culture and gender stereotypes essay

Stereotypes and Gender Roles

Many of our gender stereotypes are strong because we emphasize gender so much in culture (Bigler & Liben, 2007). For example, children learn at a young age that there are distinct expectations for boys and girls. Gender roles refer to the role or behaviors learned by a person as appropriate to their gender and are determined by the dominant cultural norms. Cross-cultural studies reveal that children are aware of gender roles by age two or three and can label others’ gender and sort objects into gender categories. At four or five, most children are firmly entrenched in culturally appropriate gender roles (Kane, 1996). When children do not conform to the appropriate gender role for their culture, they may face negative sanctions such as being criticized, bullied, marginalized or rejected by their peers. A girl who wishes to take karate class instead of dance lessons may be called a “tomboy” and face difficulty gaining acceptance from both male and female peer groups (Ready, 2001). Boys, especially, are subject to intense ridicule for gender nonconformity (Coltrane and Adams, 2008; Kimmel, 2000)

By the time we are adults, our gender roles are a stable part of our personalities, and we usually hold many gender stereotypes. Men tend to outnumber women in professions such as law enforcement, the military, and politics. Women tend to outnumber men in care-related occupations such as child care, health care, and social work. These occupational roles are examples of typical Western male and female behavior, derived from our culture’s traditions. Adherence to these occupational gender roles demonstrates fulfillment of social expectations but may not necessarily reflect personal preference (Diamond, 2002).

Gender stereotypes are not unique to American culture. Williams and Best (1982) conducted several cross-cultural explorations of gender stereotypes using data collected from 30 cultures. There was a high degree of agreement on stereotypes across all cultures which led the researchers to conclude that gender stereotypes may be universal. Additional research found that males tend to be associated with stronger and more active characteristics than females (Best, 2001); however recent research argues that culture shapes how some gender stereotypes are perceived. Researchers found that across cultures, individualistic traits were viewed as more masculine; however, collectivist cultures rated masculine traits as collectivist and not individualist (Cuddy et al., 2015). These findings provide support that gender stereotypes may be moderated by cultural values.

There are two major psychological theories that partially explain how children form their own gender roles after they learn to differentiate based on gender. Gender schema theory argues that children are active learners who essentially socialize themselves and actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes into gender categories, which are known as schemas . These schemas then affect what children notice and remember later. People of all ages are more likely to remember schema-consistent behaviors and attributes than schema-inconsistent behaviors and attributes. So, people are more likely to remember men, and forget women, who are firefighters. They also misremember schema-inconsistent information. If research participants are shown pictures of someone standing at the stove, they are more likely to remember the person to be cooking if depicted as a woman, and the person to be repairing the stove if depicted as a man. By only remembering schema-consistent information, gender schemas strengthen more and more over time.

A second theory that attempts to explain the formation of gender roles in children is social learning theory which argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modeling. Children are rewarded and reinforced for behaving in concordance with gender roles and punished for breaking gender roles. In addition, social learning theory argues that children learn many of their gender roles by modeling the behavior of adults and older children and, in doing so, develop ideas about what behaviors are appropriate for each gender. Social learning theory has less support than gender schema theory but research shows that parents do reinforce gender-appropriate play and often reinforce cultural gender norms.

Gender Roles and Culture

Hofstede’s (2001) research revealed that on the Masculinity and Femininity dimension (MAS), cultures with high masculinity reported distinct gender roles, moralistic views of sexuality and encouraged passive roles for women. Additionally, these cultures discourage premarital sex for women but have no such restrictions for men. The cultures with the highest masculinity scores were: Japan, Italy, Austria and Venezuela. Cultures low in masculinity (high femininity) had gender roles that were more likely to overlap and encouraged more active roles for women. Sex before marriage was seen as acceptable for both women and men in these cultures. Four countries scoring lowest in masculinity were Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden. The United States is slightly more masculine than feminine on this dimension; however, these aspects of high masculinity are balanced by a need for individuality.

Culture and Psychology Copyright © 2020 by L D Worthy; T Lavigne; and F Romero is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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9 Gender and Culture

• Published: July 2019
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Culture and gender are closely intertwined with biological factors creating predispositions for sex and gender development. However, sociocultural factors are critical determinants leading to gender differences in roles and behaviors that may be modest but culturally important. Culture has profound effects on gender-related behavior, values, identity, roles, and how these are regarded in various social contexts. Culture governs the socialization of children, the tasks children are taught, the roles adult men and women adopt, and the expectations that govern women’s and men’s attitudes and behaviors. Culture provides the context in which gender roles, identity, and stereotypes unfold as well as parameters regarding sexual behavior. Culture affects variation in gender-related behaviors between individuals within a cultural group as well as variation between cultures. Culture can maximize, minimize, or even eliminate gender differences in social behaviors and cognitions. Indeed, it is impossible to separate gender and culture.

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Essay on Gender Stereotypes

Students are often asked to write an essay on Gender Stereotypes in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Gender Stereotypes

Introduction.

Gender stereotypes are general beliefs about behaviors, characteristics, and roles of men and women in society. They can limit individuals’ potential and opportunities.

Common Stereotypes

Men are often seen as strong and decisive, while women are considered nurturing and emotional. These stereotypes can limit personal growth and career choices.

Consequences

Stereotypes can lead to discrimination and unequal treatment. They can also affect self-esteem and mental health.

Breaking Stereotypes

Education and awareness are key to breaking gender stereotypes. Encouraging individuality and respect for everyone’s abilities can help create a more equal society.

250 Words Essay on Gender Stereotypes

The origin of gender stereotypes.

The roots of gender stereotypes can be traced back to traditional societal structures. Historically, men were hunters and protectors, while women were gatherers and caregivers. These roles have been passed down generations, evolving into modern stereotypes.

Implications of Gender Stereotypes

These stereotypes limit individual growth and societal progress. They force individuals into predefined boxes, stifling their true potential. For instance, the stereotype that women are not good at math discourages them from pursuing STEM fields, while the belief that men should not show emotions hinders their mental health.

Breaking Down Stereotypes

It’s crucial to challenge these stereotypes to achieve gender equality. This can be done through education, promoting representation, and encouraging open dialogue. It’s also essential to challenge our own biases and question the stereotypes we unconsciously uphold.

Gender stereotypes are not only unfair but also counterproductive. They limit individuals and society as a whole. By actively challenging these stereotypes, we can work towards a more equitable and inclusive society.

500 Words Essay on Gender Stereotypes

Gender stereotypes are preconceived notions about the roles, characteristics, and behaviors of men and women. These stereotypes are deeply ingrained in our society and have significant implications on individual and societal levels. They are often perpetuated by media, educational systems, and social interactions, and can limit the potential and freedom of individuals, as well as perpetuate inequality and discrimination.

Gender stereotypes have far-reaching implications. They can limit opportunities and possibilities for individuals, leading to unequal outcomes in education, employment, and leadership roles. For instance, women are often stereotyped as being less capable in STEM fields, which can discourage them from pursuing careers in these areas. Similarly, men may face societal pressure to avoid careers perceived as feminine, such as nursing or teaching.

Furthermore, gender stereotypes can perpetuate harmful norms and behaviors. For example, the stereotype that men should be emotionally strong can deter them from seeking help for mental health issues, leading to adverse health outcomes. On the other hand, women are often objectified and sexualized due to prevalent stereotypes, contributing to issues such as body shaming and sexual harassment.

Challenging Gender Stereotypes

Challenging gender stereotypes requires collective efforts at various levels. Education plays a crucial role in breaking down these stereotypes. Schools and universities should promote a curriculum that encourages critical thinking about gender roles and stereotypes.

Media also plays a significant role in shaping societal perceptions. Hence, it is essential for media outlets to portray diverse and non-stereotypical images of men and women. This includes showcasing women in leadership roles and men in caregiving roles.

Moreover, individuals can challenge gender stereotypes in their everyday lives. This can be achieved by questioning traditional gender roles, promoting gender equality in personal and professional spaces, and encouraging open conversations about gender stereotypes.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Gender Stereotypes — Gender Stereotypes Of Women

Gender Stereotypes of Women

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Towards Evaluating the Relationship Between Gender Stereotypes & Culture Research Paper

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Modernization and science has freed people’s perception and consciousness from many retrogressive traditions, having exposed them to be socially illusionary, economically unproductive, and politically partisan.

For example, no one in the 21 st century would now challenge the fact that no race, creed, or nationality is superior to another. However, several stereotypes to date remain untouched. And one, in particular, is the notion that gender intrinsically determines an individual’s psyche, occupation, and social standing in society (Kluchko, 2010).

This notion has heralded a multiplicity of other incomplete and inaccurate beliefs, fueled by our varying cultural dispositions, and encoded in our linguistic expressions as well as in normative discourses. It is therefore the object of this paper to examine the relationship between gender stereotypes and culture with a view to elucidating how gender stereotypes, reinforced by our diverse cultural beliefs, continue to allocate roles along the tenets of gender.

