ABSTRACT

Gender is familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced. Gendered roles change—today fathers are taking care of little children, girls and boys are wearing unisex clothing and getting the same education, women and men are working at the same jobs. In early childhood, humans develop gendered personality structures and sexual orientations through their interactions with parents of the same and opposite gender. The pervasiveness of gender as a way of structuring social life demands that gender statuses be clearly differentiated. As a social institution, gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. When gender is a major component of structured inequality, the devalued genders have less power, prestige, and economic rewards than the valued genders.