Gender as an Institution

Shannon N. Davis, Sarah Winslow, and David J. Maume

Marcia, age 18, is a senior in high school, while her brother Mark, age 16, is a junior. They live with their biological parents. Both are planning to attend college; Marcia has been accepted at the best liberal arts college in her state. She does well in school, but is so overscheduled that she is tired frequently, leading her parents to make comments about how she needs to worry more about how she looks each day. Mark does well in school, too, but his parents have been pushing him to be more involved in sports so he can look more well-rounded in his college applications. Being president of the Chess Club is important, they say, but he needs to show that he has athletic skills as well. Both Marcia and Mark have many friends, though neither has a steady dating partner. One of the key points of contention in their household is that they have the same curfew, even though Marcia is only a few months away from living on her own.

DEFINING GENDER

If we were writing a script for a twenty-first-century situation comedy about a middle-class white American family, the vignette above would be the ideal backstory for our main characters. The family dynamics that underlie Marcia and Mark's life likely sound familiar. The daughter and son live in the same household but have different expectations placed upon them by their parents. However, their parents are simply trying to encourage them to be the best young woman and man they can be given their presumed natural talents. What is interesting about this vignette is that we find it so normal. Of course young women are going to be interested in the liberal arts. Those disciplines focus on communication and consensus, ideas and collaboration. And shouldn't young men be active in sports? Don't they channel men's natural tendencies to be aggressive and competitive? Young women need to be protected more than young men do, so having the same curfew is simply their parents' way of making sure that Marcia is safe.

These underlying assumptions are gendered assumptions. They presume that because Marcia is female and Mark is male that there are normal, biologically based ways in which they should behave that need to be encouraged through socialization by their parents. However, decades of scholarship in sociology and other disciplines have documented the difference between biological sex (or what we're referring to when we say people are female or male) and gender. Indeed, one of the key contributions of the late twentieth century to the study of gender is that we no longer say that there are sex or gender roles (that is, specific, biologically based roles in society that women and men are supposed to play). Instead, scholars have made the case that gender is socially constructed, with specific meanings for relationships between and among women and men that are temporally and contextually specific and that have implications for individuals, interactions, and societies and social institutions. Importantly, scholars have also highlighted the ways in which differences between males and females and men and women are linked to inequality. It is not just that we ascribe different meanings to being a man or a woman but that these differences are associated with unequal opportunities, constraints, and, ultimately, outcomes. Let's return to Marcia and Mark. Marcia's relatively earlier curfew given her age may limit the employment and extracurricular activities in which she is able to engage, both of which may have negative implications for her future academic and professional achievements. Mark, on the other hand, is encouraged to increase his involvements, including participation in sports, all with an eye toward enhancing his academic and professional prospects. In these seemingly small and taken-for-granted ways, gendered assumptions contribute to unequal outcomes for this brother-sister duo.

In this volume, the chapter authors build on much sociological scholarship to make the case that gender is a social institution, what some have called a social structure, that has implications for individuals, interactions, and institutions themselves. When we say that gender has implications for individuals, we mean that individuals' sense of self, their identity, their personalities, and their actual physical bodies are gendered. In the Western world, we tend to think of gender along a continuum, with women/femininity on one end and men/masculinity on the other. There is the presumption that individuals live their lives at the poles of this continuum, a concept known as gender polarization, as evidenced, for example, by the term "opposite sexes." Further, there is the presumption that biological sex, gender, and gender identity are aligned with one another.

While there is a growing understanding of how each of these possible continua does not match people's experiences, researchers cannot ignore that many individuals think of themselves as existing along each continua. So when we talk about gender as a social structure or social institution having implications for individuals, we mean that individuals think of themselves as more or less feminine or masculine, identify as female/male (and that may or may not match their sex category), and craft a sense of self that is an extension of what they see their sex category and gender identity as being, and that these may or may not align with one another neatly. Marcia, therefore, thinks of herself as a young woman, sees herself that way, and has crafted a sense of self that is (in her mind) consistent with femininity. Mark has done the same for himself, focusing instead on constructing his sense of self around being a young man and masculine. However, while cultural beliefs may allow us to presume that this process of constructing a sense of self reflects the simultaneity of biological sex, gender, and gender identity, some of the chapters in this volume document the more complicated nature of how these continua intersect in our lives.

Gender also has implications for interactions that are based in part on our understanding of individuals. How would we know that Marcia thinks of herself as a young woman? We could ask her but if we were around her we may see that she presents herself as a young woman. She may wear her hair in ways that are consistent with what young women in the United States do, she may dress in a particular way, she may also act in ways that are consistent with how women are expected to act in the contemporary United States. The concept of "doing gender" was coined to explain (in part) this...