Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies. This non-exhaustive list introduces readers to scholarship in the field.

Jack Halberstam, Afsaneh Najmabadi-Evaz and bell hooks

Gender studies asks what it means to make gender salient, bringing a critical eye to everything from labor conditions to healthcare access to popular culture. Gender is never isolated from other factors that determine someone’s position in the world, such as sexuality, race, class, ability, religion, region of origin, citizenship status, life experiences, and access to resources. Beyond studying gender as an identity category, the field is invested in illuminating the structures that naturalize, normalize, and discipline gender across historical and cultural contexts.

JSTOR Daily Membership Ad

At a college or university, you’d be hard pressed to find a department that brands itself as simply Gender Studies. You’d be more likely to find different arrangements of the letters G, W, S, and perhaps Q and F, signifying gender, women, sexuality, queer, and feminist studies. These various letter configurations aren’t just semantic idiosyncrasies. They illustrate the ways the field has grown and expanded since its institutionalization in the 1970s.

This non-exhaustive list aims to introduce readers to gender studies in a broad sense. It shows how the field has developed over the last several decades, as well as how its interdisciplinary nature offers a range of tools for understanding and critiquing our world.

Catharine R. Stimpson, Joan N. Burstyn, Domna C. Stanton, and Sandra M. Whisler, “Editorial.” Signs , 1975; “Editorial,” off our backs , 1970

The editorial from the inaugural issue of Signs , founded in 1975 by Catharine Stimpson, explains that the founders hoped that the journal’s title captured what women’s studies is capable of doing: to “represent or point to something.” Women’s studies was conceptualized as an interdisciplinary field that could represent issues of gender and sexuality in new ways, with the possibility of shaping “scholarship, thought, and policy.”

The editorial in the first issue of off our backs , a feminist periodical founded in 1970, explains how their collective wanted to explore the “dual nature of the women’s movement:” that “women need to be free of men’s domination” and “must strive to get off our backs.” The content that follows includes reports on the Equal Rights Amendment, protests, birth control, and International Women’s Day.

Robyn Wiegman, “Academic Feminism against Itself.” NWSA Journal , 2002

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies, which consolidated as an academic field of inquiry in the 1970s. Wiegman tracks some of the anxieties that emerged with the shift from women’s to gender studies, such as concerns it would decenter women and erase the feminist activism that gave rise to the field. She considers these anxieties as part of a larger concern over the future of the field, as well as fear that academic work on gender and sexuality has become too divorced from its activist roots.

Jack Halberstam, “Gender.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition (2014)

Halberstam’s entry in this volume provides a useful overview for debates and concepts that have dominated the field of gender studies: Is gender purely a social construct? What is the relationship between sex and gender? How does the gendering of bodies shift across disciplinary and cultural contexts? How did the theorizing of gender performativity in the 1990s by Judith Butler open up intellectual trajectories for queer and transgender studies? What is the future of gender as an organizing rubric for social life and as a mode of intellectual inquiry? Halberstam’s synthesis of the field makes a compelling case for why the study of gender persists and remains relevant for humanists, social scientists, and scientists alike.

Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, “Defeating Bigenderism: Changing Gender Assumptions in the Twenty-First Century.” Hypatia , 2009

Scholar and transgender activist Miqqi Alicia Gilbert considers the production and maintenance of the gender binary—that is, the idea that there are only two genders and that gender is a natural fact that remains stable across the course of one’s life. Gilbert’s view extends across institutional, legal, and cultural contexts, imagining what a frameworks that gets one out of the gender binary and gender valuation would have to look like to eliminate sexism, transphobia, and discrimination.

Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories.” Social Problems , 2006

Judith Lorber identifies the key paradigm shifts in sociology around the question of gender: 1) acknowledging gender as an “organizing principle of the overall social order in modern societies;” 2) stipulating that gender is socially constructed, meaning that while gender is assigned at birth based on visible genitalia, it isn’t a natural, immutable category but one that is socially determined; 3) analyzing power in modern western societies reveals the dominance of men and promotion of a limited version of heterosexual masculinity; 4) emerging methods in sociology are helping disrupt the production of ostensibly universal knowledge from a narrow perspective of privileged subjects. Lorber concludes that feminist sociologists’ work on gender has provided the tools for sociology to reconsider how it analyzes structures of power and produces knowledge.

bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.” Feminist Review , 1986

bell hooks argues that the feminist movement has privileged the voices, experiences, and concerns of white women at the expense of women of color. Instead of acknowledging who the movement has centered, white women have continually invoked the “common oppression” of all women, a move they think demonstrates solidarity but actually erases and marginalizes women who fall outside of the categories of white, straight, educated, and middle-class. Instead of appealing to “common oppression,” meaningful solidarity requires that women acknowledge their differences, committing to a feminism that “aims to end sexist oppression.” For hooks, this necessitates a feminism that is anti-racist. Solidarity doesn’t have to mean sameness; collective action can emerge from difference.

Jennifer C. Nash, “re-thinking intersectionality.” Feminist Review , 2008

Chances are you’ve come across the phrase “intersectional feminism.” For many, this term is redundant: If feminism isn’t attentive to issues impacting a range of women, then it’s not actually feminism. While the term “intersectional” now circulates colloquially to signify a feminism that is inclusive, its usage has become divorced from its academic origins. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s based on Black women’s experiences with the law in cases of discrimination and violence. Intersectionality is not an adjective or a way to describe identity, but a tool for analyzing structures of power. It aims to disrupt universal categories of and claims about identity. Jennifer Nash provides an overview of intersectionality’s power, including guidance on how to deploy it in the service of coalition-building and collective action.

Treva B. Lindsey, “Post-Ferguson: A ‘Herstorical’ Approach to Black Violability.” Feminist Studies , 2015

Treva Lindsey considers the erasure of Black women’s labor in anti-racist activism , as well as the erasure of their experiences with violence and harm. From the Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter, Black women’s contributions and leadership have not been acknowledged to the same extent as their male counterparts. Furthermore, their experiences with state-sanctioned racial violence don’t garner as much attention. Lindsey argues that we must make visible the experiences and labor of Black women and queer persons of color in activist settings in order to strengthen activist struggles for racial justice.

Renya Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging.” Meridians , 2007

Renya Ramirez (Winnebago) argues that indigenous activist struggles for sovereignty, liberation, and survival must account for gender. A range of issues impact Native American women, such as domestic abuse, forced sterilization , and sexual violence. Furthermore, the settler state has been invested in disciplining indigenous concepts and practices of gender, sexuality, and kinship, reorienting them to fit into white settler understandings of property and inheritance. A Native American feminist consciousness centers gender and envisions decolonization without sexism.

Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.” Science & Society , 2005

Hester Eisenstein argues that some of contemporary U.S. feminism’s work in a global context has been informed by and strengthened capitalism in a way that ultimately increases harms against marginalized women. For example, some have suggested offering poor rural women in non-U.S. contexts microcredit as a path to economic liberation. In reality, these debt transactions hinder economic development and “continue the policies that have created the poverty in the first place.” Eisenstein acknowledges that feminism has the power to challenge capitalist interests in a global context, but she cautions us to consider how aspects of the feminist movement have been coopted by corporations.

Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran.” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Afsaneh Najmabadi remarks on the existence of sex-reassignment surgeries in Iran since the 1970s and the increase in these surgeries in the twenty-first century. She explains that these surgeries are a response to perceived sexual deviance; they’re offered to cure persons who express same-sex desire. Sex-reassignment surgeries ostensibly “heteronormaliz[e]” people who are pressured to pursue this medical intervention for legal and religious reasons. While a repressive practice, Najmabadi also argues that this practice has paradoxically provided “ relatively safer semipublic gay and lesbian social space” in Iran. Najmabadi’s scholarship illustrates how gender and sexual categories, practices, and understandings are influenced by geographical and cultural contexts.

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore’s “Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore map the ways that transgender studies can expand feminist and gender studies. “Transgender” does not need to exclusively signify individuals and communities, but can provide a lens for interrogating all bodies’ relationships to gendered spaces, disrupting the bounds of seemingly strict identity categories, and redefining gender. The “trans-” in transgender is a conceptual tool for interrogating the relationship between bodies and the institutions that discipline them.

David A. Rubin, “‘An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender.” Signs , 2012

David Rubin considers the fact that intersex persons have been subject to medicalization, pathologization, and “regulation of embodied difference through biopolitical discourses, practices, and technologies” that rely on normative cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Rubin considers the impact intersexuality had on conceptualizations of gender in mid-twentieth century sexology studies, and how the very concept of gender that emerged in that moment has been used to regulate the lives of intersex individuals.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs , 2005

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson provides a thorough overview of the field of feminist disability studies. Both feminist and disability studies contend that those things which seem most natural to bodies are actually produced by a range of political, legal, medical, and social institutions. Gendered and disabled bodies are marked by these institutions. Feminist disability studies asks: How are meaning and value assigned to disabled bodies? How is this meaning and value determined by other social markers, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, national origin, and citizenship status?

The field asks under what conditions disabled bodies are denied or granted sexual, reproductive, and bodily autonomy and how disability impacts the exploration of gender and sexual expression in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood historical and contemporary pathologization of genders and sexualities. It explores how disabled activists, artists, and writers respond to social, cultural, medical, and political forces that deny them access, equity, and representation

Karin A. Martin, “William Wants a Doll. Can He Have One? Feminists, Child Care Advisors, and Gender-Neutral Child Rearing.” Gender and Society , 2005

Karin Martin examines the gender socialization of children through an analysis of a range of parenting materials. Materials that claim to be (or have been claimed as) gender-neutral actually have a deep investment in training children in gender and sexual norms. Martin invites us to think about how adult reactions to children’s gender nonconformity pivots on a fear that gender expression in childhood is indicative of present or future non-normative sexuality. In other words, U.S. culture is unable to separate gender from sexuality. We imagine gender identity and expression maps predictably onto sexual desire. When children’s gender identity and expression exceeds culturally-determined permissible bounds in a family or community, adults project onto the child and discipline accordingly.

Sarah Pemberton, “Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes.” Signs , 2013

Sarah Pemberton’s considers how sex-segregated prisons in the U.S. and England discipline their populations differently according to gender and sexual norms. This contributes to the policing, punishment, and vulnerability of incarcerated gender-nonconforming, transgender, and intersex persons. Issues ranging from healthcare access to increased rates of violence and harassment suggest that policies impacting incarcerated persons should center gender.

Dean Spade, “Some Very Basic Tips for Making High Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies.” The Radical Teacher , 2011

Lawyer and trans activist Dean Spade offers a pedagogical perspective on how to make classrooms accessible and inclusive for students. Spade also offers guidance on how to have classroom conversations about gender and bodies that don’t reassert a biological understanding of gender or equate certain body parts and functions with particular genders. While the discourse around these issues is constantly shifting, Spade provides useful ways to think about small changes in language that can have a powerful impact on students.

Sarah S. Richardson, “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges.” Synthese , 2010

Feminist philosophy of science is a field comprised of scholars studying gender and science that has its origins in the work of feminist scientists in the 1960s. Richardson considers the contributions made by these scholars, such as increased opportunities for and representation of women in STEM fields , pointing out biases in seemingly neutral fields of scientific inquiry. Richardson also considers the role of gender in knowledge production, looking at the difficulties women have faced in institutional and professional contexts. The field of feminist philosophy of science and its practitioners are marginalized and delegitimized because of the ways they challenge dominant modes of knowledge production and disciplinary inquiry.

Bryce Traister’s “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies.” American Quarterly , 2000

Bryce Traister considers the emergence of masculinity studies out of gender studies and its development in American cultural studies. He argues that the field has remained largely invested in centering heterosexuality, asserting the centrality and dominance of men in critical thought. He offers ways for thinking about how to study masculinity without reinstituting gendered hierarchies or erasing the contributions of feminist and queer scholarship.

JSTOR logo

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Get Our Newsletter

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

More Stories

Gift for the grangers

  • The Gift of the Grange

Aerial shot of Brooklyn, New York city on an overcast day in summer, taken from over the Bedford-Stuvesant neighborhood.

  • Where Are the Trees?

Muhammad Ali and George Foreman boxing in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Remembering the Rumble in the Jungle

Close-up portrait of Border Collie dog on Rainbow Bridge background

Do All Dogs Go to Heaven?

Recent posts.

