research on gender theory

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.

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.

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.

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• Open access
• Published: 20 March 2018

How gender theories are used in contemporary public health research

• Anne Hammarström   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3310-6069 1 &
• Gunnel Hensing 2  

International Journal for Equity in Health volume  17 , Article number:  34 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Public health research often focuses on gender differences within certain diagnoses, but so far research has failed to explain these differences in a satisfactory way. Theoretical development could be one prerequisite for moving beyond categorical thinking. The aim of this paper was to analyse how gender theories have been used in public health research in relation to various methodological approaches.

Six special issues of gender research with public health relevance (comprising 33 papers in total) were identified from a search of PubMed and Web of Science, spanning a 10-year period. The papers were analysed inductively through posing questions to the text.

Gender theories were used in eight different ways: 1. to test hypotheses, 2. integrate theories, 3. develop gender concepts and models, 4. interpret findings, 5. understand health problems, 6. illustrate the validity of other theories, 7. integrated into a gender blind theory, as well as to 8. critique of other gender theories. The strategies applied seemed independent of the health aspects of the papers. However, the methodologies were of importance, indicating that both theoretical papers and papers using qualitative methodologies used almost all available strategies, while papers using quantitative empirical research used a limited number of strategies.

Conclusions

This study contributes to identifying how gender theories are used in contemporary public health research, which can help researchers move beyond a categorical understanding of gender in health research.

International research shows that substantial gender differences exist within certain major diagnoses, such as hypertension [ 1 ] and depression [ 2 ]. However, researchers have so far failed to explain these differences in a satisfactory way. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] This might in part be related to the fact that public health studies often favour empirical research while the researchers lack strong theoretical frameworks [ 5 ]. Thus, much research is devoted to replicating previously known gender differences in health status rather than to explain their origin, which also might contribute to the preservation of gender stereotypes.In order to find better explanations for gender differences in health status we need to use gender-related concepts, models or theories, yet there is still a lack of development of gender theories in public health research [ 6 ].

The lack of gender theoretical analyses in the final report of the influential Commission of Social Determinants in Health [ 7 ] (CSDH) has been highlighted as a major problem. The commission was set up by the WHO in 2005 in order to marshal evidence on what could be done to reach equity in health from a global perspective. The commission organised itself in knowledge networks in various areas, among them one called ‘Women and Gender Equity’ network. The chapter from this network in the final report from the CSDH [ 7 ] has been heavily criticised by feminist researchers. While acknowledging its focus on gender on a structural level, embedded in social relations of power, Bates et al. [ 8 ] criticised the chapter for not adequately using contemporary gender theories. Their main critique is directed towards equating gender with women, which leads to inadequate attention on how gender interacts with other dimensions of social stratification and neglect of gender in relation to men’s health. In addition, Raewyn Connell [ 9 ] has criticised the report for its lack of gender theoretical approach and for its categorical thinking about gender. Categorical thinking implies that men and women are viewed as fixed, unproblematic categories and that gender becomes reduced to a statistical difference between men and women [ 9 ].

As gender researchers in public health, we recognise the difficulties of moving beyond the statistical quantification of differences between men and women, which is common in epidemiological research. Gender theoretical development is central in the process of moving beyond categorical thinking. In previous research, we developed a tool (i.e., a set of questions) to help researchers move from research that focuses on gender differences to more complex gender theoretical research [ 10 , 11 ]. In gender research, there is a need for questioning the dominating epistemology in medicine as well as for gender theoretical development including power analyses as well as analyses of differences within the group of men/women [ 10 ].

In previous research, we have also clarified our use of gender related concepts in order to advance the development of gender theories [ 6 , 12 ]. Since we are often asked how gender theories can be used in public health research, we believe an important next step towards a comprehensive theory of gender in public health would be to study how gender theories are actually used in contemporary public health research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study about how theories can be used in public health research.

The aim of the paper was to analyse how gender theories have been used in public health in relation to various methodological approaches.

A purposeful sampling of public health papers expected to have a strong gender theoretical base was chosen to provide relevant and rich information. As gender theoretical development is difficult to publish in traditional medical or public health journals [ 12 ], we decided to select special issues in which the included papers have greater opportunities to develop gender theories.

A literature search was performed in May 2016 in PubMed and Web of Science with the search terms: ((gender[Title]) OR (femini*[Title]) OR (sex*[Title]) OR (masculin*[Title])). The search was limited to English language papers published since 2005, and in order to find special issues we first searched for editorials.

The inclusion criteria required editorials to be for a special issue with public health relevance, defined in a broad way as dealing with population health issues (e.g., health status, health behaviour and health care experiences). As such, editorials introducing special issues about clinical treatment of patients were excluded.

In total, we found 282 editorials in PubMed and (partly overlapping) 339 editorials in Web of Science ( n  = 621). The sex* search term yielded many excluded publications dealing with sexuality without any public health focus. In addition, most of the editorials were not related to any special issue and were therefore excluded. When the editorials did introduce a special issue, many of these issues had a narrow clinical focus that was out of scope for our analyses of public health research. We identified 13 special issues with public health relevance. All papers in these special issues were read and analysed in relation to two inclusion criteria:

Public health relevance, defined in a broad way as dealing with population health while excluding research about clinical treatment of patients

Use of gender theories (as described under the Analyses heading).

No papers in the following seven special issues fulfilled these two criteria and were therefore excluded: Issues Ment Health Nurs. 2012 Dec;33(12) Maturitas 2011 Mar;68(3), Fam Med 2011 Mar;43(3), Violence Against Women. 2010 Feb;16(2): Int J Tuberc Lung Dis. 2008 Jul;12(7), Women Health 2007;46(1), Soc Sci Med. 2007 Mar;64(5).

The following six special issues contained at least one paper and therefore fulfilled our inclusion criteria (33 papers in total):

Current Sociology 2009–7 papers

Social Science and Medicine (intersectionality) 2012–16 papers

Scandinavian Journal of Work Environment and Health 2005 – 1 paper

International Review of Psychiatry 2011–1 paper

Ergonomics 2012-– 1 paper

Social Science and Medicine (masculinities and suicidal behaviour) 2012–7 papers

These Roman numerals will be used below for referring to the various special issues. A reference list of all included papers is available in Additional file  1 .

We read all papers ( n  = 33) featured in the selected special issues and used the following two ways for identifying the gender theories utilised therein:

Identification of text about gender theories (such as gender constructions, masculinities, femininities, gender relations, gendered power structures, intersectionality). In addition, theories often used in gender research (e.g., Foucault’s theories of bio power and power and knowledge [ 13 ], as well as embodiment theories [ 14 , 15 ]) were included when the focus of the paper was on gender.

Identification of text with references to known gender theoreticians (such as Judith Butler, Raewyn Connell, Olena Hankivsky, Nancy Krieger, Beverly Skeggs, Sylvia Walby etc.). Such text was scrutinised for gender theories as in the first point.

The analysis of how gender theories were used was developed inductively in two steps. First, we read each paper with a focus on how gender theories were used and identified two overarching ways: a., in order to explain a health phenomenon or, b., health phenomena were used to illustrate that the gender theory was valid (see Table  1 ). The first author reread all papers again with a focus on finding other ways of using gender theories and discussed the findings with the second author. Each paper was coded in relation to the four questions in Table 1 . During this procedure we identified several other ways of using gender theories.

Second, these various ways of using gender theories were translated into specific questions (Table  2a and b ). All papers were coded once again in order to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the questions in Table 2a and b (see Additional file  2 ). Initially, each paper was also coded in relation to the following two questions: ‘Other ways of using gender theories: How?’ and ‘Other reflections of the use of gender theories in the paper?’ The answers to these questions were translated into existing or new questions in Table 2a and b .

Three of the 33 papers were editorials and mainly contained a description of which gender theories were used in the papers of the special issue. As such, these editorials were not very interesting to code in relation to the questions in Table 2a and b and so they were not included in that analysis.

In Table  3 we summarised our main findings from Additional file 2 . Here we have translated the questions about how gender theories were used into strategies. Information is also provided about which gender theories, health aspects, and methodological approach (i.e., distinguishing between editorials, theoretical papers, empirical papers using qualitative methods, and empirical papers using quantitative methods) were used in each paper. Finally, in the Table  4 we give a short background description of the gender theories that were most often used in our analysed papers.

The six special issues differed in relation to both their focus and theoretical approach. The health outcomes were specific in three of them; mental health (IV), ergonomics (V) and suicide (VI), while unspecific in the others. The gender theoretical focus was specified in some of the special issues: as relational, intersectional and biosocial (II), to focusing on masculinities (VI). In Current Sociology (I), the theoretical point of departures was specified as the sociological understanding of gender and health (health as gendered, unpacking gender as social category, the health needs of various gender identities, medicalization and the sociology of the body). Gender differences (without references to gender theories) in occupational health as well as in ergonomics were in focus in two special issues (III, V), while special issue IV dealt with more general biological and epidemiological differences in mental health.

How were the theories used?

As illustrated by the eight questions in Table 2b , we inductively identified the following eight ways of using gender theories in the reviewed material (the number of times each strategy was used is denoted in parentheses):

Gender theories were used to:

test hypotheses (4)

be integrated in various parts of the paper (29)

develop gender concept and models (3)

interpret empirical findings (11)

understand health problems (14)

illustrate the validity of theories with health status as an example (5)

be integrated in traditional gender blind theories (2)

critique other gender theories (7).

Jewkes & Morell [ 16 ] could be used as a good example in relation to several of the above identified strategies. Their Introduction was permeated by gender theories (strategy 2) such as the framework of gender and power, hegemonic masculinity, and social constructions of gender within power hierarchies. With qualitative methods, the paper inductively developed gendered concepts (strategy 3) in terms of various constructions of femininities in relation to HIV risk practices grounded in a framework of agency within structure. The results were interpreted (strategy 4) and discussed in relation to gender theories (patriarchy, male power, contextualised femininities etc.). Thus, strategies 2, 3 and 4 were identified. In addition, strategy 5 was also evident since gender theories were used to understand HIV risk practices.

The paper by Jordan-Young [ 17 ] is notable since it was the only one using strategy 7, i.e., how researchers integrate gendered aspects/theories into a gender blind medical theory. Jordan-Young made a critical feminist analysis of the congenital adrenalin hyperplasia (CAH) hypothesis (that steroids in utero shape “brain gender” and gender ‘atypical’ behaviour in humans) and expanded the ‘tunnel vision’ of the hypothesis to include gendered aspects of living with CAH (such as medical interventions, living with atypical genitals, how physical manifestation of CAH becomes entangled with lived gendered experiences).