Gender stereotypes has been defined by Kluchko (2010) as the “…totality of fixed ideas about the natural determination of male and female social characteristics” (p. 75).

Current literature as revealed by Cuddy et al. (2009) and Lenton et al. (2009) demonstrate that culture, which can be simply defined as a people’s way of life, employs powerful and influential representations to vehicle and maintain these stereotypes. Indeed, it is the opinion of many researchers and theorists that there exist distinct division between male and female throughout all cultures, and more so in the division of labor and wealth ownership.

From the list of Occupations and Gender provided, a pattern was formed upon responding to the questions, which saw more complicated roles being allocated to men and less technical jobs being allocated to women.

The list revealed that some complicated roles such as doctor, lawyer, taxi-driver, pilot, mechanic, and architect have more traditional masculine traits, while other less complicated roles such as baby sitter, chef, designer, and make-up artist have more traditional feminine traits.

Such a pattern only serves to perpetuate the conceptual difference between men and women, not mentioning that it reveals the veracity and dynamism of modern-day gender stereotypes and their ability to cut across cultural boundaries (Tripathy, 2010).

Both responses from the list revealed some similarities and differences. Most similarities revolved around the complexity of a particular role and the gender to be allocated such a role. More complex roles, as indicated above, were allocated to men across the two responses, while less complex roles were allocated to women.

For instance, roles of doctor, lawyer, pilot, and architect were all allocated to men, while roles of baby sitter, chef, and make-up artist were allocated to women. Some differences were noted, though, especially in roles that were neither too complex nor too easy. These roles include that of a school-teacher and dancer.

In all dimensions, our cultural backgrounds affected the perceptions that were drawn. Cultural disposition, according to Campbell & Collaer (2009), is a major component and influencer of how society delegates roles according to gender. The observations from the list demonstrate how different cultures across the world employ similar but unrelated normative values and stereotypes to assign roles for men and women in relation to the roles’ complexity (Lenton et al., 2009).

By taking into account culturally learned characteristics, men are viewed as more masculine and therefore able to handle more complex roles, while women are traditionally viewed as more feminine and malleable, thus unfit to be entrusted with complex roles. In short, this is a reflection of gender stereotypes.

Culture, particularly in African and Asian countries, is largely viewed as unchanging and oppressive, to some extent fossilized and frozen in time. When one is born, he is internalized into this unchanging culture along with its rules, normative values, and beliefs (Tripathy, 2010).

In consequence, if one is born into a culture that has biased constructions of femininity and masculinity, chances are that he will remain with the internalized notion of division of labor for a long time, and will also make biased decisions as to what roles fits men and what roles fits women, thus falling into a spin of cultural essentialism (Tripathy, 2010).

Most cultures across the world delegates simple roles to women, while the more professional and financially fulfilling roles are the preserve of men. Kluchko (2010) puts it right by observing that “…for a woman, housewife and mother is considered the most significant social role.

She is assigned to the private sphere of life: home, giving birth to children and responsibility for interrelations in the family is entrusted to her” (p. 75). Such cultural orientations affected the perceptions drawn in the Occupations and Gender list. However, the differences noted in the list demonstrate that gender stereotypes are not natural dispositions, but are founded on gender ideologies and are culturally constructed.

A meta-analytic review on automatic gender stereotypes found that there exist a lot of gender stereotypes in the workplace (Lenton et al., 2009). Indeed, some CEOs are to date unconvinced that a woman is able to handle a managerial position in their organizations.

Indeed, Kluchko (2010) observes that “…according to traditional ideas, it is assumed that women’s work should be in the nature of doing and serving, part of the expressive sphere of activity” (p. 75). But this must not be allowed to continue. Tripathy (2010) argues that women, the main culprits of gender stereotypes, need to be empowered to be creative and endeavor to achieve more.

Lenton et al. (2009) argues that employees should be educated and coached so as not to resist change. Resistance to change has been highlighted by Campbell & Collaer (2009) as one of the contributing factors towards gender stereotypes. Lastly, employees need to avoid experiences or environments that may activate gender stereotyping. All in all, society needs to shed off some of these inaccurate and incomplete beliefs such as gender stereotypes.

Reference List

Campbell, S.M., & Collaer, M.L. (2009). Stereotype threat and gender differences in performance on a novel visuospatial task. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33 (4), 437-444. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database

Cuddy, A.J.C., Fiske, S.T., Kwan, V.S.Y., Glick, P., Demoulin, S…Palacios, M. (2009). Stereotype content model across cultures: Towards universal similarities and some differences. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48 (1), 1-33. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database

Kluchko, O.I. (2010). Gender stereotyping in studying pressing social problems. Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia, 49 (1), 75-91. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database

Lenton, A.P., Bruder, M., Sedikides, C. (2009). A meta-analysis on the malleability of automatic gender stereotypes. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33 (2), 183-196. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database

Tripathy, J. (2010). How gendered is gender and development? Culture, masculinity, and gender difference. Development in Practice, 20 (1), 113-121. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database

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

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Article contents

Gender in a social psychology context.

• Thekla Morgenroth Thekla Morgenroth Department of Psychology, University of Exeter
•  and  Michelle K. Ryan Michelle K. Ryan Dean of Postgraduate Research and Director of the Doctoral College, University of Exeter
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.309
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Understanding gender and gender differences is a prevalent aim in many psychological subdisciplines. Social psychology has tended to employ a binary understanding of gender and has focused on understanding key gender stereotypes and their impact. While women are seen as warm and communal, men are seen as agentic and competent. These stereotypes are shaped by, and respond to, social contexts, and are both descriptive and prescriptive in nature. The most influential theories argue that these stereotypes develop in response to societal structures, including the roles women and men occupy in society, and status differences between the sexes. Importantly, research clearly demonstrates that these stereotypes have a myriad of effects on individuals’ cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors and contribute to sexism and gender inequality in a range of domains, from the workplace to romantic relationships.

• gender stereotypes
• gender norms
• social psychology
• social role theory
• stereotype content model
• ambivalent sexism
• stereotype threat

Introduction

Gender is omnipresent—it is one of the first categories children learn, and the categorization of people into men and women 1 affects almost every aspect of our lives. Gender is a key determinant of our self-concept and our perceptions of others. It shapes our mental health, our career paths, and our most intimate relationships. It is therefore unsurprising that psychologists invest a great deal of time in understanding gender as a concept, with social psychologists being no exception. However, this has not always been the case. This article begins with “A Brief History of Gender in Psychology,” which gives an overview about gender within psychology more broadly. The remaining sections discuss how gender is examined within social psychology more specifically, with particular attention to how gender stereotypes form and how they affect our sense of self and our evaluations of others.

A Brief History of Gender in Psychology

During the early years of psychology in general, and social psychology in particular, the topic gender was largely absent from psychology, as indeed were women. Male researchers made claims about human nature based on findings that were restricted to a small portion of the population, namely, white, young, able-bodied, middle-class, heterosexual men [see Etaugh, 2016 ; a phenomenon that has been termed androcentrism (Hegarty, & Buechel, 2006 )]. If women and girls were mentioned at all, they were usually seen as inferior to men and boys (e.g., Hall, 1904 ).

This invisibility of women within psychology changed with a rise of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Here, more women entered psychology, demanded to be seen, and pushed back against the narrative of women as inferior. They argued that psychology’s androcentrism, and the sexist views of psychologists, had not only biased psychological theory and research, but also contributed to and reinforced gender inequality in society. For example, Weisstein ( 1968 ) argued that most claims about women made by prominent psychologists, such as Freud and Erikson, lacked an evidential grounding and were instead based on these men’s fantasies of what women were like rather than empirical data. A few years later, Maccoby and Jacklin ( 1974 ) published their seminal work, The Psychology of Sex Differences , which synthesized the literature on sex differences and concluded that there were few (but some) sex differences. This led to a growth of interest in the social origins of sex differences, with a shift away from a psychology of sex (i.e., biologically determined male vs. female) and toward a psychology of gender (i.e., socially constructed masculine vs. feminine).

Since then, the psychology of gender has become a respected and widely represented subdiscipline within psychology. In a fascinating analysis of the history of feminism and psychology, Eagly, Eaton, Rose, Riger, and McHugh ( 2012 ) examined publications on sex differences, gender, and women from 1960 to 2009 . In those 50 years, the number of annual publications rose from close to zero to over 6,500. As a proportion of all psychology articles, one can also see a marked rise in popularity in gender articles from 1960 to 2009 , with peak years of interest in the late 1970s and 1990s. In line with the aforementioned shift from sex differences to gender differences, the largest proportion of these articles fall into the topic of “social processes and social issues,” which includes research on gender roles, masculinity, and femininity.

