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Gender is used as a means of describing the distinction between the biological sex and socialized aspects of femininity and masculinity. [9] According to West and Zimmerman, gender is not a personal trait; it is "an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements, and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions ...
Therefore, bodies and sexuality are gendered—biology, physiology, and sexuality do not add up to gender, which is a social institution that establishes patterns of expectations for individuals, orders the social processes of everyday life, is built into the major social organizations of society, and is also an entity in and of itself.
Femininity as a social construct relies on a binary gender system that treats men and masculinity as different from, and opposite to, women and femininity. [8] In patriarchal societies, including Western ones, conventional attitudes to femininity contribute to the subordination of women, as women are seen as more compliant, vulnerable, and less ...
Anne Fausto-Sterling (née Sterling; born July 30, 1944) is an American sexologist who has written extensively on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, gender roles, and intersexuality. She is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University. [1]
The social sciences' views on what it means to be a woman have changed significantly since the early 20th century as women gained more rights and greater representation in the workforce, with scholarship in the 1970s moving toward a focus on the sex–gender distinction and social construction of gender.
Consequently, many feminists consider sex to only be a matter of biology and not a social construction. [112] [113] Gayle Rubin, for example, defines her influential concept of the sex/gender system as "the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity”. [114]
Women and men experience different types of mobility within the workplace. For example, women tend to experience a glass ceiling, an invisible barrier that prevents them from moving up the corporate ladder. [41] An example of this is a study from Sweden that compared the number of females in director jobs to men in director jobs.
These considerations make feminist biology debatable and conflictive with itself, particularly when concerning matters of biological determinism, whereby descriptive sex terms of male and female are intrinsically confining, or extreme postmodernism, whereby the body is viewed more as a social construct. [3]