What is Gender?

Sociological Approaches

Mary Holmes

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780761947134, 9780761947127
• eBook ISBN: 9781446240250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Is gender something done to us by society, or something we do? What is the relationship between gender and other inequalities?

What is Gender? explores these complex and important questions, helping readers to critically analyse how women?s and men?s lives are shaped by the society in which they live. The book offers a comprehensive account of trends in sociological thinking, from a material and economic focus on gender inequalities to the debates about meaning initiated by the linguistic or cultural turn.

The book begins by questioning simplistic biological conceptions of gender and goes on to evaluate different theoretical frameworks for explaining gender, as well as political approaches to gender issues. The cultural turn is also examined in relation to thinking about how gender is related to other forms of inequality such as class and ?race?.

The book is up-to-date and broad in its scope, drawing on a range of disciplines, such as: sociology, psychoanalysis, masculinity studies, literary criticism, feminist political theory, feminist philosophy and feminist theory.

 

1

Introduction to the sociology of gender

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Chris got up and went to the bathroom. Leaving pyjamas on the floor and turning on the shower, Chris stepped into the water. It was not a hair-washing day, so after a quick rub with the soap it was time to get out and dry off. After towelling and applying hair putty to the new short haircut, Chris dabbed on some moisturising lotion and went to get dressed. Nothing special was happening today so jeans and a T-shirt would be fine. The only choice really to be made was between basketball boots or sandals.

This is a paragraph I made up. When you read it I imagine that you assumed either that Chris was a woman, or that Chris was a man. Yet Chris is a shortened name which both Christophers and Christines use and I have not used any pronouns to indicate sex. There is nothing in this description that definitively identifies masculinity or femininity.You may protest that ‘real’ men do not use moisturiser, or that women are less likely to have short hair. Nevertheless, most people know of men who are into face creams and other such products and women who have short hair.Your decision is not defensible, but the point is that you made a decision. We do not know how to think about people as neutral; we always think about them as women or as men and we interact with them accordingly. If you decided Chris was a woman, go back and read the paragraph again and imagine Chris is a man. Does that change how you read it or what you think about Chris? Do you think it ‘typical’ of a man just to leave his pyjamas on the floor; do you feel a little titillated by imagining a naked man in the shower? Try to continue describing Chris’s day without giving away whether Chris is a man or a woman. It is very difficult to do.

We live in a world which is organized around the idea that women and men have different bodies, different capabilities, and different needs and desires. This book examines these assumptions, drawing on sociological and related approaches to understand how and why the social world is arranged around such gender distinctions. This introduction begins that task by defining key terms, then looking briefly at the history of gender within sociology. In some senses the rest of this chapter outlines what the book is not about – or, to put it more positively, why I focus on the issues that appear in the book and not on facts about inequalities or on media images of gender. I want to explain why I say so little about these things because long experience of teaching this topic tells me that people come to it with a strong sense of what is important. Many assume that women and men are equal now and that the media are most crucial in how we now behave as women and men. I want to establish some of the bare facts about inequalities and discuss why the media may not be as all powerful as they initially appear. I will then be able to turn to my central project of explaining the cultural turn within sociological and feminist approaches to gender. When the sociology of gender emerged, inequalities between women and men were the focus. Discussion of women’s relative lack of access to wealth and other resources was gradually overtaken by concerns with language and meaning. The promise and problems of this shift within ideas about gender are the subject of following chapters.Those chapters will make more sense if the key terms used are clearly understood.

Defining terms

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Key words are highlighted throughout the text in bold.