However, as interest in the area has grown, the ways in which gender is studied, and the political views of those studying it, have become more diverse. Eagly and colleagues note:

we believe that this research gained from feminist ideology but has escaped its boundaries. In this garden, many flowers have bloomed, including some flowers not widely admired by some feminist psychologists. (p. 225)

Here, they allude to the fact that some research has shifted away from societal explanations, which feminist psychologists have generally favored, to more complex views of gender difference. Some of these acknowledge the fact that nature and nurture are deeply intertwined, with both biological and social variables being used to understand gender and gender differences (e.g., Wood & Eagly, 2002 ). Others, such as evolutionary approaches (e.g., Baumeister, 2013 ; Buss, 2016 ) and neuroscientific approaches (see Fine, 2010 ), focus more heavily on the biological bases of gender differences, often causing chagrin among feminists. Nevertheless, much of the research in social psychology has, unsurprisingly, focused on social factors and, in particular, on gender stereotypes. Where do they come from and what are their effects?

Origins and Effects of Gender Stereotypes

A stereotype can be defined as a “widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members” (Vaughan & Hogg, 2011 , p. 51) and has both descriptive and prescriptive aspects. In other words, gender stereotypes tell us what women and men are like, but also what they should be like (Heilman, 2001 ). Gender stereotypes are not only widely shared, but they are also stubbornly resistant to change (Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro, 2016 ). Both the origin and the consequences of these stereotypes have received much attention in social psychology. So how do stereotypes form? The most widely cited theories on stereotype formation—social role theory (SRT; Eagly, 1987 ; Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000 ) and the stereotype content model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, J., 2002 )—answer this question. Both of these models focus on gender as a binary concept (i.e., men and women), as does most psychological research on gender, although they could potentially also be applied to other gender groups. Both theories are considered in turn.

Social Role Theory: Gender Stereotypes Are Determined by Roles

SRT argues that gender stereotypes stem from the distribution of men and women into distinct roles within a given society (Eagly, 1987 ; Eagly et al., 2000 ). The authors note the stability of gender stereotypes across cultures and describe two core dimensions: agency , including traits such as independence, aggression, and assertiveness, and communion , including traits such as caring, altruism, and politeness. While men are generally seen to be high in agency and low in communion, women are generally perceived to be high in communion but low in agency.

According to SRT, these gender stereotypes stem from the fact that women and men are over- and underrepresented in different roles in society. In most societies, even those with higher levels of gender equality, men perform less domestic work compared to women, including childcare, and spend more time in paid employment. Additionally, men disproportionately occupy leadership roles in the workforce (e.g., in politics and management) and are underrepresented in caretaking roles within the workforce (e.g., in elementary education and nursing; see Eagly et al., 2000 ). Eagly and colleagues argue that this gendered division of labor leads to the formation of gender roles and associated stereotypes. More specifically, they propose that different behaviors are seen as necessary to fulfil these social roles, and different skills, abilities, and traits are seen as necessary to execute these behaviors. For example, elementary school teachers are seen to need to care for and interact with children, which is seen to require social skills, empathy, and a caring nature. In contrast, such communal attributes might be seen to be less important—or even detrimental—for a military leader.

To the extent that women and men are differentially represented and visible in certain roles—such as elementary school teachers or military leaders—the behaviors and traits necessary for these roles become part of each respective gender role. In other words, the behaviors and attributes associated with people in caretaking roles, communion, become part of the female gender role, while the behaviors and attributes associated with people in leadership roles, agency, become part of the male gender role.

Building on SRT, Wood and Eagly ( 2002 ) developed a biosocial model of the origins of sex differences which explains the stability of gendered social roles across cultures. The authors argue that, in the past, physical differences between men and women meant that they were better able to perform certain tasks, contributing to the formation of gender roles. More specifically, women had to bear children and nurse them, while men were generally taller and had more upper body strength. In turn, tasks that required upper body strength and long stretches of uninterrupted time (e.g., hunting) were more often carried out by men, while tasks that could be interrupted more easily and be carried out while pregnant or looking after children (e.g., foraging) were more often carried out by women.

Eagly and colleagues further propose that the exact tasks more easily carried out by each sex depended on social and ecological conditions as well as technological and cultural advances. For example, it was only in more advanced, complex societies that the greater size and strength of men led to a division of labor in which men were preferred for activities such as warfare, which also came with higher status and access to resources. Similarly, the development of plough technology led to shifts from hunter–gatherer societies to agricultural societies. This change was often accompanied by a new division of labor in which men owned, farmed, and inherited land while women carried out more domestic tasks. The social structures that arose from these processes in specific contexts in turn affected more proximal causes of gender differences, including gender stereotypes.

It is important to note that this theory focuses on physical differences between the genders, not psychological ones. In other words, the authors do not argue that women and men are inherently different when it comes to their minds, nor that men evolved to be more agentic while women evolved to be more communal.

Stereotype Content Model: Gender Stereotypes Are Determined by Group Relations

The SCM, formulated by Fiske and colleagues ( 2002 ), was not developed specifically for gender, but as an explanation of how stereotypes form more generally. Similar to SRT, the SCM argues that gender stereotypes arise from societal structures. More specifically, the authors suggest that status differences and cooperation versus competition determine group stereotypes—among them, gender stereotypes. This model also suggests two main dimensions to stereotypes, namely, warmth and competence. The concept of warmth is similar to that of communion, previously described, in that it refers to being kind, nice, and caring. Competence refers to attributes such as being intelligent, efficient, and skillful and is thus different from the agency dimension of SRT.

The SCM argues that the dimensions of warmth and competence originate from two fundamental dimensions—status and competition—which characterize the relationships between groups in every culture and society. The degree to which another group is perceived to be warm is determined by whether the group is in cooperation or in competition with one’s own group, which is in turn associated with perceived intentions to help or to harm one’s own group, respectively. While members of cooperating groups are stereotyped as warm, members of competing groups are stereotyped as cold. Evidence suggests that these two dimensions are indeed universal and can be found in many cultures, including collectivist cultures (Cuddy et al., 2009 ). Perceptions of competence, however, are affected by the status and power of the group, which go hand-in-hand with the group’s ability to harm one’s own group. Those groups with high status and power are stereotyped as competent, while those that lack status and power are stereotyped as incompetent.

Groups can thus fall into one of four quadrants of this model. Members of high status groups who cooperate with one’s own group are seen as unequivocally positive—as warm and competent—while those of low status who compete with one’s own group are seen as unequivocally negative—cold and incompetent. More interesting are the two groups that fall into the more ambivalent quadrants—those who are perceived as either warm but incompetent or competent but cold. Applied to gender, this model suggests—and research shows—that typical men are stereotyped as competent but cold, the envious stereotype, while typical women are stereotyped as warm but incompetent, the paternalistic stereotype.

However, these stereotypes do not apply equally to all women and men. Rather, subgroups of men and women come with their own stereotypes. Research demonstrates, for example, that the paternalistic stereotype most strongly applies to traditional women such as housewives, while less traditional women such as feminists and career women are stereotyped as high in competence and low in warmth. For men, there are similar levels of variation—the envious stereotype applies most strongly to men in traditional roles such as managers and career men, while other men are perceived as warm but incompetent (e.g., senior citizens), as cold and incompetent (e.g., punks), or as warm and competent (e.g., professors; Eckes, 2002 ). The section “Gender Stereotypes Affect Emotions, Behavior, and Sexism” discusses the consequences of these stereotypes in more detail.

The Effects of Gender Stereotypes

SRT and the SCM explain how gender stereotypes form. A large body of work in social psychology has focused on the consequences of these stereotypes. These include effects on the gendered perceptions and evaluations of others, as well as effects on the self and one’s own self-image, behavior, and goals.

Gendered Perceptions and Evaluations of Others

Our group-based stereotypes affect how we see members of these groups and how we judge those who do or do not conform to these stereotypes. Gender differs from many other group memberships in several ways (see Fiske & Stevens, 1993 ), which in turn affects consequences of these stereotypes. First, argue Fiske and Stevens, gender stereotypes tend to be more prescriptive than other stereotypes. For example, men may often be told to “man up,” to be tough and dominant, while women may be told to smile, to be nice, and to be sexy (but not too sexy). While stereotypes of other groups also have prescriptive elements, it is probably less common to hear Asians be told to be better at math or African Americans to be told to be more musical. The consequences of these gendered prescriptions are discussed in the section “Gender Stereotypes Affect the Evaluation of Women and Men.” Second, relationships between women and men are characterized by an unusual combination of power differences and close and frequent contact as well as mutual dependence for reproduction and close relationships. The section “Gender Stereotypes Affect Emotions, Behavior, and Sexism” discusses the effects of these factors.

