Gender as a Social Construct Essay

Gender is a social construction that reaches from the individual to the institutional level of society. The term, gender, refers to masculinity and femininity, which are traits and characteristics that are associated with being male-bodied or female-bodied. Gender differentiates itself from sex because sex is based on the biological primary and secondary characteristics, like reproductive organs. Gender, however, is a performance that forms the gender norms and is reinforced through social…

The book Assigned: Life with Gender produced by editors Lisa Wade, Douglas Hartmann, and Christopher Uggen is a collection of articles that talk about gender in the United States from a sociological viewpoint. The topics range from queer parenting to inequality to what the future can offer. A couple of topics I will discuss is gender and its social construction and how women’s bodies are viewed, specifically their breasts, compared to the bodies of men. Gender is indeed socially constructed and…

Understanding Gender Roles Gender roles are the typical expectations placed on children of either sex at birth as a member of society. Determining the way people behave and the tasks that they are responsible for, gender roles dictate the social difference between men and women. Shifting in specifics from generation to generation, the genders roles practiced by a society differ throughout time. Ann Macy Roth explores the distinction between men and women in the ancient world in her essay…

Why Can’t Run Like a Girl Also Mean Win the Race? Gender categorizes humans and provides structure, however it allows for a perception of difference, allowing for the by-products of discrimination and oppression. In “Night to his Day”: The Social Construction of Gender”, Judith Lorber points out, “from society's point of view, however, one gender is usually the touch¬ stone, the normal, the dominant, and the other is different, deviant, and subordi¬nate, In Western society, "man" is A,…

It is interesting how the topics of social constructs such as sex, gender, and sexual expression are not usually questioned ‘out loud’ by people. And in the case they are indeed questioned, in silence, what is it that keeps us from verbalizing these questions? It seems from an ‘outside’ perspective that everyone, even laws and education, agrees with what is a normal behaviour for a man and for a woman and their positions in society. However, if we observe carefully the behaviour of people it…

The workforce varies in gender composition based on occupation. This is due to the fact that there are a variety of factors that can drive an individual to select a certain occupation. In male and female dominated occupations the salaries differ which relates to the concept of occupational segregation based on gender. This all becomes evident when looking at a male dominated profession, such as mechanical engineering with only 8.8% women, a female dominated profession, such as preschool teachers…

it comes to the topics of gender and sex. Butler challenges the ideas that have been inculcated in our own culture by exposing the truth behind what is considered normal and critiquing the binaries in society. Queer theory is important to address because of the lack of knowledge our society has on queerness. Butler’s ideas on queerness and gender will not only empower others, but it will help social workers in their practice. One of Butler’s ideas is that sex, gender and sexuality are not…

one of the oldest models in health promotion specifically developed for health promotions and health campaigns. This model is still significantly used today as it is seen as a social cognitive model, which predicts and explains health behaviour by focusing on the culture and social context of individual within a health social context (Sadeghi, Taghdisi & Solhi 2012:4212, Nutbeam, Harris & Wise 2010:35, Gerend and Sheperd 2012:173,Karimy, Gallali & Niknami 2012:48). When the individual is…

endeavor. The concept of gender is one much more complex than that of deciding between two things, for gender is not a choice, but something chosen for you, shaped and defined by the environment around you. It is this external influence on gender that I will be focusing on throughout this paper, with a specific focus on the male gender role. Even more specifically, I want to know why…

I: Summary “Meta-Analysis and the Psychology of Gender Differences” is an article written by Janet Shibley Hyde that was published in 1990. Though this article is dated, the information presented in it retains it’s relevance in the current culture. In this article, Hyde examines and meta-analyzes the history of research on gender differences in boys and girls. The earliest research and tests of gender differences attempted to confirm the claim that white males were evolutionary superior to…