cultural construction of gender essay

Gender is a Social Construct Essay

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How is gender socially constructed? The essay answers this question. It defines gender as a social construction and explains its significance as a cultural phenomenon.

Introduction

Social construction of gender, relationship between the two genders, sex, gender and gender conformity, works cited.

Gender as a topic has become very popular over the recent past. The global society has witnessed many changes in social construction of gender. According to World Health Organization, gender is a socially constructed trait, conduct, position, and action that a given society considers suitable for men and women. Lockheed (45) defines gender as a given range of characteristics that distinguishes a male from a female.

Gender refers to those attributes that would make an individual be identified as either male or female. As can be seen from the above definitions, gender is more of a social than a physical attribute. We look at gender from a societal point of view. Lepowsky (90) defines social construction as an institutionalized characteristic that is largely acceptable in a given society because of the social system.

Social construction, in a narrower term, refers to the general behavioral patterns of a certain society shaped by beliefs and values. A socially constructed characteristic therefore varies from one organization to another. Different societies have different beliefs and cultural practices that help define them. Therefore, a social construction of one society would be different from another society.

To social constructionists, social construct is a notion or an idea that is considered obvious and natural to a certain group of individuals in a given society, which may be true or not. This means that it holds just to the specific society. In this regard therefore, gender and associated beliefs would vary from one community to another depending on perceptions.

On the other hand, essentialists hold there is a set of characteristics that are universal in a certain entity. This means that a given entity can receive a single definition, regardless of the societal set up. In this regard, gender is a universal entity, irrespective of the society and the cultural beliefs associated with it. This perspective dilutes the notion that gender is a social construction.

This is because it gives it a universal definition, where there is a remarkable difference in the social construct of different societies in the world. This is due to differences in religion, cultural beliefs and civilization. To validate this discussion, the essay is based on social constructionist thinking as opposed to essentialism.

Gender is socially constructed. As Lepowsky (31) notes, there is a remarkable difference in the way different societies view the two genders that is, male and female. This scholar says that issues related to gender purely take the approach of social constructionists. He says that societies in the world have varied characteristics, depending on cultures.

He notes that the way one society would view the relationship between the two genders would vary from another, which also depend on a number of factors. Lerro (74) is opposed to this notion. He says that gender is best viewed from essentialists’ perspective. He holds that universally, women have always been regarded as the weaker sex, irrespective of the society. In many regions in the world, women have been treated with low esteem.

This is because of the fact that they are physically weak as compared to men. To various societies across the world, women are expected to be below men socially. Although the current wave of change has seen women take active roles in income generating activities, many societies still consider them as home keepers who should always be willing to receive and obey instructions from men.

This scholar’s argument is valid. However, his explanation, though leaning towards essentialism, still points out that gender is a social construct. Although many societies have almost a similar perception regarding gender, the fact is that they have construed the meaning of gender. The perception is a mere creation of the society members.

According to Lepowsky (53), gender cannot take an essentialist approach. The current world has varied perceptions towards women. The society in Saudi Arabia defines gender in a very different way as compared to the United Kingdom society. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic society that follows strict teachings of the holy Quran.

In this society, there is a big social gap between men and women. The society defines a woman as a subordinate who should always serve men. When it comes to addressing issues of importance, a woman must consult a man because by virtue of being a woman, the society assumes that one cannot make a decision personally.

This is a very sharp contrast to how this gender is viewed in a liberal country such as the United Kingdom. This society has completely narrowed the gap between the two genders that what remain are the physiological differences between the two genders. The country has embraced equality between the two sexes, a fact that saw it elect a female Premier Margret Thatcher.

The social environment in Saudi Arabia is very different from that in the United Kingdom. Because of this, the two societies have different views on what the two genders are and how they should relate. While one society is of the view that gender is just but the biological differences that makes one male or female, the other society sees more. It sees difference in roles, freedom, and positions in the society.

The society is waking to a new down where women and men are considered equal. The only differences existing are biological. Man has been the dominant sex over years. Terms such as mankind, chairman and fireman were used to refer to both men and women. However, these are currently considered sexist titles, which should be avoided at all costs. Although the global society is still largely patriarchal, there is an observable effort to create equality between the two sexes.

However, men are not willing to relinquish their prestigious positions in the society. In social centers such as schools and colleges, men would try to prove that they are in control. Plante (6) notes that jokes are always essential in our society. Although they are always taken from the face value as a form of entertainment, it has a purpose beyond entertainment.

This scholar gives an analysis of sexist jokes used by men towards female students in learning institutions. What comes clear is that men still rely much on their physical superiority, as their way of showing dominance. They use force in order to make female students listen to their jokes, which is highly sexist.

When it comes to sex, men completely change. Chappell (19) gives a confession of a certain girl and her sexual encounter. Through this, it can be observed that when a man has the desire for sex, he is willing to bend very low to a woman. However, things change immediately after the process. He becomes rude and he would easily pick mistakes from the same woman.

Gender identity is the biological characteristic that would define an individual’s gender. In this regard, it would be appropriate to just categorize humanity based on sex. This would mean that the two categories would be men and women. However, because of these biological differences between the two sexes, there is another way of classifying the two sexes that is, gender. Gender is more of a social than a biological difference between the two sexes.

As Plante (110) notes, in this approach, the two genders are analyzed based on the abilities and inabilities. Because men are considered stronger physically, they are given a higher rank in the society because it is assumed that their capabilities are superior to those of women. Sex in itself is a gendered word. In many societies, sex is used to emphasize the difference between the two genders.

Because societal pressure, the ‘weaker’ sex (woman) is forced to conform to the position they are given. They conform, not because they like the assigned position, but because they are not allowed to oppose the decision. They may not necessarily accept the position given to them by the society. However, because the society is intolerant and very rigid, they are left with very limited option other than conforming to the norm.

In some instances, women are exposed to physical abuse from their male counterparts who are keen on asserting their authority in the societal set up. Plante (136) says that this high handedness has seen many women suffer in silence, simply because they are women. Gender identity disorder is a syndrome that is always traumatizing.

An individual who cannot clearly be categorized as a man or a woman may find either himself or herself at the center of social stigmatization. Such an individual lacks a gender to identify with in a society that is so keen on identifying individuals based on gender.

It can be seen from the above discussion that gender can be defined differently, depending on the community in question. Depending on the societal structure of a given community, gender will assume a meaning depending on how men and women relate. Unlike sex that is defined based on biological differences, gender is defined based on the behavioral patterns of the two genders and the society’s perception of the concerned individual.

Every society has its own way of viewing men and women and the relationship between the two. In some societies, women are treated with very low esteem. In such societies, gender is held with high esteem, as a way of showing the boundary that exists between men and women. In other societies, civilization has made a woman be accepted as equal to a man hence the term gender has lost its previous meaning.

Issues of gender have raised many questions in the current society. In the current world, women have acquired a new status. They no longer depend on men for everything. As a number of authors note, gender has to be given a new definition other than what it was before. Based on how gender is defined, the current society needs a to re-define it.

Chappell, Marissa. The war on welfare: family, poverty, and politics in modern America . Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Print.

Lepowsky, Maria. Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Print.

Lerro, Bruce. Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World . Manchester:Trafford Publishing, 2005. Print.

Lockheed, Marlaine. Gender and social exclusion . Paris: Education Policy series publishers, 2010. Print

Plante, Rebecca. Doing gender diversity: readings in theory and real-world experience . New York: West view Press, 2010. Print.

• Learning to Speak about the Controversial issues
• Role of Women in Society
• Why is society a social construct
• Social Constructs of Childhood
• Rapidly Changing Female Gender as Social Construct
• Analysis of the Peculiarities of Gender Roles Within Education, Families and Student Communities
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• The Sexual Revolution
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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

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• > Journals
• > Language and Cognition
• > Volume 16 Issue 2
• > Gender is conceptualized in different ways across cultures

Article contents

• Introduction
• Study 1: semantic associations of gender for Italian, Dutch, and English
• Study 2: typicality ratings for gender of biological and sociocultural features from Italian and Dutch
• Study 3: essentialist ~ constructivist beliefs about gender among Italian and Dutch participants
• General discussion
• Conclusions

Supplementary material

Data availability statement, gender is conceptualized in different ways across cultures.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2023

• Supplementary materials
• Study 3: essentialist ~ constructivist beliefs about gender among Italian and Dutch participants

Gender can be considered an embodied social concept encompassing biological and cultural components. In this study, we explored whether the concept of gender varies as a function of different cultural and linguistic norms by comparing communities that vary in their social treatment of gender-related issues and linguistic encoding of gender. In Study 1, Italian, Dutch, and English-speaking participants completed a free-listing task, which showed Italians and Dutch were the most distinct in their conceptualization of gender: Italian participants focused more on socio-cultural features (e.g., discrimination , politics , and power ), whereas Dutch participants focused more on the corporeal sphere (e.g., hormones , breasts , and genitals ). Study 2 replicated this finding focusing on Italian and Dutch and using a typicality rating task: socio-cultural and abstract features were considered as more typical of “gender” by Italian than Dutch participants. Study 3 addressed Italian and Dutch participants’ explicit beliefs about gender with a questionnaire measuring essentialism and constructivism, and consolidated results from Studies 1 and 2 showing that Dutch participants endorsed more essentialist beliefs about gender than Italian participants. Consistent with socio-cultural constructivist accounts, our results provide evidence that gender is conceptualized differently by diverse groups and is adapted to specific cultural and linguistic environments.

1. Introduction

The ability to flexibly form and master concepts and categories enables us to give meaning to the world (Smith & Medin, Reference Smith and Medin 1981 ). We use concepts to draw inferences about objects and people, adapting our behavior to be consistent with our expectations and knowledge (Murphy, Reference Murphy 2002 ). Social concepts, in particular, are interesting as they lie at the border between abstract and concrete concepts (see Conca et al., Reference Conca, Borsa, Cappa and Catricalà 2021 ; Diveica et al., Reference Diveica, Pexman and Binney 2023 ; Pexman et al., Reference Pexman, Diveica and Binney 2023 ), with concreteness (i.e., the extent to which a concept is related to sensory experience) being a pivotal dimension for conceptual representation (Paivio, Reference Paivio 1986 ). Some scholars suggest both concrete and abstract concepts are themselves composed of several components varying in their degrees of abstractness (e.g., Barsalou et al., Reference Barsalou, Dutriaux and Scheepers 2018 ; Borghi et al., Reference Borghi, Barca, Binkofski, Castelfranchi, Pezzulo and Tummolini 2019 ), any of which may differ depending on the context in which they are retrieved (e.g., Borghi, Reference Borghi 2022 ; Kiefer & Harpaintner, Reference Kiefer and Harpaintner 2020 ; Majid et al., Reference Majid, Burenhult, Stensmyr, De Valk and Hansson 2018 ; Villani et al., Reference Villani, Lugli, Liuzza and Borghi 2019 ; for reviews, see Conca et al., Reference Conca, Borsa, Cappa and Catricalà 2021 ; Mazzuca et al., Reference Mazzuca, Fini, Michalland, Falcinelli, Da Rold, Tummolini and Borghi 2021 ).

From a broader perspective, the cultural context is a critical source of variation that also impacts the way certain categories are conceptualized, and this seems to be particularly relevant for social categories. For instance, children from both politically conservative and liberal US communities believe natural categories (e.g., animals) reflect the objective structure of the world, that is, as indicating fixed groups of things, with absolute boundaries represented by perceptual features, but they differ in their beliefs about social categories (e.g., race), where cultural context affects whether these are conceptualized as more natural or conventional (Rhodes & Gelman, Reference Rhodes and Gelman 2009 ). Indeed, cultural practices and language provide critical input for the structure of categories (Gelman & Roberts, Reference Gelman and Roberts 2017 ; Malt & Majid, Reference Malt and Majid 2013 ).

In this study, we explore how people in different cultures conceptualize “gender,” particularly with respect to how abstractly or concretely it is conceived. The concept of gender is of widespread relevance today, due to changing understandings of gender/sex configurations (American Psychological Association (APA), 2015 ), and studies investigating the relation between different gender systems and attitudes toward transgender individuals across cultures are becoming increasingly relevant (Elischberger et al., Reference Elischberger, Glazier, Hill and Verzduco-Baker 2018 ; Monro, Reference Monro 2007 ). Still, what counts as “gender” is a matter of public and academic debate since it encompasses both biological features (such as genitalia and hormones) and performative and psychological aspects. Moreover, addressing gender from a cross-cultural perspective can contribute to our understanding of concepts in a novel way. Currently, it is unclear whether gender should be considered mainly a concrete and “universal” concept or an abstract and culturally relative concept.

Lay theories of the ontological status of gender might be broadly distinguished into two main classes (Saguy et al., Reference Saguy, Reifen-Tagar and Joel 2021 ). On the one hand, gender has been linked to biological sex differences that are reflected in behavioral and cognitive differences between women and men (Baron-Cohen, Reference Baron-Cohen 2003 ; Ingalhalikar et al., Reference Ingalhalikar, Smith, Parker, Satterthwaite, Elliott, Ruparel and Verma 2014 ). According to this perspective, gender is an “essential” category (i.e., objective, natural, and stable across time), whose members share an innate “essence” (Haslam et al., Reference Haslam, Rothschild and Ernst 2000 ; Roberts et al., Reference Roberts, Ho, Rhodes and Gelman 2017 ). If gender is conceptualized primarily as a concrete concept, then it could be argued that its conceptualization should be minimally affected by cultural–linguistic variability (Borghi, Reference Borghi 2019 ; Thompson et al., Reference Thompson, Roberts and Lupyan 2020 ). On the other hand, socio-cultural Footnote 1 theories claim that gender is “an emergent feature of social situations” (West & Zimmerman, Reference West and Zimmerman 1987 ), rather than an innate property of individuals, and as such, its boundaries are flexibly shaped by cultures and societies (Butler, Reference Butler 1990 ; Herdt, Reference Herdt 1993 ; Monro, Reference Monro 2007 ; Risman & Davis, Reference Risman and Davis 2013 ). Arguably, then, if gender is conceptualized primarily as an abstract concept, we should observe more variation across cultures (Borghi & Mazzuca, Reference Borghi and Mazzuca 2023 ).

Here, we test whether the conceptual representation of gender varies across three different cultural and linguistic communities – Italian, Dutch, and Anglo (English speaking) – in three studies using different tasks: a semantic fluency task, typicality ratings, and a questionnaire assessing people’s explicit beliefs about gender. We ask whether the conceptual representation of gender varies according to specific cultural and linguistic experiences – as suggested by social constructionist proposals – or alternatively whether there is a shared conceptualization of gender across cultures.

1.1. The cultural treatment of gender across three western groups

Although the notion of culture is “volatile” and contested (Hirschfeld, Reference Hirschfeld 2018 ; Swidler, Reference Swidler 1986 ), here, we rely on specific socio-cultural indices concerning gender-related issues to identify our three communities of interest.

The latest Global Acceptance Index (Flores, Reference Flores 2021 ) – which measures social acceptance of LGBT people – shows that the Netherlands is the second most accepting of 175 countries (number one is Iceland). Similarly, countries in the Anglosphere (i.e., United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) Footnote 2 are also generally positive toward LGBTQI people, ranking in the top 23 countries. Italy, on the other hand, scores lower on the Global Acceptance Index and secures the 27 th place – ranked in the middle among European countries. Overall, the public opinion on gender-related issues in the Netherlands indicates greater social acceptance than Italy. For example, non-binary genders are legally recognized and appear on official documents in the Netherlands, while this is not possible in Italy. The Anglosphere countries differ among themselves in the treatment of non-binary genders: the UK legal system does not currently allow for non-binary/third gender, and as we are writing, only some US states permit this; but in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, non-binary/third gender options are available.