Gender Stereotypes Affect the Evaluation of Women and Men

The evaluation of women and men is affected by both descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes. Research on these effects has predominantly focused on those who occupy counterstereotypical roles such as women in leadership or stay-at-home fathers.

Descriptive stereotypes affect the perception and evaluation of women and men in several ways. First, descriptive stereotypes create biased perceptions through expectancy confirming processes (see Fiske, 2000 ) such that individuals, particularly those holding strong stereotypes, seek out information that confirms their stereotypes. This is evident in their tendency to neglect or dismiss ambiguous information and to ask stereotype-confirming questions (Leyens, Yzerbyt, & Schadron, 1994 ; Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994 ). Moreover, people are more likely to recall stereotypical information compared to counterstereotypical information (Rojahn & Pettigrew, 1992 ) Second, descriptive gender stereotypes also bias the extent to which men and women are seen as suitable for different roles, as described in Heilman’s lack of fit model ( 1983 , 1995 ) and Eagly and Karau’s role congruity theory ( 2002 ). These approaches both suggest that the degree of fit between a person’s attributes and the attributes associated with a specific role is positively related to expectations about how successful a person will be in said role. For example, the traits associated with successful managers are generally more similar to those associated with men than those associated with women (Schein, 1973 ; see also Ryan, Haslam, Hersby, & Bongiorno, 2011 ). Thus, all else being equal, a man will be seen as a better fit for a managerial position and in turn as more likely to be a successful manager. These biased evaluations in turn lead to biased decisions, such as in hiring and promotion (see Heilman, 2001 ).

Prescriptive gender stereotypes also affect evaluations, albeit in different ways. They prescribe how women and men should behave, and also how they should not behave. The “shoulds” generally mirror descriptive stereotypes, while the “should nots” often include behaviors associated with the opposite gender. Thus, what is seen as positive and desirable for one gender is often seen as undesirable for the other and can lead to backlash in the form of social and economic penalties (Rudman, 1998 ). For example, women who are seen as agentic are punished with social sanctions because they violate the prescriptive stereotype that women should be nice, even in the absence of information indicating that they are not nice (Rudman & Glick, 2001 ). These processes are particularly problematic in combination with the effects of descriptive stereotypes, as individuals may face a double bind—if women behave in line with gender stereotypes, they lack fit with leadership positions that require agency, but if they behave agentically, they violate gender norms and face backlash in the form of dislike and discrimination (Rudman & Glick, 2001 ). Similar effects have been found for men who violate prescriptive masculine stereotypes, for example, by being modest (Moss-Racusin, Phelan, & Rudman, 2010 ) or by requesting family leave (Rudman & Mescher, 2013 ). Interestingly, however, being communal by itself does not lead to backlash for men (Moss-Racusin et al., 2010 ). In other words, while men can be perceived as highly agentic and highly communal, this is not true for women, who are perceived as lacking communion when being perceived as agentic and as lacking agency when being perceived as communal.

Gender Stereotypes Affect Emotions, Behavior, and Sexism

Stereotypes not only affect how individuals evaluate others, but also their feelings and behaviors toward them. The Behavior from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes (BIAS) map (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2007 ), which extends the SCM, describes the relationship between perceptions of warmth and competence of certain groups, emotions directed toward these groups, and behaviors toward them. Cuddy and colleagues argue that bias is comprised of three elements: cognitions (i.e., stereotypes), affect (i.e., emotional prejudice), and behavior (i.e., discrimination), and these are closely linked. Groups perceived as warm and competent elicit admiration while groups perceived as cold and incompetent elicit contempt. Of particular interest to understanding gender are the two ambivalent combinations of warmth and competence: Those perceived as warm, but incompetent—such as typical women—elicit pity, while those perceived as competent, but cold—such as typical men—elicit envy.

Similarly, perceptions of warmth and competence are associated with behavior. Cuddy and colleagues ( 2007 ) argue that the warmth dimension affects behavioral reactions more strongly than competence because it stems from perceptions that a group will help or harm the ingroup. This leads to active facilitation (e.g., helping) when a group is perceived as warm, or active harm (e.g., harassing) when a group is perceived as cold. Competence, however, leads to passive facilitation (e.g., cooperation when it benefits oneself or one’s own group) when the group is perceived as competent, and passive harm (e.g., neglecting to help) when the group is perceived as incompetent.

How these emotional and behavioral reactions affect women and men has received much attention in the literature on ambivalent sexism and ambivalent attitudes toward men (Glick & Fiske, 1996 , 1999 , 2001 ). According to ambivalent sexism theory (AST), sexism is not a uniform, negative attitude toward women or men. Rather, it is comprised of hostile and benevolent elements, which arises from status differences between, and intimate interdependence of, the two genders. While men possess more economic, political, and social power, they depend on women as their mothers and (for heterosexual men) as romantic partners. Thus, while they are likely to be motivated to keep their power, they also need to find ways to foster positive relations with women.

Hostile sexism combines the beliefs that (a) women are inferior to men, (b) men should have more power in society, and (c) women’s sexuality poses a threat to men’s status and power. This form of sexism is mostly directed toward nontraditional women who directly threaten men’s status (e.g., feminists or career women), and women who threaten the heterosexual interdependence of men and women (e.g., lesbians)—in other words, toward women perceived to be competent but cold.

Benevolent sexism is a subtler form of sexism and refers to (a) complementary gender differentiation , the belief that (traditional) women are ultimately the better gender, (b) protective paternalism , where men need to cherish, protect, and provide for women, and (c) heterosexual intimacy , the belief that men and women complement each other such that no man is truly complete without a woman. This form of sexism is directed mainly toward traditional women.

While benevolent sexism may seem less harmful than its hostile counterpart, it ultimately provides an alternative mechanism for the persistence of gender inequality by “keeping women in their place” and discouraging them from seeking out nontraditional roles (see Glick & Fiske, 2001 ). Exposure to benevolent sexism is associated with women’s increased self-stereotyping (Barreto, Ellemers, Piebinga, & Moya, 2010 ), decreased cognitive performance (Dardenne, Dumont, & Bollier, 2007 ), and reduced willingness to take collective action (Becker & Wright, 2011 ), thus reinforcing the status quo.

With perceptions of men, Glick and Fiske ( 1999 ) argue that attitudes are equally ambivalent. Hostile attitudes toward men include (a) resentment of paternalism , stemming from perceptions of unfairness of the disproportionate amounts of power men hold, (b) compensatory gender differentiation , which refers to the application of negative stereotypes to men (e.g., arrogant, unrefined) so that women can positively distinguish themselves from them, and (c) heterosexual hostility , stemming from male sexual aggressiveness and interpersonal dominance. Benevolent attitudes toward men include maternalism , that is, the belief that men are helpless and need to be taken care of at home. Interestingly, while such attitudes portray women as competent in some ways, it still reinforces gender inequality by legitimizing women’s disproportionate amount of domestic work. Benevolent attitudes toward men also include complementary gender differentiation , the belief that men are indeed more competent, and heterosexual attraction , the belief that a woman can only be truly happy when in a romantic relationship with a man.

Cross-cultural research (Glick et al., 2000 , 2004 ) suggests that ambivalent sexism and ambivalent attitudes toward men are similar in many ways and can be found in most cultures. For both constructs, the benevolent and hostile aspects are distinct but positively related, illustrating that attitudes toward women and men are indeed ambivalent, as the mixed nature of stereotypes would suggest. Moreover, ambivalence toward women and men are correlated and national averages of both aspects of sexism and ambivalence toward men are associated with lower gender equality across nations, lending support to the idea that they reinforce the status quo.

Gender Stereotypes Affect the Self

Gender stereotypes not only affect individuals’ reactions toward others, they also play an important part in self-construal, motivation, achievement, and behavior, often without explicit endorsement of the stereotype. This section discusses how gender stereotypes affect observable gender differences and then describes the subtle and insidious effects gender stereotypes can have on performance and achievement through the inducement of stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995 ).

Gender Stereotypes Affect Gender Differences

Gender stereotypes are a powerful influence on the self-concept, goals, and behaviors. Eagly and colleagues ( 2000 ) argue that girls and boys observe the roles that women and men occupy in society and accommodate accordingly, seeking out different activities and acquiring different skills. They propose two main mechanisms by which gender differences form. First, women and men adjust their behavior to confirm others’ gender-stereotypical expectations. Others communicate their gendered expectations in many, often nonverbal and subtle ways and react positively when expectations are confirmed and negatively when they are not. This subtle communication of expectations reinforces gender-stereotypical behavior as people generally try to elicit positive, and avoid negative, reactions from others. Importantly, the interacting partners need not be aware of these expectations for them to take effect.

