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Western culture creates cultural gender roles based on the meanings of gender and cultural practices. Western culture has clear distinctions among sex and gender, where sex is the biological differences and gender is the social construction. However, sex still influences how society perceives a certain gender. [9]
Our society has convinced us that there are just two options for gender identity, "male" and "female," based on biological sex. But in reality, there's more fluidity. Gender identity is on a ...
The social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct, and gender studies particularly does, while research in the natural sciences investigates whether biological differences in females and males influence the development of gender in humans; both inform the debate about how far biological differences influence the formation of ...
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, 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 of society."
Gender systems are the social structures that establish the number of genders and their associated gender roles in every society. A gender role is "everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male, female, or androgynous. This includes but is not limited to sexual and erotic arousal ...
In the Oxford English Dictionary, gender is defined as—in a modern and especially feminist use—"a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes", with the earliest example cited being from 1963. [55]
On another level, there is debate even within the feminist community on how to deal with biological sex differences. Some account on the importance of accepting biological sex differences to reach gender equality, while others contend that sex differences are overly emphasized in society, contributing to gender stereotypes. [9]
Sociologists tend to use the term "gender role" instead of "sex role", because the sociocultural understanding of gender is distinguished from biological conceptions of sex. [8] In the sociology of gender, the process whereby an individual learns and acquires a gender role in society is termed gender socialization. [9] [10] [11]