The Social

Construction of Gender

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Gender Inequality
 Simone de Beauvoir – commenting on Rosa
Luxembourg and Marie Curie –

 “it is not women's inferiority that has

determined their historical insignificance: it is
their historical insignificance that has
doomed them to inferiority".

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Sex and Gender
 Two different things

 Sex is assigned on the basis of: Biological/Physiological

differences

 Gender: social definition of feminine or masculine, a

learned identity; the distinction between girl and boy is
taught

 Sex does not translate neatly into gender

 A co-construction of the biological and the social

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Gender
 Gender refers to the cultural and social definition of
feminine and masculine, it bears no relevance to the
biological sex.

 Rather, it is the socially constructed expectations placed

on a person as a result of their sex.

 Though both sexes have both sets of hormones, the

proportion of those hormones gives a person their
masculine or feminine physical traits.

 Yet the biological differences that exist in males and females

are only averages that are very influenced by other factors.

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Contd.
 For example, although men are on average larger
than women, body size is in fact influenced by
diet and physical activity, which in turn is maybe
influenced by culture, class and race.

 The general all-or-none categorizing of gender

traits is very misleading.

 There is an overlap in the distribution of "typical

male" or "typical female" traits.

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Gender order of society
 Gender arrangements are common and familiar

 Taken as part of the natural order of society

 Yet gender is acquired and enacted –people

construct themselves as feminine or masculine

 Most of us combine masculine and feminine

characteristics rather than being all one or all
the other

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Gender
 Gender construction starts with assignment to a sex
category at birth.

 Sex category becomes a gender status through

naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers

 Sex does not come into play until puberty – by then

sexual identity is shaped by gendered norms and
expectations

 Parenting too is gendered

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Gendering
 Legitimated by religion, law, science and the
society’s entire set of values.

 Gender as a social status is constructed

through prescribed processes of teaching,
learning, emulation and enforcement

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Gender cannot be reduced to the
biological just as:
 Economy is much more than producing food and
goods and distributing them to eaters and users (no
one eats money or credit)

 Morals and religions are not the fears and ecstasies in

the brain

 Language goes far beyond the sounds produced by

the tongue and larynx

 Family and kinship are not equivalent to having sex

and procreating

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Contd.
 Similarly, gender cannot be equated to
biological and physiological differences
between human males and females

 Three genders in some societies; in most only

two are recognized

 Women who have lived as men and vice versa

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Billy Tipton – a jazz musician

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Cross-dressing – learning how to
be a different sex

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The classical Indian representation

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Rethinking sex and gender

 Sex is a determination made through the

application of socially agreed upon
biological criteria for classifying persons as
females or males.

  It is important to note that it is possible to

claim membership in a sex category even if
one lacks the required traits based on
biological "sex". Is the science certain?

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Sex Reassignment through surgery
 Bradley Channing (US Army)- I want to live as a
woman

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Gender
 Gender is the activity. It is the activities of
managing situated conduct in light of
normative conceptions of attitudes and
activities appropriate for one's sex category
– mostly understood as male or female.

 We all "do gender" constantly. "Gender

performances" are NOT just something done
in rare exotic/"deviant" situations like "drag
queens”.

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contd.
 We ALL "do gender" everyday... the way you do
your hair, the clothes you wear, whether or not
you shave and where you shave, the scented
products you put on, the way you walk and carry
yourself, the way you talk, even the way you're
sitting right now are all part of how your
communicate your gender to others.

 Why are IIT girls sometimes called non-males?

Are they disturbing boundaries by being in a
supposedly male profession – engineering?

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Associations/Stereotypes

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Gender
 Re-conceptualization of gender as not so much a
 ‘set of traits’

 residing with individuals, but as something people do in their

 social interactions

 Gendered activities are not so much expressions of natural

gender differences but the very act of the production of
these differences.

 Constantly created out of human interaction, out of social life

 Everyone “does gender”

 Gender performance

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Learning to do gender;
“performing” gender
 No essential femaleness or maleness, femininity or masculinity,
womanhood or manhood

 Yet, society shapes individuals into particular genders

 Individuals then recreate society’s version of men and women

 Sustain, reproduce and render legitimate institutional arrangements

which produce gender – a power relationship?

 Happens through an invisible process – which makes possible

alternatives virtually unthinkable

 Society polices and protects boundaries that separate male and female

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Gender as a social institution
 Major way of organising social life

 Society chooses people for different tasks in the following

ways:

 A) on the basis of talents, motivations and competence –

achieved characteristics

 B) on the basis of gender, race and ethnicity – ascribed

characteristics

 Every society uses gender and age grades

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Gender as a social institution
 As a social institution, gender is a process of
creating distinguishable social statuses for
the assignment of rights and responsibilities

 An enduring and extensive pattern of social

relations

 In gender we move the focus on ‘difference’

to a focus on ‘relations’

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What are the binaries around
which gender is organised?
 Masculine Feminine
 Public Private
 Outside Inside
 Visible Secluded
 Work Home
 Paid Unpaid
 Work Leisure
 Production Reproduction
 Production Consumption
 Strong Weak
 Independence Dependence
 Power Lack of power

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Gender as process, structure
 Society demands that genders be perceived differently

 People come to be required to be accountable for every action

they perform to be appropriate to one's sex category.

 Does not matter what people actually do…

 As a process, gender creates the social differences that

define woman and man.

 As a structure, gender divides work in the home and in

economic production, legitimates those in authority, and
organizes sexuality and emotional life.

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Gender inequality
 Belief in categorical difference, which is
binary and also hierarchical, constructs
women as inferior to men and the
attributes of femininity as less highly
valued than those of masculinity.

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And stratification - Gender
inequality
 Unequal statuses of male and females

 Gender inequality- the devaluation of women

and the social domination of men has social
functions and a social history.

 It is not the result of sex, procreation,

physiology, anatomy, hormones or genetic
predispositions.

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Gender inequality
 It is produced and maintained by identifiable
social processes and built into the general
social structure and individual identities
deliberately and purposefully.

 In India – seen in lower development

indicators for women as well as their lower
status in most domains of life.

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Feminism
 Argues that the construction and significance
of sexual differentiation is:

 the key organising principle and axis of social

power

 Crucial part of constitution of our subjectivity

 Of an individual’s self identity as a sexed and

gendered person

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Feminism
 Wishes to dismantle the structures that
reinforce the inferiority of women and to
mount a challenge to the very definition and
constraints of femininity as conventionally
understood.

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Hegemonic Masculinity
 Masculinity which is culturally ascendant

 Physical success; economic success;

professional success, heterosexual virility

 Six packs?

 Provider (bread-winner) ideology

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Reflections of hegemonic
masculinity in science
 The ‘political unconscious’ of science

 The sperm as active, the egg as passive

 Sperms ‘activate’, have a ‘velocity’,

‘penetrates’ a ‘waiting’ egg!

 Such language reinforces stereotypically

defined gender roles and the inferiority of
women

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