The sociology of gender and related knowledge sometimes uses language that may be unfamiliar or have different meanings to those used in everyday life. Terminology and jargon are the same thing depending on whether you understand them or not. Having specific terms with specific meanings is useful as a shorthand way of dealing with ideas that can otherwise take some time to explain. Defining the most crucial terms can serve as a way to introduce the kinds of things with which this book is concerned. The first thing to deal with is the distinction sociologists have made since the 1970s between sex (biological differences between males and females) and gender (socially produced differences between being feminine and being masculine). Later the book will return to the question of how distinct gender is from sex. However, it is generally agreed that gender differences are to be understood as a central feature of patriarchy, a social system in which men have come to be dominant in relation to women. There are, as we shall see, questions around to what extent gender is imposed on individuals as a result of the material conditions and social structures in which they live. Within sociology, ‘material’ has meant various things. Karl Marx, whose thought forms a good deal of the foundations of sociology, was particularly concerned with how societies were organized, or structured, around meeting material needs, such as the need for food and shelter. He argues that people’s lives were determined by how a society organized the production of the things needed to survive.This was an emphasis on the economic, meaning the producing, managing and distributing of resources within society. Marx argued that industrialization instituted a new economic system called capitalism based on employers exploiting workers’ labour (only paying a wage not a share of the profits) and accumulating for themselves the wealth resulting from selling things. However, material is a term that has taken on broader meanings in more recent years, especially with regard to gender. Now it is maintained that the material may include a wider range of things, not just the things we need to survive but our bodies as things (Rahman and Witz, 2003).Yet widening what is meant by material has been only part of the story of developing understandings of gender. For sociologists the key has been to see gender as a social construction (something created by the social environment).An appreciation of how material conditions produce gender will be discussed but this book also looks at the importance of discourses (systematized ways of talking and thinking) in how gender operates. Medical and scientific discourses, for example, have been important in constructing gender. It is important to understand the part that ideas and meanings play in the social construction of femininity and masculinity. There are of course sociological discourses on gender and our discussion begins with a history of these ideas.

The history of gender

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Classic sociology and other social theory contain little attention to the social differences between women and men. Marx, Weber and Durkheim are not noted for their insights into ‘sex’ inequality (the word gender was not known to them in its present usage) and in fact tended mostly to consider women’s subordinate social role as a natural ‘given’ (Sydie, 1987). Durkheim thought of modernity’s greater distinction between ‘sex roles’ as a functional, biologically based evolution resulting from the progressive forces of a shift to organic solidarity.To translate, he argued that as society became more complex, more distinct differences in body and mind emerged between women and men; they specialized in their roles and this made the division of labour more efficient and society stronger. Weber also saw women’s dependent social position as fundamentally determined by ‘the normal superiority of the physical and intellectual energies of the male’ (Weber cited in Sydie, 1987: 59). This marred an otherwise interesting analysis of traditional power as patriarchal – in the pre-feminist sense of older males exercising traditional domination through the family (Sydie, 1987: 51–87). It seems slightly odd that these thinkers should view ‘sex roles’ as naturally determined, given that they were busy stressing how social forces affected everything else. It also seems a little odd given that Weber’s wife Marianne was a notable German feminist and Marx’s daughter Eleanor was involved in feminist politics. Nevertheless these thinkers failed to examine ‘sex’ as an important social division and this view was long dominant within sociology (Oakley, 1974). However, this does not mean that inequalities between women and men were entirely ignored. Marx recognized inequality between the sexes as a problem, albeit a problem of secondary importance to capitalist exploitation of workers. Marx’s friend and collaborator Frederick Engels did attempt a Marxist explanation of women’s subordination (see Chapter 4). There was also a tradition of women writing about women’s social position. There was Mary Wollstonecraft (1985/1792) in the eighteenth century (see Chapter 4), and Harriet Martineau, in the nineteenth century, who also produced the first book on sociological methods (see Hill and Hoecker-Drysdale, 2001). In addition the highly influential Chicago School of sociology contained at least a dozen women from its establishment in the 1890s, including the well-known sociologist Jane Addams. These women were professional sociologists actively researching and writing on a range of issues, including many relating to women’s place in society (Delamont, 1990: 139–159). Yet little or no reference is made to these women and more recent understandings of gender are often seen as beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s (1988/1949) philosophically based treatise, The Second Sex. In her famous statement that ‘[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir, 1988/1949: 295), she established a core principle of most subsequent efforts to understand gender inequalities. It was not nature but society or ‘culture’ that made women (and men) what they were.

