Social construction of gender difference believes that gender is socially constructed. Social constructionism of gender moves away from socialization as the origin of gender differences; people do not merely internalize gender roles as they grow up but they respond to changing norms in society.[1] Children learn to categorize themselves by gender very early on in life. A part of this is learning how to display and perform gendered identities as masculine or feminine. Boys learn to manipulate their physical and social environment through physical strength or other skills, while girls learn to present themselves as objects to be viewed.[2] Children monitor the their own and others’ gendered behavior. Gender-segregated children's activities creates the appearance that gender differences in behavior reflect an essential nature of male and female behavior.[3]
Many factors can affect gender development, one of the key influences being the environment children are brought up in. It has been found that unresolved conflicts are one of the major causes for irregular personality development in children and can often lead to harmful effects in gender orientation. [4]
Judith Butler[5] contends that being female is not “natural” and that it appears natural only through repeated performances of gender; these performances in turn, reproduce and define the traditional categories of sex and/or gender. A social constructionist view looks beyond categories and examines the intersections of multiple identities, the blurring of the boundaries of essentialist categories. This is especially true with regards to categories of male and female that are typically viewed by others as binary and opposites of each other. By deconstructing categories of gender, the value placed on masculine traits and behaviors disappears. However, the elimination of categories makes it difficult to make any comparisons between the genders or to argue and fight against male domination.
The social construction of gender comes out the general social constructionist thought. Social constructionism, briefly, is the concept that there are many things that people “know” or take to be “reality” that are at least partially, if not completely, socially situated.[6] For example, money is a socially constructed reality in most societies. The paper bills that people use to pay for goods and services, for which they work most of their lives, have little inherent or essential value. Even the gold that backs the bills is socially constructed. Gold only has value because we, as a society, give it value. We act, however, as though gold were worth working for, fighting for, and even dying for. This meaning that we ascribe to money only serves to reinforce our belief in its essential nature.
The basic assumptions of social constructionism are: meaning making is central; we are not autonomous information processors; meaning making is contextual; essentialism is problematic; and that we should question how truth functions rather than what is true. Meaning making is central to social constructionism. Just as in the money example above, things do not exist as we know them until we ascribe meaning to them. As such, we are not autonomous information processors. We do not come into the world creating our own thoughts and making our own meanings. We are born into a society that is already making meaning of things and we make our own meanings within the context of social interaction. We are influenced by this social context that varies by time, space, culture, family, etc. Essentialism, the idea that certain things are inherent or ingrained, and therefore to some degree immutable, is problematic for social constructionism. To a true social constructionist, there is nothing inherent in human beings to be uncovered by psychological research. Rather, there are general forms that are then shaped and molded by the social context and the individuals way of making meaning of it. Finally, social constructionists are concerned primarily with how truth functions rather than what truth is. Social constructionist are interested in making visible the invisible social construct and in uncovering the inequalities inherent in the social construct.[7]
These basic assumptions are then applied to a variety of social constructs. Here we will be discussing how these assumptions apply to gender. Is gender an essential category or a social construct? If it is a social construct, how does it function? How does it work? Who benefits from the way gender is constructed?
Gender is not simply what one is, but what one does - it is actively produced within social interactions. Gender is an accomplishment : “the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category”.[8] People do not have to be in mixed gender groups or in groups at all for the performance of gender to occur; the production of gender occurs with others and is even performed alone, in the imagined presence of others. “Doing” gender is not just about conforming to stereotypical gender roles - it is the active engagement in any behavior that is gendered, or behavior that may be evaluated as gendered.
The performance of gender varies given the context: time, space, social interaction, etc. The enactment of gender roles is context dependent - roles are “situated identities” instead of “master identities”.[3] The sociology of knowledge must first of all concern itself with what people “know” as “reality” in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives. In other words, individual perceptions of “knowledge” or reality...must be the central focus.”.[6]
These performances normalize the essentialism of sex categories. In other words, by doing gender, we reinforce the essential categories of gender - that there are only two categories that are mutually exclusive. The idea that men and women are essentially different is what makes men and women behave in ways that appear essentially different. Though sex categorization is based on biological sex, it is maintained as a category through socially constructed displays of gender (for example, you could identify a transgender person as female when in fact she is biologically male).
