“Boys and Girls” and “The Lottery” suggest how gender roles can be reinforced which perpetuates stereotypes. How are gender roles presented in these texts? Think about the causes of gender stereotypes and what the effects of these stereotypes are as demonstrated in the texts.

The short stories "Boys and Girls" and "The Lottery" both appear to be set around the mid-twentieth century in North America, and the gender norms they present are consequently of that era—an era when men went out to work, while women kept house and raised children. "The Lottery" is considerably shorter than "Boys and Girls" and is told from an omniscient third-person point of view, so the gender roles at play in that story must be inferred from the text, whereas "Boys and Girls" is told from the first-person point of view of a pre-teen girl, who directly feels the oppression of her assigned gender role throughout the story.
The women and girls in "The Lottery" are quieter and neater than the men and boys and are primarily concerned with maintaining their households. They are introduced as follows:

The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands.

Tessie Hutchinson, the unfortunate "winner" of the lottery, arrives late to the gathering because she was doing the dishes. Jane Dunbar has to draw the lot for her husband, Clyde, who cannot attend the lottery due to a broken leg. When she explains that she'll be drawing for Clyde, the lottery organizer asks:

"Don't you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?"

A "grown boy" from the Watson family announces, "I'm drawing for my mother and me," and is greeted with approval from the crowd, who say things like "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it."
When all the lots have been drawn, there's a pause, and then everyone unfolds their slips of paper to see who has "won."

Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saying, "Who is it?," "Who's got it?"

Tessie Hutchinson vehemently protests when it transpires that her family has been selected, and even tries to shunt the "win" onto her daughter Eva, who has married a man named Don, claiming that she's still part of the Hutchinson household.

"Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr. Summers said gently. "You know that as well as anyone else."

Tessie continues to protest, up to the moment the villagers begin stoning her to death, screaming about how unfair the situation is.
The gender stereotypes here are implicit in the role the women and girls hold in the narrative: they are adjuncts to their "menfolk," they are never the heads of their own households if there is a male (even just a teenage boy) to stand in for them, and daughters belong to their husbands' households after marriage. The women are concerned with housework and child-rearing, while the men are concerned with business and civic life. The women "gossip" while the men "talk." Tessie Hutchinson's horror at winning the lottery is presented as unreasonable, hysterical even, considering that the whole village knows the rules and the consequences of this ritual.
Women throughout history have often held a "supporting role" in events, by dint of their social limitations and the rigid gender role assigned to them. While it is clear that the women and girls in this village attend school, it is also clear that they are all destined for marriage, childbirth, and housekeeping. There are no women like Old Man Warner, defiantly single and cantankerous. The women have no authority in this community, even to draw their own lots in the annual human-sacrifice stakes. Their acceptance of this role reinforces the role, and it is seen as astounding, pitiable, and even rather gauche that Tessie Hutchinson tries to subvert the "natural order of things" when she wins the lottery. Women accept the way things are, and the way things are is decided by the men.
In "Boys and Girls," the narrator is an eleven-year-old girl with a younger brother, growing up on a fur farm in the countryside. She assumes the natural authority of older siblings over younger siblings, and by consequence of her greater age and ability, she often works closely with her father in helping him to run the farm. She loves her parents but views them very differently, saying,

My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing. In this he was quite different from my mother, who, if she was feeling cheerful, would tell me all sorts of things . . . Whatever thoughts and stories my father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions. Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride.

The speaker respects her father, perhaps because she finds him rather intimidating, and she longs for his approval. Her mother, by contrast, is the object of the narrator's disdain—an attitude she may have inherited from watching the men in her life, and mimicking their values. Although her mother is responsible for the feeding, clothing, bathing, and general care of the entire household, she says that

It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically important.

She aligns herself strongly with her father, and is dismayed to learn as she approaches adolescence that this alignment is not allowed to continue, that she will be expected to help her mother in the house, while her younger brother, Laird, takes over the farm chores. She feels this is entirely a scheme of her mother's devising, to take her away from her father:

My mother, I felt, was not to be trusted. She was kinder than my father and more easily fooled, but you could not depend on her, and the real reasons for the things she said and did were not to be known. She loved me . . . but she was also my enemy. She was always plotting. She was plotting now to get me to stay in the house more, although she knew I hated it (because she knew I hated it) and keep me from working for my father. It seemed to me she would do this simply out of perversity, and to try her power. It did not occur to me that she could be lonely, or jealous.

It does not occur to the speaker that her father, too, expects her to follow her mother's example, and leave off the farm-work and go into the house to make and mend clothing, cook meals, can preserves, and otherwise see to the day-to-day running of the family. This "women's work" is distasteful to Alice; it feels like a trap she must escape. Her admiration of Flora, the highly-strung mare, is no coincidence, for this horse can rage and scream and prance and have a "crisis of nerves" at her leisure, and still be fed and housed. Flora refuses to behave like a proper mare and is impossible to tame. When she is due to be put down and rendered into fox-food, she makes a mad dash for freedom, and the speaker enables her escape from the farm. This creates more work for her father, who must chase the horse down, and in the end, Flora is shot and butchered as planned, but having purchased her a few more hours of freedom seems worth it to the narrator, even though it came at the cost of her father's respect for her. When he asks her why she would do such a thing, she is unable to express herself, and begins to cry, which is all the answer her father thinks he needs:

"Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humour the words which absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he said.

The speaker's journey in the story is one of moving from childhood to adolescence, but particularly within the framework of her assigned gender role and all the heavy cultural baggage that entails. As she notes:

The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me.

She resists "becoming" a girl for as long as she can, maintaining her authority over her little brother, defying her mother's orders, and embracing the smelly, bloody, physically demanding work of the fox-farm in emulation of her father. She daydreams at night about being a hero in various scenarios, and feels stifled and irritated by comments about what "girls" should and should not do, for these comments do not reflect her inner life at all.

My grandmother came to stay with us for a few weeks and I heard other things. "Girls don't slam doors like that." "Girls keep their knees together when they sit down." And worse still, when I asked some questions, "That's none of girls’ business." I continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free.

Gradually, however, the social pressure to "become" a girl begins to wear her down. She unconsciously starts to care more about "typical" girl-things, like dresses, hairstyles, and boys. She decorates her half of the bedroom she shares with her brother to make it prettier, and while gazing in the mirror, wonders if she herself will be pretty when she grows up. Her daydreams change from placing herself as the hero to placing herself as the object of the hero's actions, classic "damsel in distress" scenarios:

And at this point the story concerned itself at great length with what I looked like—how long my hair was, and what kind of dress I had on; by the time I had these details worked out the real excitement of the story was lost.

The speaker is losing her original sense of self to the restrictions of her gender role, and when she makes a last, defiant bid to assert herself in letting Flora run free, her disobedience is not even treated seriously, because it can be dismissed as feminine frivolity. She has a complex inner life that is devalued at a single stroke by her father's careless sexism, and she feels herself to be as worthless as he has just declared her to be.

"She's only a girl," he said. I didn't protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true.