Chapter 3 – Socialization and the Social Construction of Gender

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Chapter 3 Socialization and the Social
Construction of Gender

• Robert Wonser

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• Remember, that biology alone does not explain
  where gender comes from.
• How do these social factorssocial learning,
  social interaction, and social structurefit
  together to create our gendered experience?
• Three levels
• 1) the individual level of social learning and
  psychological sex differences
• 2) at the interactional level of social relations
  in everyday life
• 3) at the level of structural and institutional
  forces that constrain and shape action

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Gender Lenses of Androcentrism, Polarization, and
Essentialism

• Different ways we see gender from our culture
• 1) androcentrism or, male-centeredness, makes
  everything male appear the neutral norm, the
  universally human.
• Ex he to refer to men and women
• 2) gender polarization refers to the ways that
  diverse aspects of human experience are
  culturally linked to sex differences.
• Ex cultural items, emotions are either male or
  female. Girls wear pink, men are rational.
• 3) essentialism is the view that gender is a
  fixed biological or social trait that does not
  vary among individuals or over time.
• Traits are inborn and immutable. Also used to
  argue racial and ethnic traits are inborn.

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• As a claim based on biology, essentialism is
  problematic
• 1) not all individuals can be categorized as
  either male or female.
• What would a person born intersexed essential
  traits be?
• 2) essentialist thinking is akin to stereotyping

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Individual Level Theory Social Roles

• Role theory flourished during the reign of
  functionalism
• Society is made up of interrelated parts
• Individuals are socialized into parts (and play
  their respective roles) that fulfilled societys
  needs crucial in maintaining the system.
• They internalize societys norms, values, how to
  think and feel.
• They play roles husbands, fathers, wives,
  mothers, employers, workers, teachers and students

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Role Theory and Functionalism

• Functionalism supported the status quo as the
  best, and perhaps only way to organize an ongoing
  stable society.
• Men lives were in public, womens were in
  private. Any deviation was labeled deviant
• A 1946 study and Friedans Feminine Mystique
  exposed womens dissatisfaction with the idea
  that home and family are not enough

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Roles and Feminists

• Feminists kept the idea of roles on the
  individual level and that they were rooted in
  statuses and the expectations of those statuses.
• Sex-role learning produced nurturing women and
  aggressive men
• Research was done on white middle class families,
  ignoring black families.

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Patricia Hill Collins and Intersectionality

• It is important to understand how intersecting
  oppressions of class and gender differentially
  position black women nationally and globally.
• All of us are in some ways privileged and in
  other ways oppressed.
• Context dependent for example, in some settings
  white women are privileged by their race and in
  others oppressed by their gender.

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Interactionist Theory of Gender Gender as a
Course of Action

• Gender is situational and contextual
• Situations we find ourselves in (and seek out)
  draw from us particular ways of acting and
  particular identities.
• Ex in class, youre a student
• Gender differences are created socially and
  historically, rather than on account of an
  individuals biology or psychology.
• Doing gender

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Agnes

• Garfinkel called Agnes a practical methodologist
  because she turned a sociological eye on the
  trivial but necessary social tasks that women
  enacted to appear normally female.
• She made gender happen
• Second, she was accountable to her audience.
• For her, gender was an achieved status, an
  accomplishment, not ascribed by her genitals.

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• Our biological sex, our status as males or
  females, and the ways we live our lives as sexed
  beings need not coincide.
• Sex may be a biological category but in practice
  it depends on social cues. We deduce sex from
  what we see before us.
• Sex category refers to the status of male or
  female that most persons inhabit unambiguously
• Gender refers to the performance itself, the ways
  people accomplish being a man or woman
• Gender is a property of and emerges in social
  situations
• Gender is omnirelevant (relevant in every
  situation)

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Props and Resources for Doing Gender

• People enact gender by drawing on resources
  that are features of local settings and that
  guide actions that produce and reproduce gender
  difference.
• Ex public restrooms no bio need for
  segregation. Instead, these arrangements produce
  the difference they were meant to respect.
• Ex sports, assortive mating practices, fixing
  a flat tire, lifting a heavy box, etc.
• ? Doing gender reinforces the illusion that there
  are essential differences between men and women,
  when in fact, the doing is what creates these
  very differences.
• We interactionally create the social worlds we
  inhabit but in turn are constrained and pressed
  into certain courses of action as our creations
  take on a life of their own (reifications).

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• What accounts for the strength and persistence of
  gendered inequality in interaction, its
  occurrence across social institutions and
  contexts and its reproduction over time?
• Whereas interactionists focus on social actors in
  the everyday world, structuralists maintain that
  the rules and resources that frame local actions
  best explain gender.