Strategy 4 (to use theories in order to interpret findings) is related to (but not the same as) strategy 2 (integrating theories). Strategy 2 includes papers in which the gender theories were integrated in the whole paper or only in some part of the paper, often in the Introduction section. Even though it was not the aim of this paper to analyse how strongly the identified gender theoretical approaches contributed to developing gender theories, these eight ways do say something about how pronounced the gender theoretical approach was. The focus on gender theories is probably strongest when the aim of a paper is involved, such as in Muñoz-Laboy et al. [ 18 ], which includes gender theories about gender systems and constructions of masculinities in relation to health needs and risk behaviour. Furthermore, papers that develop gender concepts/ theories are often theoretically advanced.

From a public health perspective, strategy 5 (to use gender theories in order to understand health aspects) is more interesting than strategy 6 in which health issues are used to validate a gender theories, while the authors seem less interested in developing the health focus. To use gender theories in order to critique other gender theories (strategy 8) is part of the theoretical development within the field.

Some of the strategies were dependent on the methodology; to test a hypothesis (strategy 1) is primarily performed in quantitative research while concepts are mainly developed with qualitative methods.

Table 3 summarises which gender theories, health aspects and methodologies that were used in the analysed papers.

The table shows that many of the papers had an ambitious use of various gender theories as well as of a wide range of strategies. The strategies were used, seemingly independent of the health aspects. However, they differed in relation to the various methodological approaches. Almost all possible strategies were used in theoretical papers (strategies 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8) and in papers using qualitative methods (strategies 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8). Theoretical papers do not have empirical results and therefore cannot use strategy number 4. Empirical qualitative papers seldom test hypotheses, and strategy number 1 was not used in these papers. Quantitative papers had the most limited use of strategies – they only used four of the eight strategies (number 1, 2, 4 and 5). Even though it is important to do studies that are stratified by women and men, there is a risk of the simplified use of categorical and biological explanations. Thus, the methodology might lead to a reductionist approach unable to move beyond stereotypical and dualistic understandings of women, men and health.

In relation to health aspects, Table 3 shows that seven of the included papers had a vague focus on ‘health’ (e.g., writing about health as an unspecified topic), while eight papers focused on reproductive health issues, and seven were about suicide. Surprisingly, the strong theoretical focus on gender in several of the papers was accompanied by an almost complete lack of theoretical reflections about the outcome (i.e., the health aspects) of the papers. In spite of the fact that the editorial of Current Sociology 2009 underlined the importance of ‘looking at health as a gendered issue in sociological research’ [ 19 ], there was a lack of awareness about gender theories in relation to the health outcome in most of the papers therein. A more distinct focus on the outcome as gendered was found in some of the papers of the special issues on suicide. For example, Oliffe et al. [ 20 ] stated that depression was a “decidedly unmasculine ailment”, seen as a woman’s disease and certain masculinities were constructed as risk behaviour including suicidal behaviour. In addition, another of the papers [ 21 ] used theories in writing about the mental health outcome, in this case the gendered construction of symptoms of mental health. Jordan-Young’s paper also included gendered analysis of the outcome in relation to living with congenital adrenal hyperplasia [ 17 ].

There was a notable lack of focus (apart from one paper about coronary heart disease) on major public health problems like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and health behaviours. Furthermore, none of the studies were devoted to better understanding prevention and health promotion from a gender perspective.

Table 4 provides a brief background to the most commonly used gender theories in the analysed papers.

Interestingly, all of the gender theories featured in the reviewed papers were developed outside the field of public health/medicine, mainly in social science. In addition, the theories mirror the wide range of perspectives that exist in gender research.

Implications of our findings

The categorical thinking in public health research about gender-related topics should be met with gender theoretical development. With this paper we hope to both inspire and demonstrate to researchers how to develop gender theories in public health research. We do this by providing a set of strategies for using gender theories in relation to various methodological approaches (both qualitative and quantitative, as well as mixed methods approaches) within the broad field of public health.

As a study initiating this approach, we consider our findings to also be useful in education. Public health practitioners have diverse backgrounds. In medical and health science professions, a binary understanding of women and men from a mainly biological point of view is usually predominant in education. However, most public health problems need to be addressed combining bio-psycho-social perspectives. Gender theories open up new perspectives for how to understand women and men in their various contexts, including gendered structures and norms. An important aspect in developing teaching material on gender and health is the inclusion of various gender theories. Our paper has the potential to be an important aid in such training, addressing both the approaches that are currently most used, as well as highlighting how new theoretical perspectives can be applied in research.

A problem within the field of public health research, is that theories are generally underdeveloped. However, there is an increasing theoretical interest in health promotion. This interest has resulted in evidence that public health interventions developed within an explicit theoretical framework are more effective than those performed without a theoretical base [ 22 , 23 ], Thus, theories are useful in explaining why certain interventions are successful while others are not. Our study identified no gender theoretical paper within the field of health promotion. Through gender theoretical development, the effects of public health interventions can be improved for both men and women with various backgrounds.

All of the gender theories identified in this review were developed outside the field of public health. In addition, the surprisingly weak theoretical interest in the health outcomes, in combination with the lack of focus on the most common public health diseases, may reflect the lack of public health researchers within our analyses. Among the 33 papers analysed, only four had authors from the field of public health. Consequently, there is an urgent need for public health researchers to engage in gender theoretical research. Our findings provide a stepping stone to further studies within the field.

In this paper we have addressed gender theories, but our approach regarding the interpretation of science, and the development of theories in science, may well be used in analyses of intersectional theories that focus on power dimensions other than gender (e.g., race, sexuality, socioeconomic status) as well as in the few available models/ frameworks in public health, such as social causation and health selection.

This is the first study to analyse how gender theories have been used in public health research. We identified eight ways of using gender theories within the field of gender and health. The methodologies were of importance for the strategies; both theoretical papers and papers using qualitative methodologies used almost all available strategies while papers using quantitative empirical research used a more limited range of strategies. Thus, there is a potential for quantitative studies to improve their use of gender theories.

Nancy Krieger [ 5 ] argues for the need of theories as a way of improving public health research, to avoid errors, spark new ideas, and enable us to be critical of studies. She argues “…by making conscious use of epidemiological theory and having informed debates over the different theoretical perspectives in play we stand a better chance of producing epidemiological knowledge truly useful for preventing disease, promoting health equity and improving people’s health.” And to that we would add: …to move beyond categorical thinking in relation to research on gender and health.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank professor Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney, for valuable comments.

The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council dnr 2011–05478.

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Hammarström, A., Hensing, G. How gender theories are used in contemporary public health research. Int J Equity Health 17 , 34 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-017-0712-x

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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.

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Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research pp 1–4 Cite as

Gender Theory

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Feminist theory , Identity theory , Gender differences theory .

Gender theory is the study of what is understood as masculine and/or feminine and/or queer behavior in any given context, community, society, or field of study (including, but not limited to, literature, history, sociology, education, applied linguistics, religion, health sciences, philosophy, cultural studies, etc.). The term sex refers to categories of the biologically observable human body, female and male or intersex (i.e., nature), while the term gender refers to the categories of social expectations, roles, and behaviors, feminine and masculine (i.e., what is nurtured). Some argue, however, that even biological sex can be socially constructed and that masculine and feminine behaviors may be rooted in physiology as well (Halberstam 1998 ; Fausto-Sterling 2000 ). The word gender can also be used as a morphological form in some languages (such as the masculine or feminine used for syntactic meaning in...

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Jule, A. (2021). Gender Theory. In: Maggino, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_1137-2

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Gender Development Research in Sex Roles : Historical Trends and Future Directions

Kristina m. zosuls.

School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 873701, Tempe, AZ 85287-3701, USA

Cindy Faith Miller

School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Diane N. Ruble

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA

Carol Lynn Martin

Richard a. fabes.

The late 1960s through the 1970s marked an important turning point in the field of gender research, including theory and research in gender development. The establishment of Sex Roles in 1975 as a forum for this research represented an important milestone in the field. In this article, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of Sex Roles and, in particular, its contributions to the field of research on children’s and adolescents’ gender development. We examine the trends in research on gender development published in Sex Roles since its inception and use this analysis as a vehicle for exploring how the field has grown and evolved over the past few decades. We begin with a brief review of the history of this field of research since 1975. Then, we present a descriptive assessment of articles published on gender development in Sex Roles over time, and link this assessment to general trends that have occurred in the study of gender development over the past 35 years. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for the field of gender development. In particular, we highlight areas in which the journal could play a role in promoting more diversity in topics, methods, and ages employed in gender development research.

Introduction

Even before a child is born, processes of gender socialization begin as parents prepare for their child’s arrival: do the parents allow the ultrasound technologist to tell them the sex of their baby? Does knowing this information make a difference in how parents think about their unborn child? Once a child is born, parents remark, react to, and question the origins of their child’s behaviors—are they related to how they treat their child, or might they be related to their genes or personality? Developmental scientists are concerned with how and why behaviors emerge and change over time, and gender developmental scientists narrow their focus to the study of the origins of gendered behavior and gendered thinking. Gender development researchers, similar to other developmental researchers, focus on questions of change over time ( Ruble and Martin 1998 ). How early do children learn to identify themselves and others as males or females, and what are the consequences of learning to discriminate and label gender? At what point in development do girls and boys begin to diverge in their behaviors and interests, and why do these gender differences emerge? When do children develop a sense of male privileged status and when do they form negative attitudes about the other sex? These questions all concern basic processes underlying the origins and transmission of gender-role attitudes and structures, and are important to understanding broader issues related to the role of gender in shaping individuals, relationships, and social institutions.

These questions have also found their way into the journal Sex Roles. Since its first issue, the journal Sex Roles has published studies focused on children and adolescents. The presence of such articles in a journal more broadly devoted to the study of gender indicates a longstanding recognition of the importance of understanding the emergence and development of gender across development. Without having an understanding of developmental changes and of the patterns of change over time, scholars may only have a limited perspective on human behavior. Gender development researchers strive to fill these gaps in understanding.

In this article, we review both the broader history of research on gender development over the past few decades and more specifically address how this research has been represented in Sex Roles . In doing so, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of Sex Roles and, in particular, its contributions to the field of research on children’s and adolescents’ gender development. We believe that the 35th anniversary of Sex Roles provides a unique occasion to expand the mission and scope of the journal to more thoroughly incorporate ideas and research about gender development.

We examine the trends in research on gender development published in Sex Roles since 1975 and use this as a vehicle for exploring how the field has grown and evolved, and to highlight gaps in knowledge and research. We first provide a brief review of the history of this field of research since the journal’s inception. Then, we present a descriptive assessment of articles published on gender development in Sex Roles over time, and link this assessment to general trends that have occurred in the study of gender development over the past 35 years. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for the field of gender development and hope to influence what we see in the next 35 years (or more) of research in Sex Roles .