Institutions also create normative conceptions of gender. In other words, gender is simultaneously created and maintained - “both a process and a product, medium and outcome of such power relations”.[9] In his examination of blue and white-collar workers, Mumby [9] argued that hegemonic or dominant masculinity provides a standard of acceptable behavior for men, and at the same time, is the product of men’s behavior. This can be said for constructions of any identity in certain contexts (e.g. femininity, race, Black femininity, etc.).
We hold ourselves and each other accountable for our presentations of gender (how we ‘measure up’). We are aware that others may evaluate and characterize our behavior. This is an interactional process (not just an individual one). Social constructionism asserts that gender is a category that people evaluate is omnirelevant to social life.[10] Gender as omnirelevant means that we can always be judged by what we do as a man or as a woman. This is the basis for the reasoning that people are always performing gender and that gender is always relevant in social situations.
Accountability can apply to behaviors that do conform to cultural conceptions as well as those behaviors that deviate - it is the possibility of being held accountable that is important in social constructionism. For example, Stobbe[11] examined the rationale that people gave for why there were small numbers of women in the auto industry. Men cited the idea that such dirty work was unsuitable for women and women were unable to train because of family duties. Stobbe argues that the male workers created a machisimo masculinity to distinguish themselves from women who might have been qualified to work in the auto shop. Women who do work in male-dominated professions have to carefully maintain and simultaneously balance their femininity and professional credibility (e.g.[12][13])
Even though gender seems more salient in some situations - for instance, when a woman enters a male-dominated profession - gender categories also become salient in contexts in which gender is less obvious. For instance, gender is maintained before the woman enters the male-dominated group through conceptions of masculinity[3]
Race, class, and other oppressions can also be omnirelevant categories, though they are not ALL identically salient in every set of social relationships in which inequality is done. We have preconceived notions about what particular racial groups look like (although there is no biological component to this categorization). Accountability is interactional because it does not occur solely within the individual. It is also institutional because individuals may be held accountable for their behaviors by institutions or by others in social situations, as a member of any social group (gender, race, class, etc.;[3]). This notion of accountability makes gender dynamic because what is considered appropriate behavior for women and women changes and is reproduced over time and is reproduced differently depending on context. Gender is created in different ways among uneducated and educated African Americans.[1]
Gender identity is not a stable, fixed trait - rather, it is socially constructed and may vary over time for an individual. Simone de Beauvoir’s quote, “one is not born a woman, but becomes one” is applicable here. The notion of womanhood or femininity is accomplished through an active process of creating gender through interacting with others in a particular social context. Society typically only recognizes two genders. Therefore, when transsexuals want to have a sex change operation, they must prove that they can “pass” as a man or woman - so even the choice of changing one’s gender is socially constructed. The fact that these individuals want to be one sex or the other speaks to the “‘essentialness'" of our sexual natures as woman or as men”[8]
Diamond and Butterworth[14] show how gender identity and sexual identity are fluid and do not always fall into two essentialist categories (man or woman and gay or straight) through their interviews with sexual minority women over the course of ten years. One woman had a relatively normal early childhood but around adolescence questioned her sexuality and remained stable in her gender and sexual identity until she started working with men and assumed a masculine “stance” and started to question her gender identity.[14] When ‘she’ became a ‘he’ he began to find men attractive and gradually identified as homosexual as a man.
