The term gender became widespread after its adoption in the 1970s by feminist scholars as a way to refer to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes, as opposed to the socio-biological view that accounted differences between the sexes solely to biological roots [1-2]. Thus, gender refers to the idea that there are (apart from biological origins) cultural determinants in human behaviour. In short, gender refers to socially, culturally, or psychologically attributed differences between men and women. To be more precisely, gender is not about man/male versus woman/female, but about masculinity/maleness versus femininity/femaleness. Notwithstanding the fact that this seems like feminist nagging about linguistic futilities, this is an essential difference for two reasons. First, it hints to a more continuous classification than the simple man/woman-dichotomy. Second, it illustrates the dynamic nature of these differences: they are subject to change. Especially the latter is of paramount importance to understand why it is problematic to confound sex and gender. As we will further explain below, gender is not a 'constant', it is "a social interactional accomplishment" [3]. "Nothing is more clearer than that gender is a matter of learning and continuous 'work', rather than a simple extension of biologically given sexual difference" [4]. Thus, gender should be understood as something that one does rather than something that one is, like meant by the expression "doing gender" [3, 5, 17]. This draws our attention to the significance of context (i.e. situational and personnel aspects) and makes clear that gendered behaviours are variable according to the situation.

While sex is a biological category (see part 1), the categorization of people as male or female (sex categorization) is not a biological given, but a social decision: a social decision with tremendous consequences. In human societies, the sex of a baby is usually judged by the genital morphology at birth, the presence of a penis or vagina. Based on this judgment, the baby is categorized as being male or female, and, depending on its sex-category it is treated differently for the rest of his life [6].

 

There is a longstanding tradition, especially in psychology [7], to treat gender as a set of functional roles. According to this view, in a given social group or system, gender is the enactment of a well-learned set of perceived behavioural norms particularly associated with males or females (resulting from heredity and early socialization experiences). The development of these gender roles, primarily takes place in the family setting [8*], with parents passing on, both overtly and covertly, their own beliefs about gender [9-11]. And while parents do not always enforce gendered expectations for their children [12], as a whole, the literature documents definite parental tendencies toward gendered treatment of children [13]. Parents emphasize stereotypical behaviour in, for example, play-activities and household chores, and shape in this way the child's gender-stereotypical behaviour [12, 14*]. It would, however, be wrong to interpret gender as a simple enactment of roles. Human beings are not passive creatures that internalize anything and everything they encounter; at least to some degree they select their environmental inputs, including the parental inputs they attend to [11*]. Furthermore, children learn a range of different attitudes and behaviours, and they learn when one or the other type is appropriate to display (thus, the type of behaviours and attitudes displayed is dependent on social circumstances). It has convincingly been argued (see, e.g., [1, 15-16]) that one should not try to answer the question "What are the gender differences", but instead ask "What difference does gender make". That is, not to see gender as something that one is, but as a social interactional accomplishment, as something that one does [1-5]. What this in fact means, is that one should take context into account when trying to explain observed differences (e.g. different behaviours, preferences, or practices) between sex-categorized males and females. Such an analysis would not understand gender as a set of traits, nor as a variable, nor as a role, but as the product of social doings of some sort [5, 17].

 

 

THE PRIMING OF GENDER STEROTYPES

Societies prescribe particular characteristics for males and females on the basis of assigned sex (e.g. men are - and should be - competitive, women are - and should be - nurturing). This has enormous impact since sex is one of the primary categories that define a person in a society [3].

In any encounter with other human beings, we categorize them in order to define what one must know about someone to render that someone sufficiently meaningful to relate to him or her. The categories used as the primary categories of person perception in a society are simple (so that they can be quickly applied as framing devices to virtually anyone in any situation), and small in number (around three) [18]. It cannot be a surprise that sex-category is virtually always one of a society's primary categories. Sex-category is a line of difference that is relevant to what matters the most for our genes: sexuality and reproduction. Moreover, sex category is highly visible. When we encounter others, much of our attention is directed towards the face. Faces capture a disproportionate amount of our attention compared to other visual stimuli [19] because the face conveys a great deal of socially relevant information. Even when additional cultural cues to sex (e.g. hairstyle, facial hair, clothing, or make-up) are not visually available, human beings are able to reliably interpret sex cues in human faces [20]. Thus, not surprisingly, we sex-categorize automatically and nearly immediately any specific person we encounter [21*]. The impact of this cannot be overestimated since our interactions with others are influenced by our initial perceptions of them. Social categorization has implications for stereotype activation. When we identify someone as being male or female, their sex-category functions as a stimulus variable [1]; it influences reality in the eye of the observer by priming gender stereotypes [3, 22*]. The mere categorization of a person into a social group activates associated stereotypes (i.e. stereotype activation) [23-24], which can influence social interaction (i.e. stereotype application) [25]. Stereotypical beliefs relate personal characteristics to sex (so that men are rather masculine and women rather feminine) and such stereotypes are not only descriptive in nature (i.e. what we think males and females are and do), but just as much prescriptive (i.e. what we think males and females should be and do) [26-27]. Gender stereotypes (e.g. boys are better at math than girls) our omnipresent in our contemporary societies, and are perpetuated throughout childhood and on into adolescence [28]. Moreover, given the omnipresence of sex-categorization, a person engaged in virtually any activity may be held accountable for performance of that activity as a woman or a man [5, 17]. Furthermore, since we all know these stereotypes as cultural knowledge (as, for example, in 'men are from Mars and women are from Venus') we must take them into account in our own behaviour [3]. Even if we personally do not endorse these gender stereotypes, we need to take them into account because we think that 'most people' endorse them and, thus, we think that we will be judged by them. Therefore, we always frame and are framed by gender (i.e. gender influences the way we see things) [29*]; other categorizations (e.g. employer) are nested in our prior understandings.

