Gender

Gender – from the English word “gender”, meaning grammatical gender or kind – is a sociocultural and symbolic construction of sex that organizes meanings, social expectations, roles, identities, and relations associated with women, men, femininity, masculinity, and other gendered positions.

In other words, gender is a system of values, norms, characteristics, roles, lifestyles, modes of thinking, and relations between women and men that is modeled by society and sustained by social institutions. These characteristics are acquired by individuals in the process of socialization and are shaped above all by the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts of human existence. Gender fixes and reproduces ideas about women and men in connection with sex, but it cannot be reduced to biological sex alone (Melnyk, 2004, p. 11).

Initially, the term gender was used in linguistics to denote the grammatical category of gender. In social research, the category of gender was introduced in order to move beyond the previously dominant concepts of sex role and the sex-role approach. The idea of distinguishing biological sex from socially shaped sex-related characteristics had already been expressed by Margaret Mead in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). The term became widely used in Western scholarship in the 1970s, and in post-Soviet scholarship in the 1990s.

An important role in the development of the distinction between sex and gender was played by the American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Jesse Stoller. In his work on gender identity, Stoller helped establish the distinction between sex, understood primarily in biological and physiological terms, and gender, understood as a psychological, social, cultural, and historical phenomenon. In this approach, the study of sex belongs mainly to biology and physiology, whereas the analysis of gender belongs to psychology, sociology, and the study of cultural and historical processes (Shylova, 2013, p. 148).

The concepts sex and gender should be distinguished. The term sex is used to denote biological, anatomical, and physiological differences between female and male bodies, including different roles in reproduction, differences in genitalia, and chromosomal patterns. If biological sex is assigned at birth, gender is socially constructed and culturally shaped in a specific historical period. Gender may therefore be understood as the sociocultural dimension of sexed identity and social relations: it forms behavioral, cultural, psychological, visual, and other socially conditioned differences associated with women and men.

Gender is a complex concept because it reveals the multidimensional nature of the phenomenon. In scholarly literature, it is used in several meanings:

  1. Gender as the social-role and cultural interpretation of personality traits and behavioral models of women and men, as distinct from biological characteristics;
  2. Gender as the acquisition of sociality by individuals born into biological categories of female or male sex;
  3. Gender as a field of equal-rights policy for women and men, as well as practical activity aimed at creating mechanisms for implementing such equality (Melnyk, 2004, p. 12).

For example, Olha Voronina distinguishes three approaches to understanding gender:

  1. Gender as a social construction produced through mechanisms of socialization, division of labour, gender roles, mass media, and stereotyping;
  2. Gender as a network, structure, or process, that is, as a stratification category alongside other categories of social stratification;
  3. Gender as a cultural metaphor in philosophical and postmodernist concepts (Males, 2004, pp. 122–123).

Judith Lorber gives a detailed account of gender in relation to both society and the individual. As a social institution, gender includes the following components:

  1. Gender statuses – socially recognized norms manifested in behavior, gestures, language, emotions, and appearance;
  2. The gendered division of labour – the distribution of productive and domestic work between women and men;
  3. Gendered kinship relations – family rights and obligations assigned to each sex, as well as sexual prescriptions;
  4. Gendered personality structures – combinations of characteristic traits expressed in feelings and behavior;
  5. Gendered social control – formal or informal acceptance and encouragement of conforming behavior, and the stigmatization, social isolation, punishment, or medical treatment of nonconforming behavior;
  6. Gender ideology – the justification of gender statuses, including their differential evaluation;
  7. Gender imagery – cultural representations of gender and the embodiment of gender in symbolic language and artistic production, which reproduce and legitimize gender statuses.

In relation to the individual, gender includes the following components:

  1. Sex category – belonging to a biological sex category assigned at birth on the basis of genitalia;
  2. Gender identity – a person’s perception of their sex/gender belonging in relation to their roles as a worker and as a family member;
  3. Gendered marital and reproductive status – participation or nonparticipation in socially permitted or prohibited forms of courtship, pregnancy, childbirth, and parental roles;
  4. Sexual orientation – socially or individually accepted patterns of sexual desire, feeling, practice, and identification;
  5. Gendered personality structure – internally organized patterns of socially recognized emotions shaped by family and parenthood structures;
  6. Gender processes – social practices of learning, being taught, and acquiring the necessary role cues that make behavior gender-acceptable or gender-unacceptable, as well as the development of gender identity;
  7. Gender beliefs – acceptance of or resistance to gender ideology;
  8. Gender display – the presentation of oneself as a particular type of gendered person through clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, and permanent or temporary bodily markers (Shakirova, 2000).

References:

Males, L. V. (2004). Biolohichni, psykholohichni ta sotsiokulturni chynnyky [Biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors]. In Osnovy teorii genderu: Navchalnyi posibnyk [Foundations of gender theory: A textbook] (pp. 109–131). Kyiv: K.I.S. [in Ukrainian].

Melnyk, T. M. (2004). Gender yak nauka ta navchalna dystsyplina [Gender as a science and academic discipline]. In Osnovy teorii genderu: Navchalnyi posibnyk [Foundations of gender theory: A textbook] (pp. 10–29). Kyiv: K.I.S. [in Ukrainian].

Shakirova, S. (2000). Tolkovaniia gendera [Interpretations of gender]. In Pol zhenshchiny: Sbornik statei po gendernym issledovaniiam [The sex of woman: A collection of articles in gender studies] (pp. 15–26). Almaty: Center for Gender Studies. [in Russian].

Shylova, E. E. (2013). Gender kak innovatsionnyi nauchnyi i filosofskii diskurs [Gender as an innovative scientific and philosophical discourse]. Vestnik MGIMO Universiteta. Filosofiia, 148–152. [in Russian].

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