ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the conceptualization of gender in family therapy. It focuses on the contributions made by psychoanalysis and social anthropology. Hare-Mustin suggests that family therapy has not provided a truly new vision of the family, looking at the way other disciplines have approached the subject may enable family therapists to introduce a difference which will make a difference to the conceptualization of gender. Family therapy has ignored the issue of gender. This can be confirmed by the widely accepted definition of the family as 'a self-regulating group system which controls itself according to rules formed over a period of time, through a process of trial and error'. Women can work in the productive system side by side with men and still have unequal status. The struggles for economic and legal equality levels as well as for equal status should be distinguished from the right to diversity.