The second process by which gender stereotypes translate into gender differences is the self-regulation of behavior based on identity processes and the internalization of stereotypes (e.g., Bem, 1981 ; Markus, 1977 ). Most people form their gender identity based on self-categorization as male or female and subsequently incorporate attributes associated with the respective category into their self-concept (Guimond, Chatard, Martinot, Crisp, & Redersdorff, 2006 ). These gendered differences in the self-concepts of women and men then translate into gender-stereotypical behaviors. The extent to which the self-concept is affected by gender stereotypes—and in turn the extent to which gendered patterns of behavior are displayed—depends on the strength and the salience of this social identity (Hogg & Turner, 1987 ; Onorato & Turner, 2004 ). For example, individuals may be more likely to display gender-stereotypical behavior when they identify more strongly with their gender (e.g., Lorenzi‐Cioldi, 1991 ) or when their gender is more likely to be salient, which is more likely to be the case for women (Cadinu & Galdi, 2012 ).

However, many different subcategories of women exist—housewives, feminists, lesbians—and thus what it means to identify as a woman, and behave like a woman, is likely to be complex and multifaceted (e.g., Fiske et al., 2002 ; van Breen, Spears, Kuppens, & de Lemus, 2017 ). Moreover, research demonstrates that the salience of gender in any given context also determined the degree to which an individual displays gender-stereotypical behavior (e.g., Ryan & David, 2003 ; Ryan, David, & Reynolds, 2004 ). For example, Ryan and colleagues demonstrate that while women and men act in line with gender stereotypes when gender and gender difference are salient, these differences in attitudes and behavior disappear when alternative identities, such as those based on being a student or being an individual, are made salient.

Gender Stereotypes Affect Performance and Achievement

The consequences of stereotypes go beyond the self-concept and behavior. Research in stereotype threat describes the detrimental effects that negative stereotypes can have on performance and achievement. Stereotype threat refers to the phenomenon whereby the awareness of the negative stereotyping of one’s group in a certain domain, and the fear of confirming such stereotypes, can have negative effects on performance, even when the stereotype is not endorsed. The phenomenon was first described by Steele and Aronson ( 1995 ) in the context of African Americans’ intellectual test performance, but has since been found to affect women’s performance and motivation in counterstereotypical domains such as math (Nguyen & Ryan, 2008 ) and leadership (Davies, Spencer, & Steele, 2005 ). This affect holds true even when minority group members’ prior performance and interest in the domain are the same as those of majority group members (Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999 ). Moreover, the effect is particularly pronounced when the minority member’s desire to belong is strong and identity-based devaluation is likely (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002 ).

Different mechanisms for the effect of stereotype threat have been proposed. Schmader, Johns, and Forbes ( 2008 ) suggest that the inconsistency between one’s self-image as competent and the cultural stereotype about one’s group’s lack of competence leads to a physiological stress response that directly impairs working memory. For example, when made aware of the widely held stereotype that women are bad at math, a female math student is likely to experience an inconsistency. This inconsistency, the authors argue, is not only distressing in itself, but induces uncertainty: Am I actually good at math or am I bad at math as the stereotype would lead me to believe? In an effort to resolve this uncertainty, she is likely to monitor her performance more than others—and more than in a situation in which stereotype threat is absent. This monitoring leads to more conscious, less efficient processing of information—for example, when performing calculations that she would otherwise do more or less automatically—and a stronger focus on detecting potential failure, taking cognitive resources away from the actual task. Moreover, individuals under stereotype threat are more likely to experience negative thoughts and emotions such as fear of failure. In order to avoid the interference of these thoughts, they actively try to suppress them. This suppression, however, takes effort. All of these mechanisms, the authors argue, take working memory space away from the task in question, thereby impairing performance.

The aim of this article is to give an overview of gender research in social psychology, which has focused predominantly on gender stereotypes, their origins, and their consequences, and these are all connected and reinforce each other. Social psychology has produced many fascinating findings regarding gender, and this article has only just touched on these findings. While research into gender has seen a great growth in the past 50 years and has provided us with an unprecedented understanding of women and men and the differences (and similarities) between them, there is still much work to be done.

There are a number of issues that remain largely absent from mainstream social psychological research on gender. First, an interest and acknowledgment of intersectional identities has emerged, such as how gender intersects with race or sexuality. It is thus important to note that many of the theories discussed in this article cannot necessarily be applied directly across intersecting identities (e.g., to women of color or to lesbian women), and indeed the attitudes and behaviors of such women continue to be largely ignored within the field.

Second, almost all social psychological research into gender is conducted using an overly simplistic binary definition of gender in terms of women and men. Social psychological theories and explanations are, for the most part, not taking more complex or more fluid definitions of gender into account and thus are unable to explain gendered attitudes and behavior outside of the gender binary.

Finally, individual perceptions and cognitions are influenced by gendered stereotypes and expectations, and social psychologists are not immune to this influence. How we, as psychologists, ask research questions and how we interpret empirical findings are influenced by gender stereotypes (e.g., Hegarty & Buechel, 2006 ), and we must remain vigilant that we do not inadvertently seek to reinforce our own gendered expectations and reify the gender status quo.

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1. Psychology largely conceptualizes gender as binary. While this is problematic in a number of ways, which we touch upon in the Conclusion section, we largely follow these binary conventions throughout this article, as it is representative of the social psychological literature as a whole.

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Gender and Media Representations: A Review of the Literature on Gender Stereotypes, Objectification and Sexualization

Media representations play an important role in producing sociocultural pressures. Despite social and legal progress in civil rights, restrictive gender-based representations appear to be still very pervasive in some contexts. The article explores scientific research on the relationship between media representations and gender stereotypes, objectification and sexualization, focusing on their presence in the cultural context. Results show how stereotyping, objectifying and sexualizing representations appear to be still very common across a number of contexts. Exposure to stereotyping representations appears to strengthen beliefs in gender stereotypes and endorsement of gender role norms, as well as fostering sexism, harassment and violence in men and stifling career-related ambitions in women. Exposure to objectifying and sexualizing representations appears to be associated with the internalization of cultural ideals of appearance, endorsement of sexist attitudes and tolerance of abuse and body shame. In turn, factors associated with exposure to these representations have been linked to detrimental effects on physical and psychological well-being, such as eating disorder symptomatology, increased body surveillance and poorer body image quality of life. However, specificities in the pathways from exposure to detrimental effects on well-being are involved for certain populations that warrant further research.

1. Introduction

As a social category, gender is one of the earliest and most prominent ways people may learn to identify themselves and their peers, the use of gender-based labels becoming apparent in infants as early as 17 months into their life [ 1 ]. Similarly, the development of gender-based heuristics, inferences and rudimentary stereotypes becomes apparent as early as age three [ 2 , 3 ]. Approximately at this age, the development of a person’s gender identity begins [ 4 ]—that is, the process through which a person tends to identify as a man, as a woman or as a vast spectrum of other possibilities (i.e., gender non-conforming, agender, genderfluid, etc.). These processes continue steadily throughout individuals’ lives as they receive and elaborate information about women and men and what it means to belong to either category, drawing from direct and indirect observations, social contact, personal elaborations and cultural representations [ 5 , 6 ]. As a result, social and mental representations of gender are extremely widespread, especially as a strictly binary construct, and can be argued to be ubiquitous in individual and social contexts.

Among the many sources of influence on gender representations, media occupies an important space and its relevance can be assessed across many different phenomena [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. The ubiquity of media, the chronicity of individuals’ exposure to it and its role in shaping beliefs, attitudes and expectations have made it the subject of scientific attention. In fact, several theories have attempted to explore the mechanisms and psychological processes in which media plays a role, including identity development [ 12 , 13 , 14 ], scripts and schemas [ 15 ], cultivation processes [ 16 , 17 , 18 ] and socialization processes [ 5 , 6 ].

The public interest in the topic of gender has seen a surge in the last 10 years, in part due to social and political movements pushing for gender equality across a number of aspects, including how gender is portrayed in media representations. In the academic field as well, publications mentioning gender in their title, abstract or keywords have more than doubled from 2012 to 2022 [ 19 ], while publications mentioning gender in media representations have registered an even more dramatic increase, tripling in number [ 20 ]. Additionally, the media landscape has had a significant shift in the last decade, with the surge in popularity and subsequent addition of social media websites and apps to most people’s mediatic engagement [ 21 ].

The importance of media use in gender-related aspects, such as beliefs, attitudes, or roles, has been extensively documented. As reported in a recent review of the literature [ 22 ], several meta-analyses [ 17 , 23 , 24 ] showed support for the effects of media use on gender beliefs, finding small but consistent effect sizes. These effects appear to have remained present over the decades [ 25 ].

Particular attention has been given to stereotypical, objectifying and sexualizing representations, as portrayals that paint a restrictive picture of the complexity of human psychology, also producing sociocultural pressures to conform to gender roles and body types.