In addition, there are differences in the spread and adherence to the so-called anti-gender movements or campaigns across the three socio-cultural communities (Kuhar & Paternotte, Reference Kuhar and Paternotte 2017 ). In Italy, “anti-gender” movements mobilized big groups of protesters against the “ideology of gender” (Bernini, Reference Bernini 2016 ), supported by right-wing populist parties and fueled by the Catholic social doctrine that prevented Italy from approving same-sex marriages until 2016 (Garbagnoli, Reference Garbagnoli, Kuhar and Paternotte 2017 ). In the Netherlands, on the other hand, the official positions of Dutch populist parties like Partij voor de Vrijheid – the second largest party in the Netherlands at the time of data collection – emphasized the role of gender and sexual equality as a constitutive Dutch social value opposing processes of “Islamization” (Verloo, Reference Verloo 2018 ). In this narrative, additional gender measures were not thought to be required because gender equality had already been achieved in the Netherlands. The situation in the UK and the US – i.e., countries that make the bulk of our Anglo sample – was more heterogeneous, with different social forces and actors coming into play. In the US, the Trump administration was determined to change the Title IX amendment to the Education Act, which would have defined gender as determined by biological sex, and biological sex as immutable and determined by genitalia at birth (Phipps, Reference Phipps 2020 ), hence legally delegitimizing transgender people’s lives and experiences. These anti-transgender arguments were also embraced by some groups in the UK – although the public opinion toward transgender individuals across UK seemed to be consistently positive (McLean, Reference McLean 2021 ).

If gender is represented as a complex social category, we hypothesized that being embedded in Italian, Dutch, or Anglo cultural context might have an effect on the conceptualization of gender. According to current cultural and social norms related to gender, Italian and Dutch participants can be considered as the most distinct groups in our sample. English-speaking participants would be somewhere in the middle of this continuum. Given the correlation between gender binarism and essentialist beliefs with transgender prejudice (Broussard & Warner, Reference Broussard and Warner 2019 ; Saguy et al., Reference Saguy, Reifen-Tagar and Joel 2021 ; Tebbe & Moradi, Reference Tebbe and Moradi 2012 ), one might hypothesize that countries with lower levels of acceptance toward LGBTQI people (i.e., Italy) would conceptualize gender in more essentialist, concrete, and binary terms (e.g., referring to specific bodily referents). On the other hand, participants from more gender-inclusive countries (i.e., the Netherlands) perhaps conceptualize gender in more abstract, social, and constructivist terms (e.g., processes of socialization, performativity, cultural norms, and beliefs). On this logic, participants from the Anglosphere would be more likely to lie in the middle and represent gender as a mix of concrete, biological, and physical attributes, as well as more abstract, social, and cultural features. Alternatively, if gender is considered an essential category universally, we should observe little variation across the three groups, and participants should agree on a consistent set of features.

In line with Oyèwùmí’s ( Reference Oyèwùmí 1997 ) suggestion that “because gender is pre-eminently a cultural construct, it cannot be theorized in a cultural vacuum” (p. 21), we ask whether there are differences in the conceptualization of gender between these three cultural–linguistic communities that vary on both cultural and linguistic parameters related to gender. To test this, we adopted three different methods targeting different aspects of conceptual knowledge. In Study 1, we used a semantic fluency task to compare speakers of Italian, Dutch, and English. Data from this task are understood as a measure of psychological similarity of concepts and are often used to uncover the conceptual organization of a given domain. Study 2 focuses on Italian and Dutch participants who were asked to judge how typical biological and socio-cultural features were for “gender,” as well as how abstract or concrete those features were. Finally, in Study 3, we asked Italian and Dutch participants explicitly about their beliefs about gender, employing a validated questionnaire measuring essentialism~constructivism.

2. Study 1: semantic associations of gender for Italian, Dutch, and English

Among the methods used to test conceptual knowledge, property (or feature) generation tasks are often employed. In this task, participants are presented with a target word (a concept) and are asked to list properties or features that characterize it. This family of methods are frequently employed by cognitive psychologists and anthropologists to shed light on category structure (e.g., McRae et al., Reference McRae, Cree, Seidenberg and McNorgan 2005 ; Wu & Barsalou, Reference Wu and Barsalou 2009 ; for a discussion, see Chaigneau et al., Reference Chaigneau, Canessa, Barra and Lagos 2018 ) and have been used to study a variety of concepts across cultures (e.g., Medin et al., Reference Medin, Waxman, Woodring, Ross and Winkler-Rhoades 2010 ; van Putten et al., Reference van Putten, O’Meara, Wartmann, Yager, Villette, Mazzuca, Bieling, Burenhult, Purves and Majid 2020 ; Vivas et al., Reference Vivas, Montefinese, Bolognesi and Vivas 2020 ; Wnuk & Majid, Reference Wnuk and Majid 2014 ).

Here, we asked participants to produce features related to gender (Italian: genere ; Dutch: geslacht Footnote 3 ) in their native language. In addition, all participants completed a feature rating task and provided information about their sexual orientation (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ), adherence to gender roles (Kachel et al., Reference Kachel, Steffens and Niedlich 2016 ), interoceptive awareness (Mehling et al., Reference Mehling, Price, Daubenmier, Acree, Bartmess and Stewart 2012 ), and other demographic and linguistic backgrounds to provide further contextualization.

2.1. Participants

A total of 201 speakers of Italian, Dutch, and English took part in the experiment. Ethical approval was provided by the Ethics Committee of the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy (Ethical approval n. 0000315). We excluded 9.4% of participants from the study either because their nationality was other than targeted or because they did not understand the task (e.g., they produced full sentences instead of single words). Participants were recruited through social media and focused solicitation of LGBTQI participants in collaboration with LGBTQI associations. Sociodemographic information can be found in the Supplementary Materials.

2.1.1. Italian

A total of 55 native speakers of Italian were tested, excluding one participant who did not understand the task, resulting in 54 Italian participants. All participants were recruited from Italy and indicated Italian as their native language.

2.1.2. Dutch

A total of 52 native speakers of Dutch were tested, but one was excluded because they indicated Italy as their birth nation. Participants considered eligible for the study ( N  = 51) were participants from the Netherlands ( n  = 48), Belgium ( n  = 2), and Germany ( n  = 1). All participants were recruited in the Netherlands and indicated Dutch as their native language, except for one participant who indicated Limburgish Footnote 4 as a first language and Dutch as second language.

2.1.3. Anglosphere

A total of 94 speakers of English were tested. We excluded 17 participants who were not native of English-speaking countries (Germany , n  = 14; China, n  = 1) or whose cultural background was not Anglosphere (Ghana n  = 1; India, n  = 1). Participants considered eligible for the study ( N  = 77) were from the US (50.6%, n  = 40), UK (30.2%, n  = 23), Canada (11.8%, n  = 9), Australia (5.2%, n  = 4), and New Zealand (1%, n  = 1) whose native language was English. Participants were rewarded with Amazon vouchers worth 5 euros for their participation.

2.2. Materials

The Kinsey Scale (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ) is a self-report measure of sexual orientation where participants define their sexual orientation choosing one definition on a 7-point scale, ranging from “exclusively heterosexual” to “exclusively homosexual” – so not considering sexual behavior a strict dichotomy. To avoid potential discrimination of different sexual identities (cf. Galupo et al., Reference Galupo, Mitchell and Davis 2018 ), we added to the 7-point scale an eighth point labeled “other” accompanied by a blank box that participants could fill with their response.

Gender identity was measured by asking participants to choose one self-describing label among “woman,” “man,” “transgender,” and “queer.” We added a fifth choice labeled “other” accompanied by a blank box that participants could fill with their response.

The TMF scale (Kachel et al., Reference Kachel, Steffens and Niedlich 2016 ) is a 6-item scale constructed to measure the degree of attainment to traditional gender roles. It is structured as a bipolar, one-dimensional scale, in which participants respond to six statements with ratings ranging from 1 “totally masculine” to 7 “totally feminine,” describing their preferences and behaviors. The scale “is about how people relate or conform to social standards (how feminine/masculine do they believe themselves to be), but not about social norms appropriate for women and men (i.e., what people consider as feminine/masculine)” (Kachel et al., Reference Kachel, Steffens and Niedlich 2016 , p. 16).

The MAIA survey (Mehling et al., Reference Mehling, Price, Daubenmier, Acree, Bartmess and Stewart 2012 ) is a 32-item survey covering 8 general dimensions of interoceptive awareness (e.g., the capacity to notice internal bodily states, or the connection between body sensations and emotions). Participants respond on a 6-point scale ranging from “never” to “always” to statements concerning each of the eight dimensions. Since these data are not relevant to the research questions sketched in this article, we do not discuss it further within this article.

2.3. Procedure

The study was implemented as an on-line questionnaire in Qualtrics and consisted of six parts: (1) a free-listing task, (2) a rating task, (3) the Kinsey sexual orientation scale (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ), (4) the TMF scale (Kachel et al., Reference Kachel, Steffens and Niedlich 2016 ), (5) the MAIA scale (Mehling et al., Reference Mehling, Price, Daubenmier, Acree, Bartmess and Stewart 2012 ), and (6) demographic and linguistic questions.

In the free-listing task, participants were asked to type up to ten features they thought were related to the concept of gender in their native language (Italian genere ; Dutch geslacht ; English gender ). They were also asked to rate on a 7-point scale ranging from “not confident at all” to “extremely confident” their confidence about the features they produced. Finally, they were asked to provide a brief explanation motivating the features they produced in the free-listing task. For space reasons, we do not report these data here.

In the rating task, participants were presented with 30 features that were most frequently associated with the concept gender by Italian participants in a previous study (Mazzuca et al., Reference Mazzuca, Majid, Lugli, Nicoletti and Borghi 2020 ). We asked participants to indicate on a scale from 1 (“not at all related”) to 7 (“highly related”) how much they thought the features, presented in a randomized order, were related to the concept of gender. Target features were translated from Italian to English and Dutch. We presented the rating task after the free-listing task to avoid potential spill-over effects.

The last sections of the questionnaire contained the Kinsey Scale (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ), Traditional Masculinity and Femininity (TMF) scale (Kachel et al., Reference Kachel, Steffens and Niedlich 2016 ), and Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) (Mehling et al., Reference Mehling, Price, Daubenmier, Acree, Bartmess and Stewart 2012 ). Finally, participants provided demographic information such as education level and linguistic background.

2.4. Data analysis

All data were analyzed using R (version 3.6.2, R-Core Team, 2019 ) and RStudio (version 1.2.1335, RStudio Team, 2018 ). Data processing was also carried out using “tidyverse” (Wickham et al., Reference Wickham, Averick, Bryan, Chang, McGowan, François, Grolemund, Hayes, Henry, Hester and Kuhn 2019 ) and “dplyr” (Wickham et al., Reference Wickham, François, Henry and Müller 2020 ), and data visualization was implemented using “ggplot2” (Wickham, Reference Wickham 2016 ) and “ggpubr” (Kassambara, Reference Kassambara 2020 ).

We analyzed the free-listing data from each group first by computing the Cognitive Salience Index for the most frequently produced associates to “gender” (see Table 1 ). Cognitive salience is an index combining two critical parameters in free-listing data, that is, frequency and item position. The index ranges from 0 to 1, where items with higher scores are deemed as more cognitively salient for a given concept, and is calculated as follows: F/( N × m P) (Sutrop, Reference Sutrop 2001 ; van Putten et al., Reference van Putten, O’Meara, Wartmann, Yager, Villette, Mazzuca, Bieling, Burenhult, Purves and Majid 2020 ), where F is frequency, N is the total sample of participants, and m P is the mean position of the item (see Vivas et al., Reference Vivas, Montefinese, Bolognesi and Vivas 2020 for similar semantic measures).

Table 1. Features of “gender” produced by at least 10% of participants in each culture ordered by frequency and the corresponding cognitive salience index (rounded)

Note : Terms produced by all three groups are in bold.

Data clusterability was assessed using Hopkins’s statistics (Lawson & Jurs, Reference Lawson and Jurs 1990 ), with the “factoextra” R package (Kassambara & Mundt, Reference Kassambara and Mundt 2019 ). HCA was carried out using Ward’s method, which minimizes the total within-cluster variance by merging pairs of clusters with minimum between-cluster distance at each step (Murtagh & Legendre, Reference Murtagh and Legendre 2014 ; see also Harpaintner et al., Reference Harpaintner, Trumpp and Kiefer 2018 ). The outcome is represented in dendrograms, obtained using the “dendextend” R package (Galili, Reference Galili 2015 ), where features more frequently listed in succession are clustered together linked by short branches. To determine the number of clusters in each dendrogram, we relied on the most commonly used indices (Silhouette, Dunn, C-Index, and McClain) using the “NbClust” R package (Charrad et al., Reference Charrad, Ghazzali, Boiteau and Niknafs 2014 ) and followed the “majority rule” where possible, or opted for indices considered to be the most reliable (Chouikhi et al., Reference Chouikhi, Charrad and Ghazzali 2015 ). All data and scripts are available at https://osf.io/zdnhb/ .

2.5. Results

2.5.1. The concept of “gender” across cultures

Overall, Italian participants ( n  = 54) produced a total of 254 features, Dutch participants ( n  = 51) produced 181 features, and English-speaking participants ( n  = 77) produced 276 features. After completing the free-listing task, we also asked participants from all three groups to rate on 7-point scale their level of confidence about the features they listed (1 = “not confident at all”; 7 = “extremely confident”). Italian ( M  = 5.05; SD  = 1.32), Dutch ( M  = 5.11; SD =  1.54), and English ( M  = 5.63; SD  = 1.17) participants were all moderately confident about the features they produced, with no differences across groups, F (2, 176) = 2.31, p  = .101.

Within groups, there was, in fact, low coherence in the features produced, that is, 69% ( n  = 177) of features were produced only once by one individual for Italian, 63% ( n  = 115) for Dutch, and 59% ( n  = 163) for English (see Table 1 ). This heterogeneity suggests gender is composed of multiple, different, and sometimes idiosyncratic components.

There was a little overlap in the features produced for “gender” in Italian, Dutch, and English. Only 5 features ( identity, sex, sexuality, transgender , and woman ) were produced by at least 10% of participants across all three groups. Dutch participants showed most unanimity within group such that woman and man were produced by more than 80% of participants, whereas in Italian and English, the two most frequently produced features – identity and sex – were only produced by ~30% of participants. Table 1 also indicates Dutch participants mainly focused on physical and biological features (e.g., genitals , penis , vagina , and breasts ), whereas Italian and English-speaking participants produced features more related to political and social aspects (e.g., discrimination , equality , and stereotype ).

For illustrative purposes, we focus on the top five cognitively salient features of each group. Sex and identity were the most salient features for Italian participants (0.11 and 0.07, respectively), followed by masculine , sexuality (0.06), and feminine (0.05). For the Dutch sample instead, the two top salient associates were woman (0.30) and man (0.38), followed by gender (0.10), sekse (0.09), and genitals (0.05). Finally, for the English-speaking sample, we found the top two salient features were sex (0.14) and identity (0.11) – similarly to Italian – followed by male (0.07), female (0.06), and masculinity (0.05). It is interesting to note that although many of the most cognitively salient features for each culture rest on the opposition between femininity and masculinity ( feminine and masculine , woman and man , female and male ), Dutch participants distinctively underline the biological component of gender ( genitals ).

We found there were good clusterability tendencies in our data (Italian H  = 0.54; Dutch H  = 0.63; English H  = 0.60). We performed hierarchical cluster analyses on each group’s data. For the Italian dendrogram, we opted for a five-cluster solution (SI = 0.40; Dunn = 0.13), while for the Dutch and the English dendrograms, we adopted a six-cluster solution (Dutch: SI = 0.41; English: Dunn = 0.21; SI = 0.45) as these best fit the data.

We give a qualitative interpretation of the associations emerging from the cluster analyses referring to a coding scheme implemented in Schudson et al. ( Reference Schudson, Beischel and van Anders 2019 ). The authors coded the content of participants’ definitions of gender/sex-related terms into socio-cultural content (e.g., identity, roles, social power, behaviors, physical presentation, and traits), biological content (e.g., genitals, gonads, hormones, chromosomes, reproduction, body, and other sex characteristics), and content whose origin is both socio-cultural and biological (see Schudson et al., Reference Schudson, Beischel and van Anders 2019 , p. 5).