Milestones in the Study of Gender Development

The late 1960s through the 1970s marked an important turning point in the field of gender research. For example, in 1978, the current editor of this journal and her co-authors published one of the first textbooks on the psychology of women and gender roles ( Frieze et al. 1978 ). At that time, these areas were just emerging and the textbook represented an early and important effort to survey and integrate the existing literature. A recurring theme throughout the text was the white male bias that characterized the existing research and its interpretation. Furthermore, it provided a thorough discussion of the complexities surrounding the relative contributions of biological and social factors in understanding the psychology of women. Since that time, the field of gender studies has evolved and research on the development of gender-related behaviors and processes has grown considerably. In this section, we briefly review the developments in this field over the past few decades, with a particular focus on innovations in theory and research on gender development. In this section, we provide some perspective on the broader context of research and theory in the field that coincided with the establishment of Sex Roles as a forum for gender research.

A pivotal moment in the field of the psychology of gender occurred with the publication of Maccoby’s (1966) edited book, The Development of Sex Differences . The book focused on theories of gender development and contained several chapters that remain to this day the foundations of research and theory on children’s gender development (chapters by Hamburg and Lunde on hormonal influences on gender differences in behavior, Mischel’s chapter on social learning theory of gender development, and Kohlberg’s chapter proposing his cognitive developmental theory of gender development). These theoretical contributions gave direction to the study of gender in children.

In 1972, Money and Ehrhardt’s book, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl , advanced a provocative theory about gender identity and gender differentiation that continues to spark debate. Based on research with intersex patients, this book advanced the idea that social factors were more important than biological factors in gender identity and gender roles and brought nature-nurture issues to the forefront. The authors also promoted the notion of “gender role” as a term referring to the socially defined, outward manifestations of gender, and “gender identity” as one’s personal experienced sense of gender.

Chronologically, another important contribution was Maccoby and Jacklin’s (1974) book, The Psychology of Sex Differences. This book presented an unparalleled synthesis of research findings on gender differences in development. It was especially innovative because it challenged the idea that there were numerous differences between the genders; instead, it argued for only a few well-established differences. This book was also important for highlighting that within-gender differences are often larger than those between the genders (a point still lost in many of the popularized beliefs held today; for example, see Sax 2006 ). Maccoby and Jacklin’s conclusions stimulated further investigations on gender differences and similarities. Furthermore, the authors challenged the notion that parents are the primary agents of children’s gender socialization. Instead, they promoted the idea that children play an important and proactive role in the adoption of gender-stereotyped behaviors, and introduced the term “self-socialization” to describe these child-directed processes. The idea that children’s choices of whom to imitate plays a key role in their gender development sparked a new generation of research and debate on social and cognitive processes involved in children’s gender socialization. Their ideas also added a new dimension to research in the field by turning attention to group-level peer processes.

The 1970s marked a turning point in terms of how scholars thought about the concepts of sex and gender. Unger’s (1979) influential paper, Toward a Redefinition of Sex and Gender , asserted that the use of the term gender “serves to reduce assumed parallels between biological and psychological sex or at least to make explicit any assumptions of such parallels” (p. 1,086). Her ideas led scholars to become more selective in their use of the terms sex and gender and to avoid framing research in ways that might hint at biological determinism ( Poulin 2007 ). Terminology issues have continued to be raised in the field: some researchers proposed other usages because of concern that separating “sex” and “gender” may presuppose knowledge of the origins of behaviors (e.g., Deaux 1993 ).

Also during the 1970s, scholars started to move away from unidimensional and relatively simplistic models about the origins and meaning of gender differences and began to challenge conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity as representing bi-polar opposites. Most notably, in a conceptual breakthrough with both theoretical and methodological ramifications, Constantinople (1973) and Bem (1974) argued that males and females possess both masculine and feminine qualities. This idea revolutionized the measurement of these characteristics. Bem (1974) also argued that having both masculine and feminine qualities—that is, being psychological androgynous—was optimal for psychological adjustment. Her research laid the groundwork for subsequent research on gender identity and framed much research over the following years ( Marecek et al. 2003 ).

These ideas about multidimensionality were further emphasized in Huston’s (1983) chapter in the Handbook of Child Psychology . Huston encouraged researchers to conduct empirical investigations of links between domains of gender typing rather than to infer their existence, as researchers had been doing (e.g., make assumptions about a child’s gender identity based on toy preferences). To provide a framework for organizing existing theoretical constructs and describing different content areas, Huston presented a matrix of gender typing. This matrix helped focus theoretical debates and organize literature in the field. The matrix also has provided directions for new research.

Another important advancement in gender research has been the development and incorporation of meta-analytic methods. Meta-analysis allows for the systematic quantitative assessment of patterns across the findings of multiple studies and has had considerable impact on the study and understanding of many aspects of the psychology of gender ( Hyde and Linn 1986 ). Although not an experimental method, the application of meta-analysis to the study of gender differences has once again highlighted the limited nature of differences between the genders and has illuminated the conditions under which gender differences are more or less likely to appear (e.g., Else-Quest et al. 2006 ; Hyde et al. 1990 ). Meta-analyses are themselves not without limitations; they are non-experimental and thus limited in ability to draw cause-effect conclusions and tend to focus on mean differences rather than distributions (see Knight et al. 1996 ). Nonetheless, they provide important insights into gender development and gender differences.

Current Theoretical Trends and Debates

The field of gender development has been dominated by a few prevailing theoretical perspectives that have driven progress and debate in the field. Some of these competing perspectives have given rise to concepts (and related terms), methods, and research studies that have shaped the literature, including the research found in the pages of Sex Roles . In this section, we describe these contrasting perspectives and debates; however, we refer the reader to other sources for detailed discussions of the individual theories that are beyond the scope of what we can do in this article (e.g., Ruble et al. 2006 ).

Because developmental researchers are interested in the origins of behaviors, it is not surprising, that issues of nature and nurture are theoretically important and that great attention and fervor surround biological versus socialization approaches to understanding gender development ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). Biological arguments have long been advanced to justify gender inequality ( Shields 1975 ) and are often interpreted as deterministic. As such, there is much at stake when biological theories are proposed and research findings are interpreted. Nonetheless, with advancements in research methods and theories addressing biological mechanisms, this field of inquiry has gained acceptance and visibility ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). Current biological approaches do not imply determinism and instead emphasize the ways in which biological and social factors interact to produce behavior. Some of the most active research in this area has been on girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disease in which the fetus is exposed to elevated levels of androgens. Researchers have found that girls with CAH tend to be masculinized in some aspects of their preferences and behaviors (e.g., Berenbaum and Snyder 1995 ). Studies of prenatal exposure to normal variations in hormones such as testosterone ( Cohen-Bendahan et al. 2005 ), and cross-species comparisons ( Alexander and Hines 2002 ; Wallen 1996 ) have also become increasingly sophisticated and common.

Another debate that has received considerable attention in the field has concerned socialization and cognitive approaches to gender development. Although this debate can be traced back to Kohlberg’s and Mischel’s chapters in Maccoby’s 1966 book, more recent reviews of empirical evidence has re-stimulated this discussion (e.g., Bandura and Bussey 2004 ; Bussey and Bandura 1999 ; Martin et al. 2002 , 2004 ). Both approaches emphasize socialization versus biological processes and highlight the shaping of children’s behavior to match cultural gender role norms. However, the socialization and cognitive perspectives differ in the degree to which they emphasize the role of the social environment, especially reinforcement and modeling of adults and peers, relative to cognitive developmental processes, such as the emergence of children’s gender identity and knowledge of gender stereotypes. Despite the disagreements over relative contributions of socialization and cognitive processes, there are a number of similarities in these approaches, and both groups of theorists have conducted studies of cognitive and socialization factors. For instance, Bussey and Bandura (1999) describe some cognitive information-processing mechanisms, such as selective attention, forming cognitive representations, and forming plans of action, that mediate observational learning. Cognitive theorists describe the ways in which children interpret and respond to messages provided by socialization agents, such as peers ( Ruble et al. 2006 ).

These controversies have been important for driving new research. For example, researchers have increased efforts to understand early origins of gender differences and have done so by focusing research on younger ages, when gendered cognitions and behaviors first emerge (e.g., Zosuls et al. 2009 ). More research has also turned to focusing on links among various cognitive and socialization processes, thus leading to more complex models and studies of gender development (for example, see Tobin et al. 2010 ).

Gender Development Research in Sex Roles

There is no doubt that the historic changes described above have influenced the research that appears in our scholarly journals. To explore these trends, we turn our attention to the patterns of publication on gender development within Sex Roles since 1975. Our aim is to provide a descriptive medium for presenting trends in the field (and this journal, in particular) rather than to present an empirical piece with analyses that are an end in themselves. In taking this approach, we intend to characterize the issues, methods, and age groups that have received attention in the published research, and identify areas that need additional emphasis. Furthermore, we discuss why conducting developmental investigations is enriching to the field of gender studies, both theoretically and methodologically.

Identifying Patterns in Sex Roles Articles

To accomplish our goals, we reviewed all articles published in Sex Roles since 1975 (through 2009) and identified 660 abstracts of Sex Roles articles that specifically focused on children and child development (for further inclusion criteria, see Appendix A ). We then categorized these articles based on the age of the participants in the study (see Fig. 1 ), the principal type of methodology used in the study (see Fig. 2 ), and the content. Given the large number of articles we compiled and the descriptive purpose of our categorizations, our classifications were based on text provided in the abstracts. Because articles often investigated more than one content area or topic, categorizations were not mutually exclusive.

Percentage of articles by decade including each age grouping

Percentage of articles by decade using each type of methodology

Issues of Terminology

One of the most challenging aspects of classifying the articles was deciphering the meaning of some terms. In fact, this exercise served to highlight conceptual developments in the field and we felt a discussion of terminology was in itself a revealing way to illustrate important conceptual issues. As the area of gender development has evolved and expanded, the terminology used has similarly expanded and sometimes the meaning terms have changed over time. For example, although the terms “sex-typing,” “gender-typing,” or “gender stereotyping,” and “gender identity” have been the most frequently used terms in the field, the definitions and operationalizations of these terms have changed over time. To address this definitional issue, we briefly review these terms, how they have been used, and how we decided to code them in our analyses.