 

 

GENDER IS FLEXIBLE

The degree to which a particular situation is framed by gender is, however, dependent on the interaction of this background gender frame with the situational context (in which there is always much more going on than just gender). Thus, the extent to which our behaviour is actually shaped by gender can vary from negligible to substantial depending on the nature of the particular situation and our own motives or interests. A person may manifest an attribute under particular conditions and not under other conditions (because the same behaviour may be interpreted differently in different settings). People may display gender congruent behaviour when situations demand it, and not in situations in which they are not subject to controls (i.e. when punishment for deviation is absent). Such situational dependency of sex-typed behaviour can not (solely) be explained by sex, but it can be explained by gender – women can be seen as unfeminine, but that does not make them 'unfemale'.

Thus, the fact that we observe different behaviours, preferences, and so on, for females and males can be attributed to the fact that they often appear in different social situations. Consider for example the case of risk taking. It is widely believed that women are more risk-averse than men [30-31], and, as a result, men are, for example, offered high risk assets more often than are women [31-32]. The difference in risk-aversion between males and females may, however, be an artefact. Risk-taking is related to self-perceived masculinity [33], and differences between males and females may have more to do with the fact that males are more often confronted or seek out risky situations than females [34] than with anything else. Note also that, the same social context may be experienced differently by males and females. Thus, it is naïve to believe that examining men and women in the same gender-skewed context places them in an identical social context [16]. It is, thus, perfectly compatible with this view that even among financial experts women sometimes appear to be more risk-averse than their male colleagues [35].

GENDER =//= SEX

To sum up, gender is not some essential property of our selves (a trait, variable, or role), but something that we do. It is our social accomplishment of the socio-cultural prescribed essentialities of male and female nature. The influence of gender can vary from negligible to substantial, depending on the context. It is confusing and unnecessary to use the term sex in cases were one is clearly talking about gender (for example when describing the practice of  a woman to allow men, rather than other women, to light her cigarette, or the fact that contemporary Western societies have public bathrooms for 'ladies' and 'gentlemen'). It is just as foolish to use the term gender in cases were one should talk about sex (for example when you ask somebody if their baby is going to be a boy or a girl; see part 1).

Let me conclude by stressing the importance of gender in the shaping of social life. Laws, business codes, and informal norms promoting gender equality all are useful, but gender inequalities stay alive because unacknowledged status beliefs produce unequal outcomes in many situations [36]. Can things change? The existence of differences between males and females is often much smaller than assumed (see, e.g., [37]), and the magnitude of such differences can be erased or even reversed, depending on the context. Stereotypical gender beliefs are, however, not decreasing (let alone disappearing) [38]. Males as well as females can display masculine and feminine behaviour, the behaviour that actually is displayed by them gets however, in many occasions, biased in gendered directions. One of the most durable and consequential gender structures of industrial societies is the sex-segregation of occupations [39]. Some of the societies that have achieved the lowest levels of material inequality between men and women (e.g. the Scandinavian countries) have some of the most sex-segregated occupational structures of advanced industrial societies [39]. It is not hopeful to know that: (a) information about the stereotypical gender associated with occupations and roles is typically incorporated into people's mind immediately, and (b) such information is also difficult or impossible to suppress [40]. Nevertheless, the effects of gender can be downplayed by introducing additional status information (e.g. dressing professional, let people know she is a college graduate with a high-level job, use educated grammar and vocabulary, and the like) [41]. As long as a society is organized on the basis of gender differences, however, women cannot do much more than "helping them to forget that they are women".

 

West, C. & D. H. Zimmerman (1987) Doing Gender. Gender & Society 1 (2): 125-151

Ridgeway, C. L. (2009) Framed Before We Know It: How Gender Shapes Social Relations. Gender & Society 23 (2): 145-160 

Unger, R. K. (1979) Toward a Redefinition of Sex and Gender. American Psychologist 34 (1): 1085-1094

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