Chapter 10: Gender

and Society
Sevsem Cicek-Okay, PhD
Sociology Department
Niagara University
The Sociological Concepts of Sex
and Gender
Complex interaction between biology and culture shapes
behavioral differences associated with gender
Sex does not equal gender

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The Sociological Concepts of Sex and
Gender

Sex: anatomical or other biological differences between males and

females that originate in human genes and reproductive organs
Gender: refers to appropriate physical, behavioral, and personality
characteristics given a person’s sex.
Sex does not equal gender.
Gender and Sex as Dynamic Concepts

Intersexed: individuals have ambiguous genitalia.

Intersexed

Both sex and gender are fluid, dynamic, socially-constructed

concepts.

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Gender and Sex as Dynamic Concepts

Gender identity: is one’s sense of being a women, man, girl, or boy,

or being outside of gender identity.
Transgender: individual’s gender differs from the gender assigned to
them at birth.
Gender identity

Cisgender: individual’s gender aligns with the gender assigned to

them at birth.

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Sexuality
Sexuality: the ways in which people construct their sexual desires
and relationships, including the norms governing sexual behavior
Queer theory challenged binary notions of sexuality
Queer theory proposes thinking of identity categories as always open
and fluid, since no one conforms perfectly to identity categories.
 Sexuality
Asexual: Those who do not experience sexual attraction to any gender.
Bisexual: Those who have physical, romantic, and/or emotional attractions to both genders.
Gay: Those who have enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attractions to people of the same
gender.
Lesbian: A woman who has enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attractions to other women.
LGBTQ+: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning and + can stand for ally or other
groups. Notably, transgender relates to gender rather than sexuality. Queer or questioning and + can
relate to both sex and gender.
Pansexual: Those who have sexual attractions to people regardless of their gender.
Questioning: Those who are questioning their sexuality or gender identity.
Queer theory: A theory that challenges binary ideas of gender and sexuality.
Queer: Those who fall outside of gender and sexuality norms.
Sexual orientation: A person’s sexual identity based on their enduring physical, romantic, or emotional
attraction. Sexual orientation is often classified heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, and asexual.
 Chapter 9

Gender and Society

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Learning and Performing Gendered Selves

Culture and society influence gender and gender roles, the

attitudes and behaviors considered appropriately “masculine” or
“feminine” in a particular culture.
Masculinities and Femininities: refer to the cultural definitions
of the traits associated with being a “woman” or a “man” acquired
during the socialization process
Whether we act more masculine or feminine has less to do with
our biological sex than with the societal gender roles associated
with our gender.
Construction of Gendered Selves
What we consider “masculine” and “feminine” differs across cultures,
and gender displays can vary dramatically.
There are pressures to conform to conventional gender roles in all
cultures.
Agents of gender socialization—the process of learning social norms
and values around gender—contribute to the creation of our
gendered selves.
Agents of Gender Socialization
The Family
“Factory of gendered personalities” - children learn about socially
normative gender roles from their families, particularly their
parents.
Even before birth, parents begin to treat their children differently
based on the child’s gender.
Sons—“Wings”—taught to complete a task on their own
Daughters—“Roots”—taught to ask for help or for someone else
to complete the task
Let’s discuss:
What are the household tasks and chores you were expected to do
growing up. Are there gendered patterns in the types of tasks you
were expected to do?
Class activity
Work with 2–3 classmates to create a list of toys popularly associated
with boys and toys normally associated with girls. Find the pictures
from Internet if you can. Discuss the “girl” and “boy” toys and
describe how they are played with and what kinds of skills they might
teach.
Let’s discuss how toys are part of gender socialization.
Agents of Gender Socialization
Friends and Peers
Peers teach stereotypical gender roles from an early age
Peer pressure reflects and affirms stereotypes
Engage in gender policing, stigmatizing those who perform gender
incorrectly
“Social dosage” effect
Stereotypical gender behavior enforced in sports teams,
sororities/fraternities, and other groups
Agents of Gender Socialization
31% of LGBTQ youth, 43% of transgender youth and 40% of questioning youth have been bullied
at school, compared to 16% of their non-LGBTQ peers;

24% of LGBTQ youth, 35% of transgender youth and 41% of questioning youth have skipped
school because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to school, compared to 8% of non-LGBTQ
youth;

Over half (54%) of LGBTQ youth, 61% of transgender youth and 61% of questioning youth are
battling depression compared with 29% of non-LGBTQ youth.
Agents of Gender Socialization
Media
Highly sexualized images of women who exhibit passivity and
dependency
In cartoons:
Male cartoon characters represented 4x as often and used more physical aggression
Females more likely to display behaviors of fear, romance, politeness, acting supportive
In video games, women are presented in hypersexualized ways
and less likely to have playable female characters.
Popular music videos portray women as sex objects who are
submissive in relation to men.
EGLITIS, DISCOVER SOCIOLOGY. © SAGE PUBLISHING, 2018.
Do new media sources offer more diverse images? Are old
stereotypes still pervasive? What do you think?

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Agents of Gender Socialization
Schools
Hidden curriculum: unspoken socialization to norms, values, and roles—
including gender roles—that occurs in the classroom
Shyness discouraged in boys
History textbooks and literature dominated by male figures
Roles of adults in school (teacher, administrator, janitor) provide early lessons
to students about career prospects
Teachers’ gender bias has a significant effect on the
educations of boys and girls.
Gender bias refers to the conscious or unconscious
differential treatment of boys and girls, or men and
women, because of their gender.
Research has found that girls and boys receive different
educations from elementary school through college
(Sadker and Zittleman 2009).