The perception of sexuality by others is an extension of others’ perceptions of one’s gender. Heterosexuality is assumed for those individuals who appear to act appropriately masculine or appropriately feminine. If one wants to be perceived as a lesbian, one must first be perceived as a woman; if one wants to be seen as a gay man, one has to be seen as a man.[3]
The way gender is constructed for an individual depend on gendered interactions the individual has with others as well as other identities or roles he or she may have. Gender, race, class, and other oppressions are all potential omnirelevant categories, though they are not ALL identically salient in every set of social relationships in which inequality is done. Multiple oppressions are not seen as having “additive” or “multiplicative” effects but are seen as simultaneously depending on each other to create a unique form of oppression. Although West and Fenstermaker[3] do not elaborate on exactly how intersectionality can be incorporated into social constructionist theory, they do say that intersecting social identities are constant “interactional accomplishments” (p. 96).
While men and women are held accountable for normative conceptions of gender, this accountability can differ in content based on ethnicity, race, age, class, etc. Hurtado[15] argues that white woman and women of color experience gender differently because of their relationship to white men and that both groups of women are used to substantiate male power in different ways. Women of color are subordinated through rejection, or denial of the “patriarchal invitation to privilege”.[3] White men see women of color as workers and objects of sexual aggression; this allows the men to display power and sexual aggression without the emotional attachment that they have with white women. White women are accountable for their gendered display as subservient to white men while women of color are held accountable for their gendered performance as sexual objects and as recalcitrant and bawdy women in relations with white men. West and Fenstermaker[3] conclude that doing gender involves different versions of accountability, depending on women’s “relational position” to white men.
Women are oftentimes held responsible for the private sphere and the household - including taking care of children, cooking, and cleaning. Rather than interpreting this as conforming to traditional gender roles, social constructionists argue that the division of labor produces performances of gender, along with the performance of household goods and services.[3] Through the ‘doing’ of gender and the household labor, women (and men) reinforce the seemingly natural division of labor (which consequently makes changing these patterns of labor much harder). The performance of gender legitimizes the natural accomplishment of the production of household labor and vice versa. While the content of the interactions surrounding the production of work and gender may differ and the type of gender inequality may differ depending on the context, the general shape of the practice is the same. We know that the practices are similar, for “the structural intersection of inequality as it is experienced in the family and in the economy is made possible by the mechanism of gender’s interactional achievement”[3]
Coltrane[16] studied heterosexual, White, and dual-earner couples who either shared parenting tasks equally or shared parenting tasks less equally. For both groups, perceptions of how the parenting was gendered shaped their reasoning behind the allocation of parenting tasks. For instance, shared parenting couples believed that men and women were just as capable parents while unequally shared parenting couples believed that there were innate gender differences in the ability to nurture. Their discussions of parenting arrangements centered around normative conceptions of gender/ “the essential womanly nature of child care”[3]
Judith Lorber argues that sex and gender are not pure categories; while they are different physiologically they are “transformed by social practices to fit into the salient categories of a society, the most pervasive of which are ‘female’ and ‘male’”.[17] Bodies have not changed over the years but the way in which we see men and women as similar or different and our justification for gender inequality has changed. Researchers assume that there are biological differences between men and women (and assume that every human must fit into those two categories), seek differences between those groups, and overlook individual differences within sexes - a better method of categorization is based on a pattern of similar behaviors.
In sports, for example, women are assumed to have less physical strength; individual women may be as physically capable as men, yet their gender status (women as inferior athletes) overrides their physical skills and potential. Lorber[17] cites different rules and values for the same sport (e.g. basketball, gymnastics). Sports are constructed on the basis of men’s physical abilities - they construct “men’s bodies to be powerful and women’s bodies to be sexual” (16). George[18] shows how women “do” gender in subtle ways through bodily displays- women developed muscle but not “too much" so as not to look “too masculine”.
Language and linguistic categories are socially constructed and can be deconstructed. Language “creates the world and frames the truths that can be told,” therefore language can be analyzed to uncover how categories are socially constructed but can also be used in order to discover other ways of expressing meaning.[19] West and Zimmerman[3] disucss how, when men and women interact, they reinforce essential gender differences and therefore maintain a power differential. Men dictate what gets talked about and by whom. In other words, what is considered important in the conversation is constructed by men who direct conversations and the women who accept this reality.
