ABSTRACT
The term gender has traditionally been used to refer to the masculine and feminine grammatical categories of language, but sometime in the 1960s it came to be used to refer to categories of human males and females. Judith Lorber, claimed that "a purely biological substrate cannot be isolated because human physiology is socially constructed and gendered". Gender socialization means learning gender behavior, attitudes, and roles considered to be appropriate in one's culture, and is imparted by the family and reinforced by friends, school, work, and the mass media. Some constructionists even claim that sex differences are social constructions. Margaret Mead reported that her "discovery" among the Tchambuli was "a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our culture, with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner, the man the less responsible and emotionally dependent person". Melford Spiro's studies of Israel's kibbutzim were perhaps the most devastating blows to the gender-as-social-construct argument to come from the social sciences.
