The Importance Of Gender As A Social Structure

It does not take someone with an IQ equal to Einstein to walk into any retail store and notice that they have stepped into a gender structure. Unfortunately, while most people would recognize this if prompted, most people do not realize the importance of this issue. According to Barbara J. Risman, “We need to conceptualize gender as a social structure, and by doing so, we can better analyze the ways in which gender is embedded in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of our society.” While it would be very difficult to best Risman’s article Gender as a Social Structure, a breakdown of how and why retail stores market to certain genders is a great stepping stone in the journey to conceptualize gender as a social structure. I took a trip to a Wal-Mart Supercenter with one mission; to break down their gender based marketing strategies and attempt to explain why they use these strategies and why society is accepting of them. If you have ever walked down the toy isle of any retail store, you have probably noticed a major difference in boy and girl toys, so that is where I started my journey. The current gender stereotype that women adore shopping is spelled out perfectly by the famous Barbie Doll. The …show more content…
As a male who enjoys playing video games, this was very easy for me to see how stores like Wal-Mart market to certain genders. A majority of video games for sell today are broken down into three categories. They are either first person “shoot em up” games, racing games, or sports games and on the cover of these games is almost always a male character doing some crazy awesome feat to go along with the theme of that game. The video game section was the most affected by gender at this particular store. The reason behind this is because retail stores realize that in today’s society, a majority of video game players are males and males enjoy action. So, action video games is what they