From left to right of the Italian dendrogram ( Fig. 1 ), Cluster 1 ( fluidity, freedom, violence ) and Cluster 2 ( equality, sex, patriarchy, binarism, discrimination ) cover socio-cultural features, including emotionally laden features, referring both to negative and positive experiences ( discrimination , violence , freedom ) and social constructs ( patriarchy , binarism , equality ). Cluster 3 ( queer, feminine, masculine, culture, and transgender ) included mainly socio-cultural aspects of gender presentation and features challenging strict bigenderist conceptions (Gilbert, Reference Gilbert 2009 ); Cluster 4 ( identity, woman, role , and stereotype ) and Cluster 5 ( difference to society ) included both socio-cultural features and miscellaneous content ( sexuality, difference ), suggesting a close relationship between gender and society.

Figure 1. The concept of “gender” in Italian, Dutch, and English. Dendrograms depict (translated) features produced by at least 10% of participants for each cultural–linguistic group.

Notably the feature man did not appear here or elsewhere in the dendrogram. In Italian mainstream discussions, the term genere (gender) is often employed to refer to phenomena involving women (e.g., violenza di genere and “gender-based violence”), in keeping with Hegarty and Bruckmüller’s ( Reference Hegarty and Bruckmüller 2013 ) proposal that asymmetric explanations of group differences often focus on lower status groups (a notion related both to Foucault’s, Reference Foucault 1978 idea of “disciplinary power” and “androcentrism,” Bailey et al., Reference Bailey, LaFrance and Dovidio 2019 ). Overall, the concept of “gender” in Italian makes salient political features and emphasizes the social and cultural context ( society , difference , culture , violence , patriarchy ), as well as their consequences on personal experience ( discrimination , freedom ).

In the Dutch dendrogram, from left to right, Cluster 1 was the most explicitly biological cluster, including hormones , biological , and intersex. Cluster 2 (from breasts to vagina ) is composed of miscellaneous associations, pointing to exterior gender presentation, such as boy and girl paired with sexual organs ( penis and vagina ), linked further to gender and breasts. Cluster 3 contained socio-cultural identities, that is, woman and man (see Schudson et al., Reference Schudson, Beischel and van Anders 2019 ). Cluster 4 ( gender-neutral to transgender ) and Cluster 5 ( identity , born, sexuality ) presented heterogeneous features related to both social discourses concerning different gender identities (e.g., gender-neutral ), and perceptual-biological features ( genitals and sex ). Finally, Cluster 6 centered around sekse and included reproduction and chromosome , marking the biological domain of gender/sex. Overall, the Dutch dendrogram revealed embodied aspects of gender/sex, stressing biological, physical, and perceptual features, but also including features diverging from a binary conception of gender/sex ( transgender , gender-neutral , intersex ).

In the English dendrogram, from left to right, Clusters 1 ( femininity to expression ) and 2 ( stereotype to feminism ) were predominantly socio-cultural, related to societal impacts of gender-related features and gendered expressions. Cluster 3 was a heterogeneous cluster, including biological ( male, female ), socio-cultural ( role, identity ), and miscellaneous features ( sexuality ). Cluster 4 could also be interpreted in socio-cultural terms as it had features related to social gender identities and their construction ( woman , man , performance ) connected to sex in the overarching cluster. Clusters 5 and 6 included features referring to and challenging a binary perspective on gender ( binary, nonbinary, queer, transgender ). Overall, the English dendrogram aligns well with the notion of gender/sex (Fausto-Sterling, Reference Fausto-Sterling 2019 ; van Anders, Reference van Anders 2015 ), according to which both biological~physical ( male , female , sexuality ) and socio-cultural ( feminism , discrimination , performance , stereotype ) factors were entrenched.

To summarize briefly, the cluster analyses of the free-listing data show differences in how people from different cultures conceptualize gender, consistent with social constructivist perspectives. However, contrary to our initial predictions, Italians were not more focused on biological features and Dutch on social features. The data suggest the opposite pattern; we return to this later.

2.5.2. Ratings of gender-related features

After listing features, participants from all groups rated how well another standardized set of features related to gender (see Supplementary material S4 ). Ratings across the three groups were positively correlated: Italian and Dutch ratings were least similar, r (28) = 0.63, p  < .001, R 2  = .40, English and Dutch ratings were most similar, r (28) = 0.78, p  < .001, R 2  = .60, leaving Italian and English ratings intermediate, r (28) = 0.69, p  < .001, R 2  = .47. A visual inspection of the data ( Fig. 2 ) indicates some features in particular differed across groups (see Supplementary material).

Figure 2. Scatterplot of ratings of gender relatedness in Italian, Dutch, and English.

To summarize, the explicit rating data seem to recapitulate the qualitative patterns we found in the cluster analyses of the free-listing data in §2.5.1. Overall, it seems Italian participants rated socio-cultural features as more related to gender than Dutch participants, who instead rated features related to the physical sphere as more related to gender than Italian participants.

2.6. Discussion

Study 1 showed that “gender” is not conceptualized the same way across Italian, Dutch, and English participants. In the free-listing task, Italian participants mainly produced socio-cultural features ( fluidity, binarism, freedom ), whereas Dutch participants produced more biological features ( reproduction, penis, vagina ), with English-speaking participants lying in the middle. These results were also evident in the rating task.

Taken together, the data suggest there are cross-cultural differences in how people conceptualize gender, consistent with socio-cultural proposals. However, the content of the conceptual features in Italian and Dutch responses was surprising. Based on national survey data, we had predicted Italians would be more essentialist in their responses and draw more on biological features of gender, while the Dutch would be more oriented toward social features. We found the opposite pattern. To establish whether this was a stable finding, in Study 2, we sought to replicate and extend this work by focusing on the differential weighting of socio-cultural and biological features of gender in Dutch and Italian where the differences where most stark.

3. Study 2: typicality ratings for gender of biological and sociocultural features from Italian and Dutch

In Study 2, we took features generated from the free-listing task in Study 1 and asked a new sample of Italian and Dutch participants to provide typicality ratings and abstractness ratings. Typicality ratings are widely used to identify the best, most central – and thus more similar to the prototype – examples of a given category (Malt et al., Reference Malt, Gennari, Imai, Ameel, Tsuda and Majid 2008 ; Rosch, Reference Rosch 1975 ). While most commonly used for concrete categories (e.g., fruits and birds), typicality-like effects were also reported for abstract concepts (Hampton, Reference Hampton 1981 ).

Based on the results of Study 1, we predicted that typicality ratings for gender should differ in Italian and Dutch. Moreover, we predicted there would be a concomitant difference in how abstract features associated with gender are deemed to be across groups. Specifically, we predicted a difference in the relation between typicality judgements and abstractness ratings for Italian and Dutch participants.

3.1. Participants

A new group of 55 speakers of Italian and Dutch took part in the experiment. We excluded 7.2% of participants from the study because they indicated a native language other than Italian or Dutch. A total of 25 native speakers of Italian were tested, all recruited from Italy and indicated Italian as their native language. Thirty native speakers of Dutch were tested, but four were excluded because they indicated Dutch was not their native language. Italian participants were recruited via social media and through the University of Bologna student pool; Dutch participants were recruited through the SONA system and were given course credit for participating.

3.2. Materials

Gender identity and sexual orientation were measured as in Study 1 (see § 2.2 ). Stimuli for the typicality rating task and abstractness rating tasks were selected from the list of features produced by participants in the free-listing task in Study 1. Specifically, we selected the top 10 socio-cultural features produced by Italian participants ( identity, feminine, masculine, fluidity, binarism, freedom, stereotype, culture, role, and discrimination ) and the top 10 biological features produced by Dutch participants ( genitals, reproduction, penis, vagina, born, intersex, hormones, biological, breasts, and sex ).

3.3. Procedure

The study was implemented as an on-line questionnaire in Qualtrics and consisted of three parts: (1) typicality rating task, (2) abstractness rating task, and (3) demographic and linguistic questions, including the Kinsey sexual orientation scale (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ). In the typicality rating task, participants were presented with the twenty features in a randomized order and asked to rate on a 7-point scale how much these features were typical for the concept of gender, in their native language (1 = “not at all typical”; 7 = “extremely typical”).

In the abstractness rating task, participants were presented with the same features and were asked to indicate on a scale from 1 (“extremely concrete”) to 7 (“extremely abstract”) how much they thought the features, presented in a randomized order, were concrete or abstract. In the final section of the study, participants completed the Kinsey Scale measuring sexual orientation (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ) and answered questions about their demographic background.

3.4. Data analysis

Typicality data were analyzed using a linear mixed-effects model (Baayen et al., Reference Baayen, Davidson and Bates 2008 ; Winter, Reference Winter 2020 ) fit by maximum likelihood to assess the impact of Culture (Italian, Dutch), Features (Sociocultural, Biological), and their interaction on ratings of “gender typicality,” with random intercepts for Participants and Items. Statistical significance of fixed effects was determined using the type III ANOVA test with the “mixed” function from the “afex” R package (Singmann et al., Reference Singmann, Bolker, Westfall, Aust and Ben-Shachar 2023 ); p-values were calculated with likelihood ratio tests comparing the model including the interaction term to models varying for the complexity of fixed effects. Post-hoc comparisons were performed with the “emmeans” R package (Lenth, Reference Lenth 2020 ) and Tukey correction for multiple comparisons.

To assess whether Italian and Dutch participants also differ in how abstractly they construe “gender,” we fit a linear mixed-effects model testing the impact of Abstractness ratings, Culture (Italian, Dutch), and their interaction on ratings of gender typicality, with random intercepts for Participants and Items. Abstractness ratings were entered in the model as a mean-centered continuous predictor.

3.5. Results

3.5.1. Typicality ratings for gender-related features in Italian and Dutch

We predicted that Italian and Dutch participants would vary in their typicality ratings such that Italians would rate socio-cultural features as more prototypical for “gender,” whereas Dutch participants would rate biological features are more prototypical.

3.5.2. Relation between abstractness and typicality ratings for gender-related features in Italian and Dutch

Figure 3. Interaction of Culture (Italian and Dutch) and Abstractness in ratings of gender typicality. Shaded regions represent confidence intervals of 95% for regression slopes.

Post-hoc comparisons revealed that abstractness ratings negatively predicted typicality ratings for Dutch participants, t (786) = −6.306, p  < .0001, but did not predict Italian participants typicality ratings, t (775) = 1.006, p  = .314.

3.6. Discussion

Study 2 provides converging evidence that Italian and Dutch participants differ in their conceptualization of gender. In the typicality rating task, Italian participants judged socio-cultural features to be more typical of gender than Dutch participants. In addition, we found features that were rated as more abstract by Dutch participants were also deemed to be less typical of the concept of gender. Taken together with the results of Study 1, this suggests that the conceptual representation of “gender” differs across cultures.

4. Study 3: essentialist ~ constructivist beliefs about gender among Italian and Dutch participants

Both studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that Italian and Dutch participants differ in their conceptualization of “gender,” but the results seem to contradict the expectation based on previous national survey reports that Dutch participants endorse more constructivist approaches toward gender, and Italian participants more essentialist approaches. These differences could be the result of methodological differences: Studies 1 and 2 used methods taken from the concept literature to understand the underlying representation people have for “gender.” However, previous studies have relied on explicit judgements using questionnaires. So, in Study 3, we probed Italian and Dutch participants’ explicit beliefs about gender-related issues using a previously established questionnaire measuring essentialist~constructivist beliefs about gender, sex, and sexual orientation (Lloyd & Galupo, Reference Lloyd and Galupo 2019 ). In doing so, we ask whether in their explicit beliefs, Italians are also more constructivist about gender and Dutch more essentialist, in line with Studies 1 and 2. Alternatively, in line with evidence from international reports on attitudes toward LGBTQI people (Flores, Reference Flores 2021 ) and studies on its relation with gender essentialism (Saguy et al., Reference Saguy, Reifen-Tagar and Joel 2021 ), we might expect Italians to be more essentialist about gender, and Dutch more constructivist.

4.1. Participants

A new group of 51 speakers of Italian and Dutch took part in the experiment. We excluded one participant from the study because they indicated a native language other than Italian. This meant a total of 25 native speakers of Italian were tested and 25 native speakers of Dutch were tested. As in Study 2, Italian participants were recruited via social media and through the University of Bologna student pool; Dutch participants were recruited through the SONA system and were given course credit for participating.

4.2. Materials

The essentialist~constructivist questionnaire by Lloyd and Galupo ( Reference Lloyd and Galupo 2019 ) was translated from the original English to Italian and Dutch by the first and the third authors, native speakers of Italian and Dutch, respectively, and back-translated to English to check the accuracy of the translation. The questionnaire measures participants’ agreement with four statements assessing essentialist~constructivist beliefs about gender, sex, and sexual orientation. Specifically, essentialist beliefs are represented by “fixed” and “binary” prompts (e.g., “In general, I believe sex to be relatively fixed”), whereas constructivist beliefs are represented by “fluid” and “continuous” prompts (e.g., “In general, I believe sex to be relatively fluid”). Table 2 reports original statements assessing essentialist and constructivist beliefs about gender along with their Italian and Dutch translations (see Supplementary material for the complete questionnaire and its translation). Participants’ gender identity and sexual orientation were assessed as in Studies 1 and 2.

Table 2. Statements targeting essentialist and constructivist beliefs about gender from the Lloyd and Galupo ( Reference Lloyd and Galupo 2019 ) with their Italian and Dutch translations

4.3. Procedure

The study was implemented as an on-line questionnaire in Qualtrics and consisted of two parts: (1) essentialism~constructivism questionnaire and (2) demographic and linguistic questions, including the Kinsey sexual orientation questionnaire (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ). In the essentialism~constructivism questionnaire, participants were presented with four statements about sex, gender, and sexual orientation expressing their agreement regarding fixed, binary, fluid, and continuous beliefs about each identity construct (see Lloyd & Galupo, Reference Lloyd and Galupo 2019 ). Participants were asked to rate their agreement with each statement on a scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”).

The last section of the questionnaire contained the Kinsey questionnaire measuring sexual orientation (Kinsey et al., Reference Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948 ) and questions about participants’ demographic information such as education level and linguistic background.

4.4. Data analysis

To assess whether Italian and Dutch participants differed, we compared rating scores using independent t-tests.

4.5. Results

4.5.1. Italian and Dutch essentialist beliefs about gender

Italian and Dutch participants differed in their ratings to whether gender is fixed, t (47.34) = −2.293, p  = .026, with Italians judging it as less fixed than Dutch (Italian M  = 1.96; Italian SD  = 1.27; Dutch M  = 2.84, Dutch SD  = 1.43). Similarly, they differed in how binary they considered gender to be, t (47.62) = −2.583, p  = .012, with Italians judging it as less binary than Dutch (Italian M  = 1.96; Italian SD  = 1.31; Dutch M  = 2.96, Dutch SD  = 1.43). Overall, then, Dutch participants endorsed more essentialist beliefs about gender.

4.5.2. Italian and Dutch constructivist beliefs about gender

Italian and Dutch participants also differed in how fluid they considered gender to be, t (43.54) = 2.146, p  = .037, with Italians judging it as more fluid than Dutch (Italian M  = 3.96; Italian SD  = 0.97; Dutch M  = 3.24, Dutch SD  = 1.36). However, there was no significant difference in how continuous the two groups considered gender to be, t (47.99) = 1.836, p  = .072, although the means were in the same direction (Italian M  = 4.08; SD  = 1.15; Dutch M  = 3.48; SD  = 1.15) (see Fig. 4 ). Overall, there was more endorsement by Italians of constructivist beliefs about gender.

Figure 4. Agreement scores for statements relating to Essentialist (Fixed, Binary) and Constructivist (Fluid, Continuous) beliefs about gender for Italian and Dutch participants. Red dots represent means, black dots represent extreme values, and black bars represent medians.