  • Richard Gregg: An American Pioneer of Nonviolence Remembered 
  • L. M. Montgomery’s Plain Jane
  • Meteorite Strike in South Africa

Support JSTOR Daily

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

SEP home page

  • Table of Contents
  • Random Entry
  • Chronological
  • Editorial Information
  • About the SEP
  • Editorial Board
  • How to Cite the SEP
  • Special Characters
  • Advanced Tools
  • Support the SEP
  • PDFs for SEP Friends
  • Make a Donation
  • SEPIA for Libraries
  • Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

  • Friends PDF Preview
  • Author and Citation Info
  • Back to Top

Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

  • It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
  • One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
  • AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
  • AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
  • AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
  • AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.
S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

  • Alcoff, L., 1988, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory”, Signs , 13: 405–436.
  • –––, 2006, Visible Identities , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Andler, M., 2017, “Gender Identity and Exclusion: A Reply to Jenkins”, Ethics , 127: 883–895.
  • Ásta (Sveinsdóttir), 2011, “The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender”, in Feminist Metaphysics , C. Witt (ed.), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 47–65.
  • –––, 2018, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories, New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Ayala, S. and Vasilyeva, N., 2015, “Extended Sex: An Account of Sex for a More Just Society”, Hypatia , 30: 725–742.
  • Antony, L., 1998, “‘Human Nature’ and Its Role in Feminist Theory”, in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice , J. Kourany (ed.), New Haven: Princeton University Press, pp. 63–91.
  • Armstrong, D., 1989, Universals: An Opinionated Introduction , Boulder, CO: Westview.
  • Bach, T., 2012, “Gender is a Natural Kind with a Historical Essence”, Ethics , 122: 231–272.
  • Barnes, E., 2020, “Gender and Gender Terms”, Noûs , 54: 704–730.
  • de Beauvoir, S., 1972, The Second Sex , Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  • Benhabib, S., 1992, Situating the Self , New York: Routledge.
  • Bettcher, T.M., 2013, “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman’”, in The Philosophy of Sex , N. Power, R. Halwani, and A. Soble (eds.), Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, pp. 233–250.
  • Bogardus, T., 2020, “Evaluating Arguments for the Sex/Gender Distinction”, Philosophia , 48: 873–892.
  • Butler, J., 1990, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”, in Performing Feminisms , S-E. Case (ed.), Baltimore: John Hopkins University, pp. 270–282.
  • –––, 1991, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’”, Praxis International , 11: 150–165.
  • –––, 1993, Bodies that Matter , London: Routledge.
  • –––, 1997, The Psychic Life of Power , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • –––, 1999, Gender Trouble , London: Routledge, 2 nd edition.
  • Byrne, A., 2020, “Are Women Adult Human Females?”, Philosophical Studies , 177: 3783–3803.
  • –––, 2021, “Gender Muddle: Reply to Dembroff”, Journal of Controversial Ideas , 1: 1–24.
  • Campbell, A., 2002, A Mind of One’s Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Chodorow, N., 1978, Reproducing Mothering , Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • –––, 1995, “Family Structure and Feminine Personality”, in Feminism and Philosophy , N. Tuana, and R. Tong (eds.), Boulder, CO: Westview, pp. 43–66.
  • Deaux, K. and B. Major, 1990, “A Social-Psychological Model of Gender”, in Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference , D. Rhode (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 89-99.
  • Dembroff, R., 2020, “Beyond Binary: Genderqueer as Critical Gender Kind”, Philosopher’s Imprint , 20: 1–23.
  • –––, 2021, “Escaping the Natural Attitude about Gender”, Philosophical Studies , 178: 983–1003.
  • Fausto-Sterling, A., 1993a, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men , New York: Basic Books, 2 nd edition.
  • –––, 1993b, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough”, The Sciences , 33: 20–24.
  • –––, 2000a, “The Five Sexes: Revisited”, The Sciences , July/August: 18–23.
  • –––, 2000b, Sexing the Body , New York: Basic Books.
  • –––, 2003, “The Problem with Sex/Gender and Nature/Nurture”, in Debating Biology: Sociological Reflections on Health, Medicine and Society , S. J. Williams, L. Birke, and G. A. Bendelow (eds.), London & New York: Routledge, pp. 133–142.
  • –––, 2005, “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1 – Sex and Gender”, Signs , 30: 1491–1527.
  • Friedan, B., 1963, Feminine Mystique , Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
  • Frye, M., 1996, “The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive Category of Women”, Signs, 21: 991–1010.
  • –––, 2011, “Metaphors of Being a φ”, in Feminist Metaphysics , C. Witt (ed.), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 85–95.
  • Gatens, M., 1996, Imaginary Bodies , London: Routledge.
  • Gorman, C. 1992, “Sizing up the Sexes”, Time , January 20: 42–51.
  • Green, J. M. and B. Radford Curry, 1991, “Recognizing Each Other Amidst Diversity: Beyond Essentialism in Collaborative Multi-Cultural Feminist Theory”, Sage , 8: 39–49.
  • Grosz, E., 1994, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
  • Harris, A., 1993, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory”, in Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations , D. K. Weisberg (ed.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 248–258.
  • Haslanger, S., 1995, “Ontology and Social Construction”, Philosophical Topics , 23: 95–125.
  • –––, 2000a, “Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural”, in Feminism in Philosophy , M. Fricker, and J. Hornsby (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107–126.
  • –––, 2000b, “Gender and Race: (What) are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?”, Noûs , 34: 31–55.
  • –––, 2003a, “Future Genders? Future Races?”, Philosophic Exchange , 34: 4–27.
  • –––, 2003b, “Social Construction: The ‘Debunking’ Project”, in Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality, F. Schmitt (ed.), Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, pp. 301–325.
  • –––, 2005, “What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds”, Hypatia , 20: 10–26.
  • –––, 2006, “What Good are Our Intuitions?”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , Supplementary Volume 80: 89–118.
  • –––, 2012, Resisting Reality , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Heyes, C., 2000, Line Drawings , Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
  • hooks, b., 2000, Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center , London: Pluto, 2 nd edition.
  • Jaggar, A., 1983, “Human Biology in Feminist Theory: Sexual Equality Reconsidered”, in Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy , C. Gould (ed.), Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, pp. 21–42.
  • Jenkins, K., 2016, “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman”, Ethics , 126: 394–421.
  • –––, 2018, “Toward an Account of Gender Identity”, Ergo , 5: 713–744.
  • Kimmel, M., 2000, The Gendered Society , New York: Oxford University Press.
  • King, H., 2013, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence , Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
  • Laqueur, T., 1990, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Lawford-Smith, H., 2021, “Ending Sex-Based Oppression: Transitional Pathways”, Philosophia , 49: 1021–1041.
  • Lloyd, G., 1993, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy , London: Routledge, 2 nd edition.
  • MacKinnon, C., 1989, Toward a Feminist Theory of State , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Martin, J. R. 1994, “Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Dangerous Traps”, Signs , 19: 630–655.
  • McKitrick, J., 2015, “A Dispositional Account of Gender”, Philosophical Studies , 172: 2575–2589.
  • Mikkola, M. 2006, “Elizabeth Spelman, Gender Realism, and Women”, Hypatia , 21: 77–96.
  • –––, 2007, “Gender Sceptics and Feminist Politics”, Res Publica , 13: 361–380.
  • –––, 2009, “Gender Concepts and Intuitions”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 9: 559–583.
  • –––, 2011, “Ontological Commitments, Sex and Gender”, in Feminist Metaphysics , C. Witt (ed.), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 67–84.
  • –––, 2016, The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in Feminist Philosophy , New York: Oxford University Press.
  • –––, 2020, “The Function of Gender as a Historical Kind”, in Social Functions in Philosophy: Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives , R. Hufendiek, D. James, and R. van Riel (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 159–182.
  • Millett, K., 1971, Sexual Politics , London: Granada Publishing Ltd.
  • Moi, T., 1999, What is a Woman? , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Munro, V., 2006, “Resemblances of Identity: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Contemporary Feminist Legal Theory”, Res Publica , 12: 137–162.
  • Nicholson, L., 1994, “Interpreting Gender”, Signs , 20: 79–105.
  • –––, 1998, “Gender”, in A Companion to Feminist Philosophy , A. Jaggar, and I. M. Young (eds.), Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 289–297.
  • Price, H. H., 1953, Thinking and Experience , London: Hutchinson’s University Library.
  • Prokhovnik, R., 1999, Rational Woman , London: Routledge.
  • Rapaport, E. 2002, “Generalizing Gender: Reason and Essence in the Legal Thought of Catharine MacKinnon”, in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity , L. M. Antony and C. E. Witt (eds.), Boulder, CO: Westview, 2 nd edition, pp. 254–272.
  • Renzetti, C. and D. Curran, 1992, “Sex-Role Socialization”, in Feminist Philosophies , J. Kourany, J. Sterba, and R. Tong (eds.), New Jersey: Prentice Hall, pp. 31–47.
  • Rogers, L., 1999, Sexing the Brain , London: Phoenix.
  • Rubin, G., 1975, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, in Toward an Anthropology of Women , R. Reiter (ed.), New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210.
  • Salih, S., 2002, Judith Butler , London: Routledge.
  • Saul, J., 2006, “Gender and Race”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 80: 119–143.
  • Spelman, E., 1988, Inessential Woman , Boston: Beacon Press.
  • Stoljar, N., 1995, “Essence, Identity and the Concept of Woman”, Philosophical Topics , 23: 261–293.
  • –––, 2000, “The Politics of Identity and the Metaphysics of Diversity”, in Proceedings of the 20 th World Congress of Philosophy , D. Dahlstrom (ed.), Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, pp. 21–30.
  • –––, 2011, “Different Women. Gender and the Realism-Nominalism Debate”, in Feminist Metaphysics , C. Witt (ed.), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 27–46.
  • Stoller, R. J., 1968, Sex and Gender: On The Development of Masculinity and Femininity , New York: Science House.
  • Stone, A., 2004, “Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy”, Journal of Moral Philosophy , 1: 135–153.
  • –––, 2007, An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy , Cambridge: Polity.
  • Tanesini, A., 1996, “Whose Language?”, in Women, Knowledge and Reality , A. Garry and M. Pearsall (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 353–365.
  • Witt, C., 1995, “Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Theory”, Philosophical Topics , 23: 321–344.
  • –––, 2011a, The Metaphysics of Gender , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • –––, 2011b, “What is Gender Essentialism?”, in Feminist Metaphysics , C. Witt (ed.), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 11–25.
  • Wittig, M., 1992, The Straight Mind and Other Essays , Boston: Beacon Press.
  • Young, I. M., 1997, “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective”, in Intersecting Voices , I. M. Young, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 12–37.
  • Zack, N., 2005, Inclusive Feminism , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
  • The Feminist Philosophers Blog
  • QueerTheory.com , from the Internet Archive
  • World Wide Web Review: Webs of Transgender
  • What is Judith Butler’s Theory of Gender Performativity? (Perlego, open access study guide/ introduction)

Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

Copyright © 2022 by Mari Mikkola < m . mikkola @ uva . nl >

  • Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

  • Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Logo for College of Western Idaho Pressbooks

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

45 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large.  Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.”  Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.  20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.”  Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction).  University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

What a Gender Lens Brings to Development Studies

  • First Online: 22 December 2018

Cite this chapter

gender lens essay

  • Wendy Harcourt 8  

Part of the book series: EADI Global Development Series ((EADI))

1353 Accesses

1 Citations

2 Altmetric

The chapter explores the challenges of gender for Development Studies in the new Millennium. It looks at the implications of applying a gender lens to the complex economic, social and cultural processes shaping development processes. The underlying premise of the chapter is that development itself is powerfully gendered. It argues that applying a gender lens to Development Studies helps to reveal important insights into how power and knowledge operate in development practice. It presents some of the latest contributions of gender analysis to Development Studies in a discussion of gender and diversity; body politics; post development, feminist political ecology and sustainable development.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

gender lens essay

Gender Dilemmas in International Development Studies

What a feminist curiosity contributes to the study of development.

gender lens essay

A History of Development Through a Gender Prism: Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives

Agostino, A. (2015). Climate Justice and Women’s Agency: Voicing Other Ways of Doing Things. In R. Baksh & W. Harcourt (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements (pp. 815–836). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Google Scholar  

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Alverez, S., de Lima Costa, C., Feliu, V., Hester, R. J., Klahn, N., & Thayer, M. (Eds.). (2014). Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/A Américas . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Antrobus, P. (2004). The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues, Strategies . London: Zed Books.

Baksh, R., & Harcourt, W. (Eds.). (2015). The Oxford Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Batliwala, S. (2007). Taking the Power Out of Empowerment—An Experiential Account. Development in Practice, 17 (4–5), 557–565. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614520701469559 .

Article   Google Scholar  

Bergeron, S. (2006). Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Biekart, K., & Fowler, A. (2012). Transforming Activisms 2010 + Exploring Ways and Waves. Development and Change Forum 2013, 44 (3), 527–546. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi.org/10.1111/dech.12032/pdf .

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter . London: Routledge.

Carty, L. E., & Mohanty, C. T. (2015). Mapping Transnational Feminist Engagements: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Solidarity. In R. Baksh & W. Harcourt (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements (pp. 82–115). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Chakrapani, V. (2010). Hijras/Transgender Women in India: HIV, Human Rights and Social Exclusion . New Delhi: UNDP India. http://www.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/hijras_transgender_in_india_hiv_human_rights_and_social_exclusion.pdf . Accessed 18 February 2018.

Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment . New York: Routledge.

Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and Power . Cambridge: Polity Press.

Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Connell, R. W. (2009). Gender in World Perspectives . Cambridge: Polity Press.

Connell, R. (2012). Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 37 (4), 857–881. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/664478 .

Connell, R. (2014). Rethinking Gender from the South. Feminist Studies, 40 (3), 518–539. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15767/feministstudies.40.3.518 .

Connell, R., & Pearse, R. (2015). Gender: In World Perspective . Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cornwall, A. (2009). Revisiting the Gender Agenda. IDS Bulletin, 38 (2), 69–78. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2007.tb00353.x/full .

Cornwall, A., & Eade, D. (2010). Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords . Bourton: Practical Action.

Cornwall, A., & Edwards, J. (2014). Feminisms, Empowerment and Development: Changing Women’s Lives . London: Zed Books.

Cornwall, A., Harrison, E., & Whitehead, A. (Eds.). (2006). Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges . London: Zed Books.

Cornwall, A., Jolly, S., & Correa, S. (2008). Development with a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development . London: Zed Books.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43 (6), 1241.

Crenshaw, K. (1994). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. In M. Fineman & R. Mykitiuk (Eds.), The Public Nature of Private Violence (pp. 93–118). New York: Routledge.

De Jong, S. (2016). Mainstream(ing) Has Never Run Clean, Perhaps Never Can: Gender in the Main/Stream of Development. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), Palgrave Handbook on Gender and Development . London: Palgrave.

Davis, K. (2008). Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful . Feminist Theory, 9 (1), 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700108086364 , http://fty.sagepub.com .

Escobar, A. (1995 [2011]). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Escobar, A. (2007a). Post-development as Concept and Social Practice. In A. Ziai (Ed.), Exploring Post-development: Theory and Practice, Problems and Perspectives (pp. 18–32). London: Routledge.

Escobar, A. (2007b). Towards Post-development: Searching for Signposts, a New Language and New Paradigms. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The Post Development Reader (pp. 377–403). London: Zed Books.

Ferguson, L. (2015). “This Is Our Gender Person”. The Messy Business of Working as a Gender Expert in International Development. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17 (3), 380–397. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616742.2014.918787 .

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The End of Capitalism as We Knew It: A Feminist Critique of Political Economy . Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A Post-capitalist Politics . Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Grosz, L. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Towards Corporeal Feminism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hankivsky, O., et al. (2014). An Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis Framework: Critical Reflections on a Methodology for Advancing Equity. International Journal for Equity in Health, 13 (119), 1–16. https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-014-0119-x .

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14 (3), 575–599. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00463663%28198823%2914%3A3%3C575%3ASKTSQI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M .