Hochschild[20] demonstrated that female flight attendants embodied (and performed) White, middle-class conceptions of femininity through their emotional labor - they allay fears of passengers and played ‘hostess’ to make passengers as comfortable as possible during the flight. Not only are the women performing essential femininity but the airline itself, on the corporate level, produces gender as well. Advertisements for airlines that include a smiling female flight attendant with a slogan like “we move our tails for you” profit from making a business out of gender construction.
The social construction of gender in high schools has shaped the ways in which male and female students are believed to perform in various subjects, such as math, science, and literature. In the past, gender has been used to define the potential of students in areas of qualitative and quantitative subjects. It was traditionally thought that male students were naturally better at quantitative subjects, such as math and science; female students were considered to be better at qualitative subjects, such as literature, writing, and art. It was widely believe that this was based on biology, with boys having a “math gene” and girls lacking this supposed gene.[21] The truth is that there is no proof that biology plays a role in whether or not male and female students excel at math. There is no evidence of a “math gene” [however] there is a lot of evidence that practice and encouragement improves math and science skills for girls (and for boys).[21] It has also been stated that teachers have found that when certain types of teaching, such as experiments that reflect daily life, works for girls, it generally works for boys too .[22] This is more proof that the academic differences between students based on gender are non-existent. If there are cases where girls do not excel at math and science in the ways that boys do, it is due to a social construction of gender that leads girls to receive less support in regards to these subjects. “Since there are no innate or essential intelligence differences in our society, the explanations must be social and cultural. More specifically, they must be tied to how gender, as a social process, is lived, experienced, prescribed, and enforced in our society” [23] Once these myths are refuted, there will be more proof that sex does not determine academic capabilities. Overall, sex differences tend to be smaller than most other demographic differences.[21] The results of the 1992 NAEP 12th grade science tests, on a 500 point scale, show that the differences of scores between white and African American students were around 48 points and differences between male and female students were around 11 points.[21] This is evidence that gender does not play as large of a role in academic performance as race and class. The lack of evidence supporting gender specific genes regarding academics leads us to see that any differences in academic performance are not based on biological differences between the sexes, but are socially constructed.
High school athletic programs have helped to both construct and break down gender differences. High school is a very influential time for the construction of gender differences; any deviation from the norm can bring serious sanctions for the individuals that deviate. High school athletics have long been a place in which boys’ teams received ample support financially, and more moral support from both faculty and students, than girls’ teams. In 2008 “high school female athletes received only 41% of participation opportunities, which is 1.25 million fewer participation opportunities than male high school athletes”.[24] The fact that high school males’ sports programs receive more attention than their female counterparts sends the message to staff and students alike that female athletes are inferior and less valued than male athletes. These messages perpetuate the stereotypes about males being more physically capable than females, which constructs gender in a very important way by suggesting that anything physical is a masculine domain. An example of this is the gendered constructions surrounding cheerleading and football. Although cheerleading requires a high amount of physical strength and activity, due to its gendered status as being feminine, it is often mocked instead of respected. Donna Eder noted in her study that a “male coach was observed mocking cheerleaders on one occasion. He told the football players that he’s get them skirts if they wanted to cheer instead of practicing harder”.[25] This type of behavior by authority figures influences students’ beliefs on what type of physical activity is valued and what is not based on the gender of the individuals that generally participate in them. Despite this evidence of disparities between high school athletics for males and females, there is evidence female involvement in high school sports is on the rise. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, “since Title IX was enacted 34 years ago, female high school athletic participation has increased by 904%”.[24] The sharp rise in female participation in high school athletics over the past 34 years is proof that gender barriers are slowly being broken down. Females are viewed as more athletic and physically capable of the activities required to participate in the same sports as males.