4.6. Discussion

When explicitly questioned about their explicit beliefs about gender, we found Dutch participants held more essentialist beliefs than Italian participants, whereas the Italians endorsed more constructivist beliefs. Overall, these results are consistent with Studies 1 and 2, indicating Dutch participants lean more on biological, concrete, and essentialist components of gender, and Italian participants lean more on socio-cultural, abstract, and constructivist components.

5. General discussion

Across three studies, we found people from different cultures have different conceptualizations of “gender.” Study 1 showed that for the term “gender,” Italian participants found features related to social, political, and cultural spheres more salient (e.g., binarism, freedom, stereotype, discrimination, and patriarchy) , whereas Dutch participants were more likely to report features referring to the embodied and physical spheres (e.g., genitals, reproduction, penis, vagina, and hormones ). English participants displayed more heterogeneous associations, including bodily and biological components (e.g., sex, female, and male ) as well as social and cultural features (e.g., discrimination, equality, feminism ). Similarly, Study 2 found Italian participants judge socio-cultural features to be more typical of the concept “gender” than Dutch participants. Finally, Study 3, which probed people’s explicit beliefs, confirmed the same distinction: whereas Italians are more constructivists about gender, the Dutch are more essentialist.

Italian, Dutch, and English representations of “gender” varied, but in an unexpected direction. According to some studies, prejudicial attitudes toward transgender people are correlated with gender binary beliefs (Broussard & Warner, Reference Broussard and Warner 2019 ; Tebbe & Moradi, Reference Tebbe and Moradi 2012 ) and essentialist beliefs (Saguy et al., Reference Saguy, Reifen-Tagar and Joel 2021 ). So, we expected Dutch participants would rely more on features related to social and cultural aspects of gender (based on gender equality and LGBTQI acceptance indices, see § 1.1 ), and Italian participants would rely on associations related to physical and biological aspects. We found the opposite pattern when we probed people’s concept of “gender” using tasks from the concept formation literature in Studies 1 and 2 and explicit questionnaires targeting essentialist~constructivist beliefs in Study 3.

In Italy, gender-related issues are often the purview of political struggles (Arfini et al., Reference Arfini, Ghigi and Magaraggia 2020 ; Garbagnoli, Reference Garbagnoli, Kuhar and Paternotte 2017 ), and this may have affected the associations of Italian speakers, making certain features related to political debate more salient (see Rabb et al., Reference Rabb, Fernbach and Sloman 2019 ; Shea, Reference Shea 2018 ). The situation in the Netherlands is different, given the broader consensus regarding an inclusionary approach toward LGBTQI rights. In this context, terms that were previously used only in restricted communities (e.g., political activism, and academia) such as binarism, patriarchy, and performance might become more commonly used. This points to the importance of keeping in mind the historical and cultural embeddedness of concepts such as “gender” – embodied social concepts evolve as society changes.

Our results add a new perspective to the literature on the encoding of grammatical gender and its impact on society (Gygax et al., Reference Gygax, Zufferey, Elmiger, Garnham, Sczesny and von Stockhausen 2019 ). Countries with gendered languages (e.g., Italian),or with languages combining natural and grammatical gender (e.g., perhaps surprisingly, Dutch) exhibit lower levels of gender equality than countries with natural gender languages (e.g., English) or genderless languages (e.g., Estonian; Prewitt-Freilino et al., Reference Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell and Laakso 2012 ; see also Pérez & Tavits, Reference Pérez and Tavits 2019 ). Indeed, according to Ansara and Hegarty ( Reference Ansara and Hegarty 2014 ), most gendered languages imply binary distinctions or implicitly convey forms of androcentric thinking (Bailey et al., Reference Bailey, LaFrance and Dovidio 2019 ; Bem, Reference Bem 1993 ) – for instance, through the use of masculine generics (Misersky et al., Reference Misersky, Majid and Snijders 2019 ; Stahlberg et al., Reference Stahlberg, Braun, Irmen, Sczesny and Fiedle 2007 ). This has been recently challenged in some countries by the introduction of linguistic strategies such as the promotion of inclusive language. In Sweden, for example, the gender-inclusive pronoun hen can be used both as a generic pronoun and to refer specifically to non-binary gender identities (Renström et al., Reference Renström, Lindqvist and Sendén 2022 ). Recent evidence shows that using gender-inclusive or gender-neutral pronouns favors tolerance for marginalized gender/sex groups and reduces patterns of androcentrism (Tavits & Pérez, Reference Tavits and Pérez 2019 ). Our study shows that even the notion of “gender” itself, encoded as a lexical item, can impact conceptualizations.

We also found the concept of gender varied in how abstractly or concretely it was conceptualized across groups. Study 2 probed abstractness directly by collecting new ratings for the same set of socio-cultural and biological features related to gender in Italian and Dutch. Abstract features were judged as less typical of “gender” in Dutch than in Italian (see also Supplementary material). These findings are in line with recent perspectives on abstract knowledge that suggest that abstract or concrete aspects of a given concept might be more salient depending on specific situations and cultural contexts (Barsalou et al., Reference Barsalou, Dutriaux and Scheepers 2018 ; Borghi et al., Reference Borghi, Barca, Binkofski, Castelfranchi, Pezzulo and Tummolini 2019 ; Majid et al., Reference Majid, Burenhult, Stensmyr, De Valk and Hansson 2018 ). In addition, these results align well with recent proposals suggesting the saliency of more abstract components of a concept in a given socio-cultural setting might also be considered as a proxy for the concept’s degree of politicization (Mazzuca & Santarelli, Reference Mazzuca and Santarelli 2022 ). According to this approach, because abstractness implies partial indetermination and vagueness, it allows for the contestation, negotiation, and redefinition of a concept – that is, for key aspects of politicization.

More broadly, our results are in line with contemporary understandings of gender – or gender/sex Footnote 5 – which consider it to be both biologically and socially constructed (e.g., Fausto-Sterling, Reference Fausto-Sterling 2019 ; Hyde et al., Reference Hyde, Bigler, Joel, Tate and van Anders 2019 ; van Anders, Reference van Anders 2015 ). In this perspective, gender can be considered an embodied social concept, in which both concrete, physical, and biological factors (i.e., referring to a specific bodily referent; e.g., chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia), and more abstract, social, and cultural factors (i.e., features spanned over different situations, e.g., processes of socialization, performativity, and cultural norms and beliefs; see Davis et al., Reference Davis, Altmann and Yee 2020 ; McRae et al., Reference McRae, Nedjadrasul, Pau, Lo and King 2018 ; Wiemer‐Hastings & Xu, Reference Wiemer‐Hastings and Xu 2005 ) are relevant. Our work shows that although both sorts of features are important, they may be weighted differently in one culture than another.

5.1. Future studies and limitations

It is perhaps worth mentioning that intrinsic semantic differences of the targeted terms ( genere, geslacht, and gender ) might account, to some extent, for the differences we found. In Italian, the translation equivalents for the English terms sex ( sesso ) and gender ( genere ) are frequently used interchangeably. In Dutch, the indigenous term for gender is  geslacht , although in more recent times, the loan from English  gender  is also found in popular discourse. Here, we focused on  geslacht. Geslacht and sekse are used interchangeably to describe both social differences and sexual differences derived from biology (Vonk, Reference Vonk, Braidotti, Vonk and van Wichelen 2012 , p. 79). Although the data from our translation survey suggest geslacht could be confidently used as a translation equivalent for the English word gender , they also underline the fact that Dutch has evolved, borrowing the English form and incorporating it into common discourses – similarly to Italian, where, on the other hand, it appears the English form has a connotation that is often considered derogative (Bernini, Reference Bernini 2016 ; Garbagnoli, Reference Garbagnoli, Kuhar and Paternotte 2017 ). Future studies might assess whether the differences we found hold across different terms, for example, when presenting Italian and Dutch participants with English forms. These different sense systems in each language may have contributed to some of the differences we uncovered.

Nevertheless, given that language is a primary vehicle for discussions about gender in everyday talk and policy-making, these results provide evidence that even in closely related Western cultures with strong historical and geographic ties, there can be striking differences in how gender is conceptualized.

Finally, caution is needed in the scope of conclusions. Our results might not be generalizable to the entire Italian and Dutch populations as the studies reported here targeted young adults primarily. Whether the results hold across cohorts, especially over older generations who may have a more conservative conception of gender-related issues, is still an open question (see e.g., Baiocco et al., Reference Baiocco, Nardelli, Pezzuti and Lingiardi 2013 ).

6. Conclusions

Overall, our results show that gender is conceptualized differently across cultures. Indeed, some anthropologists and sociologists have urged caution in applying the same conceptual categories of gender/sex across diverse cultural and social settings as this leads to oversimplifications (Hegarty et al., Reference Hegarty, Ansara, Barker, Dess, Marecek and Bell 2018 ; Morris, Reference Morris 1995 ). As Oyèwùmí ( Reference Oyèwùmí 1997 ) puts it, “I argue that concepts and theoretical formulations are culture-bound and that scholars themselves are not merely recorders or observers in the research process; they are also participants. […] by writing about any society through a gendered perspective, scholars necessarily write gender into that society. Gender, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.” (p. xv). While investigating gender conceptualizations from a non-WEIRD perspective (Henrich et al., Reference Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan 2010 ; Muthukrishna et al., Reference Muthukrishna, Bell, Henrich, Curtin, Gedranovich, McInerney and Thue 2020 ) and across speakers of different languages (Blasi et al., Reference Blasi, Henrich, Adamou, Kemmerer and Majid 2022 ) is important to pursue in future investigations, our studies show that even across Western cultures and related languages, the conceptualization of gender is varied and certain aspects are more salient depending on specific cultural settings.

These findings contribute to a broader understanding of concepts that takes conceptual knowledge to be a dynamic system that is responsive to unfolding situations (e.g., Barsalou, Reference Barsalou 2016 ; Borghi et al., Reference Borghi, Barca, Binkofski, Castelfranchi, Pezzulo and Tummolini 2019 ), and which is modulated by a variety of factors (for a review see Yee & Thompson-Schill, Reference Yee and Thompson-Schill 2016 ), including culture (Markus & Kitayama, Reference Markus, Kitayama, Strauss and Goethals 1991 ; Medin et al., Reference Medin, Waxman, Woodring, Ross and Winkler-Rhoades 2010 ; Mesquita, Reference Mesquita 2022 ) and language (Boroditsky, Reference Boroditsky 2018 ; Lucy, Reference Lucy 2016 ; Majid et al., Reference Majid, Burenhult, Stensmyr, De Valk and Hansson 2018 ).

The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2023.40 .

The data, materials, and codes for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/zdnhb/ . None of the experiments was preregistered.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Henk van den Heuvel and Erwin Komen at the Humanities Lab, Centre of Language Studies, Radboud University, for technical support, and Hasan Erkan at the Radboud University Medical Center and Ludy Cilissen at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics for their help with translations.

1 Social constructionist claims about reality have historically taken many forms, and specific meanings of social constructionism vary, but according to Hacking ( Reference Hacking 1999 , p. 7): “most people who use the social construction idea enthusiastically want to criticize, change, or destroy some X that they dislike in the established order of things.”

2 Although these countries also vary in some respects, they nevertheless maintain cultural, diplomatic, and military links today (e.g., shared values of secular Christianity; close institutional ties through participation in Five Country Conference, Five Eyes, Five Nations Passport Group, etc.), so we consider them together in the context of this paper.

3 We asked 10 Dutch speakers (7 women, M age  = 19.42; SD age  = 0.78; 3 men, M age  = 22; SD age  = 2.64) to provide Dutch translation equivalents for the English words gender and sex embedded in four different sentences (“Discrimination based on religion, race, or gender is illegal”; “What is your gender?”; “There is no difference in the frequency of tattoos across the sexes”; “What is your sex?”). Overall, we found that people translated the English word gender as geslacht 11 times, and as gender 10 times. This was split across the two gender question prompts, with one participant giving both English gender and geslacht as translations for gender. As for the English word sex , we found 15 geslacht translations, 2 gender translations, 1 sexe, 1 sekse , and 1 soorten translation. This underlines that, although there is variability in how the concept gender is expressed in Dutch, our linguistic prompts were appropriate and understood by this cohort of participants. Geslacht is a widely used term for the concept of ‘gender’. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for raising this point for our attention.

4 Limburgish is a language variety spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium, and is part of a continuum of West Germanic dialects (Tallman et al., Reference Tallman, Lugli and Schuler 2017 ).

5 The term gender/sex has been proposed to account for the entwinement of varied influences shaping gendered identities, ranging from biological to sociocultural components (Fausto-Sterling, Reference Fausto-Sterling 2019 ; van Anders, Reference van Anders 2015 ).

6 The term seks is used to denote sexual intercourse, so its translation does not overlap entirely with Italian sesso and English sex which are used to indicate biological sex, as well as sexual intercourse, while Dutch sekse refers to biological sex.

Table 2. Statements targeting essentialist and constructivist beliefs about gender from the Lloyd and Galupo (2019) with their Italian and Dutch translations

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• Volume 16, Issue 2
• Claudia Mazzuca (a1) , Anna M. Borghi (a1) (a2) , Saskia van Putten (a3) , Luisa Lugli (a4) , Roberto Nicoletti (a4) and Asifa Majid (a5)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2023.40

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Cultural Constructions of Gender

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Introduction

Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century a considerable amount of ethnographic data regarding cultural variations in concepts of sex and gender were collected. The data included a variety of casual mentions, some detailed case-oriented studies, and compilations of data. However, most of these were cast within an ethnocentric paradigm focused on psychosocial anomalies or presumed pathologies. The major exception was the collection by Ford and Beach (1951) dealing with variations in human sexual behavior, looking to develop a sense of patterning. A little more than 20 years later, Martin and Voorhies (1975) coined the term “supernumerary sexes” in an effort to make sense out of the data that then existed. They meant this term to refer to cultural categories that did not fit the Western European and North American bipolar paradigms.

Although a great deal of ethnographic data regarding cultural variations in conceptualizing sex and gender had been...

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Unit I: An Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies: Grounding Theoretical Frameworks and Concepts

Social Constructionism

Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge that holds that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological—such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality—are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts (Subramaniam 2010). As such, social constructionism highlights the ways in which cultural categories—like “men,” “women,” “black,” “white”—are concepts created, changed, and reproduced through historical processes within institutions and culture. We do not mean to say that bodily variation among individuals does not exist, but that we construct categories based on certain bodily features, we attach meanings to these categories, and then we place people into the categories by considering their bodies or bodily aspects. For example, by the one-drop rule (see also page 35), regardless of their appearance, individuals with any African ancestor are considered black. In contrast, racial conceptualization and thus racial categories are different in Brazil, where many individuals with African ancestry are considered to be white. This shows how identity categories are not based on strict biological characteristics, but on the social perceptions and meanings that are assumed. Categories are not “natural” or fixed and the boundaries around them are always shifting—they are contested and redefined in different historical periods and across different societies. Therefore , the social constructionist perspective is concerned with the meaning created through defining and categorizing groups of people, experience, and reality in cultural contexts.

The Social Construction of Heterosexuality

What does it mean to be “heterosexual” in contemporary US society? Did it mean the same thing in the late 19th century? As historian of human sexuality Jonathon Ned Katz shows in The Invention of Heterosexuality (1999), the word “heterosexual” was originally coined by Dr. James Kiernan in 1892, but its meaning and usage differed drastically from contemporary understandings of the term. Kiernan thought of “hetero-sexuals” as not defined by their attraction to the opposite sex, but by their “inclinations to both sexes.” Furthermore, Kiernan thought of the heterosexual as someone who “betrayed inclinations to ‘abnormal methods of gratification’” (Katz 1995). In other words, heterosexuals were those who were attracted to both sexes and engaged in sex for pleasure, not for reproduction. Katz further points out that this definition of the heterosexual lasted within middle-class cultures in the United States until the 1920s, and then went through various radical reformulations up to the current usage.