Gender stereotypes can be defined as an extremely simplified concept of attitudes and behaviors considered normal and appropriate for men and women in a specific culture [ 26 ]. They usually span several different areas of people’s characteristics, such as physical appearance, personality traits, behaviors, social roles and occupations. Stereotypical beliefs about gender may be divided into descriptive (how one perceives a person of a certain gender to be; [ 27 ]), prescriptive (how one perceives a person of a certain gender should be and behave; [ 28 , 29 ]) or proscriptive (how one perceives a person of a certain gender should not be and behave; [ 28 , 29 ]). Their content varies on the individual’s culture of reference [ 30 ], but recurring themes have been observed in western culture, such as stereotypes revolving around communion, agency and competence [ 31 ]. Women have stereotypically been associated with traits revolving around communion (e.g., supportiveness, compassion, expression, warmth), while men have been more stereotypically associated with agency (e.g., ambition, assertiveness, competitiveness, action) or competence (e.g., skill, intelligence). Both men and women may experience social and economic penalties (backlash) if they appear to violate these stereotypes [ 29 , 32 , 33 ].

Objectification can be defined as the viewing or treatment of people as objects. Discussing ways in which people may be objectified, Nussbaum first explored seven dimensions: instrumentality (a tool to be employed for one’s purposes); denial of autonomy (lacking self-determination, or autonomy); inertness (lacking in agency or activity); fungibility (interchangeable with others of the same type); violability (with boundaries lacking integrity and permissible to break into); ownership (possible to own or trade); denial of subjectivity (the person’s feelings or experiences are seen as something that does not need to be considered) [ 34 ].

In its initial definition by Fredrickson and Roberts [ 35 ], objectification theory had been offered as a framework to understand how the pervasive sexual objectification of women’s bodies in the sociocultural context influenced their experiences and posed risks to their mental health—a phenomenon that was believed to have uniquely female connotations. In their model, the authors theorized that a cultural climate of sexual objectification would lead to the internalization of objectification (viewing oneself as a sexual and subordinate object), which would in turn lead to psychological consequences (e.g., body shame, anxiety) and mental health risks (e.g., eating disorders, depression). Due to the pervasiveness of the cultural climate, objectification may be difficult to detect or avoid, and objectification experiences may be perceived as normative.

Sexual objectification, in which a person is reduced to a sexual instrument, can be construed to be a subtype of objectification and, in turn, is often defined as one of the types of sexualization [ 36 ]. As previously discussed by Ward [ 37 ], it should be made clear that the mere presence of sexual content, which may be represented in a positive and healthy way, should not be conflated with sexualized or objectifying representations.

The American Psychological Association’s 2007 report defines sexualization as a series of conditions that stand apart from healthy sexuality, such as when a person’s value is perceived to come mainly from sexual appeal or behavior, when physical attractiveness is equated to sexual attractiveness, when a person is sexually objectified or when sexuality is inappropriately imposed on a person [ 36 ]. Sexualization may involve several different contexts, such as personal, interpersonal, and cultural. Self-sexualization involves treating oneself as a sexual object [ 35 ]. Interpersonal contributions involve being treated as sexual objects by others, such as family or peers [ 38 , 39 ]. Finally, contributions by cultural norms, expectations and values play a part as well, including those spread by media representations [ 36 ]. After this initial definition, sexualization as a term has also been used by some authors (e.g., Zurbriggen & Roberts [ 40 ]) to refer to sexual objectification specifically, while others (e.g., Bigler and colleagues [ 41 ]) stand by the APA report’s broader meaning. In this section, we will explore scientific literature adopting the latter.

These portrayals have been hypothesized to lead to negative effects on people’s well-being on a mental and physical level, as well as bearing partial responsibility for several social issues, such as sexism, gender discrimination and harassment. However, the pathways that lead from an individual’s relationship with media to these detrimental effects can be complex. Furthermore, they seem to involve specificities for men and women, as well as for different sexual orientations. A wealth of publications has been produced on these themes and, to the authors’ knowledge, no recent review has attempted to synthesize their findings.

The present article aims to summarize the state of the art of research on stereotyping, sexualization and objectification in gender and media representations. A focus will be placed on the definitions of these concepts, the media where they occur, and verifying whether any changes over time are detectable or any specificities are present. The possible effects of these representations on people’s well-being will be explored as well.

A search of the literature was conducted on scientific search engines (APA PsycArticles, CINAHL Complete, Education Source, Family Studies Abstracts, Gender Studies Database, MEDLINE, Mental Measurements Yearbook, Sociology Source Ultimate, Violence & Abuse Abstracts, PUBMED, Scopus, Web of Science) to locate the most relevant contributions on the topic of media and gender representation, with a particular focus on stereotypes, objectification and sexualization, their presence in the media and their effects on well-being. Keywords were used to search for literature on the intersection of the main topics: media representation (e.g., media OR representation* OR portrayal*), gender (e.g., gender OR sex OR wom* OR m*n) and stereotypes, objectification and sexualization (e.g., stereotyp*, objectif*, sexualiz*). In some cases, additional keywords were used for the screening of studies on specific media (e.g., television, news, social media). When appropriate, further restrictions were used to screen for studies on effects or consequences (e.g., effect* OR impact* OR consequence* OR influence* OR outcome*). Inclusion criteria were the following: (a) academic articles (b) pertaining to the field of media representations (c) pertaining to gender stereotypes, objectification or sexualization. A dataset of 195 selected relevant papers was created. Thematic analysis was conducted following the guidelines developed by Braun and Clarke [ 42 ], in order to outline patterns of meaning across the reviewed studies. The process was organized into six phases: (1) familiarization with the data; (2) coding; (3) searching for themes; (4) reviewing themes; (5) defining and naming themes; and (6) writing up. After removing duplicates and excluding papers that did not meet the inclusion criteria, a total of 87 articles were included in the results of this review. The findings were discussed among researchers (LR, FS, MNP and TT) until unanimous consensus was reached.

2.1. Stereotypical Portrayals

Gender stereotypes appear to be flexible and responsive to changes in the social environment: consensual beliefs about men’s and women’s attributes have evolved throughout the decades, reflecting changes in women’s participation in the labor force and higher education [ 31 , 43 ]. Perceptions of gender equality in competence and intelligence have sharply risen, and stereotypical perceptions of women show significant changes: perceptions of women’s competence and intelligence have surpassed those relative to men, while the communion aspect appears to have shifted toward being even more polarized on being typical of women. Other aspects, such as perceptions of agency being more typical of men, have remained stable [ 31 ].

Despite these changes, gender representation in the media appears to be frequently skewed toward men’s representation and prominently features gender stereotypes. On a global scale, news coverage appears to mostly feature men, especially when considering representation as expert voices, where women are still underrepresented (24%) despite a rise in coverage in the last 5 years [ 44 ]. Underrepresentation has also been reported in many regional and national contexts, but exact proportions vary significantly in the local context. Male representation has been reported to be greater in several studies, with male characters significantly outnumbering female characters [ 45 ], doing so in male-led and mixed-led shows but not in female-led shows [ 46 ] in children’s television programming—a key source of influence on gender representations. Similar results have been found regarding sports news, whose coverage overwhelmingly focuses on men athletes [ 47 , 48 ] and where women are seldom represented.

Several analyses of television programs have also shown how representations of men and women are very often consistent with gender stereotypes. Girls were often portrayed as focusing more on their appearance [ 45 ], as well as being judged for their appearance [ 49 ]. The same focus on aesthetics was found in sports news coverage, which was starkly different across genders, and tended to focus on women athletes’ appearance, featuring overly simplified descriptions (vs. technical language on coverage of men athletes) [ 48 ]. In addition, coverage of women athletes was more likely in sports perceived to be more feminine or gender-appropriate [ 47 , 48 , 50 ]. Similarly, women in videogames appear to be both underrepresented and less likely to be featured as playable characters, as well as being frequently stereotyped, appearing in the role of someone in need of rescuing, as love interests, or cute and innocent characters [ 51 ]. In advertising as well, gender stereotypes have often been used as a staple technique for creating relatability, but their use may lead to negative cross-gender effects in product marketing [ 52 ] while also possibly furthering social issues. Hust and colleagues found that in alcohol advertisements, belief in gender stereotypes was the most consistent predictor of intentions to sexually coerce, showing significant interaction effects with exposure to highly objectifying portrayals [ 53 ]. Representation in advertising prominently features gender stereotypes, such as depicting men in professional roles more often, while depicting women in non-working, recreational roles, especially in countries that show high gender inequality [ 54 ]. A recent analysis of print ads [ 55 ] confirmed that some stereotypes are still prominent and, in some cases, have shown a resurgence, such as portraying a woman as the queen of the home; the study also found representations of women in positions of empowerment are, however, showing a relative increase in frequency. Public support, combined with market logic, appears to be successfully pushing more progressive portrayals in this field [ 56 ].

