Title: The Sociology of Gender
Headings: The Sociology of Gender
The Sociology of Gender
The Difference Between Sex and Gender
The Social Construction of Gender
Major Sociological Theories of Gender

Content: The Social Construction of Gender
That gender is a social construct becomes especially apparent when one compares how men and women behave across different cultures, and how in some cultures and societies, other genders exist too. In Western industrialized nations like the U.S., people tend to think of masculinity and femininity in dichotomous terms, viewing men and women as distinctly different and opposites. Other cultures, however, challenge this assumption and have less distinct views of masculinity and femininity. For example, historically there was a category of people in the Navajo culture called berdaches, who were anatomically normal men but who were defined as a third gender considered to fall between male and female. Berdaches married other ordinary men (not Berdaches), although neither was considered homosexual, as they would be in today’s Western culture. What this suggests is that we learn gender through the process of socialization. For many people, this process begins before they are even born, with parents selecting gendered names on the basis of the sex of a fetus, and by decorating the incoming baby's room and selecting its toys and clothes in color-coded and gendered ways that reflect cultural expectations and stereotypes. Then, from infancy on, we are socialized by family, educators, religious leaders, peer groups, and the wider community, who teach us what is expected from us in terms of appearance and behavior based on whether they code us as a boy or a girl. Media and popular culture play important roles in teaching us gender too. One result of gender socialization is the formation of gender identity, which is one’s definition of oneself as a man or woman.