Looking at this historical example makes visible the process of the social construction of heterosexuality. First of all, the example shows how social construction occurs within institutions—in this case, a medical doctor created a new category to describe a particular type of sexuality, based on existing medical knowledge at the time. “Hetero-sexuality” was initially a medical term that defined a deviant type of sexuality. Second, by seeing how Kiernan—and middle class culture, more broadly—defined “hetero-sexuality” in the 19th century, it is possible to see how drastically the meanings of the concept have changed over time. Typically, in the United States in contemporary usage, “heterosexuality” is thought to mean “normal” or “good”—it is usually the invisible term defined by what is thought to be its opposite, homosexuality. However, in its initial usage, “hetero-sexuality” was thought to counter the norm of reproductive sexuality and be, therefore, deviant. This gets to the third aspect of social constructionism. That is, cultural and historical contexts shape our definition and understanding of concepts. In this case, the norm of reproductive sexuality—having sex not for pleasure, but to have children—defines what types of sexuality are regarded as “normal” or “deviant.” Fourth, this case illustrates how categorization shapes human experience, behavior, and interpretation of reality. To be a “heterosexual” in middle class culture in the US in the early 1900s was not something desirable to be—it was not an identity that most people would have wanted to inhabit. The very definition of “hetero-sexual” as deviant, because it violated reproductive sexuality, defined “proper” sexual behavior as that which was reproductive and not pleasure-centered.

Social constructionist approaches to understanding the world challenge the essentialist or biological determinist understandings that typically underpin the “common sense” ways in which we think about race, gender, and sexuality. Essentialism is the idea that the characteristics of persons or groups are significantly influenced by biological factors, and are therefore largely similar in all human cultures and historical periods. A key assumption of essentialism is that “a given truth is a necessary natural part of the individual and object in question” (Gordon and Abbott 2002). In other words, an essentialist understanding of sexuality would argue that not only do all people have a sexual orientation, but that an individual’s sexual orientation does not vary across time or place. In this example, “sexual orientation” is a given “truth” to individuals—it is thought to be inherent, biologically determined, and essential to their being.

Essentialism typically relies on a biological determinist theory of identity. Biological determinism can be defined as a general theory, which holds that a group’s biological or genetic makeup shapes its social, political, and economic destiny (Subramaniam 2014). For example, “sex” is typically thought to be a biological “fact,” where bodies are classified into two categories, male and female. Bodies in these categories are assumed to have “sex”-distinct chromosomes, reproductive systems, hormones, and sex characteristics. However, “sex” has been defined in many different ways, depending on the context within which it is defined. For example, feminist law professor Julie Greenberg (2002) writes that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, “when reproductive function was considered one of a woman’s essential characteristics, the medical community decided that the presence or absence of ovaries was the ultimate criterion of sex” (Greenberg 2002: 113). Thus, sexual difference was produced through the heteronormative assumption that women are defined by their ability to have children. Instead of assigning sex based on the presence or absence of ovaries, medical practitioners in the contemporary US typically assign sex based on the appearance of genitalia.

Differential definitions of sex point to two other primary aspects of the social construction of reality. First, it makes apparent how even the things commonly thought to be “natural” or “essential” in the world are socially constructed. Understandings of “nature” change through history and across place according to systems of human knowledge. Second, the social construction of difference occurs within relations of power and privilege. Sociologist Abby Ferber (2009) argues that these two aspects of the social construction of difference cannot be separated, but must be understood together. Discussing the construction of racial difference, she argues that inequality and oppression actually produce ideas of essential racial difference. Therefore, racial categories that are thought to be “natural” or “essential” are created within the context of racialized power relations—in the case of African-Americans, that includes slavery, laws regulating interracial sexual relationships, lynching, and white supremacist discourse. Social constructionist analyses seek to better understand the processes through which racialized, gendered, or sexualized differentiations occur, in order to untangle the power relations within them.

Notions of disability are similarly socially constructed within the context of ableist power relations. The medical model of disability frames body and mind differences and perceived challenges as flaws that need fixing at the individual level. The social model of disability shifts the focus to the disabling aspects of society for individuals with impairments (physical, sensory or mental differences), where the society disables those with impairments (Shakespeare 2006). Disability, then, refers to a form of oppression where individuals understood as having impairments are imagined to be inferior to those without impairments, and impairments are devalued and unwanted. This perspective manifests in structural arrangements that limit access for those with impairments. A critical disability perspective critiques the idea that nondisability is natural and normal—an ableist sentiment, which frames the person rather than the society as the problem.

What are the implications of a social constructionist approach to understanding the world? Because social constructionist analyses examine categories of difference as fluid, dynamic, and changing according to historical and geographical context, a social constructionist perspective suggests that existing inequalities are neither inevitable nor immutable. This perspective is especially useful for the activist and emancipatory aims of feminist movements and theories. By centering the processes through which inequality and power relations produce racialized, sexualized, and gendered difference, social constructionist analyses challenge the pathologization of minorities who have been thought to be essentially or inherently inferior to privileged groups. Additionally, social constructionist analyses destabilize the categories that organize people into hierarchically ordered groups through uncovering the historical, cultural, and/or institutional origins of the groups under study. In this way, social constructionist analyses challenge the categorical underpinnings of inequalities by revealing their production and reproduction through unequal systems of knowledge and power.

Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies by Miliann Kang, Donovan Lessard, Laura Heston, Sonny Nordmarken is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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7 Explanation of the Concept of Social Construction of Gender

Explanation of the Concept of Social Construction of Gender

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The Social Construction of Gender

Social constructivists propose that there is no inherent truth to gender; it is constructed by social expectations and gender performance.

• Social constructionism is the notion that people’s understanding of reality is partially, if not entirely, socially situated.
• Gender is a social identity that needs to be contextualized.
• Individuals internalize social expectations for gender norms and behave accordingly.
• social constructionism The idea that social institutions and knowledge are created by actors within the system, rather than having any inherent truth on their own.
• Gender performativity Gender Performativity is a term created by post-structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, which has subsequently been used in a variety of academic fields that describes how individuals participate in social constructions of gender.
• essentialism The view that objects have properties that are essential to them.

Social Constructionism

The social construction of gender comes out of the general school of thought entitled social constructionism. Social constructionism proposes that everything people “know” or see as “reality” is partially, if not entirely, socially situated. To say that something is socially constructed does not mitigate the power of the concept. Take, for example, money. Money is a socially constructed reality. Paper bills are worth nothing independent of the value individuals ascribe to them. The dollar is only worth as much as value as Americans are willing to ascribe to it. Note that the dollar only works in its own currency market; it holds no value in areas that don’t use the dollar. Nevertheless, the dollar is extremely powerful within its own domain.

These basic theories of social constructionism can be applied to any issue of study pertaining to human life, including gender. Is gender an essential category or a social construct? If it is a social construct, how does it function? Who benefits from the way that gender is constructed? A social constructionist view of gender looks beyond categories and examines the intersections of multiple identities and the blurring of the boundaries between essentialist categories. This is especially true with regards to categories of male and female, which are viewed typically as binary and opposite. Social constructionism seeks to blur the binary and muddle these two categories, which are so frequently presumed to be essential.

Judith Butler and Gender Performativity

Judith Butler is one of the most prominent social theorists currently working on issues pertaining to the social construction of gender. Butler is a trained philosopher and has oriented her work towards feminism and queer theory. Butler’s most known work is  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , published in 1991, which argues for gender performativity. This means that gender is not an essential category. The repetitious performances of “male” and “female” in accordance with social norms reifies the categories, creating the appearance of a naturalized and essential binary. Gender is never a stable descriptor of an individual, but an individual is always “doing” gender, performing or deviating from the socially accepted performance of gender stereotypes. Doing gender is not just about acting in a particular way. It is about embodying and believing certain gender norms and engaging in practices that map on to those norms. These performances normalize the essentialism of gender categories. In other words, by doing gender, we reinforce the notion that there are only two mutually exclusive categories of gender. The internalized belief that men and women are essentially different is what makes men and women behave in ways that appear essentially different. Gender is maintained as a category through socially constructed displays of gender.

Doing gender is fundamentally a social relationship. One does gender in order to be perceived by others in a particular way, either as male, female, or as troubling those categories. Certainly, gender is internalized and acquires significance for the individual; some individuals want to feel feminine or masculine. Social constructionists might argue that because categories are only formed within a social context, even the affect of gender is in some ways a social relation. Moreover, we hold ourselves and each other for our presentation of gender, or how we “measure up.” We are aware that others evaluate and characterize our behavior on the parameter of gender. Social constructionists would say that gender is interactional rather than individual—it is developed through social interactions. Gender is also said to be omnirelevant, meaning that people are always judging our behavior to be either male or female.

Judith Butler

Author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Explanation of the Concept of Social Construction of Gender Copyright © 2020 by Boundless, Boundless Sociology, http://oer2go.org/mods/en-boundless/www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociology-textbook/index.html is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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11.1 Understanding Sex and Gender

Learning objectives.

• Define sex and gender and femininity and masculinity.
• Critically assess the evidence on biology, culture and socialization, and gender.
• Discuss agents of gender socialization.

Although the terms sex and gender are sometimes used interchangeably and do in fact complement each other, they nonetheless refer to different aspects of what it means to be a woman or man in any society.

Sex refers to the anatomical and other biological differences between females and males that are determined at the moment of conception and develop in the womb and throughout childhood and adolescence. Females, of course, have two X chromosomes, while males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. From this basic genetic difference spring other biological differences. The first to appear are the different genitals that boys and girls develop in the womb and that the doctor (or midwife) and parents look for when a baby is born (assuming the baby’s sex is not already known from ultrasound or other techniques) so that the momentous announcement, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” can be made. The genitalia are called primary sex characteristics , while the other differences that develop during puberty are called secondary sex characteristics and stem from hormonal differences between the two sexes. In this difficult period of adolescents’ lives, boys generally acquire deeper voices, more body hair, and more muscles from their flowing testosterone. Girls develop breasts and wider hips and begin menstruating as nature prepares them for possible pregnancy and childbirth. For better or worse, these basic biological differences between the sexes affect many people’s perceptions of what it means to be female or male, as we shall soon discuss.

Gender as a Social Construction

If sex is a biological concept, then gender is a social concept. It refers to the social and cultural differences a society assigns to people based on their (biological) sex. A related concept, gender roles , refers to a society’s expectations of people’s behavior and attitudes based on whether they are females or males. Understood in this way, gender, like race as discussed in Chapter 7 “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control” , is a social construction . How we think and behave as females and males is not etched in stone by our biology but rather is a result of how society expects us to think and behave based on what sex we are. As we grow up, we learn these expectations as we develop our gender identity , or our beliefs about ourselves as females or males.

These expectations are called femininity and masculinity . Femininity refers to the cultural expectations we have of girls and women, while masculinity refers to the expectations we have of boys and men. A familiar nursery rhyme nicely summarizes these two sets of traits:

What are little boys made of?

Snips and snails,

And puppy dog tails,

That’s what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice,

And everything nice,

That’s what little girls are made of.

As this nursery rhyme suggests, our traditional notions of femininity and masculinity indicate that we think females and males are fundamentally different from each other. In effect, we think of them as two sides of the same coin of being human. What we traditionally mean by femininity is captured in the adjectives, both positive and negative, we traditionally ascribe to women: gentle, sensitive, nurturing, delicate, graceful, cooperative, decorative, dependent, emotional, passive, and weak. Thus when we say that a girl or woman is very feminine, we have some combination of these traits, usually the positive ones, in mind: she is soft, dainty, pretty, even a bit flighty. What we traditionally mean by masculinity is captured in the adjectives, again both positive and negative, our society traditionally ascribes to men: strong, assertive, brave, active, independent, intelligent, competitive, insensitive, unemotional, and aggressive. When we say that a boy or man is very masculine, we have some combination of these traits in mind: he is tough, strong, and assertive.

Infant girls traditionally wear pink, while infant boys wear blue. This color difference reflects the different cultural expectations we have for babies based on their (biological) sex.

Abby Bischoff – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

These traits might sound like stereotypes of females and males in today’s society, and to some extent they are, but differences between men and women in attitudes and behavior do in fact exist (Aulette, Wittner, & Blakeley, 2009). For example, women cry more often than men do. Men are more physically violent than women. Women take care of children more than men do. Women smile more often than men. Men curse more often than women. When women talk with each other, they are more likely to talk about their personal lives than men are when they talk with each other (Tannen, 2001). The two sexes even differ when they hold a cigarette (not that anyone should smoke). When a woman holds a cigarette, she usually has the palm of her cigarette-holding hand facing upward. When a man holds a cigarette, he usually has his palm facing downward.

Sexual Orientation

Sexual orientation refers to a person’s preference for sexual relationships with individuals of the other sex ( heterosexuality ), one’s own sex ( homosexuality ), or both sexes ( bisexuality ). The term also increasingly refers to transgendered individuals, those whose behavior, appearance, and/or gender identity fails to conform to conventional norms. Transgendered individuals include transvestites (those who dress in the clothing of the opposite sex) and transsexuals (those whose gender identity differs from the physiological sex and who sometimes undergo a sex change).

It is difficult to know precisely how many people are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. One problem is conceptual. For example, what does it mean to be gay or lesbian? Does one need to actually have sexual relations with a same-sex partner to be considered gay? What if someone is attracted to same-sex partners but does not actually engage in sex with such persons? What if someone identifies as heterosexual but engages in homosexual sex for money (as in certain forms of prostitution) or for power and influence (as in much prison sex)? These conceptual problems make it difficult to determine the extent of homosexuality.

A second problem is empirical. Even if we can settle on a definition of homosexuality, how do we then determine how many people fit this definition? For better or worse, our best evidence of the number of gays and lesbians in the United States comes from surveys of national samples of Americans in which they are asked various questions about their sexuality. Although these are anonymous surveys, obviously at least some individuals may be reluctant to disclose their sexual activity and thoughts to an interviewer. Still, scholars think the estimates from these surveys are fairly accurate but that they probably underestimate by at least a small amount the number of gays and lesbians.

A widely cited survey carried out by researchers at the University of Chicago found that 2.8% of men and 1.4% of women identified themselves as gay/lesbian or bisexual, with greater percentages reporting having had sexual relations with same-sex partners or being attracted to same-sex persons (see Table 11.1 “Prevalence of Homosexuality in the United States” ). In the 2008 General Social Survey, 2.2% of men and 3.5% of women identified themselves as gay/lesbian or bisexual. Among individuals having had any sexual partners since turning 18, 2.2% of men reported having had at least some male partners, while 4.6% of women reported having had at least some female partners. Although precise numbers must remain unknown, it seems fair to say that between about 2% and 5% of Americans are gay/lesbian or bisexual.

Table 11.1 Prevalence of Homosexuality in the United States

Source: Data from Laumann, E. O., Gagnon, J. H., Michael, R. T., & Michaels, S. (1994). The social organization of sexuality . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

If it is difficult to determine the number of people who are gay/lesbian or bisexual, it is even more difficult to determine why some people have this sexual orientation while most do not have it. Scholars disagree on the “causes” of sexual orientation (Engle, McFalls, Gallagher, & Curtis, 2006; Sheldon, Pfeffer, Jayaratne, Feldbaum, & Petty, 2007). Some scholars attribute it to unknown biological factor(s) over which individuals have no control, just as individuals do not decide whether they are left-handed or right-handed. Supporting this view, many gays say they realized they were gay during adolescence, just as straights would say they realized they were straight during their own adolescence. Other scholars say that sexual orientation is at least partly influenced by cultural norms, so that individuals are more likely to identify as gay or straight depending on the cultural views of sexual orientation into which they are socialized as they grow up. At best, perhaps all we can say is that sexual orientation stems from a complex mix of biological and cultural factors that remain to be determined.

