Gender and Society (Soc Sci 104)

1. What is gender?
 Gender refers to the roles and responsibilities of men and women that are
created in our families, our societies and our cultures. The concept of gender also
includes the expectations held about the characteristics, aptitudes and likely
behaviors of both women and men (femininity and masculinity). The concept of
gender is vital because applied to social analysis, it reveals how women’s
subordination or men’s domination is socially constructed. As such, the subordination
can be changed or ended. It is not biologically predetermined nor is it fixed forever.

 Gender is a “social construct”. Gender is a lot more than just “male” and
“female”. It’s on a spectrum, and it’s impossible to say how many genders there are.
Gender is essentially what label you feel the most comfortable in.

 Gender is the fact of being male or female. It is interchangeable with the word
“sex” with the only difference being that gender is typically used in a socio-cultural
context.

 Gender would be that men wear a suit and tie and women wear a dress. It is
something like “man” or “woman”, in the cultural sense, not the biological sense.

 Gender is an expression of biological sex that you perform, so for that reason it
doesn't have a particular definition apart from the one that each person gives it by the
way they perform it. 

 Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are
socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviors and roles associated with being a
woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social
construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

 Gender is stuff that isn’t biological but instead social. Some comes from the
person. Some comes from the environment (culture, family, expectations, school,
work, others.) Gender isn’t male or female but masculine or feminine. For some
things in some cultures, there’s little separation. Wearing sandals or holding hands
among friends or singing or whatever could be masculine or feminine or neither.
Some activities, such as having a career in law or liking to play rough sports or having
a desire to have sex with men but not women, could be considered extremely
masculine or feminine depending on the culture.

 Gender is the social stuff that comes from being a man or woman. Some is
baggage, some is privilege, some is arbitrary, some is less important than others, but
all of it comes from how a person is seen based on their perceived sex.

 Gender refers to the characteristics of women men girls and boys that are socially
constructed.either the male or female division of a species especially as differentiated
by social and cultural roles and behavior.

 Gender is a psycho-biological determiner of whether you feel instinctively

rewarded by feeling masculine or feminine.

Gender is about the “animal instincts a person has.”

A woman may feel instinctively rewarded by feeling:

 Soft
 Feminine
  Desirable
 Loved
 Caring

Men have some of these instincts too, but women have them a lot more
strongly. In order for a man to have it on as nearly a large scale, it needs to
be a learned process, not an instinctual one.

A man may feel instinctively rewarded by feeling:

 Strong
 Dominant
 Competent
 Commanding

Gender expression - (the concepts of masculinity/femininity/androgyny) are also social

constructs, but are a lot different than gender. Usually people associate being masculine
with being male or male aligned, femininity with being female or fem aligned, and being
androgynous with being non binary.

Gender identity - is determined by the innate sense of who we are.

- Differences in brain structure between men, women, non-binary and
agender people that cause them to self-identify differently

Gender roles - The particular economic, political and social roles and responsibilities that
are considered appropriate for men and women in a culture.

- are roles that we as humans have assigned to each gender. If you haven’t
noticed, humans love to box things. Men do the work, hunt, build, fight.
Women raise children, gather supplies, cook. More and more, we are
seeing that men and women are performing opposite gender roles. It does
not mean they are transgender. It means social constructs around what it
means to be men and women is changing.

Gender Equality - The absence of discrimination on the basis of a person’s sex in

authority, opportunities, allocation of resources or benefits, and access to services.

Gender Equity - The process of being fair to women and men. Sometimes this involves
measures to redress historical disadvantages that have prevented men and women from
having equal access to rights and privileges. Equity leads to equality. Gender equity also
implies that health needs, which are specific to each gender, receive appropriate
resources.

Gender awareness - Understanding that there are socially determined differences

between men and women, and that these influence access to and control of resources.

Gender sensitivity - The ability to perceive existing gender differences and issues, and to
incorporate these into strategies and actions. Contrast with gender blindness.

