Sex and gender (short note)

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.