Both skewed representation and the presence of stereotypes have been found to lead to several negative effects. Gender-unequal representation has been found to stifle political [ 57 ] and career [ 58 ] ambition, as well as foster organizational discrimination [ 59 ]. Heavy media use may further the belief in gender stereotypes and has been found to be linked to a stronger endorsement of traditional gender roles and norms [ 60 ], which in turn may be linked to a vast number of detrimental health effects. In women, adherence and internalization of traditional gender roles have been linked to greater symptoms of depression and anxiety, a higher likelihood of developing eating disorders, and lower self-esteem and self-efficacy [ 36 , 61 , 62 , 63 ]. In men as well, adherence to traditional masculine norms has been linked to negative mental health outcomes such as depression, psychological distress and substance abuse [ 64 ], while also increasing the perpetration of risky behaviors [ 65 , 66 ] and intimate partner violence [ 65 , 67 ].

2.2. Objectifying Portrayals

Non-sexual objectifying representations appear to have been studied relatively little. They have been found to be common in advertising, where women are often depicted as purely aesthetic models, motionless and decorative [ 68 ]. They may also include using a woman’s body as a supporting object for the advertised product, as a decorative object, as an ornament to draw attention to the ad, or as a prize to be won and associated with the consumption of the advertised product [ 55 ].

The vast majority of the literature has focused on the sexual objectification of women. This type of representation has been reported to be very common in a number of contexts and across different media [ 69 ], and several studies (see Calogero and colleagues’ or Roberts and colleagues’ review [ 69 , 70 ]) have found support for the original model’s pathway [ 35 ]. Following experimental models expanded on the original (e.g., Frederick and colleagues or Roberts and colleagues [ 69 , 71 ]), highlighting the role of factors such as the internalization of lean or muscular ideals of appearance, finding evidence for negative effects on well-being and mental health through the increase in self-objectification and the internalization of cultural ideals of appearance [ 71 , 72 ].

Sexual objectification also appears to be consistently linked to sexism. For both women and men, the perpetration of sexual objectification was significantly associated with hostile and benevolent sexism, as well as the enjoyment of sexualization [ 73 ]. Enjoyment of sexualization, in turn, has been found to be positively associated with hostile sexism in both men and women, positively associated with benevolent sexism in women and negatively in men [ 74 ].

Exposure to objectifying media in men has been found to increase the tendency to engage in sexual coercion and harassment, as well as increasing conformity to gender role norms [ 75 ]. Consistently with the finding that perpetration of objectification may be associated with a greater men’s proclivity for rape and sexual aggression [ 76 ], a study conducted by Hust and colleagues found that exposure to objectifying portrayals of women in alcohol advertising was also a moderator in the relationship between belief in gender stereotypes and intentions to sexually coerce. Specifically, participants who had a stronger belief in gender stereotypes reported stronger intentions to sexually coerce when exposed to slightly objectifying images of women. Highly objectifying images did not yield the same increase—a result interpreted by the authors to mean that highly objectified women were perceived as sexually available and as such less likely to need coercion, while slightly objectified women could be perceived as more likely to need coercion [ 53 ].

Research on objectification has primarily focused on women, in part due to numerous studies suggesting that women are more subject to sexual objectification [ 73 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 ], as well as suffering the consequences of sexual objectification more often [ 81 ]. However, sexually objectifying portrayals seem to have a role in producing negative effects on men as well, although with partially different pathways. In men, findings about media appearance pressures on body image appear to be mixed. Previous meta-analyses found either a small average effect [ 82 ] or no significant effect [ 72 ]. A recent study found them to be significantly associated with higher body surveillance, poorer body image quality of life and lower satisfaction with appearance [ 71 ]. Another study, however, found differing relationships regarding sexual objectification: an association was found between experiences of sexual objectification and internalization of cultural standards of appearance, body shame and drive for muscularity, but was not found between experiences of sexual objectification and self-objectification or body surveillance [ 83 ]: in the same study, gender role conflict [ 84 ] was positively associated to the internalization of sociocultural standards of appearance, self-objectification, body shame and drive for muscularity, suggesting the possibility that different pathways may be involved in producing negative effects on men. Men with body-image concerns experiencing gender role conflict may also be less likely to engage in help-seeking behaviors [ 85 , 86 ]. This is possibly due to restrictive emotionality associated with the male gender role leading to more negative attitudes toward help-seeking, as found in a recent study by Nagai, [ 87 ], although this study finds no association with help-seeking behavior, conflicting with previous ones, and more research is needed.

Finally, specificities related to sexual orientation regarding media and objectification appear to be present. A set of recent studies by Frederick and colleagues found that gay men, lesbian women and bisexual people share with heterosexual people many of the pathways that lead from sociocultural pressures to internalization of thin/muscular ideals, higher body surveillance and a lower body image quality of life [ 71 , 88 ], leading the authors to conclude that these factors’ influence applies regardless of sexual orientation. However, their relationship with media and objectification may vary. Gay and bisexual men may face objectification in social media and dating apps rather than in mainstream media and may experience more objectification than heterosexual men [ 89 ]. In Frederick and colleagues’ studies, gay men reported greater media pressures, body surveillance, thin-ideal internalization, and self-objectification compared to heterosexual men; moreover, bisexual men appeared to be more susceptible to ideal internalization, displaying stronger paths from media appearance pressures to muscular-ideal internalization compared to heterosexual men; lesbian women, instead, demonstrated weaker relationships between media pressures and body image outcomes [ 71 , 88 ]. Consistently with previous studies suggesting a heightened susceptibility to social pressures [ 90 ], bisexual women appeared to be more susceptible to media pressures relative to other groups [ 88 ]. Another recent study of lesbian and bisexual women supported previous evidence for the pathway from the internalization of cultural appearance standards to body surveillance, body shame and eating disorder symptoms; however, it found no significant connection between experiences of objectification and eating disorder symptoms [ 91 ].

2.3. Sexualized Portrayals

Several studies have found sexualizing media representations to be commonplace across a number of different media contents and across different target demographics (i.e., children, adolescents or adults) and genres. Reports of common sexualized representations of women are found in contexts such as television programs [ 92 ], movies [ 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 ], music videos [ 97 , 98 ], advertising [ 54 , 55 ], videogames [ 51 , 99 , 100 ], or magazines [ 101 ].

Exposure to sexualized media has been theorized to be an exogenous risk factor in the internalization of sexualized beliefs about women [ 41 ], as well as one of the pathways to the internalization of cultural appearance ideals [ 102 ]. Daily exposition to sexualized media content has been consistently linked to a number of negative effects. Specifically, it has been found to lead to higher levels of body dissatisfaction and distorted attitudes about eating through the internalization of cultural body ideals (e.g., lean or muscular) in both men and women [ 71 ]. It has also been associated with a higher chance of supporting sexist beliefs in boys [ 103 ], and of tolerance toward sexual violence in men [ 104 ]. Furthermore, exposure to sexualized images has been linked to a higher tolerance of sexual harassment and rape myth acceptance [ 76 ]. Exposure to reality TV programs consistently predicted self-sexualization for both women and men, while music videos did so for men only [ 103 ]. Internalized sexualization, in turn, has been linked to a stronger endorsement of sexist attitudes and acceptance of rape myths [ 105 ], while also being linked to higher levels of body surveillance and body shame in girls [ 106 ]. Internalization of media standards of appearance has been linked to body surveillance in both men and women, as well as body surveillance of the partner in men [ 107 ].

As a medium, videogames have been studied relatively little and have produced less definite results. This medium can offer the unique dynamic of embodiment in a virtual avatar, which has been hypothesized to be able to lead to a shift in self-perception (the “Proteus effect”, as formulated by Yee & Bailenson, [ 108 ]). While some studies have partially confirmed this effect, showing that exposure to sexualized videogame representations can increase self-objectification [ 109 , 110 , 111 ], others [ 112 ] have not found the same relationship. Furthermore, while a study has found an association between sexualized representations in videogames, tolerance of sexual abuse of women and rape myth acceptance [ 113 ], and in another, it was linked to a decreased real-life belief in women’s competence [ 114 ], a recent meta-analysis [ 115 ] found no effect of the presence of sexualized content on well-being, sexism or misogyny.

Research on social media has also shown some specificities. Social media offers the unique dynamic of being able to post and disseminate one’s own content and almost always includes built-in mechanisms for user-generated feedback (e.g., likes), as well as often being populated by one’s peers, friends and family rather than strangers. Sites focusing on image- or video-based content (e.g., Instagram, TikTok) may be more prone to eliciting social comparison and fostering the internalization of cultural appearance ideals, resulting in more associations to negative body image when compared to others that have the same capabilities but offer text-based content as well (e.g., Facebook) [ 116 ]. Social media appears to foster social comparison, which may increase appearance-based concerns [ 117 ]. Consistently with previous research, exposure to sexualized beauty ideals on social media appeared to be associated with lower body satisfaction; exposure to more diverse standards of appearance, instead, was associated with increased body satisfaction and positive mood, regardless of image sexualization [ 116 , 118 ].