A recent model of children’s gender self-socialization, the Gender Self-Socialization Model (GSSM; Tobin et al. 2010 ) provides a useful framework for distinguishing among the various constructs studied by gender researchers. Tobin et al. point out that “sex-typing” and “gender-typing” are used in many different ways. They may refer to (a) the demonstration of knowledge or beliefs about attributes associated with gender categories (i.e., gender stereotyping), (b) thoughts and feelings about oneself in relation to being a girl or boy (i.e., gender identity), and (c) the enactment of gendered behavior. In accordance with Tobin et al. (2010) , when classifying articles, we took into account what measures authors used and classified studies as investigating Stereotyping, Gender Identity, or Gender Differences.

Studies investigating masculinity and femininity as proposed by Bem (1981) were classified under Gender Identity because this classification is consistent with the intent of the authors of these studies. However, a problem with Bem’s measurement and conceptualization of gender identity is that it is not assessed in terms of subjective thoughts, feelings, and knowledge about oneself as a member of a gender category, but rather is inferred from self-reports of the degree to which one possesses certain gender stereotyped attributes ( Tobin et al. 2010 ). Thus, we attempted to be sensitive to the multiple types of assessment methods used to investigate gender identity, such as those defined by Perry and his colleagues (e.g., Egan and Perry 2001 ) and adopted by other researchers over the past decade or so (e.g., Smith and Leaper 2006 ).

We also found that the term “gender stereotyping” was used without indication of whether gender stereotypes were assessed in terms of personal stereotype beliefs, knowledge of cultural stereotypes, stereotyped judgments, or the enactment of stereotype-consistent behaviors. Such distinctions are important. For example, a child’s personal beliefs related to gender stereotypes (e.g., believing that girls are good at math) might not always be consistent with her knowledge of cultural gender stereotypes (e.g., knowing the cultural stereotype that girls are not good at math; Signorella et al. 1993 ). Judgments, perceptions, and attributions might be closely linked with stereotype knowledge and beliefs, but are nonetheless distinct from them. Behaviors, such as engaging in stereotyped activities or demonstrating stereotyped interactions styles, might also be linked with more cognitive variables, such as stereotype knowledge, but are also distinct from them. As such, applying the general term “gender stereotyping” without explicit indication of whether gender stereotyped beliefs, knowledge, or behaviors are being measured can cause confusion and more importantly, conflate conceptually distinct constructs. In our classification, we included knowledge and beliefs in the category of stereotyping but included behaviors under Gender Differences.

Content of Gender Development Research in Sex Roles

In this section, we examine the content of articles in Sex Roles and how it relates to the field more broadly. We focus on the content both in terms of the methods used and the topics covered in the articles.

How Much Attention Has Sex Roles Paid to Gender Development Issues?

Since its inception, Sex Roles has published a substantial number of articles focused on child and adolescent participants, although such articles made up on average only about 20% of the journal’s total publications. The child-focused articles were least represented in the 2000s, comprising only 15% of the publications in Sex Roles , compared to between 20% and 23% in other decades. The changes over time are somewhat surprising when compared to the field (see Ruble and Martin 1998 ). This decline seen in Sex Roles might possibly be due to an increase in the number of developmental journals since the 1990s and greater receptiveness of other journals to articles focusing on gender development.

The publications in Sex Roles represented a wide range of developmental stages from infancy to adolescence. On average, Adolescence was clearly the most studied age group, followed by Middle Childhood (43% and 31% on average, respectively), and the least frequently studied stage was Infants/Toddlers, especially in the 2000s (see Fig. 1 ). The paucity of research in Infants/Toddlers in Sex Roles likely does not reflect a general trend in the field as sophisticated infant paradigm procedures have been recently developed, allowing researchers to gain better sense of infants’ and toddlers’ understanding of gender (e.g., Serbin et al. 2001 , 2002 ). In contrast to Infant/Toddler studies, there was a steady increase across decades in articles focusing on Adolescence (see Fig. 1 ). This change may be due to increased interest in adolescents’ gender development in general but it may also be that some of the specific topics, such as body image, have garnered more attention in recent years because of societal focus on health and problems with obesity.

What Have Been the Dominant Methods to Study Gender Development in Sex Roles ?

Although the studies in Sex Roles have used a wide range of methods, across all years the most frequently used method of study represented in Sex Roles was Survey methodology (66% on average). A number of articles also used Experimental (14% on average) and Observational (14% on average) methods; however, over time these methods were less represented (see Fig. 2 ). In addition, few articles used longitudinal or cross-sectional designs to make age comparisons and test developmental hypotheses. On average, 24% of studies involved cross-sectional or longitudinal designs, and these appeared to decrease across decades, with the 1970s and 1980s having the largest percentage and the 1990s and 2000s having a lower proportion of studies using such designs. Overall, the heavy reliance on non-experimental survey and interview methods and the lack of studies using longitudinal and cross-sectional designs may be problematic in that this tendency limits the goals and questions that can be the focus of study. For instance, debates surrounding the relative influence of biological, socialization, and cognitive factors in the emergence of gender stereotyped preferences and behaviors need to be addressed using methods that can test causal directions, including experimental methods and longitudinal designs. Furthermore, many topics that are important to theoretical development require the use of methods that may be time consuming, expensive, and complex, such as observation methods. The gender development field will need to focus more on these complicated methodologies to make further progress in answering these types of questions. Certainly, Sex Roles can be a leader in emphasizing these methods and in creating calls for special issues that focus on these methods.

Which Particular Issues of Gender Development Have Been Focused on in Sex Roles ?

In the following section, we use the latest version of the multidimensional matrix from the Handbook of Child Psychology ( Ruble et al. 2006 ) to organize the publication topics represented by gender development researchers in Sex Roles. We also use this endeavor to illustrate areas that have not been explored in any depth. This matrix addresses normative aspects of gender development and is organized around four gender-related constructs (e.g., concepts or beliefs) and six content areas (e.g., activities and interests) to create cells (identified with unique number and letter combinations) that contains specific research topics (e.g., gender constancy). Because this matrix has served as a precedent for organizing the literature and has also been modified and discussed over time in successive Handbook chapters ( Huston 1983 ; Ruble and Martin 1998 ; Ruble et al. 2006 ), it serves as a heuristic for describing trends. In Table 1 , we present a breakdown of the content areas and constructs, showing how many articles (and what percentage of the total number) fell into each cell of the matrix.

Classification of articles in the matrix of gender-typing ( Ruble et al. 2006 ): total number of articles (percentage of total articles)

Content areas and Constructs were from the latest version of the multidimensional matrix from the Handbook of Child Psychology ( Ruble et al. 2006 )

The articles in Sex Roles covered a wide range of broad content categories and constructs, although certain topics and constructs were consistently more dominant (see Table 1 ). Starting with content areas (the rows), by far more articles were written on two of the six content areas of the matrix—Activities and Interests (toys, occupations, etc.) and Personal-Social Attributes (roles, abilities, etc.)—than the other areas. Compared to the general patterns reported in the state-of-the-science review chapters on gender typing in the Handbook of Child Psychology , these two areas also received much attention from gender developmental scientists. However, there were notable differences between some of the less frequently appearing categories and trends in the broader field: Sex Roles published fewer studies on Gender-Based Social Relationships and on Biological/Categorical Sex when compared to the field in general. Given the strong socialization perspective of many readers of Sex Roles , it may not be that surprising that Sex Roles published few articles on Biological/Categorical Sex, but this topic has been very popular in the gender development literature because of its theoretical implications. Both Kohlberg’s cognitive developmental theory and gender schema approaches are based on ideas that understanding of basic gender knowledge facilitates and motivates learning about other aspects of gender (e.g., stereotypes) and engaging in gender-typed behaviors. Thus, three gender category topics that would fall under Biological/Categorical Sex (cell 1A) have received heavy research attention in developmental journals: understanding of gender identity, gender constancy (children’s understanding that gender is constant across time and situations), and infants’ abilities to discriminate gender (ability to distinguish males from females). On the other hand, research on Values Regarding Gender (attitudes, bias, discrimination, etc.) associated with gender has not been the focus of research attention by gender developmentalists, and this lack of attention has also been evident in Sex Roles . Given the feminist perspective on the importance of considering power and status, it may be somewhat surprising that so few child-focused articles appearing in Sex Roles have explored issues of gendered values.

An examination of constructs from the matrix (columns) shows that two of the four constructs—Identity/Self-Perception and Behavioral Enactment—were represented more often than others but the differences were relatively small. Concepts and Beliefs were well represented, but Preferences showed the lowest frequency of publication. These patterns are consistent with the amount of space devoted to these constructs in the Handbook of Child Psychology chapters, suggesting that the constructs of interest to gender developmental scientists have been mirrored in Sex Roles .

Also of interest are cells that were empty (e.g., concepts/belief about values; Cell 6A) or showed very low numbers of publications (concepts/beliefs about relationships; Cell 4A). When comparisons were made between the patterns of publication of gender development topics in Handbook of Child Psychology , the articles appearing in Sex Roles appeared to mirror the trends shown in the field more broadly with one major exception. Specifically, Sex Roles differed in the lack of publication of articles on topics related to identity/self perception associated with gender categories (Cell 1B). As described above, researchers have attended to this cell because of the implications for gender development more broadly, but this trend has not been demonstrated in Sex Roles .

Which Gender Development Topics Have Received Consistent Research Interest and Which Have Changed over Time?

In this section, we describe the findings using a more general classification strategy. That is, we classified articles based on major topic areas addressed in the literature on gender development. We identified topic areas using a bottom-up analysis of the articles in Sex Roles. Our topic areas are also consistent with the way in which topic areas are frequently grouped at conferences that cover gender development research, and thus reflects general research activity in the field. This approach allowed us to explore more fully and descriptively the interests of authors and editors of Sex Roles , which may diverge from the focus on topics represented in the developmental handbooks. We developed nine broad topic categories (see Table 2 ). The categories are discussed in terms of whether they have maintained consistent interest over time or have shown a change in research interest over time. We follow this review of the more prominent categories with a discussion of topics that have been relatively neglected across time and more specific content areas that deserve greater attention.

Topic categories by decade: total number of articles (percentage of articles)

Percentages calculated as a proportion of the total number of child-focused articles in individual decades. The 1970s included the years 1975–1979 and the 2000s included the years 2000–2009

Topics that have Maintained Consistent Interest Over Time

A number of topic areas received consistent research attention across time. Here we describe them in order of their prominence.