Harcourt, W. (2009). Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development . London: Zed Books.

Harcourt, W. (2014). The Future of Capitalism: A Consideration of Alternatives. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 38 (6), 1307–1328.

Harcourt, W. (2016a). Introduction: Dilemmas, Dialogues, Debates. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 1–12). London: Palgrave.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Harcourt, W. (2016b). Gender Dilemmas in International DS. European Journal of Development Research, 28 (2), 1–8 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2016.6 .

Harcourt, W. (2016c). Introduction. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development (pp. 62–76). London: Palgrave.

Harcourt, W. (2017). Another Hotel Room, Another City, Another Training: Reflections on Co-optation of Feminism by Development. International Journal of Feminist Politics, 19 (2), 249–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2017.1291224 .

Harcourt, W., & Nelson, I. L. (Eds.). (2015). Practicing Feminist Political Ecology: Moving Beyond the Green Economy . London: Zed Books.

Harcourt, W., Icaza Garza, R. A., & Vargas, V. (2016). Exploring Embodiment and Intersectionality in Transnational Feminist Activist Research. In K. Biekart, W. Harcourt, & P. Knorringa (Eds.), Exploring Civic Innovation for Social and Economic Transformation (148–167). London: Routledge.

Harding, S. (1991). Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Live . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Harding, S. (2008). Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities . Durham: Duke University Press.

Horn, J. (2013, September 30). Rethinking Social Movements. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/jessica-horn/rethinking-social-movements . Accessed 18 February 2018.

Icaza, R., & Vázquez, R. (2015). The Coloniality of Gender as a Radical Critique of Developmentalism. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development (pp. 62–76). London: Palgrave.

Jackson, C., & Pearson, R. (Eds.). (1998). Feminist Visions of Development: Gender Analysis and Policy . London: Routledge.

Jolly, S., Cornwall, A., & Hawkins, K. (Eds.). (2013). Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure . London: Zed Books.

Kabeer, N. (1994). Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought . London: Verso.

Kabeer, N. (1997). Women, Wages and Intra-Household Power Relations in Urban Bangladesh. Development and Change , 28 (2), 261–302. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7660.00043 .

Kabeer, N. (2001). Resources, Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women’s Empowerment. In A. Sisak (Ed.), Discussing Women’s Empowerment: Theory and Practice (pp 17–57). Stockholm: Sida Studies. http://dmeforpeace.org/sites/default/files/SidaStudies_No3.pdf . Accessed 18 February 2018.

Kabeer, N., & Mahmud, S. (2004). Rags, Riches and Women Workers: Export-Oriented Garment Manufacturing in Bangladesh. In Commonwealth Secretariat (Ed.), Chains of Fortune: Linking Women Producers and Workers with Global Markets (pp. 133–162). London: Commonwealth Secretariat.

Love, B. (2010). Mountain Vegetables and the Politics of Local Flavour. In S. Assmann & E. C. Rath (Eds.), Japanese Foodways, Past and Present (pp. 221–240). Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.

Lind, A. (Ed.). (2010). Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance . London: Routledge.

Luft, R. (2009). Intersectionality and the Risk of Flattening Difference. In M. T. Berger & K. Guidroz (Eds.), The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class and Gender (pp. 100–117). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

McKinnon, K. (2011). Development Professionals in Northern Thailand: Hopes, Politics and Practice . Singapore: Singapore National University Press.

Mendoza, B. (2016). Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality. In L. Disch & M. Hawkesworth (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (pp 100–121). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mohanty, C. (2003). Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity . Durham: Duke University Press.

Nash, J. (2008). Rethinking Intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.4 .

Parpart, J., Rai, S., & Staudt, K. (Eds.). (2002). Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Global/Local World . London: Routledge.

Paulson, S. (2016). Masculinities and Femininities in Latin America’s Uneven Development . New York and Abingdon: Routledge.

Petchesky, R. (2002). Global Prescriptions: Gender Health and Human Rights . London: Zed Books in association with UNRISD.

Rai, S. (2008). The Gender Politics of Development . London: Zed Books.

Resurrección, B. P. (2017). Gender and Environment from ‘Women, Environment and Development’ to Feminist Political Ecology. In S. MacGregor (Ed.), Handbook of Gender and Environment (pp. 71–85). Oxford and London: Routledge.

Richardson, D., & Robinson, V. (Eds.). (2008). Introducing Gender and Women’s Studies . London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rocheleau, D. (2015). A Situated View of Feminist Political Ecology from My Networks, Roots and Territories. In W. Harcourt & I. L. Nelson (Eds.), Practicing Feminist Political Ecology: Moving Beyond the Green Economy (pp. 29–66). London: Zed Books.

Rocheleau, D., & Nirmal, P. (2015). Feminist Political Ecologies: Grounded, Networked and Rooted on Earth. In R. Baksh & W. Harcourt (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements (pp. 793–814). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Sachs, W. (1992 [2010]). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books.

Sandler, J. (2015). “Warriors Within”: How Feminists Change Bureaucracies and Bureaucracies Change Feminists. In R. Baksh & W. Harcourt (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements (pp. 188–214). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Sharma, J. (2009). Reflections on the Construction of Heteronormativity. Development, 52 (1), 52–5. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.72 .

Spivak, G. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present . Harvard: Harvard University Press.

UN Women. (2015, December 13). The World’s Women: Trends and Statistics . New York: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. http://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/worldswomen.html . Accessed 13 December 2015.

Valters, C. (2015). Theories of Change: Time for a Radical Approach in Learning for Development (ODI Working Paper). London: ODI. http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/9835.pdf . Accessed 17 December 2015.

Visvanathan, N., Duggan, L., Nisonoff, L., Wiegersma, N., (Eds.). (1997 [2010]). Women Gender and Development Reader . London: Zed Books.

Walby, S. (2009). Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities . London: Palgrave.

Wilson, K. (2012). Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice . London: Zed Books.

Woodward, A. E. (2012). Building Velvet Triangles: Gender and Informal Governance. In W. L. Chew & B. Mosslemans (Eds.), Vesalius College 25 Years of Academic Excellence in Teaching and Research (pp. 145–170). Brussels: Academic & Scientific Publishers.VUB-Press.

Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13 (3), 193–209. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1350506806065752 .

Ziai, A. (Ed.). (2007). Exploring Post-development: Theory and Practice, Problems and Perspectives . London: Routledge.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University, The Hague, The Netherlands

Wendy Harcourt

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

Elisabetta Basile

University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

Tiina Kontinen

European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes, Bonn, Germany

Susanne von Itter

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Harcourt, W. (2019). What a Gender Lens Brings to Development Studies. In: Baud, I., Basile, E., Kontinen, T., von Itter, S. (eds) Building Development Studies for the New Millennium. EADI Global Development Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04052-9_16

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04052-9_16

Published : 22 December 2018

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-04051-2

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-04052-9

eBook Packages : Political Science and International Studies Political Science and International Studies (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

  • Publish with us

Policies and ethics

  • Find a journal
  • Track your research

113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for gender roles essay topics? This field is hot, controversial, and really worth exploring!

  • 🔝 Top 10 Gender Topics
  • 📝 Gender Essay: Writing Tips
  • 🏆 Gender Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

✍️ Gender Argumentative Essay Topics

❓ research questions about gender roles.

In your gender role essay, you might want to focus on the issues of gender equality in the workplace. Another exciting option is to write about gender stereotypes in education. Finally, you can elaborate on how traditional gender roles are changing.

In this article, you’ll find a list of gender argumentative essay topics, ideas for papers on gender and society, as well as top gender roles essay examples.

🔝 Top 10 Gender Roles Topics

  • Gender stereotypes and the way they affect people
  • Fighting gender stereotypes and sexism
  • Gender equality in the workplace
  • Gender stereotypes in education
  • Gender schema theory
  • Is gender socially constructed?
  • Social learning theory and gender
  • Gender roles and sexual orientation
  • Body image and gender
  • Social gender construction in the media

📝 Gender Roles Essay: Writing Tips

Essays on gender roles present students’ understanding of the similarities, differences, and aspects of gender roles in society.

Writing gender roles essays helps learners to understand the significance of topics related to gender roles and the changes in societal norms. Students should be highly aware of the problems associated with traditional gender roles. For example, there are many periods in world history, in which people did not have equal rights.

Moreover, some aspects of gender roles may be associated with discrimination. To make an essay on this problem outstanding, you should discuss the problem in detail and present your points clearly. A useful tip is to develop a good structure for your paper.

Before starting to work on the paper, you should select the problem that is most interesting or relevant to you.

Gender roles essay topics and titles may include:

  • The history of gender roles and their shifts throughout the time
  • Male and female roles in society
  • Gender roles in literature and media
  • How a man and a woman is perceived in current society
  • The causes and outcomes of gender discrimination
  • The problem of ‘glass ceiling’
  • The problem of social stratification and its outcomes
  • The revolution in the concept of gender

After selecting the issue for discussion, you can start working on the essay’s structure. Here are some useful tips on how to structure your paper:

  • Select the topic you want to discuss (you can choose one from the list above). Remember to pay attention to the type of essay you should write. If it is an argumentative essay, reflect on what problem you would want to analyze from opposing perspectives.
  • Gender roles essay titles are important because they can help you to get the reader’s attention. Think of something simple but self-explanatory.
  • An introductory paragraph is necessary, as it will present the questions you want to discuss in the paper. Remember to state the thesis of your essay in this section.
  • Think of your gender roles essay prompts. Which aspects of the selected problem do you want to focus on? Dedicate a separate section for each of the problems.
  • Remember to include a refutation section if you are writing an argumentative essay. In this section, you should discuss an alternative perspective on the topic in 1-2 paragraphs. Do not forget to outline why your opinion is more credible than the alternative one.
  • Avoid making the paragraphs and sentences too long. You can stick to a 190 words maximum limit for one paragraph. At the same time, make sure that the paragraphs are longer than 65 words. Try to make all sections of the body paragraphs of similar length.
  • Check out examples online to see how you can structure your paper and organize the information. Pay attention to the number of paragraphs other students include.
  • Remember to include a gender roles essay conclusion. In this paragraph, you will discuss the most important claims of your paper.
  • Do not forget to add a reference page in which you will include the sources used in the paper. Ask your professor in advance about the types of literature you can utilize for the essay.

Do not forget that there are free samples on our website that can help you to get the best ideas for your essay!