In the 1950s and early 1960s Functionalism was largely dominant within sociology and it contributed to sociological understandings of differences between women and men as socially constructed. While social construction involves structures such as class systems and institutions, the term principally refers to the processes by which ideas about how things should work are made into social reality. Before the concept of ‘gender’ came into sociological usage in the 1970s, mid-century functionalists talked about ‘sex role differences’.Their argument could be summarized as claiming that sex role differences continue to exist because they function to promote social stability. Whether this was an intended (manifest) or unintended (latent) function of sex role differences did not seem to be of major interest to functionalists.

The focus of functionalist work was on understanding the ‘complementary roles’ performed by women and men as they function to keep society running smoothly. American sociologist Talcott Parsons is the major figure within twentieth century functionalism. It is Parsons’s (see Parsons and Bales, 1956) views of women and men’s ‘complementary roles’ that are taken as the key statement of functionalist ideas about gender. Writing in the 1950s, Parsons argues that modern social life, and in particular the modern organization of work as separate from home, means that someone needs to stay home to care for young children and perform the important early socialization of human infants. For highly complex and not entirely clear reasons associated with the workings of social groups, this emotional ‘expressive’ role is assigned to women and the rational and ‘instrumental’ (goal-focused) role of paid work is associated with men. These different ‘sex roles’ become the social norms and Parsons carefully describes how children become socialized into them.Therefore, Parsons’s theory is very much sociological in looking not to nature but to social groups and social processes such as socialization to explain women’s and men’s different social positions. In the 1950s and 1960s, others using his work to understand sex roles tended to ignore this sociological position and assume that the expressive/instrumental dichotomy was in some form an expression of natural differences (Connell, 2002: 123). Though Parsons may have gone beyond this, his work offered more of a description of current gender expectations than an explication of the inequalities accompanying the differing sex roles. Parsons describes the ideal American family of the 1950s and does so in a way that justifies, rather than is critical of, this very historically and culturally specific example of gender roles. Parsons implies that this is the best way of organizing family life in response to modern social conditions, but for whom is it best? Since Parsons, much sociology of the family has focused more on how the breadwinner/housewife model of family life has been restrictive for many women. For others, it has remained a luxury they cannot afford because only those families where the men earn high wages could afford for the wife to stay at home. Other alternatives to the nuclear family are similarly ignored or devalued. Although Parsons himself does not discuss other cultures in any detail, he draws on the work of fellow contributors to the book to back his claim that a nuclear-style family still seems to function well and maintain social stability within many other societies (Parsons and Bales, 1956). The fact that the content of sex roles is different in other cultures does not necessarily challenge Parsons’s overall argument that it is complementarity – the fact that one sex is assigned opposite tasks to the other – which is functional. However, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, anthropological research can illustrate that in some other cultures women’s and men’s roles are similar not opposite (for example both women and men may contribute to child rearing), and such an arrangement can also support stability. Parsons’s focus on the way in which the sexes complement each other also fails to consider how and why the different roles have come to be valued differently. Functionalism does not explain why instrumental roles are more highly regarded within modern western society. The need for social stability was seen as justification of the continuance of such sex roles, and though changes in those roles were explored they were often construed as threatening that stability. The idea that ‘stability’ may not be beneficial to women constrained within traditional roles did not seem to occur to the functionalists. The importance attached to social stability prevented functionalists from developing a real analysis of how some social actors and groups might not benefit from the continuance of the sharply defined roles identified.Various feminist sociologists began systematically to examine differences between women and men as socially produced. It is from this key departure point in the 1970s that this book begins its travels.

It is hard for today’s students of gender, faced with mountains of relevant books, to imagine the paucity of decent literature about women thirty to forty years ago. Into this void the new ‘wave’ of feminists began to launch their considerations of the causes and state of inequalities between women and men (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 6). It is also often difficult to comprehend how many changes have taken place for women even since the 1960s. Equal Pay legislation has been passed, women have more control over if and when they reproduce, a university education is more than a way for middle class women to meet a husband, job opportunities have improved, and so on. But are women and men equal now?

Material inequalities: are women and men equal now?

