Zaldivia, Dara Chesna M.

GNED 10A

BSBM-HRMT 2B

There are many definitions of Sex and Gender. These definitions are the products of different perspectives
of different people who are dedicated to study about sex and gender.

In the field of psychology, a new wave of gender researchers were challenging the presumption that
masculinity and femininity (and, by implication, women and men) could be measured on unidimensional scales that
presume masculinity and femininity were opposite poles. Instead, these researchers argued that femininity and
masculinity were not opposites but could co-vary (Locksley & Colten, 1979; Pedhazur & Tetenbaum, 1979; Edwards
& Ashworth, 1977). Bem offered (1993, 1981) a new way to think about gender that has become the gold standard
in the social sciences. Masculinity and femininity are two different personality dimensions. A man or a woman could
be high on masculinity (measured as feeling efficacious, strategic, logical) and also high on femininity (measured as
nurturance, empathy, warmth).

Psychologists weren’t the only one’s pushing back against the functionalist theories of gender that
predominated in the mid-20th century. In the field of sociology, Lopata and Thorne (1978) published a path breaking
and, by now, iconic article in which they argued that gender researchers were ignoring the problematic implications
of using the word “role” as in “sex or gender role”. The word itself implies functionality between complementary
male and female lives. The very rhetoric of “role” implies symbiotic relationships and ignores questions of power and
privilege. Would we ever use the language of “race roles” to explain the inequality between whites and Blacks in
American society? In addition, the language of “sex role” presumes a stability of behavior expected across places,
time, and race/ethnic groups (see Connell, 1987; Ferree, 1990; Lorber, 1994; Risman, 1998, 2004).
I provide a history of gender theory in the social sciences. I highlight major themes for explaining apparent gender
differences and inequality. While there are many different theories, my conceptual intervention illustrates how
seemingly competing paradigms should be synthesized into a holistic integrative theoretical framework that I call
gender structure theory. I argue that factors contributing to gender inequality include those at the individual,
interactional, and macro level of human society. At each level of analysis, we must attend to material and cultural
processes. Understanding gender as a social structure requires us to focus on dynamism in the system: a change at
any given level of analysis may reverberate to others. While gender inequality is ubiquitous, change may originate at
the individual, interactional or macro level of analysis, and via material or cultural processes. How change happens in
the gender structure is an empirical question and one requiring more research in the future.

This handbook has been organized to reflect a way to think about gender that goes far beyond one’s personal
identity and views gender as a system of inequality embedded in all aspects of society. This is not a new
conceptualization, but one that began to be widely adopted by sociologists toward the end of the 20th century.
Social science has developed from understanding gen der simply as feminine and masculine personality
characteristics to analyzing how gender is something we perform in our daily lives, how gender stereotypes have
consequences in the distribution of opportunities and rewards, and how gender is embedded in the cultural logic of
our organizations and worldviews. In 1998, I first offered a synthetic theory that integrates individual, interactional
and macro levels of analysis. Since then I’ve been revising it regularly to reflect new research and theorizing (Risman,
2004, 2017, 2018; Risman & Davis, 2013).1 This chapter integrates much of my earlier work to describe gender
structure theory as a framework for synthesizing previous research on gender as well as for understanding the way
multiple processes involved in gender co-exist and interrelate. Readers of this handbook will notice how the chapters
have been organized according to the components in gender structure theory. Here, in this introductory theoretical
chapter, I begin with a brief interdisciplinary overview of gender theory. This overview starts with evolving bio logical
theories, and then moves to psychological theories that conceptualize gender primarily as a personality trait of
individuals. I then explain the trajectory of two distinct sociological theories: “doing gender” and structural theory;
both of which challenged the psychological view of gender as primarily a personality trait of individuals. I then end
this brief history of gender theory with a discussion of integrative and intersectional frameworks that emerged
towards the end of the last century, including my own. The main body of this chapter is a presentation of gender as a
social structure. Here, I focus on recent revisions to the theory (Risman, 2017, 2018) that differentiate between
culture and material social processes taking place at each level of the gender structure. I use examples to explain
such differentiation from the articles in the rest of this Handbook. By using gender structure theory to understand
the multiple processes contributing to gender inequality, I avoid privileging any one perspective over another and
highlight how diverse social mechanisms simultaneously contribute to the power and complexity of gender in
society. Despite a history of “theoretical warfare” between some gender scholars who pit their theories against one
other, when we observe the long-term trajectory of gender theory we do indeed see a coherent narrative of
increasingly sophisticated understandings of gender overtime. In many ways, the research on gender is a case study
that illustrates the scientific method. When empirical research did not support theoretical explanations, those
explanations were revised, contextualized, and sometimes discarded. New theories emerged. I trace this journey and
show how to use the theory of gender as a social structure to help understand gender at the individual, interactional
and macro levels of analysis.