Title: Gender Role | Cultural Anthropology
Headings: Gender Role
Gender Role
Background
References

Content: The term ‘gender role’ was first coined by John Money in 1955 during the course of his study of intersex individuals to describe the manners in which these individuals express their status as a male or female, in a situation where no clear biological assignment exists. Background
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines gender roles as “socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women”. However debate continues as to what extent gender and its roles are socially constructed (i.e. non-biologically influenced), and to what extent “socially constructed” may be considered synonymous with “arbitrary” or “malleable”. Therefore, a concise authoritative definition of gender roles or gender itself is elusive. Some systems of classification, unlike the WHO, are non-binary or gender queer, listing multiple possible genders including transgender and intersex as distinct categories. Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two (boy and girl or man and woman), others recognize more. Androgyny, for example, has been proposed as a third gender. Other societies have claimed to see more than five genders, and some non-Western societies have three genders – man, woman and third gender. Some individuals (not necessarily being from such a culture) identify with no gender at all. Gender role – defined as referring in some sense to cultural expectations according to an understood gender classification – should not be confused with gender identity, the internal sense of one’s own gender, which may or may not align with categories offered by societal norms.