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If you are a young woman you may feel that you have a lot of choice about what you do with your life. It probably seems like you will have more or less the same opportunities in life as your brothers and/or male friends.Young men reading this might feel that women can do whatever they want to these days and that talking about inequalities is out of date. Certainly the world has changed. Read some history or talk to your mothers and grandmothers and you will quickly appreciate that young women today are likely to have more education, better job opportunities and more independence than young women did forty or fifty years ago. Young women may be partly right in suggesting that they have much the same opportunities as men their age.

In terms of education young women are likely to have completed secondary school and probably did better than the boys. At university or college you are likely to see as many undergraduate women on campus as men, with women continuing to do slightly better. In the United Kingdom, for example, six times more women enrolled in higher education in 2003/04 than in 1970/71, so that around 59 per cent of undergraduates are now women (Office for National Statistics, 2006: 38). While girls in wealthier nations are able to take advantage of at least a good basic education, in other areas of the world educational opportunity for girls can be limited. Non-formal, local and traditional forms of learning may exist in many places but formal westernized types of education are likely to bring greater status and social rewards. The amount of formal education varies greatly between different regions of Africa. Southern Africa has for some time demonstrated little difference between boys and girls in length of schooling. Early twenty-first century figures show boys getting 10.9 years and girls 10.4 years at school (African Development Bank, 2002:Table 1.8). However, in Western and Central Africa only 51 per cent of primary school age girls actually attend primary school compared to 59 per cent of boys. At secondary school this drops to just over one in five of secondary age girls attending, while one in four boys of secondary age attend (UNICEF, 2006: 121). India, on the whole, provides more education. Primary school is attended by 73 per cent of girls of primary school age, compared to 80 per cent for boys (UNICEF, 2006: 121). It has a strong formal educational tradition and, as with many western nations, women higher up the caste and class hierarchy tend to be well educated. In poorer families, however, girls will probably leave school fairly young, most likely to enter a marriage arranged for them. They will then become responsible for most of the domestic work in the home of their new parents-in-law. For such poorer families, manual work and the domestic support of that work may be crucial to survival and families need children to start bringing in money as soon as possible. But this does not explain why girls are expected to do the domestic work; that expectation is better understood in terms of a culture which values the welfare of the group and especially expects women to contribute to that group welfare rather than pursue individual goals. Thus caring roles at home are still promoted as the proper course for many less privileged women (Kodoth and Eapen, 2005; Mukhopadhyay and Seymour, 1994).

Among more privileged groups in the western world, university graduates of both sexes look forward to getting a ‘good’ job at the end of their degree. However, the subjects they take in doing their degrees are likely to differ and, therefore, their job options will differ. Have a look around a sociology class – I bet there are more women than men. Try visiting an English or history lecture and you will probably find fewer men there. Then go over to a physics lecture to see if the men outnumber the women, and finally pop in to the engineering department where you may be able to count the women on one hand (e.g. see Department of Education, Science and Training, 2005: 32; Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, 2006: 8; National Science Board, 2006). These gender differences in choice of subject will affect what sorts of jobs graduates will be able to get. Although there are many good jobs that sociology and English graduates might end up with, it is not the same sort of direct route into high paying, high status work as studying engineering.The women who do engineering may not initially notice any difference between themselves and their male peers, but they may discover that the men in the class find it easier to get jobs than the women. Once in jobs it may become clear that the men are promoted ahead of women at a similar stage and with similar ability. Also women engineers may note that the men are not asked how they are going to combine a career with having a family. These are some of the factors in continuing pay gaps between women and men in science and engineering (Prokos and Padavic, 2005). Continuing beliefs about women’s responsibility for their families play a part in determining to what extent women participate in paid work.

In most of South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, women’s economic participation rate is only around 30 per cent, compared to around 45 per cent in OECD (high income) countries (World Bank, 2006).This means that in most cases women are less likely to have...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to the sociology of gender
• 2 How different are women and men?
• 3 Is gender something that we do?
• 4 How can gender best be explained?
• 5 Is gender about bodies?
• 6 What are the politics of gender?
• 7 How is gender intertwined with class?
• 8 How is gender intertwined with ‘race’?
• 9 Conclusion: So what is gender?
• References
• Index