Gender Differences

The most frequent category appearing across all years was Gender Differences (an article was coded into the Gender Differences category when the abstract mentioned a comparison between girls and boys in a specific area). On average, slightly over half of the articles published in Sex Roles examined differences between the genders, and this trend mirrored research in the field more broadly. It is noteworthy that there was a decrease in the number of these studies in Sex Roles from the 1990s to the 2000s (see Table 2 ), potentially showing a declining interest in this area of research. It is possible that Maccoby and Jacklin’s 1974 book on the psychology of gender differences initially spurred increased interest in this area that peaked in the 1990s, but that increasing criticisms pertaining to the methodology and conclusions drawn from gender differences research resulted in a decrease in studies focusing on such differences by the 2000s. Most notably, Hyde (2005) proposed the gender similarities hypothesis to counter the differences model that has been popular in science and the popular media. The gender similarities hypothesis proposes that males and females are similar on most psychological variables and that most differences are in the close to zero range when examining effect sizes. Further, Hyde (2007) has argued that more theoretical and research attention needs to focus on gender as a stimulus variable that influences how other people behave toward a person rather than as an individual difference variable. Thus, in recent years, researchers have been challenged to formulate more complex research goals and studies that directly address popular assumptions about the existence, origins, and stability (or malleability) of gender differences. It will be interesting to see if such challenges are addressed in future articles in Sex Roles .

Socialization

Over time, an average of about one-third of the articles in Sex Roles were focused on gender socialization (see Table 2 ), and almost half of these articles focused on socialization by parents. Socialization continues to be a popular topic of study in gender development ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). A range of parent factors were represented in these Sex Roles publications, from parents’ attitudes, expectations, and perceptions, to parents’ behaviors with their children, and how parental characteristics (e.g., maternal employment, gay/lesbian parents) affected children’s gender development. A fair number of studies also investigated adults more generally (e.g., adult networks in children’s lives, adults’ perceptions of children) and teachers as socialization agents, although these categories were more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. The emphasis on gender socialization by parents and other adults is consistent with the popularity of socialization theories that emerged in the late 1960s ( Mischel 1966 , 1970 ) and revised in the 1970s and 1980s ( Bandura 1977 , 1986 ; Mischel 1979 ).

Studies focused on peer socialization were also prevalent in the journal, representing on average almost 20% of the socialization articles across the decades. Somewhat more articles on peer socialization were published in the 1970s and the 2000s, perhaps a result of Maccoby’s work in the 1970s on peer socialization and later, from renewed focus and theorizing about the role of peers, such as Judith Harris’ (1995) group socialization theory, and Maccoby’s later work on the consequences of gender segregation ( 1998 ). The peer socialization category also included studies that related to peer bullying and aggression, and there appeared to be more articles on this topic in the 2000s in Sex Roles and in the field more broadly, coinciding with the popularity of new theories concerning gender differences in styles of aggression (e.g., relational aggression vs. physical aggression, Crick and Grotpeter 1995 ).

Two other socialization topics were relatively frequent in the 2000s. First, several articles examined the role of social contexts, such as the family or school environment or specific factors in the broader sociocultural context. This apparent trend toward emphasizing context is consistent with the growth of contextual theories and cultural perspectives over time (for example, see Bronfenbrenner and Morris 2006 ; Magnusson and Stattin 2006 ). Second, some studies investigated the ways in which properties of objects could lead children to develop distinct styles of play (e.g., Karpoe and Olney 1983 ; Serbin et al. 1990 ). This type of research reveals how adults’ choices of children’s toys and children’s own choices can indirectly affect girls’ and boys’ development of different interaction styles and skills and more research identifying these features and their affects could and should be published in Sex Roles.

Stereotyping

The next largest category represented in Sex Roles was Stereotyping, with approximately 25% of the studies across decades addressing some aspect of children’s stereotyping (see Table 2 ). It should be noted that studies that only concerned adult stereotyping (e.g., parents’ stereotyped beliefs) were classified under Socialization rather than Stereotyping. As a result, this category was restricted to children’s stereotype-related cognitions and behaviors. Not surprisingly, most of these studies concerned the domains of activities/interests and personal-social attributes, similar to our findings reported above for gender differences. Studies commonly investigated the links between stereotype knowledge/beliefs and children’s interests/behaviors. Such studies are necessary for resolving theoretical controversies regarding the importance of cognitions in the development of early gendered behaviors, and these types of studies have been popular in the broader field of gender development as well as being represented in Sex Roles . For example, Bradbard and Endsley (1983) found that when novel objects were labeled as being for the other gender (i. e., stereotype knowledge), preschoolers explored the objects less frequently, asked fewer questions, and were more likely to forget object names than when the objects were labeled for their own gender or both genders. Although there were a number of experimental gender-labeling studies like this conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, there have been no recent studies published in this area in Sex Roles. Such studies continue to be published in other child development journals ( Martin et al. 1995 ). This decline in Sex Roles is unfortunate as there are still a number of unanswered questions regarding mediating mechanisms, age trends, and individual differences that are essential for theoretical development and intervention efforts ( Miller et al. 2006 ).

Children’s attitudes regarding egalitarian gender roles were also included within the Stereotyping category, and a considerable number of studies were published in this area, which were coded within the matrix cell for gender attitudes. These studies represent the longstanding interest and established measures concerning attitudes about egalitarian gender roles both within Sex Roles and the broader field of gender development. Moreover, these attitudes were often studied in relation to parent socialization (i.e., how parents’ gender role attitudes relate to children’s gender role attitudes) and as factors influencing gender differences (i.e., how children’s gender role attitudes relate to their behaviors and interests).

This category also encompassed a number of articles that focused on how children process and respond to gendered information in the environment. Many of these studies were designed to investigate the effects of stereotypes on children’s perceptions, including their memory/recall of stereotype consistent and inconsistent information, social judgments, and expectancies. These studies were therefore focused on exploring the cognitive processes underlying gender development.

Gender Identity

Gender Identity was also a consistently appearing topic category across the decades. The largest number of articles on this topic concerned self-perceptions of traits and abilities. Those studies typically involved children’s self-ratings of masculinity/femininity using scales such as Bem’s Sex Role Inventory ( Bem 1974 ) and Spence’s Personal Attributes Questionnaire ( Spence et al. 1975 ). As mentioned previously, however, the studies using these measures did not specifically assess children’s own thoughts, feelings, and knowledge regarding their membership in a gender category ( Tobin et al. 2010 ). Rather, children were asked to indicate the extent to which they believe that certain gender-typed attributes characterize them and the researcher uses this information to classify children along masculine/feminine dimensions. Historically, this has been the methodology used in the adult literature and, until recently, researchers interested in children have also used this approach. Currently, however, child researchers have tended to assess gender identity by directly asking children about their personal feelings regarding being male or female such as asking children the degree to which they feel that they are typical members of their gender group and the extent to which they are content with being a member of their gender group (e.g., Egan and Perry 2001 ). However, there may be developmental constraints in collecting such data as younger children may not be able to reflect upon their personal feelings regarding being male or female.

Another central focus of research and debate on gender identity development has been Kohlberg’s concept of gender constancy and gender schema views on the importance of basic gender understanding ( Martin and Halverson 1981 ; Martin et al. 2002 ). Indeed, the second largest number of articles on Gender Identity concerned gender awareness, labeling, and constancy. These aspects of early gender identity have received less research attention in Sex Roles than in the field more broadly (as described above). Only a small handful of studies addressed children’s affective sense of themselves as male or female or the wish to be male or female. Articles published in the 2000s were more likely than earlier studies to investigate multiple dimensions of identity (e.g., Carver et al. 2003 ), thus representing current thinking about gender identity as a complex, multifaceted construct.

Aside from studies growing out of classic theories of gender identity development, another somewhat frequent sub-category concerned body image. This topic became especially noticeable in the publications in the 1990s and 2000s, likely coinciding with increased attention to and alarm in the popular media surrounding the issue of eating disorders and obesity. Indeed, during the same two decades, eating disorder symptomology also appeared as a topic in Sex Roles .

Topics that Showed Changes Over Time

Although we did not observe any dramatic changes in coverage of the various topics across decades, some did evidence an increase in research attention over time. Here we discuss them in order of their general prominence in the journal.

Increased Cross-cultural Research

One of the more noticeable changes across decades was an increase in publications in Sex Roles categorized as Cross-Cultural in the 2000s (see Table 2 ). This pattern is not surprising given that the recent editorial policy of Sex Roles emphasizes internationalization and the importance of understanding cultural context ( Frieze and Dittrich 2008 ). This increase in cultural articles is also consistent with the increasing attention to cultural differences and representation in the psychological and developmental literatures more generally. Theories about cultural differences have been adapted to provide a framework for describing gender differences ( Cross and Madson 1997 ) and researchers have increasingly called for the need to extend the study of gender differences and gender development. Prior to 2000, most of the studies categorized as cross-cultural concerned racial/ethnic group differences or differences across countries. More recently, however, the bulk of studies in this category have focused on gender in one specific (typically non-white) cultural group. This change is consistent with trends in child development more broadly in investigating within-culture variability. Some studies also investigated differences related to socioeconomic status (SES) and demographic differences related to geography (typically urban versus rural populations).

We also noted that across time, abstracts were more likely to include information on the demographic characteristics of their samples, thus implicitly acknowledging potential limits to the generalizability of their findings and highlighting studies that were not conducted on the predominant US and/or white, middle-class samples. These studies that simply mentioned the demographic characteristics of their sample in the abstract (e.g., African American sample, middle- class sample) were not coded as cross-cultural unless they specifically focused on cultural issues such as similarities or differences between cultures. Thus our figures might somewhat underestimate the presence of culture as a theme in Sex Roles articles.

Increased Attention to Media

Articles in the Media category involved a number of types of media (i.e., books, TV programs/cartoons, commercials, films/video, computer/internet, music, etc.). Published articles concerning media or books were consistently present in the journal and appeared to increase in number in the 1990s and 2000s (see Table 2 ). The form of media most frequently represented involved books, and these most often dealt with the portrayals of females and males. However, in the last two decades, articles appeared that explored new media including the content of computer applications, the internet, and video games. A few other articles examined diverse content, including consumer product packaging (e.g., cereal boxes) and personalities in the media (e.g., celebrities).

On the whole, research in this category confirmed the idea that the books and media that children are exposed to present highly stereotyped portrayals of men and women, and women are often under-represented in stereotypically male roles (e.g., Purcell and Stewart 1990 ). Most studies in this category were content analyses and did not directly test implications, such as effects on various aspects of children’s gender identity (although body image was examined in a few studies) and stereotyping.