The Development of Gender Differences

What accounts for differences in female and male behavior and attitudes? Do the biological differences between the sexes account for other differences? Or do these latter differences stem, as most sociologists think, from cultural expectations and from differences in the ways in which the sexes are socialized? These are critical questions, for they ask whether the differences between boys and girls and women and men stem more from biology or from society. As Chapter 2 “Eye on Society: Doing Sociological Research” pointed out, biological explanations for human behavior implicitly support the status quo. If we think behavioral and other differences between the sexes are due primarily to their respective biological makeups, we are saying that these differences are inevitable or nearly so and that any attempt to change them goes against biology and will likely fail.

As an example, consider the obvious biological fact that women bear and nurse children and men do not. Couple this with the common view that women are also more gentle and nurturing than men, and we end up with a “biological recipe” for women to be the primary caretakers of children. Many people think this means women are therefore much better suited than men to take care of children once they are born, and that the family might be harmed if mothers work outside the home or if fathers are the primary caretakers. Figure 11.1 “Belief That Women Should Stay at Home” shows that more than one-third of the public agrees that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” To the extent this belief exists, women may not want to work outside the home or, if they choose to do so, they face difficulties from employers, family, and friends. Conversely, men may not even think about wanting to stay at home and may themselves face difficulties from employees, family, and friends if they want to do so. A belief in a strong biological basis for differences between women and men implies, then, that there is little we can or should do to change these differences. It implies that “anatomy is destiny,” and destiny is, of course, by definition inevitable.

Figure 11.1 Belief That Women Should Stay at Home

Agreement or disagreement with statement that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008.

This implication makes it essential to understand the extent to which gender differences do, in fact, stem from biological differences between the sexes or, instead, stem from cultural and social influences. If biology is paramount, then gender differences are perhaps inevitable and the status quo will remain. If culture and social influences matter much more than biology, then gender differences can change and the status quo may give way. With this backdrop in mind, let’s turn to the biological evidence for behavioral and other differences between the sexes and then examine the evidence for their social and cultural roots.

Biology and Gender

Several biological explanations for gender roles exist, and we discuss two of the most important ones here. One explanation is from the related fields of sociobiology (see Chapter 2 “Eye on Society: Doing Sociological Research” ) and evolutionary psychology (Workman & Reader, 2009) and argues an evolutionary basis for traditional gender roles.

Scholars advocating this view reason as follows (Barash, 2007; Thornhill & Palmer, 2000). In prehistoric societies, few social roles existed. A major role centered on relieving hunger by hunting or gathering food. The other major role centered on bearing and nursing children. Because only women could perform this role, they were also the primary caretakers for children for several years after birth. And because women were frequently pregnant, their roles as mothers confined them to the home for most of their adulthood. Meanwhile, men were better suited than women for hunting because they were stronger and quicker than women. In prehistoric societies, then, biology was indeed destiny: for biological reasons, men in effect worked outside the home (hunted), while women stayed at home with their children.

Evolutionary reasons also explain why men are more violent than women. In prehistoric times, men who were more willing to commit violence against and even kill other men would “win out” in the competition for female mates. They thus were more likely than less violent men to produce offspring, who would then carry these males’ genetic violent tendencies. By the same token, men who were prone to rape women were more likely to produce offspring, who would then carry these males’ “rape genes.” This early process guaranteed that rape tendencies would be biologically transmitted and thus provided a biological basis for the amount of rape that occurs today.

If the human race evolved along these lines, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists continue, natural selection favored those societies where men were stronger, braver, and more aggressive and where women were more fertile and nurturing. Such traits over the millennia became fairly instinctual, meaning that men’s and women’s biological natures evolved differently. Men became, by nature, more assertive, daring, and violent than women, and women are, by nature, more gentle, nurturing, and maternal than men. To the extent this is true, these scholars add, traditional gender roles for women and men make sense from an evolutionary standpoint, and attempts to change them go against the sexes’ biological natures. This in turn implies that existing gender inequality must continue because it is rooted in biology. As the title of a book presenting the evolutionary psychology argument summarizes this implication, “biology at work: rethinking sexual equality” (Browne, 2002).

According to some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, today’s gender differences in strength and physical aggression are ultimately rooted in certain evolutionary processes that spanned millennia.

Vladimir Pustovit – Couple – CC BY 2.0.

Critics challenge the evolutionary explanation on several grounds (Hurley, 2007; Buller, 2006; Begley, 2009). First, much greater gender variation in behavior and attitudes existed in prehistoric times than the evolutionary explanation assumes. Second, even if biological differences did influence gender roles in prehistoric times, these differences are largely irrelevant in today’s world, in which, for example, physical strength is not necessary for survival. Third, human environments throughout the millennia have simply been too diverse to permit the simple, straightforward biological development that the evolutionary explanation assumes. Fourth, evolutionary arguments implicitly justify existing gender inequality by implying the need to confine women and men to their traditional roles.

Recent anthropological evidence also challenges the evolutionary argument that men’s tendency to commit violence, including rape, was biologically transmitted. This evidence instead finds that violent men have trouble finding female mates who would want them and that the female mates they find and the children they produce are often killed by rivals to the men. The recent evidence also finds those rapists’ children are often abandoned and then die. As one anthropologist summarizes the rape evidence, “The likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation [is] extremely low. It just wouldn’t have made sense for men in the [prehistoric epoch] to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it’s preprogrammed into us doesn’t hold up” (Begley, 2009, p. 54).

A second biological explanation for traditional gender roles centers on hormones and specifically on testosterone, the so-called male hormone. One of the most important differences between boys and girls and men and women in the United States and many other societies is their level of aggression. Simply put, males are much more physically aggressive than females and in the United States commit about 85%–90% of all violent crimes (see Chapter 7 “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control” ). Why is this so? As Chapter 7 “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control” pointed out, this gender difference is often attributed to males’ higher levels of testosterone (Mazur, 2009).

To see whether testosterone does indeed raise aggression, researchers typically assess whether males with higher testosterone levels are more aggressive than those with lower testosterone levels. Several studies find that this is indeed the case. For example, a widely cited study of Vietnam-era male veterans found that those with higher levels of testosterone had engaged in more violent behavior (Booth & Osgood, 1993). However, this correlation does not necessarily mean that their testosterone increased their violence: as has been found in various animal species, it is also possible that their violence increased their testosterone. Because studies of human males can’t for ethical and practical reasons manipulate their testosterone levels, the exact meaning of the results from these testosterone-aggression studies must remain unclear, according to a review sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences (Miczek, Mirsky, Carey, DeBold, & Raine, 1994).

Another line of research on the biological basis for sex differences in aggression involves children, including some as young as ages 1 or 2, in various situations (Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little, 2008). They might be playing with each other, interacting with adults, or writing down solutions to hypothetical scenarios given to them by a researcher. In most of these studies, boys are more physically aggressive in thought or deed than girls, even at a very young age. Other studies are more experimental in nature. In one type of study, a toddler will be playing with a toy, only to have it removed by an adult. Boys typically tend to look angry and try to grab the toy back, while girls tend to just sit there and whimper. Because these gender differences in aggression are found at very young ages, researchers often say they must have some biological basis. However, critics of this line of research counter that even young children have already been socialized along gender lines (Begley, 2009; Eliot, 2009), a point to which we return later. To the extent this is true, gender differences in children’s aggression may simply reflect socialization and not biology.

In sum, biological evidence for gender differences certainly exists, but its interpretation remains very controversial. It must be weighed against the evidence, to which we next turn, of cultural variations in the experience of gender and of socialization differences by gender. One thing is clear: to the extent we accept biological explanations for gender, we imply that existing gender differences and gender inequality must continue to exist. This implication prompts many social scientists to be quite critical of the biological viewpoint. As Linda L. Lindsey (2011, p. 52) notes, “Biological arguments are consistently drawn upon to justify gender inequality and the continued oppression of women.” In contrast, cultural and social explanations of gender differences and gender inequality promise some hope for change. Let’s examine the evidence for these explanations.

Culture and Gender

Some of the most compelling evidence against a strong biological determination of gender roles comes from anthropologists, whose work on preindustrial societies demonstrates some striking gender variation from one culture to another. This variation underscores the impact of culture on how females and males think and behave.

Margaret Mead (1935) was one of the first anthropologists to study cultural differences in gender. In New Guinea she found three tribes—the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli—whose gender roles differed dramatically. In the Arapesh both sexes were gentle and nurturing. Both women and men spent much time with their children in a loving way and exhibited what we would normally call maternal behavior. In the Arapesh, then, different gender roles did not exist, and in fact, both sexes conformed to what Americans would normally call the female gender role.

Margaret Mead made important contributions to the anthropological study of gender. Her work suggested that culture dramatically influences how females and males behave and that gender is rooted much more in culture than in biology.

U.S. Library of Congress – public domain.

The situation was the reverse among the Mundugumor. Here both men and women were fierce, competitive, and violent. Both sexes seemed to almost dislike children and often physically punished them. In the Mundugumor society, then, different gender roles also did not exist, as both sexes conformed to what we Americans would normally call the male gender role.

In the Tchambuli, Mead finally found a tribe where different gender roles did exist. One sex was the dominant, efficient, assertive one and showed leadership in tribal affairs, while the other sex liked to dress up in frilly clothes, wear makeup, and even giggle a lot. Here, then, Mead found a society with gender roles similar to those found in the United States, but with a surprising twist. In the Tchambuli, women were the dominant, assertive sex that showed leadership in tribal affairs, while men were the ones wearing frilly clothes and makeup.

Mead’s research caused a firestorm in scholarly circles, as it challenged the biological view on gender that was still very popular when she went to New Guinea. In recent years, Mead’s findings have been challenged by other anthropologists. Among other things, they argue that she probably painted an overly simplistic picture of gender roles in her three societies (Scheper-Hughes, 1987). Other anthropologists defend Mead’s work and note that much subsequent research has found that gender-linked attitudes and behavior do differ widely from one culture to another (Morgan, 1989). If so, they say, the impact of culture on what it means to be a female or male cannot be ignored.

Extensive evidence of this impact comes from anthropologist George Murdock, who created the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of almost 200 preindustrial societies studied by anthropologists. Murdock (1937) found that some tasks in these societies, such as hunting and trapping, are almost always done by men, while other tasks, such as cooking and fetching water, are almost always done by women. These patterns provide evidence for the evolutionary argument presented earlier, as they probably stem from the biological differences between the sexes. Even so there were at least some societies in which women hunted and in which men cooked and fetched water.

More importantly, Murdock found much greater gender variation in several of the other tasks he studied, including planting crops, milking, and generating fires. Men primarily performed these tasks in some societies, women primarily performed them in other societies, and in still other societies both sexes performed them equally. Figure 11.2 “Gender Responsibility for Weaving” shows the gender responsibility for yet another task, weaving. Women are the primary weavers in about 61% of the societies that do weaving, men are the primary weavers in 32%, and both sexes do the weaving in 7% of the societies. Murdock’s findings illustrate how gender roles differ from one culture to another and imply they are not biologically determined.

Figure 11.2 Gender Responsibility for Weaving

Source: Data from Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

Anthropologists since Mead and Murdock have continued to investigate cultural differences in gender. Some of their most interesting findings concern gender and sexuality (Morgan, 1989; Brettell & Sargent, 2009). Although all societies distinguish “femaleness” and “maleness,” additional gender categories exist in some societies. The Native Americans known as the Mohave, for example, recognize four genders: a woman, a woman who acts like a man, a man, and a man who acts like a woman. In some societies, a third, intermediary gender category is recognized. Anthropologists call this category the berdache , who is usually a man who takes on a woman’s role. This intermediary category combines aspects of both femininity and masculinity of the society in which it is found and is thus considered an androgynous gender. Although some people in this category are born as intersexed individuals (formerly known as hermaphrodites ), meaning they have genitalia of both sexes, many are born biologically as one sex or the other but adopt an androgynous identity.

An example of this intermediary gender category may be found in India, where the hirja role involves males who wear women’s clothing and identify as women (Reddy, 2006). The hirja role is an important part of Hindu mythology, in which androgynous figures play key roles both as humans and as gods. Today people identified by themselves and others as hirjas continue to play an important role in Hindu practices and in Indian cultural life in general. Serena Nanda (1997, pp. 200–201) calls hirjas “human beings who are neither man nor woman” and says they are thought of as “special, sacred beings” even though they are sometimes ridiculed and abused.

Anthropologists have found another androgynous gender composed of women warriors in 33 Native American groups in North America. Walter L. Williams (1997) calls these women “amazons” and notes that they dress like men and sometimes even marry women. In some tribes girls exhibit such “masculine” characteristics from childhood, while in others they may be recruited into “amazonhood.” In the Kaska Indians, for example, a married couple with too many daughters would select one to “be like a man.” When she was about 5 years of age, her parents would begin to dress her like a boy and have her do male tasks. Eventually she would grow up to become a hunter.

The androgynous genders found by anthropologists remind us that gender is a social construction and not just a biological fact. If culture does affect gender roles, socialization is the process through which culture has this effect. What we experience as girls and boys strongly influences how we develop as women and men in terms of behavior and attitudes. To illustrate this important dimension of gender, let’s turn to the evidence on socialization.

Socialization and Gender

Chapter 3 “Culture” identified several agents of socialization, including the family, peers, schools, the mass media, and religion. While that chapter’s discussion focused on these agents’ impact on socialization in general, ample evidence of their impact on gender-role socialization also exists. Such socialization helps boys and girls develop their gender identity (Andersen & Hysock, 2009).

Parents play with their daughters and sons differently. For example, fathers generally roughhouse more with their sons than with their daughters.

Jagrap – Roughhousing – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Socialization into gender roles begins in infancy, as almost from the moment of birth parents begin to socialize their children as boys or girls without even knowing it (Begley, 2009; Eliot, 2009). Many studies document this process (Lindsey, 2011). Parents commonly describe their infant daughters as pretty, soft, and delicate and their infant sons as strong, active, and alert, even though neutral observers find no such gender differences among infants when they do not know the infants’ sex. From infancy on, parents play with and otherwise interact with their daughters and sons differently. They play more roughly with their sons—for example, by throwing them up in the air or by gently wrestling with them—and more quietly with their daughters. When their infant or toddler daughters cry, they warmly comfort them, but they tend to let their sons cry longer and to comfort them less. They give their girls dolls to play with and their boys “action figures” and toy guns. While these gender differences in socialization are probably smaller now than a generation ago, they certainly continue to exist. Go into a large toy store and you will see pink aisles of dolls and cooking sets and blue aisles of action figures, toy guns, and related items.

Peer influences also encourage gender socialization. As they reach school age, children begin to play different games based on their gender (see the “Sociology Making a Difference” box). Boys tend to play sports and other competitive team games governed by inflexible rules and relatively large numbers of roles, while girls tend to play smaller, cooperative games such as hopscotch and jumping rope with fewer and more flexible rules. Although girls are much more involved in sports now than a generation ago, these gender differences in their play as youngsters persist and continue to reinforce gender roles. For example, they encourage competitiveness in boys and cooperation and trust among girls. Boys who are not competitive risk being called “sissy” or other words by their peers. The patterns we see in adult males and females thus have their roots in their play as young children (King, Miles, & Kniska, 1991).

Sociology Making a Difference

Gender Differences in Children’s Play and Games

In considering the debate, discussed in the text, between biology and sociology over the origins of gender roles, some widely cited studies by sociologists over gender differences in children’s play and games provide important evidence for the importance of socialization.

Janet Lever (1978) studied fifth-grade children in three different communities in Connecticut. She watched them play and otherwise interact in school and also had the children keep diaries of their play and games outside school. One of her central aims was to determine how complex the two sexes’ play and games were in terms of such factors as number of rules, specialization of roles, and size of the group playing. In all of these respects, Lever found that boys’ play and games were typically more complex than girls’ play and games. She attributed these differences to socialization by parents, teachers, and other adults and argued that the complexity of boys’ play and games helped them to be better able than girls to learn important social skills such as dealing with rules and coordinating actions to achieve goals.