🏆 Gender Roles Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

  • Gender Roles in the 19th Century Society: Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper However, the narrator’s developing madness can also act as the symbolical depiction of the effects of the men’s dominance on women and the female suppression in the 19th-century society.”The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in […]
  • Gender Roles in Antigone Essay This will be seen through an analysis of the other characters in the play and the values of ancient Greeks. Indeed this central character appears to be at odds with the inclinations of the other […]
  • Changing Gender Roles Between Boys and Girls In the twenty-first Century, girls have greatly stepped up and assumed some of the roles that were considered to be boy’s while boys have done the same leading to an interchange of roles.
  • Gender roles in the Wind in the Willows For instance, in the case where both the mole and the rat make comments to the toad that are full of women critics.
  • Gender Roles in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams In the play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams has written the story of the Wingfield family that lived in St Louis during the 1940s.
  • Athena and Gender Roles in Greek Mythology According to Eicher and Roach-Higgins, the elements of her dress were important because they immediately communicated specific ideas about her character that was as contradictory as the physical gender of the birthing parent.”In appropriating the […]
  • The Concepts of Gender Roles and Sexuality by John Money and Judith Butler These categories of feminists are united in the belief of existence of many children and little sex. This paper explains the concepts and ideologies relating to gender roles and sexuality.as advocated by John Money and […]
  • Gender Roles in “Bridge to Terabithia” by Paterson The theme of gender roles is consistently present in the novel, starting with character origins and becoming the central concept as they mature to defy archetypal perceptions of feminine and masculine expectations in order to […]
  • Discussing Gender Roles in the Interaction Perspective It is the purpose of this issue to discuss the concept of gender roles using the sociological perspective of symbolic interaction.
  • Conflict of Gender Roles in Munro’s “Boys and Girls” Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is a story about a puzzled girl who struggles to find the balance between the battles of her inner female-housewife side, like her mother, and a boyish character who likes to […]
  • Gender Roles and Stereotyping in Education Teachers should be trained to give clear and useful instruction to students on the issue of gender roles in modern society.
  • Nomadic Society’s Gender Roles and Warrior Culture On the one hand, it was clear that the 1100s and the 1200s included the period of male power. It was wrong to assume that all women were similar and treat them in the same […]
  • Ideology of Gender Roles In the world of literature, ideology has played a vital role in depicting the condition of the society. In this scenario, Kingston reveals that the men out-live their roles in the society, and they are […]
  • Gender Roles Inversion: The Madonna Phenomenon At the same time partial narrowing of the gender gap in the context of economic participation did not lead to the equality of men and women in the field of their occupations.
  • Women’s Gender Roles in American Literature The stories written by Constance Woolson Fenimore, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Jaqueline Bishop highlight the harmful gender roles and discrimination that still remains a major topic for disputes and illustrate the fate of oppressed women.
  • Culture and History: Gender Roles Over the Past 50 or So Years It is not that there were no women in the workforce; it was just that she had to choose one over the other, juggling the two was quite rare and unheard of.
  • Gender Roles in Society One might think that a child is born with the idea of how to behave in relation to gender while in the real sense; it is the cultivation of the society that moulds people to […]
  • Gender Roles in South Korean Laws and Society At the same time, all custody is traditionally granted to husbands and fathers in a case of a divorce” though the anxiety about the high divorce rate and the nasty endings of relationships is more […]
  • Gender Roles in Brady’s and Theroux’s Works In the satire “Being a Man” by Paul Theroux, the author demonstrates to readers the essence of how a particular manifestation of masculinity is extolled in American society.
  • Aspects of Gender Roles and Identity The breadth of her practice in transgender issues suggests that every choice Bowers makes is ethical, requiring her to be respectful and highly responsible.
  • Changing Gender Roles in Families Over Time The division of labor and traditional gender roles in the family usually consists of men doing the work while women take care of the children, other relatives, and housekeeping.
  • Gender Roles, Expectations, and Discrimination Despite Isaac being the calmest boy in the school, he had a crush on Grace, a beautiful girl in the school who was from a wealthy family.
  • Gender Roles in Social Constructionism The reality, in the view of sociologists, is a social attitude in connection with which a personality is formed that adapts to the requirements of the world.
  • Gender Roles and Stereotypes in Straightlaced Film One might conclude that gender neutrality and abstraction in offices are only a cover to maintain the basis of gender injustice.
  • Biology and Gender Roles in Society Thus, it may be more convenient for society to justify the imposition of certain gender roles on men and women using biology-related arguments, which, in reality, are more related to culture and social development.
  • Children’s Views of Gender Roles Today, both parents and teachers see the positive impact of the attempts to integrate anti-biased gender-related education on young children as they get more freedom to express themselves and grow up less aggressive.
  • The Construction of Gender Roles However, it is wrong to consider women exposed to the domestic work powerless, as they have the opportunity to informally or implicitly influence men and the decisions they make.
  • Gender Roles Set in Stone: Prehistoric and Ancient Work of Arts In the prehistoric and ancient works of art, the representation of women and men reveals a massive imbalance in gender equity that favors men over women.
  • Sociology of the Family: Gender Roles Thus, the societal predisposition and notion that women are lesser in the community should be abandoned, and greater emphasis should be placed on the critical functions they perform in the household. These assertions, equivocations, and […]
  • Femininity and Masculinity: Understanding Gender Roles The understanding of how gender roles are portrayed in the media and the general perception of the expected behavior for men and women communicated non-verbally in the society is the basis on which children build […]
  • Injustice Within Strict Gender Roles There is still no clear answer to how a person can find his or her destiny and place in the world, and understand the opportunities and prospects, considering the opinion of the dominant number of […]
  • Gender Roles and Body Image in Disney Movies In this research, attention will be paid to gender roles and body images of Disney princesses to understand the popularity of the franchise and its impact on child development.
  • Gender Roles and How People Perceive Them However, all of the survey participants indicated that their families would be inclined to differentiate between the toys for a child based on the latter’s sex and the corresponding perceived gender role.
  • Gender Roles: From Prehistoric Era to Modern Society Since each gender was assigned a particular role in the past due to the differences in the biological makeup between a man and a woman in the prehistoric era, the modern process of communication between […]
  • Gender Roles in TV Commercials and Values in the Society Each of them will watch, code, and analyze the TV commercials separately; at the end of the procedure, their results will be compared in order to ensure the inter-observer reliability of the chosen research method.
  • Gender Roles in Contemporary Society The conditions of life are tough and it is presumed that only men are able to carry out such hardships and limitations of a soldier life.
  • Gender Roles in ‘Mr. Green’ by Robert Olen Butler Green Butler uses the character of the grandfather to develop the theme of gender roles within the culture. The character of the grandfather is extremely sound for the cultural beliefs the author conveyed through all […]
  • Gender Roles and Sexuality in Media: Cosmopolitan & Maxim The woman portrayed in these sites is supposed to look ‘hot’ and sexy in order to be attractive to a man.
  • Gender Roles: Changes From the Late 1800’s to Today The definition of who is a male or a female depends on the types of gender roles one was exposed to during the early ages. In today’s society, we have a greater number of women […]
  • Social Element in Gender Roles I learned of the origins of gay and lesbian studies, as well that of the confining of such studies in earlier times to specific institutions.
  • Equality: The Use of TV to Develop Our Gender Roles In this sense, when it is the men who predominantly work outside of the home, they will usually see the home as a place of leisure and so use the TV as a source of […]
  • Gender Roles in Brady’s “Why I Want a Wife” and Sacks’ “Stay-at-Home Dads” Yet, there are some distinctions Judy Brady believes that women are often viewed as unpaid house servants who have to take care of husbands’ needs, whereas Glenn Sacks argues that gender roles begin to transform […]
  • Gender Roles and Family Systems in Hispanic Culture In the Hispanic culture, amarianismo’ and amachismo’ are the terms used to determine the various behavioral expectations among the family members.
  • Family Unit and Gender Roles in Society and Market The role of molding the infant into an adult belonged to the family in the ancient society. In the past, the father was expected to be the breadwinner of the family.
  • China’s Gender Roles in Mo Yan’s and Shen Fu’s Works Six Records of a Floating Life is a multi-faceted chronicle which helps to comprehend the difficulties and the features of Shen Fu’s life and the romance between him and his beloved Chen Yun.
  • “Beside Oneself” by Judith Butler: Gender Roles Following the views of the author, who states that choice in the formation of gender and sexuality is not transparent, and a key role is still played by others in the form of expectations and […]
  • Gender Roles in Couples and Sex Stereotypes Altogether, the last reconsiderations of the nature of relations promoted the appearance of numerous debates related to the role of partners and their right to be the leader.
  • Gender Roles in Tango: Cultural Aspects However, one should not assume that the role of women in tango is inferior because they create the most aesthetic aspects of this dance.
  • Gender Roles in Toy Stores According to Fisher-Thompson et al, two of the major differentiating factors in toys for girls and boys are color and nature.
  • Women in Hip-Hop Music: A Provocative and Objectified Gender Roles It is one thing that men want women to be in music videos and play a particular role, but women are willing to participate in the videos.
  • Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media In the critical analysis of the article, the point of disagreement is that of under-representation of women in the media. How do the media subordinate and relegate roles of women in society?
  • Effects of Media Messages about Gender Roles Media articles, such as the Maxim Magazine and the Cosmopolitan Magazine, socialize individuals to believe that women are very different from men as regards to dressing, behaving, and eating.
  • The Change of Gender Roles This similarity is one of the most important to focus on the structure of the narrative. In both plays, the main actions of the characters are not directly described by the authors.
  • Gender Equality: Male Dominance The simple reason is that gender inequality exists in affluent societies wherein women are free to do what they want, have access to education, and have the capacity to create wealth.
  • “The Odd Women” and “Women in Love”: Evolving Views of Gender Roles An effort is also made to track the changes of the roles of women in the social fabric in the Victorian era by considering The Odd Women by George Gissing written in 1893.
  • Gender Roles: Constructing Gender Identity In the course of the twentieth century and at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the images and roles of gender have constantly been changing.
  • Analysis of the Peculiarities of Gender Roles Within Education, Families and Student Communities Peculiarities of gender aspect within the education system and labour market Attitude for marriage of men and women as one of the major aspects within the analysis of gender roles Family relations as a significant […]
  • Concepts of Gender Roles As a result of these, the war on gender inequality and sexism has failed, because of the failure of these agents of change to promote gender equality and eliminate discriminative notions held by the society.
  • Cohabitation and Division of Gender Roles in a Couple Cohabitation is perceived in the society as the form of relationships which is an effective alternative to the traditional marriage because of focusing on the principles of flexibility, freedom, and equality, but few couples can […]
  • Gender Roles in the United States Over the Last Century The men’s perception towards this idea was negative, and this consequently resulted to a conflict with the men claiming that the roles of the women were in the kitchen.
  • Fashions, gender roles and social views of the 1950s and 1960s Fashion was highly valued and this can be seen in the way the clothes worn by the wives of the presidential candidates in America hit the headlines. In the 1950s, the role of housekeeping and […]
  • Gender Roles by Margaret Mead Once the a rift defining men and women develops this way, it goes further and defines the positions, which men and women occupy in the society, basing on these physical and biological differences, which form […]
  • Cheating, Gender Roles, and the Nineteenth-Century Croquet Craze The author’s main thesis is, “Yet was this, in fact, how the game was played on the croquet lawns of the nineteenth century?” Whereas authors of croquet manuals and magazines emphasize so much on the […]
  • Gender Roles in Cartoons Though the males are portrayed to be logical, but it is shown that the females are more successful because of simple blunders or miscalculations which males fail to understand, females are able to beat males […]
  • The Industrial Revolution Impact on the Gender Roles The population growth combined with the increased productivity of small parts of the country and the migration of the now landless people in search of work opportunities led to the phenomena of urbanization.
  • Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper & Trifles The two texts; the short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins and the play ‘Trifles’ by Susan Glaspell strategically illustrate this claim since they both aim at attracting the reader’s attention to the poor […]
  • How Does Aristophanes Represent Gender Roles in Lysistrata?
  • Are Gender Roles and Relationships More Equal in Modern Family Life?
  • How Do Children Develop Gender Roles?
  • Does Men’s Fashion Reflect Changes in Male Gender Roles?
  • How Did Colonialism Resonate With Gender Roles and Oppression?
  • Are Gender Roles Damaging Society?
  • How Did Revolutions Affect Gender Roles?
  • Are Gender Roles Defined by Society or by Genetics?
  • How Have Family Structure and Gender Roles Changed?
  • Are Gender Roles Fluid When Dealing With Death and Tragedy?
  • How Do Gender Roles Affect Communication?
  • Are Gender Roles Natural?
  • How Do Gender Roles Affect Immigrants?
  • Are Gender Stereotyped Roles Correct?
  • How Do Gender Roles Affect the Physical and Emotional Health?
  • Have Gender Roles Played a Big Part in the History?
  • How Do Gender Roles and Extroversion Effects How Much People Talk?
  • What Are Gender Roles? How Are They Defined?
  • How Are Gender Roles Predetermined by the Environment?
  • What Drives the Gender Wage Gap?
  • How Has Gender Roles Changed Over the Last Centuries?
  • What Factors Influence Gender Roles?
  • How Have Gender Roles in Japanese Theatre Influenced and Affected Societal View on Homosexuality and Masculinity?
  • What Society Norms for Gender Roles Should Be Conceived?
  • How Have Traditional Gender Roles Been Stressful?
  • What Was Distinctive About Gender Roles in the Nineteenth Century?
  • How Has Hegemonic Masculinity Set Ideas of Gender Roles?
  • How Do Media and Politics Influence Gender Roles?
  • Where Does the Truth on Gender Roles Lie in Nahua and Mayan Civilizations?
  • How Radical Are the Changes to the Gender Roles in Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”?
  • Masculinity Topics
  • Social Stratification Essay Titles
  • Sexism Essay Ideas
  • Women’s Movement Questions
  • Feminism Questions
  • Cultural Relativism Questions
  • Domestic Violence Paper Topics
  • Sociological Perspectives Titles
  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 26). 113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/gender-roles-essay-examples/

"113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 26 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/gender-roles-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples'. 26 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples." February 26, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/gender-roles-essay-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples." February 26, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/gender-roles-essay-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples." February 26, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/gender-roles-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

  • Basic site functions
  • Ensuring secure, safe transactions
  • Secure account login
  • Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
  • Remembering privacy and security settings
  • Analyzing site traffic and usage
  • Personalized search, content, and recommendations
  • Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

  • Remembering general and regional preferences
  • Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations International Center for the Study of Research, Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier, Kidlington, Oxford, United Kingdom

ORCID logo

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations International Center for the Study of Research, Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier Inc, New York, New York, United States of America, School of Professional Studies, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Validation, Visualization

Roles Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

  • Rachel Herbert, 
  • Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, 
  • Kristy James, 
  • Andrew Plume

PLOS

  • Published: October 7, 2022
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657
  • Reader Comments

Table 1

Through efforts of the Gender Summits and UN Women, it is evident that all United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that the outcomes benefit women and men equally. Our research focuses on the extent to which sex and gender topics are explicitly covered in research related to the SDGs. Expanding on previous studies, we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and gender terms. The approach visualizes the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and overlays that view with the proportion of the publications associated with sex and gender topics. We show that attention to sex and gender topics is uneven across the SDGs, and that even where overlap between an SDG and consideration of sex and gender is high, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG have little explicit connection with sex and gender. This study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and gender across all SDGs as well as monitoring integration progress over time.

Citation: Herbert R, Falk-Krzesinski HJ, James K, Plume A (2022) Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration. PLoS ONE 17(10): e0275657. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657

Editor: Olga Scrivner, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology / Indiana University, UNITED STATES

Received: April 20, 2022; Accepted: September 21, 2022; Published: October 7, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Herbert et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Owing to Scopus data sharing policy, we are not permitted to share the underlying database of articles on which these maps are based. Instead we have included the files that permit the reader to open the maps directly in the freely-available VOSviewer software in a Mendeley dataset. The files necessary to open the maps generated in this paper and the accompanying online supplementary material are available here: Herbert, Rachel; James, Kristy; Plume, Andrew; Falk-Krzesinski, Holly (2022), “Data for: Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/8kthxbmmm5.1 .

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the benefits of incorporating sex and gender analysis into research, with calls for this dimension to be considered from the research design stage [ 1 , 2 ]. By doing so, research questions will be answered more comprehensively and the research itself will be more robust and reproducible [ 3 ].

It has also become evident, particularly through a report by UN Women [ 4 ] and discussions and work presented at the Gender Summits held since 2011 [ 5 , 6 ], and previous research [ 7 ], that the targets for the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [ 8 ] must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that gender-responsive policies and accountability processes are developed and the outcomes to achieve the goals benefit women and men equally. This is also highlighted by the UN principle of ‘Leave No One Behind’ [ 9 ]. Indeed, progress on the goals can only be achieved through action plans that incorporate this consideration [ 10 ]. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also called for more nuanced consideration of gender: a broader view of the concept [ 4 ] and a deeper understanding of the reasons behind gender differences do exist [ 11 ].

Attention to sex and gender has increased in many areas of life in recent years, but this important dimension is still often missing from published research. This is especially the case where the first and last authors of publications are not women [ 12 ], and it has been demonstrated in recent findings from an Elsevier report that women authors are less commonly last authors than men [ 13 ]. Although the significance of the first and last author position varies, in some fields, such as molecular biology, the last author position is usually reserved for the principal investigator or equivalent [ 14 ]–an author who will steer the overall research project. Taken all together, this suggests that the situation is unlikely to change without much greater attention on this issue in research institutions.

Several of the SDGs are written with a recognition of the role of sex and gender in achieving outcomes and are specified in their targets and the indicators used to measure progress. But while the UN has recognized a need for “systematic mainstreaming of a gender perspective” [ 15 ], this is not the case across all 17 goals: one UN Women report identified cases where targets that included a gender dimension were lacking that dimension in the monitoring indicator [ 4 ] and another reported insufficient data to enable comprehensive tracking of progress [ 16 ]. With SDG outcomes fixed to a 2030 target date, building an understanding of how sex and gender are embedded within the research supporting the SDGs is an immediate imperative to support evidence-based implementation of the agenda and ensure that the impacts of the SDGs in gender can be robustly assessed. To establish an understanding based on published research studies, we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and/or gender topics. In the rest of this paper we will outline this approach and highlight some key findings.