Increased Attention to Individual Differences and Adjustment

This broad and diverse category captured a somewhat surprisingly large percentage of articles, especially in the 2000s (See Table 2 ). The size of this category was partly due to the number of studies investigating topics related to psychological adjustment, including general measures of adjustment, such as self-esteem, as well as symptoms of psychopathology. These topics are of obvious relevance to gender development, but have been less frequently studied than core aspects of gender identity and gender-related beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors. Nonetheless, implications related to adjustment have been a driving force of research in gender development and have been important to theories of gender development. Indeed, a central concern of researchers dating back to Kagan (1964) and Bem (1974 , 1981) has been the implications of gender-typing and cross-gender-typing on adjustment. More recently, researchers have investigated adjustment outcomes in relation to multiple dimensions of gender identity (for a review, see Lurye et al. 2008 ). For instance, research by Perry and his colleagues has found that felt pressure to adhere to gender norms is associated with lower self-worth ( Egan and Perry 2001 ). Thus, current research on adjustment appears to be a focus on aspects of gender that lead to good or poor adjustment outcomes. This is an especially fruitful and important direction for future research, as it directly addresses the implications of various aspects of gender for children’s more general functioning.

Several other topics included in this category because of their relevance to adjustment were Gender Identity Disorder and eating disorders and body issues. The number of articles addressing Gender Identity Disorder was extremely small and only appeared in the 2000s. Given the controversies about the causes and consequences of extreme gender non-normative behavior (e.g., Hegarty 2009 ; Zucker et al. 2009 ), and its obvious relevance to theories of gender identity development, more research on this topic is certainly warranted. The studies in this category also reflect topics related to eating disorders, body satisfaction, and body size or Body Mass Index (BMI). These topics have received much attention in the public media and are of clear relevance to gender development.

Publications that focused on various dimensions of personality and individual differences were also coded into this category. One of the individual difference constructs that stood out was the measurement of “fear of success” in the 1970s and 1980s. This was perhaps the most dated concept we came across and its disappearance after the 1980s is indicative of social changes. Although there is little, if any, recent research on girls’ motivations to avoid success as an individual difference, girls might nonetheless avoid participation in certain male-dominated fields due to real and perceived obstacles to success in those fields. For example, the concept of stereotype threat has been frequently used to discuss barriers to girls’ success in fields such as math (e.g., Spencer et al. 1999 ). Thus, in a general sense, the “fear of success” topic is still with us, but its framing has changed to reflect the role of context and the more nuanced nature of barriers to girls’ participation and success in male stereotyped fields.

A number of articles included in this category also addressed topics more closely related to sexuality, sexual maturation, and male-female relationships, including sexual behaviors, dating, menarche, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment. These topics have not been very well integrated into the gender development literature and sexual identity in particular tends to be very specialized and focused on sexual minorities ( Diamond 2003 ). Furthermore, although sexual identity is later developing and obviously related to older age groups, awareness of sexual attraction and relationships emerge earlier, and is clearly relevant to children’s conceptions of gender roles. Thus, greater consideration of issues of sexual identity and sexual and romantic relationships would provide a more complete understanding of gender development.

Neglected Topics and Gaps in the Literature

Thus far, we have primarily focused on the topics and theories that have dominated the literature and been most visible in this journal. However, gaps in the literature were found and are important to consider as they help identify future directions for researchers.

There were gaps in the ages of children studied. Few studies in our content analysis of articles published in Sex Roles involved research on infants and toddlers. The lack of infant and toddler research may be due to in part to challenges associated with testing very young children. However, researchers now have access to a variety of methods available to them for observing and analyzing behavioral data, thus freeing researchers from having to rely on self-report and parent reported data on children, and expanding options for studying children who are too young to follow complex procedures or report on their own thoughts and behaviors. Given that children demonstrate a range of gender-typed behaviors, preferences, and knowledge by 2–3 years of age, if not earlier, it behooves investigators to expand efforts to better understand the earliest stages of gender development.

Gaps were also noted in the types of methods utilized in studies. Self-report measures were the most frequently used method of data collection. This reliance on self-report measures is likely because many of the issues and questions addressed in the articles could be assessed most easily and directly via these methods (and may explain the relative lack of focus on young children and infants/toddlers). These qualities are certainly strengths of direct self-reports. However, weaknesses and limitations also exist (as is the case with any method) and differences in methods may contribute to lack of coherence in findings. For example, Eisenberg and colleagues ( Eisenberg and Lennon 1983 ; Fabes and Eisenberg 1996 ) found that gender differences in empathy and sympathy varied with the method used to assess empathy-related responding. Specifically, their meta-analyses found large differences favoring girls for self-report measures of empathy/sympathy, especially questionnaire indices. No gender differences were found when the measure of empathy was either physiological or unobtrusive observations of nonverbal behavior. Eisenberg and Lennon (1983) suggested that the general pattern of results was due to differences among measures in the degree to which the intent of the measure was obvious and people could control their responses. Gender differences were greatest when demand characteristics were high (i.e., it was clear what was being assessed) and individuals had conscious control over their responses (i.e., self-report indices were used). In contrast, gender differences were virtually nonexistent when demand characteristics were subtle and study participants were unlikely to exercise much conscious control over their responding (i.e., physiological indices). Thus, when gender-related stereotypes are activated and people can easily control their responses, they may try to project a socially desirable image to others or to themselves. Such findings call for the greater use of multiple methods in research published in Sex Roles (and elsewhere) to ascertain whether this pattern exists in our research and certainly argues for less sole reliance on self-report methods.

There is some evidence that such a change is beginning to happen. For example, our analysis revealed a slight increase in studies employing time and labor intensive methods that allow for the discovery and analysis of the more subtle and complex aspects of behavior, such as the coding of transcriptions and videotaped and real-time observation, and qualitative methods. Such methods allow for a more micro-analytic examination of the dynamics of behavioral interactions but also take considerable time and effort to code, manage, and analyze. The investigation of changing patterns of behaviors in large-scale observational or longitudinal studies may require dynamical analyses that may be unfamiliar to many gender researchers ( Martin and Ruble 2010 ). Moreover, a fair amount of debate has surrounded the value and limitations of qualitative methods, though there is now growing consensus that empirical and qualitative methods each have advantages and disadvantages and can be used to complement each other (e.g., Oakley 1999 ).

There were also a number of gaps in the content of the articles. Overall, it seems that the emphasis in the gender development publications in Sex Roles has been on the development of different gender-linked abilities and traits, often in the areas of academic and career-related choices and skills. These aspects of gender development make up only a small portion of the Matrix of Gender-Typing ( Ruble et al. 2006 ) and this emphasis on a limited set of gender-related attributes suggests that many aspects of children’s gender-typing remain to be explored. Some of these aspects might be less salient or more difficult to measure (e.g., gestures, speech patterns), but nonetheless are integral aspects of gender identity. Further research is also needed to better understand the relations among the various cells in the matrix and how such relations might change across development.

Despite the prevalence of articles addressing socialization, our analysis of this category indicated that research in this area has been heavily slated toward investigating the role of parents. Less attention was focused on peers in the articles we reviewed in Sex Roles . Nonetheless, there has been greater focus on peers in the more recent literature. This research activity may have been facilitated by the recognition of peer influences earlier in development (e.g., Fabes et al. 2003b ), as well as by methodological advances that have allowed for the exploration of peer processes in greater depth and complexity ( Martin et al. 2005 ; Martin and Ruble 2010 ).

Despite the recent interest in this topic, the fact that little attention has been paid to peer relationships in children younger than adolescents may reflect a failure to recognize the importance of early peer relationships to young children’s gender development and adjustment. Given that much of young children’s peer-related interactions are highly structured by gender and that these gender segregated peer groups have important influences on short- and long-term adjustment ( Fabes et al. 2003a ; Martin and Fabes 2001 ), researchers who publish in Sex Roles (and elsewhere) need to be more attentive to the role that peers play in early gender development.

Furthermore, relatively little research has focused on the ways in which gender affects relationships and communication with peers and might impact same- and other-gender relationships across time into adulthood. In our analysis, studies that did involve relationship processes tended to focus on adolescents and addressed specific relationship contexts and issues, such as dating and sexual harassment. Few studies focused on assessing cognitions or beliefs about relationships. There is a need for theory to better understand the dynamics and development of male-female (and same-gender) relationships over time ( Zosuls et al. 2011 ). Such knowledge would help us to better understand children’s interpersonal dynamics in friendship, school, and home contexts and how to promote more positive relationships into adulthood.

Children’s social cognition, including their intergroup attitudes, plays an important role in peer relationships. Intergroup attitudes and behaviors have been of longstanding interest to gender researchers coming from a social psychological perspective (e.g., Bigler 1995 ; Powlishta 1995a , b ) and have been prominent in gender schema views ( Martin and Halverson 1981 ; Liben and Signorella 1980 ). However, with the exception of the measurement of children’s gender role attitudes, few studies investigated intergroup processes and gender differences in values regarding gender. The limited research on intergroup processes is surprising given that the study of children’s intergroup gender attitudes should have obvious connections to theories related to children’s behaviors, including gender segregation. One reason for the dearth of research directly measuring children’s intergroup gender attitudes might be that such bias is inferred from children’s greater liking for peers of their own gender. Whereas such evidence certainly indicates more positive attitudes about one’s own group, it does not constitute a direct measure of attitudes and is a poor gauge of the exact nature of children’s feelings about their own and the other gender group ( Martin and Ruble 2010 ; Zosuls et al. 2011 ). Once again, however, it could be the case that studies focused on Intergroup Processes appear in journals that more specifically address these topics (e.g., social psychology journals).

Although gender discrimination is a common topic of study in the adult psychological literature, research on children’s same-gender peer preferences, evaluations, and interactions are rarely framed in terms of discrimination. Furthermore, relatively little is known about how children may or may not perceive gender discrimination directed at others or themselves (for an exception, see Brown and Bigler 2004 , 2005 ). More studies investigating gender discrimination within and between gender groups would be valuable for better understanding the dynamics of girls’ and boys’ relationships and for designing strategies to prevent acts of gender-based discrimination among children.

Our analysis also suggested that even less is known about the impact on gender development of socialization messages children receive from features of the larger socio-cultural context, such as the media. Given how much media children are exposed to and the debates often surrounding children’s media content, more studies that directly test the effects of media on gender-related self-concepts, behaviors, and perceptions would be a valuable direction for future research. Furthermore, although a number of studies investigated features of media that children are exposed to, few examined whether children perceive media messages in the ways that they are presented and assumed to be processed by adults. In the majority of studies of socialization, investigators have often worked under the assumption that gender-related features of the environment are relatively passively encoded by children, rather than actively processed. Future research should aim to test these assumptions.

