The Kaleidoscope of Gender
Gender permeates our life, from the sex roles in home training or the sex images in advertisements, merchandising, the fashion industry, career choice and employment to academic performance; “a body of findings has accumulated that relates sex tangentially to every conceivable phenomenon” (Unger, 1979). It indeed exists and aroused more heat than light in the past fifty years of research (Deaux, 1984; Deaux &
Major, 1987) from the 1950s and 1960s, in fields such as sociology, anthropology, psychology and other disciplines (Sax, 2005; Esplen & Jolley, 2006) up until the ample applications of sex difference studies stepped in the 1970s and 1980s’ (Deaux, 1984).
As gender maintains a salient influence on beliefs and aspirations in society, a discussion on academic experiences in the present study, must necessarily emphasize gender, allowing a more accurate prediction of perpetuating differential learning patterns for males and females, of which the origin may not necessarily lie in biological gender difference but rather in social and cultural influences.
Gender and sex
According to Catherine & Valentine (2008), sex is viewed as a biological fact and described as “non-cultural, static, scientifically measurable and unproblematic,”
“unequivocal” in Unger’s study (1979) and “given, innate and based upon objective biological reality” according to Caplan, Crawford, Hyde & Richardson’s definition (1997). Conversely, gender is viewed as “flexible, elastic, a means by which people are taught who they are, how to behave and what their roles will be” in Catherine &
Valentine’s view point (2008) and a “social label by which we distinguish two groups of people” in Unger’s dictionary (1979). Following Esplen and Jolley’s (2006) simplified definition, gender refers to the array of socially constructed roles and relationships, personality traits, attitudes, behaviors, values, relative power and influences that society ascribes to the two sexes on a differential basis. Strictly speaking, sex is not a gender because sex does not cause specific gender behaviors or activities in the social context. To summarize, following Caplan, Crawford, Hyde & Richardson’s definitions of gender and sex (1997, p7), the term sex typically defines chromosomes, hormonal properties, physiological internal and external sex organs as female and male; whereas gender describes the profiles that socio-cultural distinction delineates as “masculine or
feminine” (Burr, 2002). In the present study, I use gender and sex interchangeably as the categorical sex of female and male is no longer a fixed notion; it varies over time and culture as we put ambiguous sexual identities (such as intersex, transgender and transsexual people) into a more social and cultural milieu.
Gender difference or sex difference
Documenting sex difference or gender difference is elusive: sometimes, you see the difference and sometimes you don’t (Deaux and Major, 1987). As Deaux says,” Sex differences reside in part in the eyes of the beholder.” For Caplan et al., it is more appropriate to use gender difference than sex differences “, “because the participants are categorized on the basis of their outward appearance and behavior, not on the basis of biological characteristics.” Unger (1979), Deaux and Major (1987) hold the same tune, indicating that using sex as a subject variable often causes confusion, inconsistency and has difficulties in explaining widespread male-female differences in light of its use in the self-reports and personality traits or preferred behaviors in many experimental contexts. Both researchers suspect sex difference validity and stability in many surveys and find that some variables that affect whether or not subject sex differences included the size of the sample and the age of the subjects or the social class in the culture at large. Unger (1979) emphasizes that sex is of two kinds: one is within the individual (biological sex difference) and one relates to other persons with whom the individual interacts (stimulus sex difference). And when sex serves as a stimulus, it is used for the evaluation and appraisal of one’s own behavior (Unger, 1979), similar to the usage of gender difference.
Gender theory in the past and present
Most of the theoretical models of gender weigh more on how gender-related behaviors are acquired (Deaux and Major, 1987) and based on the research (Catherine
& Valentine, 2008: Burr, 2002; Deaux and Major, 1987; Damon & Lerner, 2008), gender theory can be roughly subdivided into three models.
In the biological model, gender development is naturally and previously engineered by sex. The biological power, like genetic determinants, external or internal genitalia and hormones is the decisive and indestructible factor that influences the human agent's construction of the resulting conduct in society. Interestingly, biological perspectives are increasingly transparent and acknowledged, based on the fact that much human behavior operates under the science of biosocial mechanisms (Damon &
Lerner, 2008). One example is the application of biological conception on the issue of hormonal influence on adolescents’ emotional, aggressive and problem behaviors and the science of brain structure as a function of differences in human cognition ability (Singer, 2003). According to Catherine & Valentine (2008), the past false myth of the nature-nurture debate or over-emphasis on biological perception to explain away human behavior may occasionally cause confusion and unnecessary debates. They held that the inborn difference between males and females in educating children is not purely because women are naturally more nurturing than men whereas men are supposed to be leaders because they are unencumbered by pregnancy and childcare, and debunked the notion that “testosterone doesn’t cause aggression in men and the menstrual cycle doesn’t cause women to be necessarily more emotional than men.” On the contrary, men and women are far more physically, cognitively, and emotionally alike.
In the sociological model, Catherine & Valentine (2008) consider gender as a social product emphasizing the recursive relationship between social structure and individuals. Social structures shape individuals; individuals, in turn, shape social
structures. Gender takes place within the context of social interactions where the process of human identity creation occurs and by which humans attain their interaction goals (Deaux & Major, 1987). Gender is “humanly-made” (Schwalbe, 2001); gender is a living organism that evolves and is involved in all the social processes of everyday life and social institutions (Burr, 2002). Many gender difference studies in this model stress the study of the distribution of men and women into different social roles (Deaux
& Major, 1987). Gender-related patterns, like children’s self-identification as males or females (concerning their self-concepts, self-esteem, preference or regulation behaviors or the formation of stereotypes) all involve the integration of many sociological factors (Damon & Lerner, 2008).
In the cultural model, gender diversities stem from the prism of culture (Catherine
& Valentine, 2008). Shared cultural experiences and common acknowledgement of certain social standards will lead to the development of normative beliefs about the behavior of males and females. Masculinity and femininity (e.g. the standard of what is masculine or feminine) are defined and experienced in the same way by people as a whole or by a select group of people within the subcultures of a particular society. For example, the Tchambuli men were very feminine based on Western standards (Mead, 2001). They were obsessed with art, beauty, and interior decorating. The women provided the sustenance of the tribe: they did the hunting (Mead, 2001). Gender, from the cultural point of view, is not just a set of role expectations, an identity or a list of expected behaviors.