Gender and Society

Doing gender

West and Zimmerman: producing gender through everyday interactions in which people are judged against gender expectations. Example: a boy hides tears because his friends would call him unmanly. The reaction helps reproduce the norm.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw: gender, race, class, sexuality, and other social positions interact to shape distinct experiences of power and inequality. Example: discrimination against Black women may differ from discrimination against white women or Black men; race and gender cannot always be separated.

Sex

Classification based on bodily traits such as reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones, usually assigned at birth. These traits do not always align in a strictly binary way; intersex variations exist. Example: assigning a baby female based on external anatomy.

Gender

Socially created meanings, expectations, practices, and roles associated with gender categories and masculinity or femininity. These vary across societies and time. Example: expecting men to provide financially and women to provide care.

Gender identity

A person's internal sense of their gender, such as being a woman, man, or nonbinary person. It may or may not match sex assigned at birth. Example: someone assigned female at birth identifies as a man.

Gender binary

The belief or system that recognizes only two distinct, opposite genders, man and woman, and often assumes they correspond directly to male and female sex. Example: a form allows only man or woman and no other gender option.

Primary socialization

Early learning of basic language, values, norms, and social behavior, usually through caregivers and close relationships. Example: a young child learns manners and expectations about boys and girls at home.

Primary group

A group with close, personal, emotionally significant, usually enduring relationships. Example: family or a close circle of friends. Primary describes the relationship, not simply who you met first.

Secondary socialization

Learning the expectations and skills of particular roles or settings beyond early primary socialization. It can happen in childhood and adulthood. Example: learning classroom rules or professional behavior at a new job.

Secondary group

A relatively impersonal group organized around a task, role, or goal. Example: a large college class or workplace committee. Close primary relationships can develop within it.

Gender socialization

The process of learning gender expectations through family, peers, schools, media, and other influences. Example: adults reward boys for toughness and girls for being helpful.

Gender norms

Shared expectations about how people of different genders should behave, look, or feel. Example: the expectation that men should not cry. Norms are expectations; socialization is how people learn them.

Icons of femininity

Objects, activities, images, or roles strongly associated with femininity. Example: pink dresses, nail polish, Barbie dolls, or ballet; in Kane's research, boys' interest in these could provoke parental disapproval.

Patriarchy

A system of social organization in which men as a group hold disproportionate authority and power over women. Example: family and institutional arrangements that reserve major decisions for men. It does not mean every man has more power than every woman.

Sexism

Beliefs, practices, or discrimination that rank or treat people unequally because of sex or gender, commonly privileging men over women. Example: assuming a woman cannot lead because women are supposedly too emotional.

Androcentrism

Treating men or masculinity as the standard, center, or more valuable model of human life. Example: using men's experiences to represent everyone's experiences, or treating feminine interests as less serious.

Subordination

Placement of a person or group in a lower position of power, status, or authority. Example: expecting a wife to defer to her husband's decisions.

Formal gender equality

Equal rights and treatment under laws or official rules; it does not guarantee equality in practice. Example: identical promotion rules coexist with biased evaluations.

Modified patriarchy

A system where formal equality coexists with continuing associations of masculinity with authority and higher status. Example: women may become leaders but still encounter expectations that leaders should be men.

Hegemonic masculinity

The culturally dominant ideal of masculinity that legitimizes men's dominance over women and ranks other masculinities below it. Example: celebrating powerful, heterosexual, emotionally controlled men as the ideal. Hegemonic means dominant in legitimacy, not necessarily most common.

Complicit masculinities

Masculinities that benefit from and help sustain male privilege without fully embodying the hegemonic ideal. Example: a man does not act especially dominant but accepts an unequal household division of labor that benefits him.

Marginalized masculinities

Masculinities denied full recognition or power through inequalities such as race or class, even when they display admired masculine traits. Example: a working-class man praised for toughness but excluded from elite economic power.

Subordinated masculinities

Masculinities positioned as inferior within the gender hierarchy, often through associations with femininity or homosexuality. Example: gay or feminine men being treated as less manly. This describes social treatment, not an inherent inferiority.

Feminine apologetic

Displaying conventional femininity to offset participation in activities coded masculine. Example: an athlete feels pressure to emphasize glamour to reassure others she is still feminine. No literal apology is necessary.

Benevolent sexism

Apparently positive or protective attitudes that stereotype women and justify restrictive roles or dependence on men. Example: excluding women from challenging assignments because they are supposedly too delicate and need protection.

Hostile sexism

Openly negative attitudes toward women, especially women perceived as challenging male power or traditional roles. Example: claiming that women seeking authority are manipulative and should be put in their place.

Double bind

Contradictory expectations that make either available choice punishable. Example: a woman leader is judged weak when gentle but unlikeable when assertive.

Patriarchal bargain

Accepting some patriarchal constraints to obtain benefits within that system. Example: accepting dependence on a male provider in exchange for financial security.

Emphasized femininity

Femininity organized around accommodating men's interests and desires. Example: prioritizing pleasing and supporting a male partner over one's own ambitions.

Emphatic sameness

Downplaying femininity to gain acceptance in a masculine setting. Example: presenting oneself as one of the guys to fit into a male-dominated workplace.

Gender equivocation

Strategically shifting between masculine and feminine presentations as contexts change. Example: emphasizing toughness among teammates and conventional femininity in another setting.

Hegemonic femininity

A culturally privileged ideal of femininity that is treated as superior to other femininities and helps organize inequality. In racialized-femininities research, white Western femininity may be treated as the superior standard. Check which theoretical framework your lecture uses.

Subordinated femininity

Forms of femininity devalued relative to a dominant feminine ideal, often through racial, class, or sexuality hierarchies. Example: stereotyping Asian women as passive and inferior to supposedly independent white women. This is a stereotype being analyzed, not a fact about either group.

Internalized oppression

Taking in dominant negative beliefs about one's own social group and applying them to oneself or others in that group. Example: a woman comes to believe that women are naturally less capable leaders.