Expanding on previous studies that investigated gender in research from a topical perspective using the Scopus database [ 17 ], we have developed a keyword search-based approach to identify publications that explicitly include terms related to sex and/or gender topical research in the title, abstract or keywords. These publications are matched to the corpus of publications reflecting research related to each of 16 SDGs (excluding SDG 17: Partnership for the Goals) that have been defined on the basis of expert-informed Scopus keyword searches augmented with machine learning [ 18 ].

As an important point of departure from previous work, in this study we consider sex and gender together. Following the WHO’s definitions, sex “refers to the biological characteristics that define humans as male or female,” and gender “refers to the socially constructed norms, roles and relations of and among women, men, boys and girls,” as well as the “expressions and identities of women, men, boys, girls and gender-diverse people” [ 19 ]. While they are separate concepts, they are also related and the keyword search that we have developed incorporates terms that relate to both. This allows for the often interchangeable (and perhaps incorrect) use of terms relating to either or both of these concepts by publication authors.

The keyword-based approach to identify publications including terms related to sex and/or gender in the title, abstract or keywords was created in an iterative fashion as follows. We captured relevant keywords from: i) keywords from publications within the public Mendeley library “Gender in the Global Research Landscape” [ 20 ]; ii) terms used by established organizations and societies, e.g. Gender Identity Research and Education Society, UNICEF and UNESCO; iii) and terms provided by Portia Ltd, the organizer of the Gender Summits. Each keyword was tested individually in a Scopus search of publication titles, abstracts and author/index keywords for precision and recall and appropriate wildcards, Boolean and proximity operators were identified for each. Some keywords (such as ‘man’, ‘marriage’ and ‘family’) were excluded because their non-specificity resulted in decreased precision without any increase in recall. While it is true that many of those terms that appear in the final query add only incrementally to the sum total of the publications retrieved in Scopus, we were conscious not to oversimplify our query to those terms that did retrieve the majority of the results (such as the single term ‘gender’, for example). We also consider that all relevant terms are equally valuable to include and that sex and gender terms are used inconsistently and sometimes incorrectly in the literature and our keyword search deliberately conflates them in order to reflect that ambiguity.

We studied years 2015 to 2020, but for the term mapping, publications were limited to those published in 2020, as this is the most recent period for which we had a full data year of articles within Scopus when we executed the analysis, and to peer-reviewed types (i.e., articles, reviews, conference proceedings, short surveys and data articles). In selecting 2020, we are illustrating the analysis that our proposed approach could show and the insights that can be revealed. The final, selected Scopus sex and gender keyword search can be found in Table 1 .

thumbnail

  • PPT PowerPoint slide
  • PNG larger image
  • TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.t001

For each of the 16 SDGs included in this study, a corpus consisting of the publications identified by queries described recently [ 18 ] was created from an analytical copy of the Scopus dataset accessed via ICSR Lab [ 21 ], snapshot dated June 1 st 2021. This delivered a unique publication set for each of the 16 SDGs. A second corpus consisting of the publications identified by each SDG keyword search AND the selected sex and gender keyword search was created from the same data. Publications in the first corpus (SDG-related publications) that also appear in the second corpus (sex and/or gender-related publications) were tagged as such after matching using Scopus unique publication identifiers. This tagging was used as the basis for calculating the proportion of each SDG’s publications that include those related to sex and/or gender research topics as well as for developing topical maps using VOSviewer.

VOSviewer is “a software tool used for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks” [ 22 ]; the current version at the time of analysis (Version 1.6.18) was employed. This tool uses natural language processing and network mapping techniques to process publication data exported from Scopus for visualization and further analysis. Owing to the processing limits of VOSviewer, where SDG publication sets were too large for mapping they have been randomly down-sampled to approximately 20,000 publications; this applies to all SDG publication sets except for SDG 1, which resulted in fewer than 20,000 publications and so all publications were included because that volume falls within the processing power of VOSviewer. In VOSviewer, we applied binary counting of terms, meaning that the presence or absence of a term in a publication was used for determining the occurrence frequencies and term co-occurrence, not the number of occurrences of a term in a publication. We applied a term occurrence threshold of at least 100 occurrences for inclusion in the map across each SDG’s publication set with the exception of SDG 1, where the smaller volume of retrieved publications meant that a threshold of at least 50 publications was more appropriate; these thresholds were selected heuristically as a trade-off between comprehensiveness and readability/interpretability of the resulting maps, and other thresholds did not materially alter our observations. VOSviewer’s default setting to map 60% of the most relevant terms (based on the calculated relevance score) was selected since “terms with a high relevance score tend to represent specific topics covered by the text data, while terms with a low relevance score tend to be of a general nature and tend not to be representative of any specific topic. By excluding terms with a low relevance score, general terms are filtered out and the focus shifts to more specific and more informative terms. By default, 40% of the terms are excluded based on their relevance score” [ 23 ]. To further validate the specificity of the sex and gender keyword search, we carefully examined the results of the approach described above for SDG 5: Gender Equality. We found the expected high degree of overlap between the SDG 5 publication set and those publications within it tagged as also being identified by the sex and gender keyword search.

Most SDGs have a low and steady proportion of publications related to sex and/or gender

The number of research publications in 2020 identified by each SDG query is shown in Table 2 , along with the number and proportion of these that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword query. The variation in volume of each of the SDG’s corpus is apparent, ranging from SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being (417,443 publications) to the much smaller SDG 1: No Poverty (13,424 publications), to some extent reflecting the disparity in the number and complexity of the targets relating to each goals (e.g. 13 targets for SDG 3 versus 7 targets for SDG 1). Of particular relevance to the present work we note the relatively small number of publications returned by the SDG 5: Gender Equality query (25,601 publications). Most of the SDGs have a low proportion of publications that explicitly relate to sex and gender research topics. SDG 5: Gender Equality and SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being stand out for their high shares (95% and 62%, respectively). Among the remainder, no SDG has a share above 40% and eight are under 10%. This means that most research on SDGs does not include explicit consideration of sex and/or gender: indeed, among the full, deduplicated dataset of 1.6 million publications, 21% of publications explicitly mentioned sex or gender.

thumbnail

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.t002

SDGs 1–16 with the count of publications in 2020 identified by the SDG query, and the count and proportion of publications of these also found by the sex and gender keyword search. SDGs are ranked descending by this proportion. The gender classifications are those identified within the UN Women report [ 4 ].The ranking of the SDGs by proportion of sex and/or gender topical publications does align to some extent with the classification that the report from UN Women gave to the SDG indicator framework [ 4 ]. In Figure 2.1 of that report, each SDG was classified as either “gender-sensitive”, “gender-sparse” or “gender-blind” to reflect the extent to which the SDG indicators are gender-specific; this classification appears in the final column of Table 2 . While the UN Women classification addressed gender (not sex), it is nonetheless clear that the “gender-sensitive” SDGs tend to have the amongst the higher proportions of sex and gender publications, and the “gender-sparse” and “gender-blind” SDGs tend to have the lowest shares of sex and gender publications. However, SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities appears to have a higher than expected proportion of publications on sex and gender given its “gender-sparse” indication, and conversely the “gender-sensitive” SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth has a relatively low proportion. It is important to note that some of the SDGs with low proportions of publications explicitly mentioning sex and gender and which are “gender-sparse” or “gender-blind” under the UN Women classification nevertheless do deal with targets and topics of high sex and gender relevance. For instance, SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy indicates a need to transition much of the world’s population towards “clean cooking fuels and technologies” which is highly gender-relevant; such nuanced views are more clearly resolved by disaggregating these summary statistics into thematic topics through the use of a term mapping approach.

The results for the single year snapshot (2020) serve as the basis for the next steps in our approach to depict the extent to which sex or gender is considered in the research for each of the 16 SDGs. However, we also wanted to understand how the proportions are changing over time. The SDGs were established in 2015 [ 8 ] and so we also calculated the proportions of each SDG’s publications that consider sex or gender for the years 2015 to 2020 ( Table 3 ). Although there are publishing lags that may mean that some 2015 papers were written prior to the SDGs being established, we include all years for completeness. Table 3 shows just the proportions for each year; in the online supplementary information section of this paper, a full table including all the publication counts of all publications relating to each SDG and the subset of which relate to sex or gender can be found ( Table 1 ).

thumbnail

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.t003

The results for 2015–2020 ( Table 3 ) show very little change in the proportions of publications that consider sex or gender. At most, the proportion of SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being publications referencing sex and gender dropped by 2.0 percentage points between 2019 and 2020. If this change did prove to be meaningful in the longer term, we might speculate that this may be linked to an influx of COVID research in 2020 which did not explicitly make reference to sex or gender, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic response. The only other notable change is for SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions which had a slight increase in the proportion of publications that consider sex or gender, increasing by 1.5 percentage points across the six-year period. For the rest of the SDGs, the changes in proportions fluctuate slightly but remain steady.

SDGs 1–16 with the proportion of publications found by each SDG query and by the sex and gender keyword search for publication years 2015–2020. The gender classifications are those identified within the UN Women report [ 4 ]. In the supplementary information accompanying this article, an extended version of this table ( Table 2 ) is available which includes the raw counts of the publications associated with each SDG, and the raw counts of those publications also associated with sex and/or gender.

For the most current view using the most recent full year at the time of conducting the research, we selected 2020 to demonstrate our approach to mapping for insights. Though we do acknowledge that 2020 was not a typical year owing to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we nonetheless believe that small perturbations in the research output and sex and gender focus that year will be minimal and only likely to appear in SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being.

The term mapping approach allows us to examine topical clusters in the corpus of research relevant to each SDG, and to overlay this with a view on those clusters which explicitly include terms related to sex and/or gender, which represent publications on sex and gender research topics. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the terms used by the authors of these publications themselves to be examined, rather than relying on any external classification scheme that which may not be sufficiently fine-grained to detect niche topics or emerging research fronts. In the following sections we will present a selection of these SDG maps. In the online S1 File , the maps for all 16 SDGs are presented.

SDG 5: Gender equality has the expected high coverage of sex and gender relevant research

The term map created for SDG 5: Gender Equality is shown in Fig 1 , and the topical clusters clearly reveal the diversity of research relevant to this SDG’s targets and indicators. Major clusters of terms relating to gender in health on the right side of the map and gender in social policy on the left are bridged by a cluster relating to the medical and policy literature around sexual abuse and exploitation appear at the top of the map. Fig 2 illustrates the high degree of overlap (95% of publications, as shown in Table 2 ) between the SDG publication set and those publications within it tagged as also being identified by the sex and gender keyword search, i.e. those that also cover sex and gender research topics. None of the terms visible in the map at this scale are associated with a low proportion of sex and gender tagged publications.

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 25,601 publications in 2020, and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this network visualization, the colors indicate topical clusters.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g001

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 25,601 publications in 2020, and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g002

Sex and gender relevant research is unevenly spread across SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being

Given the importance of human health to societies around the world, and the volume of funding made available to address research priorities ranging from formulating evidence-based public health policies to understanding the human genome, the SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being keyword search retrieves an order of magnitude more publications than most other SDG queries. The variation in volume of each of the SDG’s corpus is apparent, ranging from SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being (417,443 publications) to the much smaller SDG 1: No Poverty (13,424 publications), to some extent reflecting the disparity in the number and complexity of the targets relating to each goals (e.g. 13 targets for SDG 3. To work within the processing capability of VOSviewer, a random sample of approximately 20,000 publications was used to create the map shown in Fig 3 , which shows the topical clusters relevant to this SDG’s targets and indicators. Topics related to health evidence, governance and policy appear in red on the left side of the map, while the underlying biology of human illness and disease appear in green on the right. Bridging these two larger topical domains is a smaller set of terms in blue, relating most closely to surgical interventions in cancer treatment. Of particular interest are the terms related to the COVID-19 pandemic at the bottom on the left cluster in this map such as ‘covid’, ‘pandemic’, ‘coronavirus’ and related viral designations.

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 19,983 publications in 2020 (sampled from 417,443 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this network visualization, the colors indicate topical clusters.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g003

Acknowledging the “gender-sensitive” nature of this SDG [ 4 ] and the high proportion of publications that are also identified by the sex and gender keyword search (62% of publications per Table 2 ), the strong overlap of sex and gender in this SDG shown in Fig 4 is to be expected. What is perhaps surprising is that the terms in this map associated with publications that do not explicitly mention sex and/or gender terms are largely in the topical clusters relating to fundamental biology (the cluster on the right side of the map) but also those terms on the left of the map that relate specifically to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is despite calls for sex and gender to be incorporated and reported in research across the spectrum of human health [ 3 , 24 – 26 ]. Such calls recognise that our understanding of the underlying causes of poor health and effective prevention and treatment requires attention to sex and/or gender disaggregation in studies in the published research literature. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic-related terms, this apparent under-acknowledgement of the role of sex & gender is despite early evidence that COVID-19 patient outcomes are different for men and women [ 27 ].

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 19,983 publications in 2020 (sampled from 417,443 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g004

Sex and gender aspects of SDG 4: Quality education are explicit in education practice but not education policy research

Pedagogy is the theory and practice of teaching and learning, and research relevant to this field is represented in the map for SDG 4: Quality Education shown in Fig 5 by four topical clusters. On the right of the map, the green cluster represents terms dealing primarily with educational settings from early years (preschool and kindergarten) through to high school (secondary education); on the left, the focus is on tertiary education as well as vocational education and labour force outcomes. The blue cluster at the top of the map deals with issues relating to medical education.

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 20,030 publications in 2020 (sampled from 37,206 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this network visualization, the colors indicate topical clusters.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g005

SDG 4 is classed as “gender-sensitive” by the UN Women report [ 4 ] and for many years it has been known that formative educational experiences and educational attainment are different for boys and girls [ 28 ]. However, it has also become clear more recently that teacher (professor) gender in higher education affects attainment and outcomes for women but not for men [ 29 ]. However, Fig 6 appears to reflect sex and gender elements are included in publications addressing topics around early years, junior and senior school education (and to a lesser extent in medical education) but is almost absent from those parts of the map dealing with higher education or the effectiveness of classroom teaching.