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Gender Structures Rosabeth Moss Kanter

• We are the product of structures that we
  ourselves create.
• Structure refers to the constraints built in to
  social organizations and relationships.
• The gender division of labor is a structural
  concept.
• Kanter studied a large industrial supply firm to
  learn how organizational structure forms
  peoples sense of themselves and of their
  possibilities.
• She showed that gender differences were the
  result of structures rather than personality
  differences between men and women.

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Kanters Results

• Identified three structural features of the
  corporation that explained the differences in
  gender in their workplace performance, relations
  on the job, and attitudes towards work
• 1) the structure of opportunity offered by the
  organization
• 2) the structure or distribution of power
• 3) the relative numbers of men and women
  employed, especially as managers, professionals,
  and executives.

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Opportunity Structure

• Argued that opportunity is not a result of
  behavior on the job but opportunity structures
  produce gendered behavior.
• People with little opp behave in one way and
  those with lots behave differently.
• Low opp people dont aspire for higher positions,
  have lower self-esteem, and are resigned to stay
  where they are
• People with substantial opps have high
  aspirations, have high self-esteem, are more
  interested in work, and are more competitive.

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Power Structures

• Power the ability to get things done, to
  mobilize resources, to get whatever it is that a
  person needs for the goals he or she is
  attempting to meet is also the result of
  structural position rather than gender.
• Because men tended to have more power they tended
  to be able to get things done more effectively
  rather than a function of gender it was a
  function of power embedded in social structures.

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Relative Numbers

• Relative numbers also contribute to outcomes that
  look likebut do not originate ingendered social
  relations at the individual level.
• Women in usually male positions often faced
  Tokenism which is the social relations that grow
  from belonging to a tiny minority amidst a large
  majority.
• Subject to more scrutiny, treated as symbols,
  representing all women.
• Caused men of the company to magnify their own
  group solidarity against the intruders.
• Boundary heightening behavior intensified.
  Things like interrupting women, stereotyped,
  treated as mothers, temptresses, pets, or iron
  maidens.
• Her findings suggest that gendering is not an
  accident of structure, but integral to its
  existence.

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• To Kanter, organizational structures were gender
  neutral, she believed those differences were just
  as likely to occur between any two differently
  situated unequal groups in the organization blue
  collar versus managerial employees, majority
  versus token workers.
• She maintained gender inequality grew out of more
  generic hierarchical rules and practices, gender
  wasnt intrinsic to organizational structure.

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Gendered Organizations Joan Acker

• Acker disagrees she maintains gender is an
  integral part of those processes not an add on.
• She identified several ways that gender
  difference creates and sustains inequalities in
  organizations
• Organizational processes create gendered
  divisionsof labor, space, of behavior, of power.
  
• Organizational processes construct symbols and
  images that support gender differences in
  organizationsthe masterful business leader, the
  difficult female boss.
• Organizations promote gendered components of
  individual identityappropriate (gendered)
  clothing, workplace demeanor, language.
• There is a gendered logic discernable in the work
  rules, labor contracts, and other documents that
  are a part of organizational discourses.

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• The job itself seems neutral, but the job itself
  presupposes the existence of a split between
  unpaid domestic labor and child care (the
  so-called private sphere) and social labor, which
  takes place in a separate location, away from
  families and communities.
• The job, seemingly neutral, implicitly rests on
  the gendered division of labor in society
• Even the definition of the ideal worker can
  only be a man with a stay-at-home wife.
• No emotions, no time off for reproduction, etc.

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Gendered Institutions

• Social institution refers to a persistent
  constellation of practices, power relations,
  norms, interactional dynamics, and ideologies
  surrounding social phenomena.
• As processes, institutions entail recurring and
  predictable social practices, ways to distribute
  scarce resources, ways to care for those who
  cannot care for themselves, ways of identifying
  and legitimating leaders and so forth gender is
  the process by which we accomplish these tasks.
• Gender is embedded in all of societys
  institutions

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• Gender is a construction within and of society.
• The implication of this is radical.
• It forces the question, what is the point of
  distinguishing men from women?
• Lorbers answer is, that the point is to create a
  class of subordinates.

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Structuration

• 1) gender roles are internalized and adopted by
  individuals through gender socialization
• 2) sustained by social expectations, gender
  categorization, and accountability (doing gender)
  at the interactional level
• 3) shaped by constraints and possibilities at the
  structural and institutional levels are three
  interconnected chapters in the story about gender
  differences and gendered inequalities.
• Anthony Giddens developed the term structuration
  to refer to the relationship between human agency
  and social structure, between the individual
  level of action, in which we exercise choice, and
  the structural and institutional level of
  tradition, moral codes, institutions and
  established ways of doing things, which
  constrains our choices.
• Structures shape individuals and individuals
  shape social structures

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A quick note on research on gender

• Just as public restrooms create the differences
  they exist to honor, studies based on the
  assumption of difference will probably find the
  difference they assume exists.
• If you look for it youll find it.