The Gender Identity and Adjustment and Individual Differences categories reflected growth and evolution in theories and topics addressed by the literature, but also suggested the need for further integration of these topics into core theories and research. Both categories featured a number of studies addressing the topic of body image; however, this aspect of identity is not usually included in models and measures related to various aspects of gender identity, such as gender typicality (e.g., Egan and Perry 2001 ). Rather, body image is generally discussed in terms of its relation to psychological adjustment (e.g., eating disorders). Nonetheless, body image has obvious relevance to children’s gender identity development and future research should aim to incorporate this idea more directly into theories and studies of gender identity. For example, body image might have relevance to children’s sense of gender typicality, with children who have bodies and body images that are closer to societal ideals for their gender feeling more typical for their gender.

Finally, the vast majority of studies addressed cognitive and socialization processes. Only one published study directly focused on biological ideas about gender development ( Rodgers et al. 1998 ). Studies focusing on biology may have been virtually nonexistent because such articles are more likely to be published in journals that are oriented to the biological sciences, and may be due to this journal’s greater emphasis on socialization and feminist perspectives. Indeed, the name of this journal— Sex Roles —emphasizes roles, which connotes socially learned and prescribed behaviors. Research studies investigating of biological factors, such as hormones, also tend to be complex and expensive and are conducted by a relatively small group of investigators interested in gender development (e.g., Alexander and Hines 2002 ; Berenbaum and Snyder 1995 ; Wallen 1996 ). Nonetheless, research involving a biological perspective has gained momentum in recent decades and would be a valuable addition to the body of research represented in Sex Roles.

Looking forward, as gender development researchers and contributors to Sex Roles , we should also consider what areas of research are most important to address given current inequalities, societal problems, and shifting cultural and demographic features of society and the endpoints we are interested in achieving for future generations of girls and boys. Social issues concerning educational practices and improving school outcomes have become gendered discussions (Does the gender gap in education now favor girls? Should single-sex education be encouraged or discouraged?), and these issues warrant the attention of researchers. Changes in media also provide new areas for research investigation. For instance, the ubiquity of and interest in social networking for adolescents suggests that researchers should consider how virtual, immediate, and potentially continuous social connections among adolescents influences personal and social dimensions of gender development. Biological and cultural changes suggest how the lines between adolescence and younger ages are becoming blurred. The earlier ages of puberty and increased sexualization of young girls are examples of topics that require additional research attention ( American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls 2007 ).

Summary and Conclusion

In this paper, our primary goal was to describe trends in research on gender development published in Sex Roles over the past few decades. Overall, the topics receiving the greatest emphasis—Gender Differences, Socialization, and Stereotyping, and to a somewhat lesser degree, Gender Identity—were relatively stable over time. The prevalence of articles documenting gender differences is logical given that gender differences—whether real or perceived, small or large in magnitude—was the starting point of interest for which the field came into existence and that many researchers are ultimately interested in explaining. Gender differences have long captured the public’s interest and have been used to justify myriad laws, policies, and practices in the public and private spheres. The emphasis on gender socialization and stereotyping is also consistent with the prominence of socialization theories beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the journal’s mission to provide a feminist perspective. The Gender Identity category was especially varied and rich; the studies in this category clearly reflected the broad influence of Bem’s measure, but also included work influenced by Kohlberg’s (1966) ideas about gender constancy, and newer multidimensional models of gender identity.

Gender development has progressed a long way from the initial study of gender differences, and has continued to move forward steadily. Leaders in the field have encouraged increasingly precise and clear terminology, more sophisticated methods and analytic techniques, and a greater diversity of topics of study. Assumptions made about one domain of gender development predicting all others have been questioned, and the multidimensionality of gender has been highlighted, as evidenced here in the many topics covered by researchers. Sex Roles has played an important role in the growth of the field by providing an outlet dedicated to disseminating research on the wide array of topics associated with gender development. In the next 35 years, our hope is that the journal will continue to play a leadership role in the field, and to promote more diversity in topics, methods, and ages employed in gender development research.

Acknowledgments

The paper was supported in part by a research grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD045816-01) awarded to the Carol Lynn Martin and Richard A. Fabes; a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research grant (R01 HD04994) to Diane N. Ruble; and a National Science Foundation IRADS grant (0721383) Funds from the T. Denny Sanford Foundation also supported work on this paper. Funding also was provided by the School of Social Dynamics and the Challenged Child Project at Arizona State University.

To determine inclusion, we used several parameters. In addition to including studies that had children as direct participants, we also included studies that had children or child development as the targets of study (e.g., maternal reports about children, parents’ gender-typed discipline strategies). Second, we included studies that involved content analyses of children’s media (e.g., gender-typed behaviors displayed in children’s cartoons). Third, studies with a primary purpose of reporting the psychometric properties of a measure developed for and used with children were also included. We excluded studies that were based on a college student sample or that included participants 17 years and older if the primary purpose of the study did not concern adolescence. Moreover, we did not include retrospective studies, and we did not include non-empirical theoretical and review papers.

Contributor Information

Kristina M. Zosuls, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 873701, Tempe, AZ 85287-3701, USA.

Cindy Faith Miller, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

Diane N. Ruble, Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.

Carol Lynn Martin, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

Richard A. Fabes, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

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• 30 October 2018

US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Science does not support the Trump administration’s proposed move to narrow the definition of gender. Credit: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times , the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with. Genetic testing, it says, could be used to resolve any ambiguity about external appearance. The move would make it easier for institutions receiving federal funds, such as universities and health programmes, to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity.

The memo claims that processes for deciding the sex on a birth certificate will be “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable”.

The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour. Worse, it would undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.

Furthermore, biology is not as straightforward as the proposal suggests. By some estimates, as many as one in 100 people have differences or disorders of sex development, such as hormonal conditions, genetic changes or anatomical ambiguities, some of which mean that their genitalia cannot clearly be classified as male or female. For most of the twentieth century, doctors would often surgically alter an infant’s ambiguous genitals to match whichever sex was easier, and expect the child to adapt. Frequently, they were wrong. A 2004 study tracked 14 genetically male children given female genitalia; 8 ended up identifying as male, and the surgical intervention caused them great distress ( W. G. Reiner and J. P. Gearhart N. Engl. J. Med. 350 , 333–341; 2004 ).

Even more scientifically complex is a mismatch between gender and the sex on a person’s birth certificate. Some evidence suggests that transgender identity has genetic or hormonal roots, but its exact biological correlates are unclear. Whatever the cause, organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics advise physicians to treat people according to their preferred gender, regardless of appearance or genetics.

The research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female, and gender as a spectrum that includes transgender people and those who identify as neither male nor female. The US administration’s proposal would ignore that expert consensus.

The idea that science can make definitive conclusions about a person’s sex or gender is fundamentally flawed. Just ask sports organizations such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which have struggled with this for decades. In the 1960s, concerned that men would compete in women’s events, officials tried classifying athletes through genital exams — an intrusive and humiliating process. DNA tests that check for the presence of a Y chromosome did not prove reliable, either: people with XY chromosomes can have female characteristics owing to conditions including an inability to respond to testosterone.

Nowadays, the IOC classifies athletes by measuring their testosterone levels, but this, too, is flawed. Certain medical conditions can raise women’s testosterone levels to the typical male range, and the tests leave them unable to compete among women.

If the Trump administration does attempt to impose genetic testing, it will have many surprises. For instance, genetic recombination can transfer Y chromosome genes to X chromosomes, resulting in people with XX chromosomes who have male characteristics.

Political attempts to pigeonhole people have nothing to do with science and everything to do with stripping away rights and recognition from those whose identity does not correspond with outdated ideas of sex and gender. It is an easy way for the Trump administration to rally its supporters, many of whom oppose equality for people from sexual and gender minorities. It is unsurprising that it appeared just weeks before the midterm elections.

This is not the first time that the administration has attacked legal protections for transgender and non-binary people. Last year, Trump declared that transgender people would no longer be allowed to serve in the US military, and rescinded guidelines suggesting that schools should let pupils use the lavatory of their choice. An October 2017 memo from the US Department of Justice stated that laws prohibiting employment discrimination should not apply to gender identity.

Instituting a policy with a narrow definition of sex or gender and no basis in science would be a major step backwards for the United States in gender-identity issues. Sadly, the move is only the latest in a series of proposals that misuse and ignore science and harm marginalized groups as part of a quest to score cheap political points.

Nature 563 , 5 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07238-8

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Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team (AGTRT)

Welcome to AGTRT

This is the website of the Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team (AGTRT), a collective of scientists aiming to bridge the trenches of the so called “gender wars”.

Accessible theory about gender and sexuality

We publish acessible blog-style articles and academic documentation about our work on Formal Gender Theory (FGT), Androgyny-Based Gender Theory (ABGT) and Theoretical Sexology (TS).

Beyond woke and anti-woke

We are currently witnessing a “gender war” about a seemingly simple question: What is a woman? What started as a niche conflict between fractions within feminist and transgender activism, has escalated in an epic culture war of global proportions. The AGTRT aims to contribute to bridging the trenches between co-essentialism (“woke”) and essentialism (“anti-woke”), the two diametrically opposed trends in present day societal and scientific debates on gender. Co-essentialism relies solely on self-identification to define gender, while essentialism is the belief that only biological factors determine gender. The AGTRT aims to “open up” more moderate positions beyond the current polarization.

Formal Gender Theory (FGT)

FGT is all about finding Middle of the Road (MotR) positions in gender theory. It facilitates substantive dialogue among different positions in gender discourse, ensuring coherence in argumentation while allowing for respectful disagreement.

“A Middle of the Road (MotR) approach to gender theory is possible, avoiding the extremes of woke and anti-woke .”

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Androgyny-Based Gender Theory (ABGT)

ABGT explores the concept of androgyny, which links gender and sexuality to consciousness. It explores how by doing “shadow work”, individuals can cultivate potent androgynous qualities, ultimately allowing humanity to shift from patriarchal to matriarchal ways of living.

“Androgyny as a concept links gender and sexuality to consciousness. It has the potential to open up an entirely new scientific paradigm, and to kick-start a global sexual revolution.”

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The AGTRT explores the ways in which Formal Gender Theory (FGT) can be applied in Theoretical Sexology (TS), initially with an emphasis on the theory of sexual orientation.

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Documentation We have documented our theoretical work in extensive reports. Next to that, we have succinctly described some of our key insights in brief messages. They can be found under documents . We have pdf’s and Scribd-links available for every report and message.

Follow our blog posts We regularly post on our blog about our work on our three major themes : Formal Gender Theory (FGT), Androgyny-Based Gender Theory (ABGT) and Theoretical Sexology (TS). In our blog postings, we reflect on theoretical aspects or current developments regarding to gender in science and society, currently only in Dutch.

Androgynous Humanity ABGT is currently being developed in the form of a popular-scientific book for a broad audience, under the Dutch title  De Androgyne Mens  (English translation:  Androgynous Humanity ). After the book’s publication, the key aspects of ABGT will also be offered to scientific journals in the form of compartimentalized articles.

