Sex and gender, and whether gender is a social construction

Introduction

The distinction between sex and gender is the starting point of feminist theory. The question asks us to explain it and to say whether gender is a social construction, giving reasons.

Sex and gender

Feminists use the distinction to question the claim that natural difference justifies unequal positions. Sex is the biological difference between men and women. Gender is the set of roles that society assigns to men and women. The fact that only women can bear children, for example, does not require that only women should look after children after birth; much of the inequality between men and women is therefore produced by society and not by nature. Patriarchy depends on treating gender roles as if they followed from sex, so that natural difference is made to justify unequal status, as women were once called the weaker sex and denied equal rights on that ground.

Is gender a social construction? The case for saying yes: inequalities that have lasted a long time come to look natural, but the old claims about women and about black people are now seen as distinctions made by society out of differences of power, not inborn traits. Even differences that are natural need not be unalterable, as medical advances that help disabled people show. Gender roles are also visible in everyday Indian life: NCERT notes that in poor households most girls are taken out of school to look after younger siblings while their parents work. Radical feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s treated gender as a socially contrived category that sets masculinity against the feminine, and wanted to do away with it as a meaningful category. Judith Butler goes further: in Gender Trouble (1990) she questions the very split between biological sex and socially built gender, holds that gender is performative and cannot be fitted into a binary, and stresses that the body cannot be separated from social norms and language.

The case for qualification. Some feminists want to value female difference rather than erase it: cultural feminists see women's biology as a strength and argue for preserving gender distinctions, and some radical and ecological feminists hold that women are closer to nature, though they are criticised for sweeping generalisations. The reasonable conclusion is that most of the inequalities of status, work and power attached to sex are socially constructed and can be changed, even if biological sex is not.

Patriarchy

What strikes the observer first is a division of labour: women are expected to look after the private, domestic side of life and men the work of the public world. Yet most women also work outside the home, so they carry a double burden, and they are still given little or no voice in the decisions taken in public. Feminists name the system behind this patriarchy: a social, economic and cultural order that values men above women and gives men power over them. Its defence is the claim that the two sexes differ by nature and that the difference warrants their unequal positions. Feminists reply that most of the inequality between women and men is made by society rather than by nature, and can therefore be changed.

Forms. It works through law and custom, which for long kept women out of many professions and activities. It works through the family, where much of what women do goes unrecognised: the emotional and practical labour of raising children, nursing the sick and making the home liveable for those who work outside it. A household where the men are served first at every meal and the women eat what is left shows the same ranking in daily life. It follows women into paid work, where socialist feminists point to lower wages than men's and to sexual harassment. Second-wave writers such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millett widened the analysis to the sexual, psychological and personal side of women's oppression. Feminist strands explain it differently: ecofeminists see it in hierarchical pairs such as culture over nature and male over female; Marxist feminists, following Engels, ground women's oppression in class exploitation and in the family, where patriarchal forces make it appear natural; and socialist feminists, for whom capitalism is the first cause and patriarchy the second, see women's oppression as the joint product of gender together with class, race, ethnicity and sexuality.

Ending it. Feminists argue that the public/private distinction and all forms of gender inequality can and should be eliminated. The routes they have pressed include equal political and legal rights, notably the vote; equal access to education and economic opportunity; and an equal sharing of child care and household work.

Conclusion

Sex is a biological category and gender a social one. Many of the roles and inequalities tied to gender are products of society, as the history of arguments about women's nature shows, so gender is largely a social construction; this does not deny biological difference, but denies that it justifies inequality.