sex and gender

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Recommended: Summary of research work on gender differences

The importance of understanding the complexities of sex, sexuality and gender opens up real constructive and deductive dialogue about some of society’s most imperative identifiers. By forming a dialectic about these topics we expand human experience and come to more conclusive truths about human behavior rather than relying on stereotypes and single-factor observations. Research informs us that people’s behaviors depend on time, place, context and situation not sex, gender and sexuality differences (Spade, Valentine 5). Take for example the rapid increase of women in the workforce during World War II. The men were off fighting war so the women of whom were all expected to be wholly housewives were ideally and beneficially welcomed to factories in order to keep industry running. It made working women truly visible for the first time in America, but as the war subsided, men returned to work and women back to the home. This illustrates that women can be more than just stereotypical housewives and nurturers. The context of everything matters so when we erase the reality of context, time and place we deny ourselves all pieces of the puzzle to see the necessary whole.

Our generalized ideas of gender comes from a cultural ideology of femininity and masculinity. Being female does not inherently result in femininity--it is a social construction that is socialized into growing young girls who take in the culture around her by role-taking (Mead). The same applies to masculinity. These ideologies of femininity and masculinity stem from a desire to categorize--or rather organize society. Inadvertently, the organization of these compartmentalized parts became beneficial to the creation of hierarchies. In this case, a hierarchy constructed by...

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...at it is a reality, but that reviewing every other drug would be too big of an undertaking for any group of scientists. This default bias that male persons represent the whole of society puts everyone in potential danger because it expresses a singular embodiment of society, denying diversity not just in sex, but in race, sexual orientation, class status and more, only building on the hierarchy.

If this kind of negligence continues in the fields of biological science, socialized gender differences will tend to guide our research more so than the very real biological sex differences. Challenging social normative beliefs about gender, sex, and sexuality allows society to observe the history of our constructed societal standing. Otherwise, we experience cultural lag, which threatens to decrease society’s longevity and vitality as a whole, both for males and females.

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