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Gender Bias in the Classroom
Differences in positive reinforcement: Teachers tend to call on boys more in
the classroom and provide positive reinforcement for their contributions to
discussions, whereas girls are positively reinforced for keeping quiet or are
ignored (Sadker and Zittleman 2009).

Differences in teacher interaction: Teachers spend up to two-thirds of their

time talking with male students, praise boys more than girls, tolerate more
uncontrolled behavior in boys but not in girls, gaze toward boys for answers to
questions they pose to the class, and allow boys to interrupt them but tell girls
to raise their hands (Chemaly 2015).

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Bias in academic subject areas: Teachers show gender bias in how they
grade and approach student work (Lindberg, Shibley Hyde, and Peterson
2010).

When teachers are given math tests to grade that do not contain the names
of students, for example, girls score higher than boys; when given tests with
names on them, boys score higher (Lavy and Sand 2015).

Girls are also steered away from science, technology, engineering, and
math (STEM) courses, which have historically not been seen as “female”
fields, and boys are discouraged from courses in the arts and languages,
which have not historically been seen as “masculine” (Chemaly 2015).

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 SOURCE: Data from National Student
Clearinghouse Reseach Center,
http://nscresearchcenter.org/snapshotreport-
degreeattainment15/.

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 Family

Gender School
Inequalities
Work
Gender and Family Life
Women still do disproportionate share of housework and
childcare
Second shift: unpaid housework women typically do after
coming home from paid jobs
Unmarried women who live with men spend less time on
housework than do married women
Marriage has “traditionalizing” effect, even in self-described
egalitarian households
The Second Shift: Arlie Hochschild
 Gender and Higher Education
Women historically barred from most higher ed. institutions until
passage of Title XI, 1972.
Now, women graduate high school at higher rates and earn higher
GPAs.
More women than men hold a college degree and make up 60% of
advance degree holders aged 25-29
Gender and Higher Education

Figure 10.4 College Enrollment Rates by Gender and Race, 2000 and 2018

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (2020b)

Source: . College enrollment rates. National Center for Education Statistics.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cpb.asp
Let’s discuss?
Why are women now more likely than men to be enrolled in college?
More men than women leave high school without a degree.
Young women as a group have higher grades than young men.
Women perceive college as bringing greater returns.
Men are more likely than women to drop out without a degree
Gay (44%) men are more likely to finish college than their heterosexual male
(28%) and female peers (34%), and lesbian women (24%) are less likely to
complete their higher education than either gay men or heterosexual men and
women.
Gender and Economics
Gender wage gap: difference between earnings of women who work
full time year-round as a group and men who work full time year-
round as a group
On average, women working full time year-round earn 83% of what
men earn
Disparity increases for women of color
Occupational gender segregation:
concentration of men and women in different occupations
Gender and Economics
Labor supply factors: reasons that women or men may “prefer” particular
occupations
Labor demand factors needs and preferences of the employer.
Human capital: skills and knowledge a person possesses that makes them valuable
in a workplace.
Indirect labor costs: time, training, money spent when an employee takes time off to
care for others, parental leave, tardiness, or leaves after receiving training.
Some employers believe hiring women means higher indirect labor costs.
Figure 10.7 Women’s And Men’s Earnings by Occupation in Gender-Segregated Fields

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. (2018). Women’s earnings by occupation.

Gender and Economics
Glass ceiling: artificial boundary that allows women to see the next
occupational or salary level even as structural obstacles keep them
from reaching it.
Glass escalator: nearly invisible promotional boost men gain in
female-dominated occupations
Studies suggest that lesbian, gay, and transgender workers experience
high rates of discrimination in hiring, firing, and wages.
Classical Sociological Approaches
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898) viewed the relationship
between men and women as sexuo-economic relation, in
which the sexual relationship was also an economic one,
with women depending on men financially.
Talcott Parsons (1955) believed traditional sex roles
played a functional role in U.S. society, with women
socialized into “expressive” qualities for the private
sphere and men socialized with “instrumental” qualities
for the public sphere.
Contemporary Feminist Thought
Feminism: belief that social equality should exist
between the sexes. Seeks to explain, expose, and
eliminate sexism.
In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan
argued that U.S. stereotypes of femininity distorted
women’s actual experiences and contributed to their
unhappiness.
Feminist Thought, Continued
Feminism is a broad term used to describe several different waves and
ways of thought.
Liberal feminism
Socialist feminism
Radical feminism
Multicultural feminism
Third wave feminism
Intersectional feminism
Feminist Perspectives on Doing Sociology
Standpoint theory: a perspective that says the knowledge we create is
conditioned by where we stand or our subjective social position.
Standpoint epistemology: a philosophical perspective that argues that what
we can know is affected by the position we occupy in society.
Matrix of domination: a system of social positions in which any individual
may concurrently occupy a status (e.g., gender, race, class, or sexual
orientation) as a member of a dominated group and a status as a member of a
dominating group.
Sociology of Masculinity
The four “basic rules of manhood”
no “sissy stuff”: avoid any hint of femininity
be a “big deal”: acquire wealth, power, and status
be a “sturdy oak”: never show your emotions
“give ’em hell”: exude a sense of daring and aggressiveness
Hegemonic masculinity: the culturally normative idea of male behavior, which
often emphasizes strength, domination, and aggression
Harmful for both men and women
Gender—Globally
Globally, millions of women denied education and cannot read.
They are also more likely to be denied medical care, trafficked into the sex
trade, and denied the right to own or inherit property.
They are less likely to go to school, earn wages equivalent to their work,
and eat when a family’s food is scarce.
Women’s empowerment realized through education, advances in health and
technology, and microfinancing.
“Doing Gender”
Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987):
Gender is an activity we do rather than a fixed identity
Built on Goffman’s “impression management”
Sex category: the socially required identification display that confirms
someone’s membership in a given category

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