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 20,030 publications in 2020 (sampled from 37,206 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g006

SDG 13: Climate action has very low coverage of sex and gender relevant research

The final map we examine in detail here is for SDG 13: Climate Action, and Fig 7 illustrates the breadth of topics that this global challenge encompasses. The red cluster in the bottom left covers climate change risk, response and adaptation, while the blue cluster is focussed on carbon, especially carbon capture and storage (perhaps unsurprising given the policy emphasis on carbon sequestration [ 30 ]). Linking these is the green cluster, dealing primarily with climate and energy governance and policy.

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 20,030 publications in 2020 (sampled from 42,699 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this network visualization, colors indicate topical clusters.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g007

SDG 13 has just a 3% overlap of publications found by both the SDG query and the sex and gender keyword query (and is considered “gender-sparse” according to the UN Women classification [ 4 ]). As Fig 8 makes clear, very few terms in this map are associated with a relatively high proportion of sex and gender tagged publications, and these are related mainly to perceptions of and adaptation to climate change. This seems appropriate, since evidence is building that women and men experience climate change effects differently, partly as a result of the intersection between gender, poverty and political engagement [ 31 – 35 ].

thumbnail

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 20,030 publications in 2020 (sampled from 42,699 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g008

The approach described here offers a fresh perspective on both the UN SDGs and sex and gender consideration in SDG research by visualizing the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and then overlaying that view with the proportion of the publications associated with each term that also explicitly include sex and/or gender terms. In establishing this approach, we want to emphasize that this is not an end-point in of itself: as research evolves and the terms used by authors to describe their work in their publications evolve too, we understand that these keyword queries will need to be revised and updated, perhaps even extended or narrowed as policy and research priorities shift and change.

What we have been able to show with great clarity even with a single year (2020) snapshot is that consideration of sex and gender is uneven across the SDGs ( Table 2 ), and that even where overlap between the SDG and sex and gender research corpus is high as in SDG 5: Gender Equality, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG do not consider sex and/or gender (Figs 1 and 2 ). Furthermore, we have demonstrated that the proportion of publications that consider sex and/or gender is quite steady over time, despite increasing calls for this consideration and even as the SDGs matured. With this, we have demonstrated that there is progress to be made if we are to ensure that women and men benefit equally from achievements that stem from the UN SDGs. However, we acknowledge that the formulation of the SDG goals and targets was not necessarily conducted with reference to sex and gender considerations and that it must not be necessarily expected that the research community has responded to the design of the UN SDGs with targeted sex and gender relevant research.

Importantly, this study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and/or gender across research in every SDG, as well as an approach to evaluate change across each SDG over time. Our approach could be used to inform future reports by UN Women [ 4 ] to provide a rigorous evidence base to support the inclusion of sex and gender in the formulation of fresh sustainability goals and targets.

Fresh maps and tables can be created each year to monitor sex and/or gender integration progress as we move toward the 2030 SDG target goal. Furthermore, this approach could be adapted to investigate the extent to which animal and human subject studies in SDG research clusters incorporate sex and/or gender disaggregated analyses (also referred to as sex and gender-based analysis, SGBA), drawing on methodology developed for the 2018 She Figures report [ 36 ] and included within a study examining the sex and gender-based analysis of Alzheimer’s Disease research studies [ 37 ].

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.s001

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Pollitzer (director of Portia Ltd and founder of the Gender Summits) for the inspiration and her encouragement to conduct this work and her valuable input toward the creation of the sex and gender keyword search.

  • View Article
  • PubMed/NCBI
  • Google Scholar
  • 2. ICMJE. Recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. 2019 [cited 2021 Dec 23]. http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf
  • 4. UN Women. Turning promises into action: Gender equality in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. 2018 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2018/2/gender-equality-in-the-2030-agenda-for-sustainable-development-2018
  • 5. Gender Summits [Internet]. GS10 Tokyo Recommendation: BRIDGE; c2016 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://gender-summit.com/tokyo-recommendation-bridge .
  • 6. Lee H, Pollitzer E. The Role of Gender-based Innovations for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 2016 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://gendersummit.com/images/GS6Docs/SDG_Report_FINAL.Jan13.pdf
  • 8. United Nations [Internet]. The 17 Goals; c2021 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://sdgs.un.org/goals
  • 9. Leave No One Behind [Internet]. UN Sustainable Development Group [cited 2022 Aug 31]. https://unsdg.un.org/2030-agenda/universal-values/leave-no-one-behind
  • 10. Lee H, Pollitzer E. Gender in science and innovation as component of inclusive socioeconomic growth. 2016 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://gendersummit.com/images/GS6Docs/SDG_Report_FINAL.Jan13.pdf
  • 13. Elsevier. The researcher journey through a gender lens. 2020 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/gender-report
  • 15. United Nations. Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. 2015 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E
  • 16. UN Women. Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2021. 2021 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2021/09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2021#view
  • 17. Elsevier. Gender in the global research landscape. 2017 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.elsevier.com/researchintelligence/campaigns/gender-17
  • 19. World Health Organization. World health statistics overview 2019. 2019 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311696/WHO-DAD-2019.1-eng.pdf?ua=1
  • 20. Elsevier [Internet]. Gender in the Global Research Landscape Mendeley Group; c2017 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.mendeley.com/community/gender-in-the-global-research-landscape/
  • 21. International Center for the Study of Research [Internet]. ICSR Lab, c2020 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.elsevier.com/icsr/icsrlab
  • 22. CWTS [Internet]. Welcome to VOSviewer; c2021 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.vosviewer.com
  • 23. CWTS [Internet]. VOSviewer Manual for version 1.6.17; c2021 [cited 2022 Aug 31]. https://www.vosviewer.com/getting-started#vosviewer-manual
  • 31. UN Climate Change. Differentiated impacts of climate change on women and men; the integration of gender considerations in climate policies, plans and actions; and progress in enhancing gender balance in national climate delegations. 2019 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/sbi2019_inf8.pdf
  • 32. UN Climate Change. Introduction to gender and climate change. 2020 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://unfccc.int/gender
  • 33. UN Climate Change. The Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender. 2020 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://unfccc.int/topics/gender/workstreams/the-enhanced-lima-work-programme-on-gender
  • 34. International Union for Conservation of Nature [Internet]. Gender and climate change; c2020 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/gender-and-climate-change
  • 36. European Commission. She Figures. 2018 [cited 2021 Dec 21].. https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/9540ffa1-4478-11e9-a8ed-01aa75ed71a1/language-en
  • 37. Elsevier. Alzheimer’s disease research insights: Impacts, trends, opportunities. 2019 [cited 2021 Dec 21]. https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/resource-library/alzheimers-disease-researchinsights

Sample details

  • Social Issues
  • Gender Issues
  • Views: 1,683

Related Topics

  • Racial Segregation
  • Globalization
  • Homosexuality
  • Affirmative Action
  • Human Rights
  • Child Labor
  • Social Darwinism
  • Homelessness
  • Social inequality
  • Social Justice
  • Immigration
  • Social contract
  • Social isolation

What is a Gender Lens? Analysis

What is a Gender Lens? Analysis

The concept of a gender lens is like wearing glasses with different lenses for men and women. It helps to see the participation needs and realities of both genders and promotes equal valuing of their similarities and differences. Governments and NGOs use an operational gender lens that consists of a list of questions, criteria, or checklist, which is routinely used during training, planning, and research. These lenses are created in a participatory manner and usually contain less than 10 points focusing on the distinct realities of men and women. The use of artwork and colored paper helps to make the gender lens more attractive and durable.

Think of a gender lens as putting on spectacles. Out of one lens of the spectacles, you see the participation, needs and realities of women. Out of the other lens, you see the participation, needs and realities of men. Your sight or vision is the combination of what each eye sees. Gender is about relationships between men and women. Gender equality is about equal valuing of women and men – of their similarities and their differences. We need equal, respectful partnerships between men and women to have happy, healthy families and communities in the same way that we need both eyes to see best. A gender lens can be many things.

A form of gender lens that is gaining popularity is a tool that governments and NGOs can use in their regular operations. (e. g. A gender lens for training programs would be used every time you develop training. A gender lens for planning could be used for developing each annual work plan. A gender lens for research and surveying can be routinely used in data collection. ) This operational gender lens often has these characteristics: It is a list of questions, a checklist or a list of criteria. It is routinely used (see above examples). It is created in a participatory manner by those who will use it.

ready to help you now

Without paying upfront

It is recorded in words or in pictures where literacy is low. At least two copies are always kept in the same place in your organization’s files so people can find the gender lens to use it. The key people who do planning & program development are given copies of the gender lens and orientation in why and how to use it. (e. g. senior management staff and planners, pertinent stakeholders). A gender lens usually contains less than 10 points. Each point focuses on the distinct realities of men and women. Where appropriate, the distinct realities of girls and boys are included.

Many gender lenses include: planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating. Other gender lenses focus strictly on one of these functions. (e. g. A gender lens can be used for monitoring the gender sensitivity of communication tools like posters, brochures, street theatre etc. Another gender lens can be created to guide project evaluators, etc. ) ** It is useful to add artwork to the Gender Lens, make copies on coloured paper, then laminate it. The lamination gives it durability. The colour makes it attractive and easy to find in offices that are usually piled with white paper.

Cite this page

https://graduateway.com/what-is-a-gender-lens/

You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers

  • Gun Control
  • Urbanization
  • Social movements
  • Human Nature
  • Social exclusion
  • Black Lives Matter
  • Teenage Suicide
  • Social constructionism
  • Sex trafficking
  • Prison overcrowding

Check more samples on your topics

Feminist lens vs marxist lens.

Women's Suffrage

When reading a book or any piece of literature, the background of the reader plays a significant role in how they perceive the work. Two readers with different viewpoints and backgrounds will naturally have differing opinions and interpretations of the same writing. For instance, a feminist lens and a Marxist lens offer contrasting perspectives. Through

Analysis of the Dynacorp Case Through Political Lens

Conflict of Interest

Information system

Analysis of the Dynacorp Case through a Political LensDynacorp is a global information systems and communications business. In 1990, the company experienced a decline in earnings compared to previous years. As a result, the CEO attempted to improve the company’s performance by restructuring its design.In this paper, I will analyze Dynacorp through a political lens

An Analysis of Daigo Through the Lens of Wolfelt

“Departures” is an award-winning cinematic masterpiece that depicts an intricate postmortem ceremony in Japan where, before the eyes of the deceased’s family, the body is elegantly washed, made up, and “encoffined. ” At the heart of the film is Daigo’s journey through life and how his reluctant acceptance of an enconffiner position leads to life

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens Analysis

John Lennon

I have never heard of Annie Leibovitz until I watched the documentary Life through a Lens. I was amazed by her work. Since 1967, the early days of photography, Annie learned that photography is very important. Annie always concentrated on the U. S. way of life, “photographing icons of various youth cultures & countercultures”. She

King Lear Feminist Lens Critical Analysis

William Shakespeare's play King Lear is one of his most famous and popular tragedies. Part of what makes King Lear so interesting is that it was written between 1603 and 1606, it has been critiqued throughout history and, yet, still remains relevant to modern day society. Dealing with themes of human nature, King Lear can

Elie Wiesel Critical Lens

Elie Wiesel

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Elie Wiesel. In a simplified manner, this quote by Elie Wiesel stresses the importance of not remaining silent in the

Critical lens Of Mice and Men

According to Goethe, each person perceives the world in a unique manner, implying that individuals possess distinct perspectives and react differently to various circumstances. I concur with this statement as society often engages in discussions about diverse viewpoints. John Steinbeck's novel, Of Mice and Men, exemplifies the contrasting characteristics of two individuals.The focus of the

Critical Feminist Lens for Hamlet

The critical school our group will be discussing Is feminism. The Core Ideas of this such LOL Is the equality of gender. When defined In the dictionary, It states that fearfulness Is "The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes". A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity

Anthem Through a Postcolonial Lens

Anthem, by Ayn Rand, portrays a possible future for mankind if a great war destroys society. A postcolonialism lens is a lens that highlights the impacts of new power in societies. The new power, “colonizers”, usually insists on being the ‘better’ and ‘ideal’ person and culture. They want to convince the people of the old

gender lens essay

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.

  • Entertainment
  • Environment
  • Information Science and Technology
  • Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Literature Snow White

Revisiting "Snow White": Unpacking Gender Stereotypes

Revisiting "Snow White": Unpacking Gender Stereotypes essay

*minimum deadline

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below

writer logo

  • Courtly Love
  • The Hiding Place
  • An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
  • The Gift of the Magi
  • A Farewell to Arms

Related Essays

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

UN Women Strategic Plan 2022-2025

Empowering women, building sustainable assets: Strengthening the depth of gender lens investing across asset classes

Publication year: 2024.

  • Share to Facebook
  • Share to Twitter
  • Share to LinkedIn
  • Share to E-mail

The financial markets offer opportunities for advancing gender equality through impact investing and sustainable finance.

This report, prepared by UN Women, in collaboration with Phenix Capital Group, Politecnico di Milano – Tiresia, and Bocconi University – AXA Research Lab on Gender Equality, reflects on various models and challenges of gender lens investing (GLI), along with challenges they pose to feminist agendas. It urges collective action from all stakeholders to advance financing for gender equality and achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 inclusively and sustainably.

The publication highlights the urgent need for transforming the global financial architecture in advancing SDG 5 on gender equality and women's empowerment. Leveraging opportunities in today‘s financial markets such as impact investing and sustainable finance, the report calls for improved measurement, transparency, and accountability in gender lens investing to ensure real impact on gender equality. The report also highlights the various indices of gender inequality, such as limited access to education and healthcare, unequal economic opportunities, and political representation, which hinder social progress and economic stability. Gender lens investing is proposed as a practical approach to address these disparities by integrating gender analysis into investment decisions across different asset classes.

Additional documents

  • Publication (PDF, 2.7MB)

Bibliographic information

Related publications.