Meanwhile, Barrie Thorne (1993) spent many months in two different working-class communities in California and Michigan observing fourth and fifth graders sit in class and lunchrooms and play on the school playgrounds. Most children were white, but several were African American or Latino. As you might expect, the girls and boys she observed usually played separately from each other, and the one-sex groups in which they played were very important for the development of their gender identity, with boys tending to play team sports and other competitive games and girls tending to play cooperative games such as jump rope. These differences led Thorne to conclude that gender-role socialization stems not only from practices by adults but also from the children’s own activities without adult involvement. When boys and girls did interact, it was often “girls against the boys” or vice versa in classroom spelling contests and in games such as tag. Thorne concluded that these “us against them” contests helped the children learn that boys and girls are two different and antagonistic sexes and that gender itself is antagonistic, even if there were also moments when both sexes interacted on the playground in more relaxed, noncompetitive situations. Boys also tended to disrupt girls’ games more than the reverse and in this manner both exerted and learned dominance over females. In all of these ways, children were not just the passive recipients of gender-role socialization from adults (their teachers), but they also played an active role in ensuring that such socialization occurred.

The studies by Lever and Thorne were among the first to emphasize the importance of children’s play and peer relationships for gender socialization. They also called attention to the importance of the traits and values learned through such socialization for outcomes later in life. The rise in team sports opportunities for girls in the years since Lever and Thorne did their research is a welcome development that addresses the concerns expressed in their studies, but young children continue to play in the ways that Lever and Thorne found. To the extent children’s play has the consequences just listed, and to the extent these consequences impede full gender inequality, these sociological studies suggest the need for teachers, parents, and other adults to help organize children’s play that is more egalitarian along the lines discussed by Lever, Thorne, and other scholars. In this way, their sociological work has helped to make a difference and promises to continue to do so.

School is yet another agent of gender socialization (Klein, 2007). First of all, school playgrounds provide a location for the gender-linked play activities just described to occur. Second, and perhaps more important, teachers at all levels treat their female and male students differently in subtle ways of which they are probably not aware. They tend to call on boys more often to answer questions in class and to praise them more when they give the right answer. They also give boys more feedback about their assignments and other school work (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). At all grade levels, many textbooks and other books still portray people in gender-stereotyped ways. It is true that the newer books do less of this than older ones, but the newer books still contain some stereotypes, and the older books are still used in many schools, especially those that cannot afford to buy newer volumes.

Women’s magazines reinforce the view that women need to be slender and wear many cosmetics in order to be considered beautiful.

Photo Editing Services Tucia.com – Glamour /Fashion Retouching by Tucia – CC BY 2.0.

Gender socialization also occurs through the mass media (Dow & Wood, 2006). On children’s television shows, the major characters are male. On Nickelodeon, for example, the very popular SpongeBob SquarePants is a male, as are his pet snail, Gary; his best friend, Patrick Star; their neighbor, Squidward Tentacles; and SpongeBob’s employer, Eugene Crabs. Of the major characters in Bikini Bottom, only Sandy Cheeks is a female. For all its virtues, Sesame Street features Bert, Ernie, Cookie Monster, and other male characters. Most of the Muppets are males, and the main female character, Miss Piggy, depicted as vain and jealous, is hardly an admirable female role model. As for adults’ prime-time television, more men than women continue to fill more major roles in weekly shows, despite notable women’s roles in shows such as The Good Wife and Grey’s Anatomy . Women are also often portrayed as unintelligent or frivolous individuals who are there more for their looks than for anything else. Television commercials reinforce this image (Yoder, Christopher, & Holmes, 2008). Cosmetics ads abound, suggesting not only that a major task for women is to look good but also that their sense of self-worth stems from looking good. Other commercials show women becoming ecstatic over achieving a clean floor or sparkling laundry. Judging from the world of television commercials, then, women’s chief goals in life are to look good and to have a clean house. At the same time, men’s chief goals, judging from many commercials, are to drink beer and drive cars.

Women’s and men’s magazines reinforce these gender images (Milillo, 2008). Most of the magazines intended for teenaged girls and adult women are filled with pictures of thin, beautiful models, advice on dieting, cosmetics ads, and articles on how to win and please your man. Conversely, the magazines intended for teenaged boys and men are filled with ads and articles on cars and sports, advice on how to succeed in careers and other endeavors, and pictures of thin, beautiful (and sometimes nude) women. These magazine images again suggest that women’s chief goals are to look good and to please men and that men’s chief goals are to succeed, win over women, and live life in the fast lane.

Another agent of socialization, religion, also contributes to traditional gender stereotypes. Many traditional interpretations of the Bible yield the message that women are subservient to men (Tanenbaum, 2009). This message begins in Genesis, where the first human is Adam, and Eve was made from one of his ribs. The major figures in the rest of the Bible are men, and women are for the most part depicted as wives, mothers, temptresses, and prostitutes; they are praised for their roles as wives and mothers and condemned for their other roles. More generally, women are constantly depicted as the property of men. The Ten Commandments includes a neighbor’s wife with his house, ox, and other objects as things not to be coveted (Exodus 20:17), and many biblical passages say explicitly that women belong to men, such as this one from the New Testament:

Wives be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church. As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. (Ephesians 5:22–24)

Several passages in the Old Testament justify the rape and murder of women and girls. The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, also contains passages asserting the subordinate role of women (Mayer, 2009).

This discussion suggests that religious people should believe in traditional gender views more than less religious people, and research confirms this relationship (Morgan, 1988). To illustrate this, Figure 11.3 “Frequency of Prayer and Acceptance of Traditional Gender Roles in the Family” shows the relationship in the General Social Survey between frequency of prayer and the view (seen first in Figure 11.1 “Belief That Women Should Stay at Home” ) that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” People who pray more often are more likely to accept this traditional view of gender roles.

Figure 11.3 Frequency of Prayer and Acceptance of Traditional Gender Roles in the Family

Percentage agreeing that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”

A Final Word on the Sources of Gender

Scholars in many fields continue to debate the relative importance of biology and of culture and socialization for how we behave and think as girls and boys and as women and men. The biological differences between females and males lead many scholars and no doubt much of the public to assume that masculinity and femininity are to a large degree biologically determined or at least influenced. In contrast, anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists tend to view gender as a social construction. Even if biology does matter for gender, they say, the significance of culture and socialization should not be underestimated. To the extent that gender is indeed shaped by society and culture, it is possible to change gender and to help bring about a society where both men and women have more opportunity to achieve their full potential.

Key Takeaways

• Sex is a biological concept, while gender is a social concept and refers to the social and cultural differences a society assigns to people based on their sex.
• Several biological explanations for gender roles exist, but sociologists think culture and socialization are more important sources of gender roles than biology.
• Families, schools, peers, the mass media, and religion are agents of socialization for the development of gender identity and gender roles.

For Your Review

• Write a short essay about one or two events you recall from your childhood that reflected or reinforced your gender socialization.
• Do you think gender roles are due more to biology or to culture and socialization? Explain your answer.

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The Sociological Construction of Gender and Sexuality

2006, Sociological Review

This essay considers how we might come to understand social constructionism sociologically. It examines a number of related approaches to gender and sexuality that speak to sociological concerns and might be termed social constructionist: historicism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and materialist feminism. By recognising that social constructionism is multifarious rather than unified, we find that each social constructionist approach offers particular strengths for analysing the complexities of gender and sexuality. Through closely analysing these approaches and some of the criticisms of them we can reassert sociology’s specific contribution, and embrace social constructionist analyses which address the multilayered characteristics of the social in general and gender and sexuality in particular.

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The Social Construction of Gender Roles

Gender is a social construct: essay introduction, how is gender socially constructed, gender is a social construct: essay conclusion.

Gender is an underlying characteristic of all societies, and the social construction of gender roles, behaviors, and expectations is an important aspect of modern society. Seeking to understand how gender is constructed and how gender expectations influence our lives, this essay will provide an in-depth analysis of how gender is constructed.

Furthermore, we will discuss sex and gender and the role gender plays in modern American society with a focus on the social implications of sexism. Finally, we will conclude with a summation of the research explored here and discuss the ramifications of gender role construction today.

Unlike sex, gender is artificially imposed, and although based upon biological differences between men and women, gender is socially constructed. As a social construct, gender roles, behaviors, attitudes, and expectations are created by society and enforced by social norms.

The funny thing about gender is that we are led to believe that it is innate and something that we are born with. As Aaron Devor so eloquently points out in his ground-breaking and incredibly illuminating essay, “Gender Role, Behavior, and Attitudes,” gender is created, acquired, and constructed by the greater society at large. Sex has a biological basis and is predetermined at birth.

Gender, on the other hand, is a social construction, and gender roles and expectations are unique to each and every society. As social actors, individuals play an important role in the construction and creation of gender roles, attitudes, and expectations and are not simply passive recipients of societal expectations about how men and women are to behave (Devor 458-463).

In his lucid analysis of the construction of gender, Aaron Devor explores the socially constructed nature of gender in modern society and persuasively argues for a reevaluation of traditional gender role expectations in modern society.

Seeking to dispel the myths surrounding sex and gender, this author persuasively argues that a gender hierarchy is embedded within our society and unmasks the argument for the naturalness of gender roles, behaviors, and expectations.

Asserting that gender roles are created and not innate, he argues that the naturalness argument for gender has no biological basis and is a social construction. Our society is organized under a patriarchal gender schema in which men and women, as dichotomous members of the gender hierarchy, are situated on opposite ends of the schema.

While we are taught from a very young age to believe that gender differences are normal and natural, Devor actually asserts that a power imbalance underlies the gender hierarchy so prevalent in our society and informs our beliefs about gender (Devor 458-463).

Patriarchy is defined as a type of social structure in which men are perceived as being superior to women, and it is impossible to understand the construction of gender roles and expectations in modern Western society without first understanding the omnipresent patriarchal nature of our society.

Patriarchy is subconscious and not universal. In fact, matriarchy, a society that is structured with women at the helm, has been found in places as diverse as Latin America, India, and parts of Africa (Amadiume 1997). Despite the global diversity, modern Western culture is characterized by its patriarchal nature, and this has important implications in a variety of social realms.

Social stratification can be explained by the gender hierarchy. Female job ghettos, including teachers, nurses, and librarians, tend to be overpopulated with women and characterized by low wages and prestige. Interestingly, Devor points out that these jobs tend to be based upon the same characteristics which are viewed as innate to women.

Feminine qualities like caring and nurturing are found in job descriptions for employment in the ‘pink collar ghetto’ of daycare workers, elementary school teachers, and nurses. Gender role expectations are also explained through social cues such as body posture and demeanor, speech patterns, and dress style.

The nature of these cues lends credence to the argument that gender is socially constructed, and the way we talk, the way we carry ourselves, and the types of clothes we wear are all determined by social forces. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who says today that women wear dresses because they have a biological need to do so; this would be an example of sex stereotypes and sexism (Devor 460-463).

Accordingly, sexism is a scourge in American society that affects the overall quality of life for women today. Sexism is the belief that one sex is superior to the other and generally implies ideas about superiority and inferiority between sex and gender.

While some societies are characterized as matriarchal, much of Western society is patriarchal, and the United States is no exception. The patriarchal nature of American society is explained by various social and historical factors beyond the scope of this assignment.

Nonetheless, while women in America have made incredible gains in the social, economic, cultural, and political spheres over the past century, sexism remains a prevalent aspect of our society. Sexism is the result of the social construction of gender in society, and while it can be overt, latent, or suppressed, it exists and has a variety of wide social repercussions.

Accordingly, women in America earn less than their male counterparts, and the employment mobility of women is often hindered by preconceived ideas about sexuality and the economic roles that women can play in the modern world. Anthropologists and cultural theorists have written for years about a “pink ghetto” in which women are regulated to a sector of the labor market which is poorly remunerated and oftentimes unrewarding.

Ideas about “women’s work” force women into so-called female ghettos in which women predominate, and their upward social mobility is hindered by preconceived notions of what women can (and should) do. Accordingly, there is also an invisible “glass ceiling” which limits the future job prospects of women in American society and their future earning power.

Looking at the medical sector again, a profession formerly limited to men, the New England Journal of Medicine reports that as in “young male physicians earned 41% more per year than young female physicians” (Baker, 960). Is this the result of sexism, either latent or overt? Although it is difficult to say, it is important to remember that these disparities do, in fact, exist and have real-world implications.

Aaron Devor’s arguments in “Gender Role, Behavior, and Attitudes” persuasively argue that gender is socially constructed and culturally specific. Accordingly, gender role expectations are largely a product of social forces and are the result of systemic power imbalances in our society. These expectations and attitudes serve to reinforce discrimination based on gender and are socially constructed.

The social construction of gender influences behaviors, roles, attitudes, and expectations, and because of the hierarchical nature of gender in our society, masculinity becomes superior, and femininity is deemed to be inferior. Because of a socially enforced gender code, our engrained ideas about gender are incredibly difficult to change.

We are all products of our own individual societies, and we subconsciously impart the ideas and beliefs which make up our cultures. Ideas about gender roles are subsequently often unquestioned since they are perceived to be so integral to our understanding of how the world works. Understanding that gender is a construction is perhaps the first step in breaking free from the bonds of gender.

Amadiume, I. (1997). Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, and Culture . London: Zed Books.

Baker, L C. (1996). Differences in Earnings between Male and Female Physicians. New England Journal of Medicine . 334.15: 960-964.

Devor, A. (1993). “Gender Role, Behavior and Attitudes”. Annual Review of Sex Resear ch, 7, 44-89.

Devor, A. (1997). “Toward a Taxonomy of Gendered Sexuality.” Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality , 6(1), 23-55.

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IS GENDER A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT? EXPLAINED

Synopsis : There has been a long-standing debate about whether a person’s gender is biologically-defined or ascribed to them based on social constructions. Feminist theory divides sex and gender into two distinct aspects of individuals’ identity, thereby separating the biological and the social. This article explains the difference between sex, or the biological, and gender, or the social, explains the changing nature of gender, and tries to examine whether gender is a social construct.

There can be no contention over the fact that human society is intrinsically and universally gendered, and hardly do we find instances where society is not divided and differentiated on the basis of gender. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one” – this famous quote by Simone de Beauvoir in her most famous work, The Second Sex , hints at the idea that gender is not innate or congenital; rather it is a set of acquired attributes based on certain societal factors. Gender manifests itself all around us; for example, products (such as clothing and personal hygiene items) are frequently sold separately for men and women. Rarely are these on an equal plane—inequality is one of the core features of gender in human society, which also makes gender an important and interesting topic of discussion. Much debate has taken place, particularly in academia, as to whether gender is a biological fact or an abstract idea constructed by human society. There is, however, an overwhelming amount of strong evidence that suggests favoring gender as a social construct—a learned set of behaviors rather than inherent properties or features. To understand this, it is first important to understand and arrive at a definition of gender.

Sex Vs. Gender – Is Gender Biological or Social?

Two terms often used synonymously, sex and gender, have actually been defined by feminist theory as having two very different connotations. Based on the nature vs. nurture debate, sex and gender are separated on the grounds that one is natural or inherent, while the other is a product of nurture. Both, however, form part of a person’s identity. Sex is basically part of the biology of a person; it comprises all those biological features and inherent aspects that, in binary terms, are assigned at birth and differentiate between males and females. Most living organisms on this planet are divided on the basis of sexes in binary terms, and so are humans when they are born. Generally, the sex of a person (or any other organism) can be determined by the type of reproductive organs, or genitalia, they possess. Usually, sex is defined in terms of a binary, while the intersex, or those people born with sex characteristics different from common binary notions of sex but biologically natural, are largely excluded from this consideration or projected as ‘anomalies’. Intersex people seldom fit into the boxes of ‘male’ or ‘female’ as defined “properly” by society, and are therefore subjected to large-scale discrimination. It is a common practice, for instance, for parents of a child born with intersex features to ‘correct’ them in order to fit socially acceptable categories of binary sexes. Even in something as biological as sex, societal norms play a huge role, which brings us to the next category–gender. For the purpose of this article, sex will be referred to in binary terms.