In high schools, gender- based harassment serves as a form of gender boundary policing. Girls are expected to conform to stereotypical gendered appearances, as are boys. Both male and female students regularly take part in policing gender boundaries through bullying. Male students frequently harass male and female students, while female students generally only harass other female students. The practice of male students bullying other male students is explicitly linked to machismo that boys are expected to subscribe to in order to be constructed and related to as ‘normal’ boys.[26] Many girls report that boys tease and ridicule them on the basis of their appearance, which is linked to boys asserting masculine power through sexist practices of denigrating girls.[26] This also serves to perpetuate the idea that appearance is a female’s most important asset. The way in which girls harass other girls is through gossiping, instead of confronting the other girls directly. Unique appearances and attempts to stand out among girls are regarded very negatively.[25] This type of female on female bullying sets the standard for appearance norms and the importance of appearance for females. Overall, gender-based harassment serves to define and enforce gender boundaries of high school students by high school students.
Social constructionist methods of research entail revealing the unique, socially constructed realities of individuals and value qualitative methods of research. Social constructionist researchers are open to many other interpretations of what constitutes scientific research. Inclusiveness and acceptance play significant roles in social constructionist practice – examples include sharing work with others in a cooperative manner, including a diverse sample, being open to other interpretations of data, and blurring the lines between scientific research, participatory research and social activism.[19] The blurring of scientific research also means incorporating other disciplines into psychological work (e.g. performative psychology includes artistic expression or humor) and thinking in terms that go beyond traditional scientific language.[19] These methods are not currently valued in psychology because they are not seen as “scientific.”
A social constructionist psychologist can make it explicit that his or her perspective is not universally true in all contexts across historical periods. Social constructionists recognize that every researcher has an opinion and is biased in some way. They acknowledge that their own views and findings/results of a study are open to deconstructive critique – no grand truth can be found because everything is context-specific and has potential to change across time periods and different situations. Related to this is the idea that social constructionists must constantly question their own work because their work can be constantly reinterpreted and have different meanings at different times[19]
Doing gender also means (men) doing dominance and (women) doing submissiveness and it reinforces the essentialism of gender categories.[3][27] In order for subordination to go unquestioned, the structure must not appear as a cultural product - it must seem natural.[28] Social movements can challenge the categories that appear “natural.” Certain legislation can promote equality for men and women, which could question whether there need to be two categories of gender at all (if both are treated equally). Social change relies on an understanding of how inequality is rooted in gender accomplishment.
Throughout the history, women have been fighting for their rights regarding various issues. One of the most significant revolutions in this century is the Feminist movement. The first wave which began in 1854 was a fight for women's rights to education and to voting by the Suffragettes. What the women want to change through the revolutions, it is not only about fighting for their rights, it is more essentially about earning recognition and respect from the general public acknowledging the fact that they are not inferior than men and thus deserving to be treated equally and granted fair opportunities. After substantial efforts made by generations of women, there is no stereotype against women anymore. In fact, women have proven that they can be stronger than men and compete with men successfully in many areas.
Because the theory says that one can “do” gender whether he or she conforms to gender norms or not (we are always held accountable for behaving in accordance with gender norms), change seems impossible. If resisting and conforming to gender norms does not prevent us from “doing” gender, how would we “undo” gender? In addition, if essential differences between the sexes are problematic, a society where gender is omnirelevant could be argued to always uphold gender inequality. The language of “doing” gender implies doing difference instead of unraveling it. Most studies that rely on social constructionism explore the ways in which gender is constructed but nevertheless demonstrate how those gender constructions uphold gender as a construct and gender inequality.
However, because gender is “done” or constructed, it can also be “undone” or deconstructed.[1] Researchers need to focus more on the variations in gender inequality that exist across societies, over time, and even within a society. The study of the interactional level could expand beyond simply documenting the persistence of inequality to examine: (1) when and how social interactions become less gendered, not just differently gendered, (2) the conditions under which gender is irrelevant in social interactions, (3) whether all gendered interactions reinforce inequality, (4) how the structural (institutional) and interactional levels might work together to produce change, and (5) interaction as the site of change.[1]