The Social Construction of Gender

Abstract

Gender is a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced. In early childhood, humans develop gendered personality structures and sexual orientations through their interactions with parents of the same and opposite gender. The pervasiveness of gender as a way of structuring social life demands that gender statuses be clearly differentiated. Varied talents, sexual preferences, identities, personalities, interests, and ways of interacting fragment the individual's bodily and social experiences. Gendered patterns of interaction acquire additional layers of gendered sexuality, parenting, and work behaviors in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In a gender-stratified society, what men do is usually valued more highly than what women do because men do it, even when their activities are very similar or the same.

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