in women's history and I found it really engaging and covered topics that I was completely unaware of (for instance in China and Japan).
The gist of Foreman's research highlights the idea that women did not always conform to the gender role that later characterised other eras. This is especially true for Çatalhöyük. Now in modern Turkey. Here Prof. Ian Holder theorises that people had nearly non existent gender roles and didn't even live in biologically related nuclear family units. Foreman suggests that it wasn't until the agricultural revolution and the creation of surplus that restrictions on women's freedom in political, socioeconomic and religious spheres started to become restricted.
I'm currently on a mobile so can't add as much on source material as I would like. But I will return to this comment later and add more! Computer permitting.
Link to the BBC website and documentary mentioned above: