The New Gender Paradox. Judith Lorber

1 How Gendered People, Organizations, and Societies Are Constructed

      We live in a world that is divided by gender in every way. Gender is a constant part of who and what we are, how others treat us, and our general standing in society. Our bodies, personalities, and ways of thinking, acting, and feeling are gendered. Because we are gendered from birth by naming, clothing, and interaction with family, teachers, and peers, our identity as a boy or girl, and then as a man or woman, is felt as, and usually explained as, a natural outcome of the appearance of our genitalia, the signs of our biological sex. The assumption is that it is biology that produces two social categories of different people, “females” and “males,” and that it is inevitable that societies will be divided along the lines of these two categories and that the people in those categories will be different.

It’s a twentieth-century doxa – that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying” (Bourdieu 1977: 167; emphasis in original). Despite its taken-for-grantedness, the search for the biological sources of gender differences fuels the glut of scientific studies on genetic, hormonal, or other physiological origins for all sorts of gendered behavior (Jordan-Young 2010; Van den Wijngaard 1997). Actually, there are very few gender differences, as meta-analyses of compilations of those studies has shown. One research team (Zell, Krizan, and Teeter 2015) had 106 meta-analyses, incorporating data from 12 million people. Most of the gender differences they found were small, with few that were medium (11.9%), large (1.8%), or very large in size (0.8%).

      Yet we live in societies structured by gender differences, so, since they are not natural, they need to be constructed. Gender divides people into contrasting social categories, “girls” and “boys” and “women” and “men.” In this structural conceptualization, gendering is the process and the gendered social order the product of social construction. Through interaction with caretakers, socialization in childhood, peer pressure in adolescence, and gendered work and family roles, people are divided into two groups and made to be different in behavior, attitudes, and emotions. The content of the differences depends on the society’s current culture, values, economic and family structure, and past history. The resultant gendered social order is based on and maintains these differences. Thus there is a continuous loop-back effect between gendered social institutions and the social construction of gender by individuals (West and Zimmerman 1987). In societies with other major social divisions, such as race, ethnicity, religion, and social class, gender is intricately intertwined with these other statuses (West and Fenstermaker 1995). Despite these crosscutting statuses, the contemporary western world is a very bi-gendered world, consisting of only two legal categories – “female” and “male.”

For individuals, gender is a major social status that is intersected with other major social statuses (racial and ethnic group, social class, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) and so gender is actually not a binary status, even though it is treated as such legally, socially, and in most social science research. On an individual basis, gender fragments; from a societal perspective, gender overrides these multiplicities and simply divides people into two categories.

      The binary divisions of gender are deeply rooted in every aspect of social life and social organization in most societies. Although the binary principle of gender remains the same, its content changes as other major aspects of the social order change. The gendered division of work has shifted with changing means of producing food and other goods, which in turn modify patterns of childcare and family structures. Gendered power imbalances, which are usually based on the ability to amass and distribute material resources, change with rules about property ownership and inheritance. Men’s domination of women has not been the same throughout time and place, but varies with political, economic, and family structures. In the sense of an underlying principle of how people are categorized and valued, gender is differently constructed throughout the world and throughout history. The prevailing tenet is that men dominate women, although the extent of domination fluctuates.

As pervasive as gender is, because it is constructed and maintained through daily interaction, it can be resisted and reshaped by gender troublemakers (Butler 1990). The social construction perspective argues that people create their social realities and identities, including their gender, through their interactions with others – their families, friends, colleagues. Gender is a constant performance, but its enactment is hemmed in by the general rules of social life, cultural expectations, workplace norms, and laws. These social restraints are also amenable to change, but not easily, because the social order is structured for stability (Giddens 1984). Many aspects of gender have been changed through individual agency, group pressure, and social movements. But the underlying binary structure has not.

      Gender is built into the western world’s overall social system, interpenetrating the production of goods and services, kinship and family, sexuality, emotional relationships, and the minutiae of daily life. Gendered practices have been questioned, but the overall legitimacy of the gendered social order is deeply ingrained and currently bolstered by scientific studies on supposed inborn differences between females and males. The ultimate touchstone is pregnancy and childbirth. Procreative and other biological differences are part of the constructed gendered social order, which is so pervasive that the behavior and attitudes it produces are perceived as natural, including women’s greater predisposition to nurturance and bonding. This belief in natural – and thus necessary – differences legitimates many gender inequalities and exploitations of women.

As the concept of gender has developed in the social sciences, it has moved from an attribute of individuals that produces effects in the phenomenon under study (e.g., men’s and women’s crime rates, voting patterns, labor force participation) to a major building block in the social order and an integral element in every aspect of social life (e.g., how crime is conceptualized and categorized is gendered, political power is gendered, the economy and the labor force are gender-segregated and gender-stratified). Feminist social scientists have mapped out the effects of gendering on daily lives and on social institutions and have produced reams of data on how these processes maintain inequality between women and men.

      Feminist theories have linked gendered social structures with gendered personalities and consciousness. Nancy Chodorow (1978) links the division of parenting in the heterogendered western nuclear family to the objectification and emotional repression in men’s psyches and the emotional openness and nurturance of women’s psyches. Both emerge from the primacy of women in parenting. Boys’ separation from their mothers and identification with their fathers and other men leads to their entrance into the dominant world but also necessitates continuous repression of their emotional longings for their mothers and fear of castration. Girls’ continued identification with their mothers makes them available for intimacy; their heterosexual coupling with emotionally dissatisfying men produces their desires to become mothers and reproduces the gendered family structure from which gendered psyches