Gender analysis - Identifies the inequalities that arise from the different roles of men and
women, and analyzes the consequences of these inequalities for their lives, health, and
well-being.

Gender expression - is the way the gender is expressed, masculine or feminine. The
gender expression does not make a person trans. This is why butch lesbians, or butch
women in general, are not trans men. Gender expression is something that can lead trans
people to discover that they are trans. Hair style, clothing, mannerisms, posture, speech
patterns. There is a lot of parts to this that are social constructs. Clothing and hairstyles
are gendered, speech patterns and postures are gendered too. Another aspect of gender
that is socially constructed.

Gender presentation - is the way you present all those things above, gender roles and
expressions, in a way that people may read you as a man or a woman. Careful to stay in
enough of the box you belong in. Social constructivism plays a big role here too.

(Gender exists because gender identity exists. Social construction is humanity’s way of
making it easy too perceive. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. That just means it isn’t as set in
stone as we think.)

2. What is society?
 This term has been derived from a Latin word ‘socious’ that means association or
companionship. Thus society means ‘A larger group of individuals, who are
associative with each other’.

 A society, or a human society, is a group of people involved with each other through
persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or
social territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural
expectations. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships
between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society
may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent
members. In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification and/or
dominance patterns in subgroups. Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can
enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an
individual basis; both individual and social benefits can thus be distinguished, or in
many cases found to overlap.

 A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and
values within a dominant, larger society. This is sometimes referred to as a
subculture, a term used extensively within criminology. More broadly, a society
may be illustrated as an economic, social, or industrial infrastructure, made up of a
varied collection of individuals. Members of a society may be from different ethnic
groups. A society can be a particular ethnic group, such as the Saxons; a nation
state, such as Bhutan; or a broader cultural group, such as a Western society.

 The word “society” may also refer to an organized voluntary association of people for
religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes. A
"society" may even, though more by means of metaphor, refer to a “social
organism” such as an ant colony or any cooperative aggregate such as, for
example, in some formulations of artificial intelligence.
 It is a system of relationships that exists among the individuals of the groups. - Prof.
Wright
  Any group of people who have lived and worked together long enough to get
themselves organized and to think of themselves as a social unit with well defined
limits”. - Linton
 It is the largest group in which individual have relationships. - A.W. Green
 It is a web of social relationship, which is always changing. - Maclver
 Society is an artificial device of Natural economy. - Adam Smith

 Society is an extended social group having a distinctive cultural and economic

organization.
 Society is a long-standing group of people sharing cultural aspects such as language,
dress, norms of behavior and artistic forms.
 Society is a group of people who meet from time to time to engage in a common
interest; an association or organization.
  A society is the sum total of all voluntary interrelations between individuals. It is the
people of one's country or community taken as a whole.
 A society is a number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine
and act toward a common goal.
 Society is a number of persons associated for any temporary or permanent object; an
association for mutual or joint usefulness, pleasure, or profit; a social union; a
partnership; as, a missionary society.
 A society are the persons, collectively considered, who live in any region or at any
period; any community of individuals who are united together by a common bond of
nearness or intercourse; those who recognize each other as associates, friends,
and acquaintances.
 Society is specifically, the more cultivated portion of any community in its social
relations and influences; those who mutually give receive formal entertainments.
 A society are the people of a specific area, community, locality, region, country,
nation or planet as an intelligent being, consciousness and whole.
 Society has a duty of to provide an existence where everyone lives in harmony and
balance and everything is shared and created for the optimum health, human rights
and shared prosperity of all members of society.
 Society, in simple words, is a human perception. It is the way you look at people,
and the manner in which their opinion makes a difference in your life, defines
society for you. In our day to day lives, often we find ourselves being affected with
the rationale of the people around us as our brain is in constant fear of the impact
that our deeds or decisions may have on the society and its response accordingly.
So, the moment you think about what other people think about you, you create a
society and that is how it comes to being.
 Whenever you think about society, think of it as “something which is just a state of
mind, something which you can control and not something that can control
you.” The more you free yourself from the burden that others put on you, or it
seems that they put on you but they actually don't care, the happier you will be.
Hence, society is a human perception that defines who you are, and that again,
depends upon how rebellious you can be.