Like sex, gender is an essential part of a person’s identity. Unlike sex, however, gender is not inherent or biological—it is part of one’s social identity, usually defined by society. An easy way to understand the difference between sex and gender is this: say there is a male and a female child. When they grow up (or even before that), both of these children will be expected to behave or conduct themselves in a certain manner or perform certain activities that are deemed “fit” for each of their sexes, male or female. Those born as males are ‘men’ whereas those born as females are ‘women’. These behaviors and activities are part of what creates someone’s gender as perceived by others, and this too is defined as a binary as we discussed. Society has some unwritten rules as to what is expected from each (binary) sex–what roles they will perform, how they will behave, how they will express themselves, what characteristics they will embody, and so on. While sex is biologically determined, even if there is no biological way to ascribe gender to a person at birth, as soon as a child is born, they are put into binary gender categories of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ based on their sex, and this decides how they will be treated throughout their lives. The treatment is also based on the social norms and rules. Gender essentially defines what is ‘appropriate’ for a male or a female to do and it based on ideas of what a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’ are supposed to be or do. Gender, unlike sex, is more complex as it involves socio-cultural determinants. Sex is largely static – except external or medically-induced changes, the biological makeup of a person that defines them as male or female mostly remains constant over time and does not depend on cultural variables. Gender, however, is a dynamic identity attribute as expectations and degrees of appropriateness are culturally defined, socially upheld, and are subjected to change across time and space. For example, in contemporary world, skirts and heels are supposed to be ‘women’s clothing’. However, at a certain point in history, heels were considered a symbol of power and were worn typically by men occupying high status positions in society, such as King Louis XIV (Kelly, 2021). Skirts too were worn both by men and women, and were essentially gender-neutral garments (Thorpe, 2017). Further, cooking is a work that women are ‘supposed’ to do according to socio-cultural norms. Yet, most of the chefs we see at hotels and restaurants are male and men largely dominate the food industry. Therefore, the values, beliefs and practices of a culture or society decide what it means to be a man or a woman, making gender an extremely complex concept.

Social Construction of Gender – Femininity and Masculinity

For gender to be produced, the biological aspect of sex plays a very important role, because, as we have discussed before, based on a binary understanding of sexes, each sex is assigned a (again binary) gender. However, since gender itself is not biology, it can be considered a socially constructed concept based purely on social standards. In the inter-relationship of things that construct a person’s gender, their biology does play a role, but the roles and expectations about each gender predefined in a society, the way individuals behave or appear and how others perceive them based on gender expectations (which are often stereotypical and binary), and even the way an individual perceives themselves, or their own sense of self, all play a greater role in determining one’s gender.

 Gender is, therefore, not a strict concept as society would like us to think. While biology is involved, gender is largely constructed by social norms and ideals of masculinity and femininity. The meanings and symbols associated with the dichotomous understanding of gender are ever-shifting and are largely defined by the popular understanding within a culture or society at a given period of time and space, thereby depicting the dynamic nature of gender. While debates exist as to whether gender is nature or learned through nurture, taking into consideration that sex and gender are two very different parts of an individual’s identity helps establish one’s biology while simultaneously understanding the social construction of gender.

Patti Wigington. (2019). Cult of domesticity: Definition and history . ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/cult-of-domesticity-4694493

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Gender is a Social Construct: Theory in Feminism and Sociology

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The Effect of Social Construction on Gender (essay)

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Cultural Constructs: 27 Examples & Clear Definition

Sanam Vaghefi (PhD Candidate)

Sanam Vaghefi (BSc, MA) is a Sociologist, educator and PhD Candidate. She has several years of experience at the University of Victoria as a teaching assistant and instructor. Her research on sociology of migration and mental health has won essay awards from the Canadian Sociological Association and the IRCC. Currently, she is am focused on supporting students online under her academic coaching and tutoring business Lingua Academic Coaching OU.

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Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

The term ‘cultural construct’ is used to explain how cultures ascribe meaning to ideas and concepts (Palmer & Ponsonby, 2002).

For example, the traditional ideas that men are leaders and women are passive come from cultural beliefs about gender norms . In other words, gender is culturally constructed.

John Storey (2018) provdes what I consider to be one of the best explanations of cultural construction when exploring the idea that the moon (yes, even the moon!) is culturally constructed:

“To describe the moon as a cultural construct might sound slightly ridiculous, Surely it is a natural satellite in synchronous roation with the earth? Yes, it is, but from the beginning of human history people have looked up at the moon and inscribed meaning on it and in this way it has also become a cultural object, represented in, for example, songs, poety, stories, paintings, mythologies” (Storey, 2018, p. 65).

Saying that a concept is a cultural construct does not mean that it does not actually exist. Rather, it means recognizing how the concept’s meaning differs across cultures and societies (Palmer & Ponsonby, 2002).

This is because social concepts often go through a process of cultural construction. Through this process, different meanings and values are attributed to social trends, attitudes, and behaviors (Palmer & Ponsonby, 2002).

While in Western secularism, the moon is seen as simply an orb in the sky, if we turn to Astrological traditions in India, we see that the moon’s phases can reveal insights about people’s personalities!

Cultural Construction Definition

Cultural construction is the formation of our definitions of social concepts based on our cultures rather than objective realities.

These concepts can be as fundamental as nationality, health, race as a social construct , or gender, which we often take for granted. A concept which is the subject of the process of cultural construction is called a cultural construct.

When a concept is culturally constructed, its definition is shaped by the culture surrounding it, instead of objective and physical truths. Therefore, their definitions can change across cultures.

For example, the North American understanding of being healthy is not the same as the definition of healthy in Chinese or Turkish cultures (Gaines, 1992).

Culture does not only refer to ethnic or national values and traditions, but also historical and social surroundings. Therefore, we have to distinguish between ethnic, national, historical, socioeconomic, and generational types of cultural constructs.

For example, the culture of Victorian era England was different from 21st century England. The cultural construct of gender changed across these historical cultures within the same country—from an idea of women being stay-at-home mothers to the idea that women can be prime ministers.

Another example is the cultural construction of communication across different generations. While older generations communicated through traditional ways such as writing letters, for Generation Z, communication often refers to texting over social media apps.

Cultural Construct Examples

• Eye contact : in most of the European cultures sustaining eye contact during communication is associated with positive values such as honesty and trust. However in other cases, such as some East Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, avoiding direct eye contact can be a sign of respect and humility.
• Gender roles : Masculine and feminine gender roles can often vary based on the cultural context. For example, in Western cultures heterosexual masculinity is associated with less public displays of physical affection with other men. In contrast, hugs or cheek kisses between platonic male friends is a normalized and acceptable part of masculinity in some Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures (Hawkins, 2018).
• Racial Categories : Racial classifications such as white, brown, and black are not used the same way in all cultures. Instead, regional and more specific ethnic categories (such as Arab, Armenian, or Irish) dominate the social and political discourse in many parts of the world. 
• Addressing Others : Forms of addressing others, and the meanings attributed to these forms (such as professionality and respect) are culturally constructed. For example, while referring to a university professor with their first name is acceptable in Canada, this is culturally seen as disrespectful behaviour in Japan.
• Sense of Fashion : Our perceptions of fashion and dressing styles are culturally constructed. A clothes combination that is seen as fashionable and cool in one culture can be seen as old-fashioned or even inappropriate in another one.
• Agreements and Contracts : Regardless of legal regulations, not all cultures perceive agreement and contracts in the same way. For example, while in many Western cultures it would be expected to sign and apply a formal contract when renting a house, in some cultures most of the transactions are based on verbal agreement and mutual trust.
• Food and Eating : The meanings that we attribute to different types of food vary across national, ethnic, social, and historical cultures (In sociology, we call the cultural practices related to food ‘ foodways ‘). Similarly, different cultures view eating ceremonies and rituals in different ways. For example, eating alone is seen as unpleasant in some cultures while it is completely normalized in some others.
• Death and grief : Despite being universal experiences, different cultures have different understandings of death and grief. For example, in some cultures, death is seen as the completion of one phase in a reincarnation circle, in contrast with an absolute end. Ways of grieving also vary heavily across different historical and ethnic cultures.
• Leadership : Different cultures view political and social leaders in different ways. In cultures where the leadership cultures are stronger, political leaders have a higher social standing and they are more respected. In other cultures, leaders are seen as equal citizens despite their political and social positions.
• Aging : Alongside its biological and physical aspects, aging is also culturally constructed. Perception of a positive aging experience and attitudes towards older people greatly vary across cultures. For example, while in some cultures expecting older people to work is seen as disrespectful to them, in some other cultures it is the complete opposite.
• Marriage : In some cultures, marriage has religious meaning and is something sacred. For some people, it’s a bond of love, while historically, it was used to consolidate power or broker peace between two warring groups. In secular Westernism, it’s increasingly simply a personal agreement between two people.
• Childhood: In Victorian England, childhood ended at around 12 years of age. After this, people would go off to work and earn a living and even get married. Today, childhood extends to age 18, and most modern cultures expend a lot of energy trying to preserve childhood innocence up until that age.
• Teachers: While we may have dictionary definitions of teachers, we also have culturally inscribed meaning connected to them. Many lament that in the past 30 years, teachers have lost a lot of respect from society and their relative wages have fallen, demonstrating how our cultural construct of the teaching profession has been changing for the worse.
• Happiness: In Western capitalism, happiness is often constructed as intrinsically connected to wealth, good looks, and materialism (we can thank advertising for that!). But many people challenge this dominant cultural construction of happiness, instead choosing to embrace the idea that happiness comes from community, love, family, and spirituality (Ahmed, 2010).
• Travel: Different cultures value travel differently. Some may consider it to be a rite of passage , while others see it as a waste of time.

Read Also: Cultural Variation Examples

Other Concepts that are Culturally Constructed

Case Studies: Prominent Cultural Constructions

1. food and eating.

Food, cooking, and eating ceremonies are integral parts to many cultures. Despite sharing these experiences, different cultures construct food and eating in different ways.

For example, while many societies share the notion of breakfast, the culturally acceptable ingredients of this meal deeply vary.

Another culturally constructed aspect of food is related to sharing food and socializing. For example, in Swedish culture it is completely normal to not serve any food to your guests, while for many other cultures this would be seen as unacceptable (Dharni, 2022).

In addition, specific meanings are attributed to foods related to cultural norms, values, ceremonies and rituals . For instance, in Islamic cultures, the dessert halva is associated with mourning (Gundem, 2015).

2. Death and grief

Death and grief are cultural constructs as their meanings differ for individuals and communities from different cultures (Larkin, 2014).

While death does imply an ending to human life in the Western cultures, some other cultures view it as a closure of only one phase of one’s existence, followed by rebirth (Novak, 2002).

Social reactions to death, including mourning and grief, are also cultural constructs as they vary across cultures (Larkin, 2014). For example, while in some cultures grieving is associated with fasting, in other cultures there are foods and desserts eaten specifically in funerals and memorial ceremonies (Rosenblatt, 2001).

3. Masculine and Feminine Gender Roles

While sex is a biological fact universally shared among humans and other species, gender is a social and cultural construct (Garofalo & Garvin, 2020).

Behaviors, attitudes, and appearances seen as masculine or feminine deeply vary, or even contrast with each other, across different cultures (Hawkins, 2018).

For example, in contrast with the United States, close physical contact with other men is seen as an acceptable part of heterosexual masculinity in Turkey (Hawkins, 2018).

Cultural construction of gender also changed throughout history. For example, in Spartan and Persian cultures, which correspond to contemporary Greece and Iran, long hair was associated with masculinity (Wichmann, 2022).

4. Sense of Fashion

Despite its globalized aspects, the sense of fashion is a social and cultural construct. A dress that is seen as trendy and fashionable in one culture might be seen as old-fashioned and even inappropriate in another one.

Clothing and garments are historically associated with different cultures and meanings. For example, various African dresses were culturally constructed as ‘traditional’  after French and British colonialism in this continent. In contrast, European dresses and sense of fashion were constructed as modern and contemporary (Rovine, 2009).

Another example of the cultural construction of fashion is the use of head scarfs, which is often associated with Muslim women.

Despite being an inevitable physical process, aging is also a cultural construct (Counts & Counts, 1985).

In some cultures aging is constructed as a process which will lead to withdrawal from the workforce and social activities. In other cases, aging is associated with taking a more significant role in handling responsibilities such as childcare (Souralová, 2019).

The variety of cultural constructions of aging results in different social treatments of older individuals across cultures.

For example, some Middle Eastern cultures place a significant role in respecting older people, including prioritizing them in public transportation and service provision (Formosa & Kutsal, 2019).

Cultural constructionism refers to a social concept or theme which is defined according to cultures instead of objective realities. Although we often take them for granted, concepts as simple as race, health, gender, food and death are cultural constructs.

Cultural constructs vary not only across ethnic and national cultures, but also between different historical and socioeconomic settings. Social concepts go through different processes of cultural construction, based on these settings and surroundings.

Understanding cultural construction is important as it enables us to go beyond our cultural assumptions that we take for granted. It also improves our critical thinking skills by allowing us to acknowledge diversity of cultural beliefs and ways of life.

Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.

Counts, D. A., & Counts, D. R. (1985). The cultural construction of aging and dying in a Melanesian community. The International Journal of Aging and Human Development , 20 (3), 229-240.

Ariés, P. (1962). Centuries of Childhood . Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK: Penguin Books (first published in English in 1962 by Jonathan Cape Ltd).

Dharni, A. (2022, June 1). Swedish People Do Not Offer Food To Their Guests. Indiatimes.com . https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/swedish-people-do-not-offer-food-to-their-guests-571082.html

Formosa, M., & Kutsal, Y. G. (2019). Ageing in Turkey. International Journal on Ageing in Developing Countries , 4 (1), 6-17.

Gaines, A. D. (1992). Ethnopsychiatry: The cultural construction of psychiatries. Ethnopsychiatry: The cultural construction of professional and folk psychiatries , 3-49.

Garofalo, E. M., & Garvin, H. M. (2020). The confusion between biological sex and gender and potential implications of misinterpretations. In Sex estimation of the human skeleton (pp. 35-52). Academic Press.

Gundem. (2015, December 17). The Multicultural Narrative of the Dessert Called Halva – EMU Gündem Newspaper . https://gundem.emu.edu.tr/en/2015/12/17/the-multicultural-narrative-of-the-dessert-called-halva/

Hawkins, S. (2018). Queerly Turkish: Queer masculinity and national belonging in the image of Zeki Müren. Popular Music and Society , 41 (2), 99-118.

Larkin, M. A. (2014, June 26). Dealing with Death: The Irish Perspective on Dying and Mourning Practices | Martha Goes Abroad in Ireland . Sites at Penn State. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://sites.psu.edu/marthagoesabroadinireland/2014/06/26/dealing-with-death/

Linnekin, J. (1992). On the theory and politics of cultural construction in the Pacific. Oceania , 62 (4), 249-263.

Novak, P. (2002). Division of the self: Life after death and the binary soul doctrine. Journal of Near-Death Studies , 20 (3), 143-189.

Palmer, A., & Ponsonby, S. (2002). The social construction of new marketing paradigms: the influence of personal perspective. Journal of Marketing Management , 18 (1-2), 173-192.

Rosenblatt, P. C. (2001). A social constructionist perspective on cultural differences in grief. In M. S. Stroebe, R. O. Hansson, W. Stroebe, & H. Schut (Eds.), Handbook of bereavement research: Consequences, coping, and care (pp. 285–300). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10436-012

Rovine, V. L. (2009). Colonialism’s clothing: Africa, France, and the deployment of fashion. Design Issues , 25 (3), 44-61.

Souralová, A. (2019). Mother–grandmother contracts: Local care loops and the intergenerational transfer of childcare in the Czech Republic. Journal of European Social Policy , 29 (5), 666-680.

Wichmann, A. (2022, October 5). Why Spartan Men Had Long Hair. Greek Reporter . https://greekreporter.com/2022/10/05/spartan-men-long-hair-ancient-greece/

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