Gender Finance Booklet, Financial Centers for Sustainability Network 2023

Gender finance booklet: Financial Centres for Sustainability Network 2023

cover for financing for gender equality via bonds case studdies

Case study series: Innovative financing for gender equality via bonds

The UN Women gender and economics training manual

The UN Women gender and economics training manual

Sarah Hyun's Portfolio

Great gatsby through the lens of feminism.

November 5, 2018

ENGL 100. Prof Whitley

The Great Gatsby through the lens of Feminism

Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature has been written according to issues of gender. It focuses its attention on how cultural productions such as literature address the economic, social, political, and psychological oppression of women as a result of patriarchy. Patriarchal ideology has a deeply rooted influence on the way we think, speak, and view ourselves in the world, and an understanding of the pervasive nature of this ideology is necessary for a feminist critique. Demonstrating how people are a product of their culture, feminist criticism of The Great Gatsby reveals how the novel both supports and challenges the assumptions of a patriarchal society. The Great Gatsby displays various aspects of feminist philosophy by reflecting opposing principles of society’s model through very different female characters. By using a range of characters who respond to the figure of the New Woman, the novel shows how difficult it was to defy the norms of the time.

The novel paints a picture of America in the 1920’s. Before the war, women had no freedom, and they had to remain on a pedestal prescribed by the limits of male ideals. But now, women could be seen smoking and drinking, often in the company of men. They could also be seen enjoying the sometimes raucous nightlife offered at nightclubs and private parties. Even the new dances of the era, which seemed wild and overtly sexual to many, bespoke an attitude of free self-expression and unrestrained enjoyment. In other words, a “New Woman” emerged in the 1920’s. The appearance of the New Woman on the scene evoked a great deal of negative reaction from conservative members of society who felt that women’s rejection of any aspect of their traditional role would inevitably result in the destruction of the family and the moral decline of society as a whole.

The main female characters in the novel – Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle – despite their many differences in class, occupation, appearance and personality traits, are all versions of the New Woman. All three display a good deal of modern independence. Only two are married, but they don’t keep their marital unhappiness a secret, although secrecy on such matters is cardinal in a patriarchal marriage. The women also challenge their assigned roles as females by preferring the excitement of night life to the more traditional employments of hearth and home. There is only one child among them, Daisy’s daughter, and while the child is well looked after by a nurse and affectionately treated by her mother, Daisy’s life does not revolve exclusively around her maternal role. Finally, all three women openly challenge patriarchal sexual taboo. Jordan engages in premarital sex, and Tom is even prompted to comment that Jordan’s family “shouldn’t let her run around the country in this way” (14). Daisy and Myrtle are both engaged in extramarital affairs, although Myrtle is more explicit about it than Daisy.

One of Daisy’s most memorable quotes is “All right, I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little food” (16). Daisy speaks of her hopes for her infant child, which reveals a lot about her character. Her bitterness and cynicism are signaled as she expresses this devastating critique of women’s position in society with reference to her daughter. It is clear that Daisy is a product of a social environment that, to a great extent, does not appreciate or value intellect in women. While Daisy conforms to a shared, patriarchal idea of femininity that values subservient and docile females, she also understands these social standards for women and chooses to play right into them. In this way, Daisy is a more subversive feminist.

Jordan is prescribed as a more masculine female character and seems to resist social pressure to conform to feminine norms. Not only does she have her own successful career, something that most women in the 1920’s did not have, but her career is in the male-dominated field of professional golf. She seems androgynous in her appearance and is described as having a “mustache of perspiration” and being “slender, small-breasted, with an erect carriage which accentuated by throwing her body backward at her shoulders like a young cadet.” The numerous masculine references in her physical descriptions through words such as ‘mustache,’ ‘erect,’ and ‘cadet’ demonstrate how she was not the typical 1920’s woman.  She is also very honest and direct, where the patriarchal norm would be to remain submissive and quiet.

Myrtle’s characterization is more focused on her physicality, and she is more quickly undermined as artificial and even grotesque. Her death is undignified and stresses the destruction of her feminine aspects, with her left breast “swinging loose” and her mouth “ripped.” It is possible to argue that Myrtle is severely punished for her expression of sexuality, while Daisy, less overt about her illicit relationship with Gatsby, and a less sensual character altogether, is able to resume her life with Tom once she has left Gatsby.

The novel also abounds with minor female characters whose dress and activities identify them as incarnations of the New Woman, and they are portrayed as clones of a single, negative character type: shallow, revolting, exhibitionist and deceitful. For example, at Gatsby’s parties, we see insincere, “enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names” (44), as well as numerous narcissistic attention-seekers in various stages of drunken hysteria. We meet, for example, a young woman who “dumps” down a cocktail “for courage” and “dances out alone on the canvass to perform” (45) and a “rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter” (51). The novel’s discomfort with the New Woman becomes evident through these characterizations.

In conclusion, the women in this text are shown to be victims of social and cultural norms that they could not change, demonstrating how influential culture can be in shaping the lives of individuals. There is an attempt to redefine society and culture in a new way by gender relations and the women in this novel actively try to change the social norms through their attitudes and actions. It becomes clear, however, that patriarchy is deeply internalized for these characters, demonstrating how powerful and often devastating this ideology can be.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Beauty and The Beast — Analyzing “Beauty and the Beast”: The Feminist Lens

test_template

Analyzing "Beauty and The Beast": The Feminist Lens

  • Categories: Beauty and The Beast Feminist Literary Criticism

About this sample

close

Words: 915 |

Published: Sep 16, 2023

Words: 915 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Beauty's autonomy and agency, the beast: from dominance to partnership, supporting characters and societal norms, feminist critiques of the tale.

  • Zipes, Jack. “Beauty and the Beast: From Myth to Fairy Tale.” In Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale , 61-82. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.
  • Baker-Sperry, Lori, and Liz Grauerholz. “The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children's Fairy Tales.” Gender and Society , vol. 17, no. 5, 2003, pp. 711–726.

Image of Dr. Charlotte Jacobson

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Let us write you an essay from scratch

  • 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
  • Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

author

Verified writer

  • Expert in: Literature

writer

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 1012 words

3 pages / 1428 words

2 pages / 1022 words

2.5 pages / 1035 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Beauty and The Beast

Madame de Villeneuve’s The Story of The Beauty and The Beast is a fictional story set in France during the eighteenth century, in a town near the countryside. The story is told in third person point of view. Although it is [...]

Beauty is a subjective concept that varies from person to person. While some may perceive beauty in physical appearances, others may find it in personality traits or actions. However, when it comes to a beautiful girl, it is [...]

Growing up means growing up with stereotypes and gender roles following behind like an annoying friend. They mature, starting from being expected to playing with and nursing dolls, or destroying toys and playing in the mud, [...]

Ernest Hemingway called his novel A Farewell to Arms his “Romeo and Juliet.” The most obvious similarity between these works is their star-crossed lovers, as noted by critic Carlos Baker; another is that the deaths of both [...]

“These are but the spirit of things that have been.” The metaphorical words of the Ghost of Christmas Past are typical of Dickens’ melodramatic writing style. Set in Victorian England, a time rife with greed and social [...]

“Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.” According to George R.R. Martin, an estimable American novelist, an individual's perspective ultimately decides whether he views himself as a [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

  • Instructions Followed To The Letter
  • Deadlines Met At Every Stage
  • Unique And Plagiarism Free

gender lens essay

Banner

Critical Lenses & "The Things They Carried": Home

  • MLA Format & Citation Tools
  • Evaluating & Choosing Credible Sources
  • Back to Library Home Page

What is a Critical Lens?

Critical literary lenses.

A Critical Literary Lens influences how you look at a work. One way to think about critical lenses is the concept of putting on a pair of glasses; the glasses affect how you view your surroundings. The lens you choose is essentially a new way to focus on the work and is a great tool for analyzing works from different viewpoints. There are many approaches, but here are five common ones.

FORMALIST LENS

A formalist critic examines the form of the work as a whole; how each individual part of the text (the individual scenes and chapters), the characters, the settings, the tone, the point of view, the diction, and all other elements of the text  join together to make it a single text. 

After analyzing each part, the critic then describes how they work together to give meaning (theme) to the text.  This approach examines a text as a self-contained object; it does not, therefore, concern itself with biographical information about the author, historical events outside of the story, or literary allusions, mythological patterns, or psychoanalytical traits of the characters.

Questions to ask:

  • What is the setting of the work? What is the basic tone througout?

How is the work’s structure unified? How is the way a story or novel is put together influence the way we read it?

How do various elements of the work reinforce its meaning?

  • What recurring patterns (repeated or related words, images, etc.) can you find? What is the effect of  these patterns or motifs?
  • How does repetition reinforce the theme(s)?
  • How does the writer’s diction reveal or reflect the work’s meaning?

Explore More:

Formalism/New Criticism

Sources related to The Things They Carried :

BIOGRAPHICAL LENS

Biographical :, a biographical approach takes the stance that the author and their history are important to the meaning of a text .  these critics look at when and where the text was written, and try to understand the social, political or cultural influence of the time period and its effect on the author.  they research the author’s life and times  and relate that information to the work.  biographical theory suggests that the work is a reflection of the author’s experience or feelings..

  • In what ways does the book reflect the experiences or feelings of the author and the time that he or she lived in
  • What is the background of the author? How does this affect their world-view? What role does this world-view have in the text?
  • How might characters in the book reflect the lives of real people who lived during the time period or events in the book? How are their perspectives represented or examined in the book?

Biographical Criticism

The databases below are the most useful for this specific project. For our other databases, visit the library online databases . Need passwords? Email the library .

MOST USEFUL

gender lens essay

DATABASE SEARCH TIPS

Google books.

Google Book Search

GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH

Historical lens, historical:.

A Historical lens analyzes a work in its historical context. This lens seeks to understand the time period, social and political context of the time, and how the events of the time affect the author and the characters of the text.

  • What time period was the work written, and what time period is the literary work taking place in? Is there a connection?
  • Were major historical events taking place? What were they? How does the text reflect this?
  • Are the characters a product of their time? 
  • Are any of the characters a voice for change? What message is the author trying to convey through them?

New Historicism, Cultural Studies

  • Tim O'Brien's "Bad" Vietnam War: The Things They Carried & Its Historical Perspective
  • Decades Later, a Family of ‘Boat People’ Find Their Rescuers

FEMINIST LENS

​​​​​​ feminist/gender:.

This lens xamines how gender roles and/or sexuality are characterized in the work. This approach is not limited to issues involving women.  

  • What is the author's gender identification? How do they connect with the text?
  • Are there traditional gender roles? Do characters follow these roles? How would they view a character that did not follow traditional roles?
  • Are women minor characters in the text or do they take on a prominent role? What roles do they have? Does it relate back to the gender of the author?
  • How does the author define gender roles?
  • What role does society/culture play in gender roles/sexuality within the text?
  • Would an LGBTQIA character be accepted in the text? Why or why not?

Feminist Criticism

Gender Studies and Queer Theory

PSYCHOLOGICAL LENS

Character/psychological:.

Based originally on the theories of Freud, the psychological lens looks at how a character's behaviors are influenced by their unconscious thoughts and fears. When using this criticism focus on the subconscious and how it affects and influences the conscious mind. Often, this theory is applied to the author and what the text is telling us about their psychology; however, it can be applied to characters as well.

  • What does the text reveal about the author? What message is the author trying to relay? 
  • What attitudes appear in the text? How do they change or progress through the piece?
  • What kinds of family dynamics are happening in the work? 
  • Perhaps a character shows signs of mental repression, what events have influenced this? How does it affect their daily life? How does it affect relationships with family and/or friends?

Psychoanalytic Criticism

  • Soldiers, Psychiatrists, and Combat Trauma

LIBRARY BOOKS

Cover Art

LIBRARY CATALOG - DESTINY

gender lens essay

GOOGLE SCHOLAR SEARCH

Google Scholar Search

  • Next: MLA Format & Citation Tools >>
  • Last Updated: May 7, 2024 11:16 AM
  • URL: https://auhsd.libguides.com/Eng2_Lenses

Essay Papers Writing Online

Step-by-step guide on how to write a highly impressive and effective critical lens essay to earn top grades.

How to write a critical lens essay

Unleashing the true essence of literature, a critical lens essay delves deep into the realm of literary analysis, exploring the layers beneath the surface. By employing a critical lens, readers embark on a journey towards deciphering a text’s hidden messages, constructing an analytical perspective that transcends the conventional meaning. Embarking on such a venture requires a skillful blend of literary prowess and brainstorming techniques. With this handy guide, you’ll find a treasure trove of strategies and insights to navigate the intricate web of analysis, unlocking the true potential of your critical lens essay.

Excellence in crafting a critical lens essay lies in the art of interpretation and analysis. By adopting a unique lens through which to view a text, readers expose themselves to an array of interpretations and perspectives. Armed with this newfound insight, the essayist can dissect the intricate web of symbols, themes, and literary devices strewn across the pages, intertwining them to form a cohesive analysis. Captivating the reader with a compelling argument and thoughtful analysis underscores the importance of employing meticulous thought when embarking on this intellectual pursuit.

Approaching the construction of a critical lens essay should be akin to delicately weaving together a tapestry of ideas and concepts. An essay of this nature demands a panoramic view of the text, exploring not only the surface-level narrative but also the hidden meanings and salient themes lurking within. Examining the characters, their motivations, and the author’s underlying message allows the essayist to challenge preconceived notions and offer fresh insights. As you embark upon this engaging journey, remember that every word you pen contributes to the intricate mosaic of ideas that is your unique interpretation.

Approaching a Crucial Perspective Composition

Approaching a Crucial Perspective Composition

When it comes to tackling a significant perspective essay, a thoughtful and strategic approach can make all the difference. This type of essay requires you to analyze and interpret a specific quote, known as the critical lens, by considering different perspectives and providing your own insight. To excel in this task, it is essential to understand the nuances of the critical lens and develop a structured approach to effectively convey your thoughts and analysis.

To begin with, familiarize yourself with the critical lens you will be working with. Take time to carefully deconstruct the lens and understand its underlying message. Identify the two literary works that can be used to support or reject the lens. This will form the foundation of your essay and influence your subsequent analysis.