 Society is really helpful because it's proven that humans need each other to survive.
The role society plays in life is important to give the world an specific order and
organize the different ideas each of us have. For example, if we didn't have to follow
any morals or rules established by society; the world will be in total chaos and we
would not notice all the different inventions important people have made on life. If
we are not consider as one all of our morals and love for each other would vanish.
The attachments we do with people are there because we are consider to be a
whole "society" in which everyone needs to respect each other and follow the rules.
I believe that it's a way of organizing life, and it's alright even though I don't agree
with some of there rules. We need to be label as one because this way it's easier to
deal with each other and it's, definitely, a way to avoid humanity destruction.

3. How gender and society interrelated?

 Gender is the personal conception of being a man or woman and the society
creates standards and comes up with gender roles basing them in existing norms and
traditions which will in turn influence gender identity. For instance, most societies
associate strength and dominance to be masculine roles while caring and assisting or
subordination known to be feminine roles. This clearly makes gender be bred within
the society. One’s gender is important as it influences his or her life through events
like life experiences, how one is being taken or treated, how to do one associate or
socialize with others, the type of job one will have to do and also opportunities that
may come up favoring a certain type of gender.
4. How gender is dependent to the society? How society is dependent to the so
called gender?

According to the gender theory, it is said that both males and females learn to
perform their biologically assigned gender through particular behaviors and attitudes.

 The theory emphasizes on the environmental causes of gender roles and the impact
of socialization, or the process of transferring norms, values, beliefs and behaviors to
group members, in learning how to behave as a male of female.

 The theory also proposes that the social structure is the underlying force in
distinguishing genders, behaviour is driven by the division of labor between the
genders within a society. here one gender in considered to be weaker in any aspect
which may be physical, mental or emotional.

 Thus depending upon these capacities certain duties and functions are handed over
to the particular gender, hence making the social structure a little differentiated and
divided for the genders.

 Every gender and social structure depends on the history of a society and the
relationship is greatly effected by the cultures too.

 The society expects one to be either feminine or masculine and ambiguity in the
distinction of the two is always a critical subject that ends up in the media for one
reason or another whenever cases arise. The issue of gender always seems to be
inborn. Culture plays a significant role in determining duties which are considered
feminine and masculine.

 One might think that a child is born with the idea of how to behave in relation to
gender while in the real sense; it is the cultivation of the society that molds people to
their sensitivity with respect to gender. This has affected the perception accorded to
people of different genders regarding their responsibilities and roles in the society.

 Attention has always been drawn to job positions, financial status, political positions,
leadership and family roles as pertains to men and women. The revolutions in
technologies and economies have brought concern in the society as some schools of
thoughts think that the social structure is being compromised due to changes in
gender roles.

 Society has stamped an image into the minds of people of how the role of each
gender should be played out. There are two recognized types of gender, a man and a
woman, however there are many types of gender roles a man or a woman may assume
or be placed into by society. The ideas of how one should act and behave are often
times ascribed by their gender by society, but these ascribed statuses and roles are
sometimes unwelcomed, and people will assume who they want to be as individuals by
going against the stereotypes set forth by society.

 Society plays a vital role in constructing our gender. Often times, it attempts to define
what being a man or a woman is like. It makes an effort to use general terms to force
human beings to conform to what society thinks is acceptable. For instance, society
feels that men should be strong while women should be sensitive. However, numerous
groups of individuals have forced society to modify its beliefs in regards to gender.

(Until equality is fully achieved in the society, the notion of gender will always be treated as two
different concepts with diverse abilities, and hence female and male will have different
expected roles to play in every society. However, with the current trend towards increase in
globalization, both genders will have equal responsibilities in the society, at least to a certain
extent .)