Collaborate with the AGTRT All our written work can be considered working papers at this moment; we are open to receive feedback and comments. On the longer term, we also aim to publish in journals and at different kinds of publishers. Are you interested to contribute to our network? Read more  about us , or send us an e-mail.

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Critical Race Feminism

Critical gender theory is a framework that analyzes the intersections of gender, power, and social structures through a critical and feminist lens. It seeks to challenge and deconstruct traditional notions of gender, exposing how gender is socially constructed and operates within systems of oppression. Critical gender theory recognizes that gender intersects with other dimensions of identity, such as race, class, and sexuality, and understands that power dynamics and inequalities shape the experiences of individuals and communities. When applied to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), critical gender theory calls for an examination of how gender norms and expectations impact marginalized groups and reinforces inequities. It seeks to dismantle gender-based discrimination and advocate for inclusive policies and practices that recognize and honor the diversity of gender identities and experiences. Critical gender theory within DEI frameworks fosters an understanding that gender intersects with other social identities and demands comprehensive approaches to create equitable and inclusive spaces.

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Vatican Says 'No' to Sex Changes and Gender Theory in New Document

Vatican Says 'No' to Sex Changes and Gender Theory in New Document

People attend the Regina Caeli prayer led by Pope Francis at the Vatican, April 7, 2024. Vatican Media/Handout via REUTERS/ File photo

By Alvise Armellini

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -The Vatican on Monday reaffirmed its opposition to sex changes, gender theory and surrogate parenthood, as well as abortion and euthanasia, four months after supporting blessings for same-sex couples.

At the same time, the head of its doctrinal office (DDF), Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, said the Vatican opposed the criminalisation of homosexuality as practised by a number of countries with the support of local Catholic groups.

The release of "Dignitas infinita" (Infinite dignity), a 20-page document, following fierce conservative pushback, especially in Africa, against the DDF's previous declaration - on LGBT issues.

There is no suggestion that the new text, which describes what the Church perceives as threats to human dignity, was prepared in direct response to the rows over same-sex blessings, as it has been five years in the making. But it has undergone extensive revisions over the period.

Pope Francis approved it last month after requesting that it also mention "poverty, the situation of migrants, violence against women, human trafficking, war, and other themes", Fernandez said in a statement.

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The declaration said surrogate parenting violates the dignity of both the surrogate mother and the child, and recalled that Francis in January called it "despicable" and urged a global ban.

GENDER THEORY

On gender theory, it said "desiring a personal self-determination ... amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel".

Gender theory suggests that gender is more complex and fluid than the binary categories of male and female, and depends on more than visible sexual characteristics.

The declaration said that "any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception".

It acknowledged the possibility of surgery to resolve "genital abnormalities", but stressed that "such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here".

The Vatican has, nevertheless, tried to reach out to transsexual people, who have been cleared by the DDF to be baptised and serve as godparents, and have been among invitees to the Vatican.

Fernandez, a liberal theologian and personal friend of the pope, a fellow Argentine, defended Francis' right to update Church positions in line with the times, noting how in the past it had gone from supporting to condemning slavery.

"It now seems that Pope Francis cannot say anything different from what has been said before, as if the teachings of the Church had been permanently set by previous popes," the cardinal lamented.

Monday's declaration doubled down on the Vatican's standing condemnation of abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty.

It also mentioned sexual abuse as a threat to human dignity - calling it "widespread in society", including within the Catholic Church - as well as cyberbullying and other forms of online abuse.

(Reporting by Alvise Armellini; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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Vatican condemns gender-affirming surgery, surrogacy and gender theory

LGBTQ+ advocates criticized the stance as harmful and contrary to the stated goal of recognizing the "infinite dignity" of all of God's children.

The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that reject God’s plan for human life.

The Vatican’s doctrine office issued “Infinite Dignity,” a 20-page declaration that has been in the works for five years. After substantial revision in recent months, it was approved March 25 by Pope Francis, who ordered its publication.

In its most eagerly anticipated section, the Vatican repeated its rejection of “gender theory,” or the idea that one’s gender can be changed. It said God created man and woman as biologically different, separate beings, and said people must not tinker with that plan or try to "make oneself God.”

“It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document said.

It distinguished between gender-affirming surgeries, which it rejected, and “genital abnormalities” that are present at birth or that develop later. Those abnormalities can be “resolved” with the help of health care professionals, it said.

What really is gender-affirming care?

Gender-affirming health care doesn't have to involve a transgender, non-binary, or gender-diverse patient at all.

Advocates for  LGBTQ+  Catholics immediately criticized the document as outdated, harmful and contrary to the stated goal of recognizing the “infinite dignity” of all of God's children. They warned it could have real-world effects on trans people, fueling anti-trans violence and discrimination.

“While it lays out a wonderful rationale for why each human being, regardless of condition in life, must be respected, honored, and loved, it does not apply this principle to gender-diverse people,” said Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBTQ+ Catholics.

The document’s existence, rumored since 2019, was confirmed in recent weeks by the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, a close Francis confidant.

He had cast it as something of a nod to conservatives after he authored a more explosive document approving blessings for same-sex couples that sparked criticism from conservative bishops around the world, especially in Africa.

And yet, the document takes pointed aim at countries — including many in Africa — that criminalize homosexuality. It echoed Francis' assertion in a 2023 interview with The Associated Press that “being homosexual is not a crime,” making the assertion now part of the Vatican's doctrinal teaching.

The new document denounces “as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation.”

The document is something of a repackaging of  previously articulated Vatican positions,  read now through the prism of human dignity. It restates well-known Catholic doctrine opposing abortion and euthanasia, and adds to the list some of Francis’ main concerns as pope: the threats to human dignity posed by poverty, war, human trafficking and forced migration.

Inclusion in Catholicism: Pope Francis' efforts into LGBTQ+ acceptance

Experts say while little has changed regarding church law, Pope Francis has found other ways to push for more inclusion for LGBTQ+ people.

In a newly articulated position, it says surrogacy violates both the dignity of the surrogate mother and the child.

While much attention about surrogacy has focused on possible exploitation of poor women as surrogates, the Vatican document asserts that the child "has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver.”

“Considering this, the legitimate desire to have a child cannot be transformed into a ‘right to a child’ that fails to respect the dignity of that child as the recipient of the gift of life.”

The Vatican had previously published its most articulated position on gender in 2019, when the Congregation for Catholic Education rejected the idea that people can choose or change their genders and insisted on the complementarity of biologically male and female sex organs to create new life.

The new document from the more authoritative Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith quotes from that 2019 education document, but tempers the tone. Significantly, it doesn’t repeat the 1986 language of a previous doctrinal document that said homosexual people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual actions are “intrinsically disordered.”

In a news conference to introduce the document, Fernandez acknowledged that the “intrinsically disordered” language was very strong and that there might be a better way, "with other words," to express the church's vision of sex as being a perfect union between husband and wife to create new life.

“It's true, the expression could find other words to express this mystery,” he said.

The Rev. James Martin, who has called for the Catholic Church to extend greater outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, said the gender terminology was similar to past declarations. But he welcomed the condemnation of legislation and violence against LGBTQ+ people.

"That cannot be repeated too often as an offense against human dignity. The LGBTQ person, like everyone else, has infinite dignity,” he said in an email.

Catholic priests can now bless same-sex unions, Pope Francis says

There's a dramatic change in policy toward the LGBTQ+ community within the Catholic Church that's being met with mixed reviews.

Francis has made reaching out to LGBTQ+ people a hallmark of his papacy, ministering to trans Catholics and insisting that the Catholic Church must welcome all children of God.

But he has also denounced “gender theory” as the “worst danger” facing humanity today, an “ugly ideology” that threatens to cancel out God-given differences between man and woman. He has blasted in particular what he calls the “ideological colonization” of the West in the developing world, where development aid is sometimes conditioned on adopting Western ideas about gender and reproductive health.

Transgender activists immediately called the document “hurtful” and devoid of the voices and experiences of real trans people, especially in its distinction between transgender people and intersex people.

“The suggestion that gender-affirming health care — which has saved the lives of so many wonderful trans people and enabled them to live in harmony with their bodies, their communities and (God) — might risk or diminish trans people's dignity is not only hurtful but dangerously ignorant,” said Mara Klein, a nonbinary, transgender activist who has participated in Germany’s church reform project.

“Seeing that, in contrast, surgical interventions on intersex people — which if performed without consent especially on minors often cause immense physical and psychological harm for many intersex people to date — are assessed positively just seems to expose the underlying hypocrisy further," Klein said.

The document comes at a time of some backlash against transgender people, including in the United States where Republican-led state legislatures are considering a new round of bills  restricting medical care for transgender youths  — and in some cases, adults. In addition, bills to govern youths’ pronouns, sports teams and bathrooms at school are also under consideration, as well as some books and school curriculums.

“On top of the rising hostility towards our communities, we are faced with a church that does not listen and refuses to see the beauty of creation that can be found in our biographies,” Klein said in an email.

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PERSPECTIVE article

This article is part of the research topic.

Un/belonging Identities: Relating Narratives of Queer Trauma

Criminalised, Victimised or Other? A reflexive engagement with Queer Criminology utilising a relational pedagogical approach Provisionally Accepted

• 1 Leeds Trinity University, United Kingdom
• 2 Keele University, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Queer Criminology is a newfound area of exploration within the discipline of Criminology, which is uniquely positioned to deal with issues regarding crime and victimisation concerning those from the LGBTQIA+ community and gender diverse/minoritized groups. The field of 'Queer Criminology' has become vast and expanding, having explored issues of interpersonal, structural and systematic inequality concerning those from the community and beyond. To this end, narratives of victimisation, trauma and injustice have dominated (and limited) understandings of Queer Criminology. Moreover, limited thinking has been attributed within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), which seeks to understand LGBTQIA+ individuals and groups -beyond binarized thinking of victimhood or criminalised. In this article, we offer the perspectives of two higher education professionals teaching Queer Criminology in a 'flipped' classroom environment, which positions the learner as expert within the subject matter and utilises a relational pedagogy lens to do so (Bovil, 2020). We discuss the use of our reflexive practice, as both Feminist Decolonial and Queer Criminologists. The article touches upon trauma informed approaches to teaching Queer Criminology. We offer several steps in building a coalition of learning, which can unpick the potential policy, theory, and practical tensions of teaching Queer Criminological Scholarship.

Keywords: Queer criminology, flipped classroom, LGBTQIA+, SoTL, higher education

Received: 19 Jan 2024; Accepted: 08 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Wrigley and Koumentaki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Liam Wrigley, Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, United Kingdom

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