Once you have a firm grasp on the critical lens and the literary works that will be incorporated, it is crucial to develop a clear thesis statement. The thesis statement should succinctly state your perspective on the lens and how it can be interpreted through the chosen literary works. This statement will guide the direction of your essay and provide structure for your arguments.

As you progress into the body paragraphs, make sure to fully analyze each literary work in relation to the critical lens. Remember to include specific examples and quotes from the texts to support your analysis. In addition to explaining how the texts align with or challenge the lens, consider the broader implications of these connections. Explore the underlying themes, messages, and character motivations that are relevant to the lens.

Lastly, conclude your essay by summarizing your arguments and reiterating your thesis statement. Leave the reader with a final thought that encompasses the overall significance of the critical lens and the literary works. Ensure that your conclusion reinforces the message you conveyed throughout the essay and leaves a lasting impression.

By approaching a crucial perspective essay with a well-defined plan and a deep understanding of the critical lens and the literary works, you can effectively analyze and interpret the given quote. Be sure to take the time to develop a strong argument, support it with pertinent evidence, and present your ideas in a clear and concise manner. With a strategic approach, you can craft a compelling essay that showcases your critical thinking skills and understanding of the texts at hand.

The Significance of Comprehending the Quotation

One of the crucial aspects of writing a critical lens essay lies in understanding the significance of the chosen quote. The quote serves as the foundation of the essay, shaping the overall analysis and interpretations that follow. By comprehending the quote, a writer can effectively develop a well-structured essay that showcases their ability to critically analyze and evaluate various literary works and perspectives.

When approaching a critical lens essay, it is essential to carefully examine the quote and break it down into its core elements. This involves deciphering the underlying meaning, identifying key terms, and considering the context in which it was originally written. By gaining a thorough understanding of the quote, a writer is equipped to explore its implications within the framework of the literature being analyzed.

Additionally, comprehending the quote allows writers to establish a clear focus for their essay. It enables them to define the central idea or theme that will guide their analysis and shape their argument. By understanding the quote, writers can develop a coherent and logical structure that supports their interpretation and evaluation of the chosen literary works.

Furthermore, understanding the quote helps writers to establish credibility and authority in their essay. By demonstrating a deep understanding of the quote and its relation to the literature, writers can present a well-informed analysis that engages readers and garners their trust. This is particularly important in critical lens essays, as the writer is required to provide a thoughtful and balanced evaluation of the literary works in question.

In conclusion, the importance of understanding the quote in a critical lens essay cannot be overstated. It forms the foundation of the essay, guiding the analysis and interpretations that follow. By comprehending the quote, writers can effectively develop a well-structured essay that showcases their ability to critically analyze and evaluate various literary works and perspectives.

Choosing the appropriate literature to support your analysis

One of the crucial aspects of writing a critical lens essay is selecting the right texts to support your analysis. The literature you choose should align with the quote, allowing you to explore the various perspectives and ideas present in the texts. By carefully considering the content and themes, you can effectively incorporate textual evidence to develop a strong argument.

When selecting the literature, it is vital to choose works that have a diverse range of ideas and perspectives. This will allow you to present a well-rounded analysis and demonstrate your understanding of different viewpoints. Consider choosing texts that provide contrasting opinions or present distinct themes, as this will make your argument more nuanced and compelling.

Additionally, it is important to choose texts that have a depth of meaning. Look for works that provoke thoughtful analysis and can be interpreted in various ways. Texts with complex characters, intricate plots, and rich symbolism often provide ample material for critical analysis. By selecting texts with depth and complexity, you will have more material to support your analysis and demonstrate your ability to engage with complex ideas.

Furthermore, consider the literary techniques used in the texts. Pay attention to the language, imagery, symbolism, and narrative structure employed by the authors. These techniques can enhance your analysis and provide evidence for your interpretations. Choose texts that utilize literary devices effectively and align with the quote, as this will help you construct a persuasive argument.

In conclusion, choosing the right texts is crucial for a successful critical lens essay. By selecting literature with diverse perspectives, depth of meaning, and effective literary techniques, you can support your analysis and develop a strong argument. Carefully consider the themes, ideas, and content of the texts, ensuring they align with the quote and allow for a comprehensive exploration of different viewpoints. With the right selection of literature, you will be able to critically analyze the quote and provide a well-supported argument.

Analyzing the literary devices and techniques

In this section, we will explore the different literary devices and techniques used in writing and how they contribute to the overall meaning and impact of a text. By understanding and analyzing these devices, readers can gain a deeper insight into the themes and ideas presented by the author.

One common literary device is symbolism, which involves the use of symbols to represent deeper meanings or ideas. Symbols can be objects, characters, or even actions that carry a symbolic significance. By analyzing the symbolism in a text, readers can uncover hidden meanings and themes that may not be immediately apparent.

Another important technique is foreshadowing, which is the use of clues or hints to suggest future events or outcomes. By carefully examining the foreshadowing in a text, readers can anticipate and understand the unfolding of the story, as well as the motivations and actions of the characters.

One of the most powerful literary devices is imagery, which involves the use of descriptive language to create vivid mental images in the reader’s mind. By analyzing the use of imagery, readers can engage with the text on a sensory level, experiencing the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures described by the author.

Another technique that authors employ is irony, which involves a contrast between what is expected or intended and what actually occurs. By recognizing and analyzing the use of irony in a text, readers can gain insight into the author’s point of view and the themes of the work.

These are just a few examples of the many literary devices and techniques that authors use to convey their ideas and messages. By analyzing these devices, readers can deepen their understanding and appreciation of a text, and develop their own interpretations and insights.

Creating a strong and coherent argument

Creating a strong and coherent argument

In order to write a compelling and persuasive critical lens essay, it is crucial to create a strong and coherent argument. This means presenting a clear and logical line of reasoning that supports your interpretation of the quote and the texts you have chosen to analyze. A strong argument is one that is well-supported by evidence, well-reasoned, and effectively conveys your main ideas.

One key element in creating a strong argument is providing evidence to support your claims. This can include quotations from the text, examples from real life or other works of literature, and any other relevant information that helps to validate your point of view. The more evidence you provide, the more convincing your argument will be.

Another important aspect of creating a strong argument is logical reasoning. This means organizing your thoughts in a clear and structured manner, making sure that each point flows logically from the previous one. It is also important to anticipate and address counterarguments or opposing viewpoints, showing that you have thoroughly considered different perspectives and have a strong response to them.

In addition to presenting a coherent argument, it is essential to convey your main ideas effectively. This involves using clear and concise language, avoiding unnecessary jargon or complex terminology that may confuse your reader. It also means using rhetorical devices such as repetition, parallelism, and analogy to enhance the persuasiveness of your argument.

Finally, a strong and coherent argument requires a strong and confident tone. This means expressing your ideas with conviction and authority, while also acknowledging any limitations or weaknesses in your argument. It is important to strike a balance between confidence and humility, demonstrating that you have fully thought through your argument and are open to constructive criticism or alternative interpretations.

In summary, creating a strong and coherent argument is crucial in writing a successful critical lens essay. By providing evidence, employing logical reasoning, conveying your main ideas effectively, and adopting a confident tone, you can persuade your reader to accept your interpretation of the quote and the texts you are analyzing.

Related Post

How to master the art of writing expository essays and captivate your audience, convenient and reliable source to purchase college essays online, step-by-step guide to crafting a powerful literary analysis essay, unlock success with a comprehensive business research paper example guide, unlock your writing potential with writers college – transform your passion into profession, “unlocking the secrets of academic success – navigating the world of research papers in college”, master the art of sociological expression – elevate your writing skills in sociology.

IMAGES

  1. Four Lenses of Gender Differences

    gender lens essay

  2. ⇉What is a Gender Lens? Analysis Essay Example

    gender lens essay

  3. PPT

    gender lens essay

  4. Great Gatsby Essay- Social, Critical, Gender Lens

    gender lens essay

  5. WGS Applying a Gender Lens

    gender lens essay

  6. PPT

    gender lens essay

VIDEO

  1. TECHNICAL SESSION 9 Gender Lens Investing Realities and Possibilities

  2. Session 4: Applying an Intersectional Gender Lens on Social Innovations in Health

  3. Evaluated essay on Gender inequality

COMMENTS

  1. PDF CHAPTER 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO GENDER

    Discourses of gender unfold not only in explicit talk about gender, but in talk about things (like burnt toast) that may be grafted on to gender. If enough people joke together continually about men's ineptness in the kitchen, women's role as cooks takes center stage, along with men's incompetence in the kitchen.

  2. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual ...

    The second lens, gender polarization, superimposes male-female differences on virtually every aspect of human experience, from modes of dress and social roles to ways of expressing emotion and sexual desire. The third lens, biological essentialism, rationalizes and legitimizes the other two lenses by treating them as the inevitable consequences ...

  3. Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts

    Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women's Studies. This non-exhaustive list introduces readers to scholarship in the field. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Gender studies asks what it means to make gender salient, bringing a critical eye to everything from labor conditions to healthcare ...

  4. Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

    Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender. First published Mon May 12, 2008; substantive revision Tue Jan 18, 2022. Feminism is said to be the movement to end women's oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand 'woman' in this claim is to take it as a sex term: 'woman' picks out human females and being a human female ...

  5. Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

    45 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism ... Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, "machine no longer ...

  6. What a Gender Lens Brings to Development Studies

    A gender lens points to what is represented in the images of women and girls, boy and men on UN websites and reports of development projects. It reveals the power plays in development meetings, indicating how women development experts have to dress and behave to ensure a gender analysis is taken seriously.

  7. 113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples

    Gender roles essay topics and titles may include: The history of gender roles and their shifts throughout the time. Male and female roles in society. Gender roles in literature and media. How a man and a woman is perceived in current society. The causes and outcomes of gender discrimination.

  8. Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which ...

    Through efforts of the Gender Summits and UN Women, it is evident that all United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that the outcomes benefit women and men equally. Our research focuses on the extent to which sex and gender topics are explicitly covered in research related to the SDGs. Expanding on previous studies, we ...

  9. PDF Nancy Finney Gender Lenses: Language and Play

    Nancy Finney Gender Lenses: Language and Play. men and women are different, but it is oftenleft. o the imagination to explain th. he reason we always assume that men and womenare different is becau. e of the lenses thr. lenses are us. d to perceive the world and thepeople in it. Two particular examples that w.

  10. PDF Applying a gender lens to climate actions: why it matters

    Gender inequalities, fueled by societal norms and defined gender roles, affect not only women's exposure to hazards, but also limit their resilience and adaptive capabilities. Therefore, governments are urged to examine the impacts of climate change through a gender lens to address key barriers to gender-responsive climate actions, and increase

  11. Gender Lens

    The gender lens enables readers to expose and consider societal constraints that are the result of one's gender, and work through how texts and authors help explain, challenge, and exploit traditional gender roles. ... The essay and TedTalk both focus on gender inequalities and societal structures, while also emphasising ideas of basic ...

  12. PDF 22 GENDER LENS

    Using It with Grantees: Gender Analysis in Grant Making. Using a gender lens in grant making can raise issues of power — and not only the obvious ones having to do with relationships between men and women, but also subtle ones having to do with relationships between grant makers and grantees.

  13. ⇉What is a Gender Lens? Analysis Essay Example

    A gender lens usually contains less than 10 points. Each point focuses on the distinct realities of men and women. Where appropriate, the distinct realities of girls and boys are included. Many gender lenses include: planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating. Other gender lenses focus strictly on one of these functions.

  14. Revisiting "Snow White": Unpacking Gender Stereotypes [Free Essay

    The essay critically analyzes the classic fairy tale "Snow White" through a feminist lens, addressing gender stereotypes and power dynamics. The analysis highlights how the story reinforces traditional patriarchal norms through Snow White's passive role and male characters' agency.

  15. Evolving the gender analysis in gender lens investing: moving from

    3.1. Research question 1: what does gender lens investing seek to achieve with regard to gender? Gender lens investing is the process of incorporating a gender analysis into investment analysis (Anderson and Miles Citation 2015).It is a process that cuts across all sectors and asset classes (VanderBrug Citation 2016).While many actors with various goals and approaches were involved in the ...

  16. Gender Lens

    Applying a gender lens to civic engagement programs and materials means that those making content and curriculum decisions view those programs and materials with particular attention to gender imbalances or biases in what is being presented. Using a gender lens reveals the ways in which content and approaches are gendered - informed by, shaped by, or biased toward men's or women's ...

  17. Empowering women, building sustainable assets: Strengthening the depth

    This report unpacks gender lens investing models and practices, while highlighting potential challenges and contradictions that they pose to feminist agendas. Drawing on case studies of funds and data, the report considers how impact funds can strengthen gender lens investing (GLI) to pave the way for inclusive and sustainable development that leaves no woman or girl behind.

  18. Great Gatsby through the Lens of Feminism

    November 5, 2018. ENGL 100. Prof Whitley. The Great Gatsby through the lens of Feminism. Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature has been written according to issues of gender. It focuses its attention on how cultural productions such as literature address the economic, social, political, and psychological oppression of women ...

  19. Analyzing "Beauty and The Beast": The Feminist Lens

    Central to the discourse on "Beauty and the Beast feminism" is the analysis of the protagonist, Belle (in many adaptations), whose portrayal can be seen as a breakaway from the traditional submissive representations of women prevalent in many early literary works. Belle embodies characteristics that are emblematic of a strong, independent woman.

  20. LibGuides: Critical Lenses & "The Things They Carried": Home

    This lens xamines how gender roles and/or sexuality are characterized in the work. This approach is not limited to issues involving women. ... The Things They Carried, in addition to several of his other works. Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ""Works Cited,"" along with endnotes. Finally, the ...

  21. Friendship Lens Essay Sequence 2023 FINAL (pdf)

    Lens Assignment: The Gender of Friendship During this first unit, we will begin a semester-long discussion about how to read closely and apply that knowledge to other texts. For the primary text of the lens essay you may choose between two texts from the ancient world that deal with issues of friendship: • For Option 1, you will read the Book of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible that describes an ...

  22. Guide to Writing a Critical Lens Essay

    One of the crucial aspects of writing a critical lens essay is selecting the right texts to support your analysis. The literature you choose should align with the quote, allowing you to explore the various perspectives and ideas present in the texts. By carefully considering the content and themes, you can effectively incorporate textual ...