Gender Stratification

What do we mean by the word ‘Gender’?
Men and women differ in their access to privilege, prestige, and power. The distribution problem of who gets what, when and how has traditionally been answered in favor of males. Throughout the world, human activities, practices, and institutional structures are ordered in terms of differentiations between man and women-in brief by gender.

It’s important to realize that the differences in the way males and females are treated are social facts, not products of biology. In fact, the terms gender and gendered are used by many sociologists to underline this socially defined reality. Whereas the word sex refers to the biological differences between males and females, the word gender refers to the different roles and expectations that people have for members of two sex groups – the social expectations that are attached to sex differences.

According to Kenrick Thompson, “Sex role refers to the behaviors, attitudes, and motivations that a particular culture considers appropriate for males or females; and gender refers to the complex of social meanings that is attached to biological sex.”

Gender identity: There are obvious biological differences between the sexes. Most important, women have the capacity to bear children, whereas men do not. These biological differences contribute to the development of gender identity, the self-concept of a person as being male or female. Gender identities are the conceptions we have of ourselves as being male or female.

Gender role: Sets of cultural expectations that define the ways in which the members of each sex should behave. Anthropological evidence suggests that gender roles probably represent the earliest division of labor among human beings.
Gender stratification is universal, but the roles men and women play in different cultures vary and there are differing degrees of inequality. Cross-cultural studies show how that idea about what is appropriate masculine and feminine behavior also vary widely.