3. Discussion

3.1. critical discussion of evidence.

The reviewed evidence (summarized in Table 1 ) points to the wide-ranging harmful effects of stereotyping, objectifying and sexualizing media portrayals, which are reported to be still both common and pervasive. The links to possible harms have also been well documented, with a few exceptions.

Summary of findings.

These representations, especially but not exclusively pertaining to women, have been under social scrutiny following women’s rights movements and activism [ 119 ] and can be perceived to be politically incorrect and undesirable, bringing an aspect of social desirability into the frame. Positive attitudes toward gender equality also appear to be at an all-time high across the western world [ 120 , 121 ], a change that has doubtlessly contributed to socio-cultural pressure to reduce harmful representations. Some media contexts (e.g., advertising and television) seem to have begun reflecting this change regarding stereotypes, attempting to either avoid harmful representations or push more progressive portrayals. However, these significant changes in stereotypes (e.g., regarding competence) have not necessarily been reflected in women’s lives, such as their participation in the labor force, leadership or decision-making [ 31 , 122 , 123 ]. Objectifying or sexualizing representations do not seem to be drastically reduced in prevalence. Certainly, many influences other than media representations are in play in this regard, but their effect on well-being has been found to be pervasive and consistent. Despite widespread positive attitudes toward gender equality, the persistence of stereotypical, objectifying and sexualizing representations may hint at the continued existence of an entrenched sexist culture which can translate into biases, discrimination and harm.

Despite some conflicting findings, the literature also hints at the existence of differences in how media pressures appear to affect men and women, as well as gay, lesbian and bisexual people. These may point to the possibility of some factors (e.g., objectification) playing a different role across different people in the examined pathways, an aspect that warrants caution when considering possible interventions and clinical implications. In some cases, the same relationship between exposure to media and well-being may exist, but it may follow different pathways from distal risk factors to proximal risk factors, as in the case of gender role conflict for men or body shame for lesbian and bisexual women. However, more research is needed to explore these recent findings.

Different media also appear to feature specificities for which more research is needed, such as videogames and social media. The more interactive experiences offered by these media may play an important role in determining their effects, and the type of social media needs to be taken into consideration as well (image- or video-based vs. text-based). Moreover, the experiences of exposure may not necessarily be homogenous, due to the presence of algorithms that determine what content is being shown in the case of social media, and due to the possibility of player interaction and avatar embodiment in the case of videogames.

Past findings [ 37 , 69 ] about links with other social issues such as sexism, harassment and violence appear to still be relevant [ 67 , 73 , 103 , 105 ]. The increases in both tolerance and prevalence of sexist and abusive attitudes resulting from exposure to problematic media representations impact the cultural climate in which these phenomena take place. Consequently, victims of discrimination and abuse living in a cultural climate more tolerant of sexist and abusive attitudes may experience lower social support, have a decreased chance of help-seeking and adopt restrictive definitions for what counts as discrimination and abuse, indirectly furthering gender inequalities.

Exploring ways of reducing risks to health, several authors [ 22 , 41 , 75 ] have discussed media literacy interventions—that is, interventions focused on teaching critical engagement with media—as a possible way of reducing the negative effects of problematic media portrayals. As reported in McLean and colleagues’ systematic review [ 124 ], these interventions have been previously shown to be effective at increasing media literacy, while also improving body-related outcomes such as body satisfaction in boys [ 125 ], internalization of the thinness ideal in girls [ 125 ], body size acceptance in girls [ 126 ] and drive for thinness in girls and boys [ 127 ]. More recently, they were also shown to be effective at reducing stereotypical gender role attitudes [ 128 ], as well as fostering unfavorable attitudes toward stereotypical portrayals and lack of realism [ 129 ]. Development and promotion of these interventions should be considered when attempting to reduce negative media-related influences on body image. It should be noted, however, that McLean and colleagues’ review found no effect of media literacy interventions on eating disorder symptomatology [ 124 ], which warrants more careful interventions.

Furthermore, both internal (e.g., new entrants’ attitudes in interpersonal or organizational contexts) and external (e.g., pressure from public opinion) sociocultural pressures appear to have a strong influence in reducing harmful representations [ 55 , 56 ]. Critically examining these representations when they appear, as well as voicing concerns toward examples of possibly harmful representations, may promote more healthy representations in media. As documented by some studies, the promotion of diverse body representations in media may also be effective in reducing negative effects [ 70 , 118 ].

3.2. Limitations

The current review synthesizes the latest evidence on stereotyping, objectifying and sexualizing media representations. However, limitations in its methodology are present and should be taken into consideration. It is not a systematic review and may not be construed to be a complete investigation of all the available evidence. Only articles written in the English language have been considered, which may have excluded potentially interesting findings written in other languages. Furthermore, it is not a meta-analysis, and as such cannot be used to draw statistical conclusions about the surveyed phenomena.

3.3. Future Directions

While this perception is limited by the non-systematic approach of the review, to what we know, very few studies appear to be available on the relationship between media representation and non-sexual objectification, which may provide interesting directions to explore in relation to autonomy, violability or subjectivity, as was attempted in the context of work and organizations [ 130 ].

More cross-cultural studies (e.g., Tartaglia & Rollero [ 54 ]) would also prove useful in exploring differences between cultural contexts, as well as the weight of different sociocultural factors in the relationship between media representation and gender.

More studies focusing on relatively new media (e.g., social media, videogames) would possibly help clear up some of the identified discrepancies and explore new directions for the field that take advantage of their interactivity. This is particularly true for niche but growing media such as virtual reality, in which the perception of embodiment in an avatar with different physical features than one’s own could prove to be important in sexualization and objectification. Only preliminary evidence [ 131 ] has been produced on the topic.

Studies to further explore the relationship between media representations, gender and sexual orientation would also be beneficial. As already highlighted by Frederick and colleagues [ 132 ], gay, lesbian and bisexual people may deal with a significantly different set of appearance norms and expectations [ 133 ], and face minority-related stresses [ 134 ] that can increase susceptibility to poorer body image and disordered eating [ 135 , 136 ]. Additionally, none of the reviewed studies had a particular focus on trans people, who may have different experiences relating to media and body image, as suggested by the differences in pathways found in a recent study [ 137 ]. Sexual orientation and gender identity should be kept into consideration when investigating these relationships, as their specificities may shed light on the different ways societal expectations influence the well-being of sexual minorities.

The examined literature on the topic also appears to feature specificities that need to be taken into account. As previously reported by Ward [ 37 ], the vast majority of the studies continue to be conducted in the United States, often on undergraduates, which limits the generalizability of the results to the global population. Given the abundance and complexity of the constructs, more studies examining the pathways from media exposure to well-being using methodologies such as path analysis and structural equation modeling may help clarify some of the discrepancies found in the literature about the same relationships.

Finally, as previously reported by many authors [ 37 , 69 , 138 ], sexualization, self-sexualization, objectification and self-objectification are sometimes either treated as synonymous or used with different definitions and criteria, which may add a layer of misdirection to studies on the subject. Given the divergences in the use of terminology, clearly stating one’s working definition of sexualization or objectification would possibly benefit academic clarity on the subject.

4. Conclusions

Consistent empirical evidence highlights the importance of media representations as a key part of sociocultural influences that may have consequences on well-being. Despite some notable progress, harmful representations with well-researched links to detrimental effects are still common across a number of different media. Exposure to stereotyping, objectifying and sexualized representations appears to consistently be linked to negative consequences on physical and mental health, as well as fostering sexism, violence and gender inequity. On a clinical level, interventions dealing with body image and body satisfaction should keep their influence into account. The promotion of institutional and organizational interventions, as well as policies aimed at reducing their influence, could also prove to be a protective factor against physical and mental health risks.

Funding Statement

This research received no external funding.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, F.S. and L.R.; methodology, T.T. and M.N.P.; writing—original draft preparation, F.S.; writing—review and editing, T.T. and M.N.P.; supervision, L.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 69, 2018, review article, gender stereotypes.

• Naomi Ellemers 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, 3508 TC Utrecht, Netherlands; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 69:275-298 (Volume publication date January 2018) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011719
• First published as a Review in Advance on September 27, 2017
• © Annual Reviews

There are many differences between men and women. To some extent, these are captured in the stereotypical images of these groups. Stereotypes about the way men and women think and behave are widely shared, suggesting a kernel of truth. However, stereotypical expectations not only reflect existing differences, but also impact the way men and women define themselves and are treated by others. This article reviews evidence on the nature and content of gender stereotypes and considers how these relate to gender differences in important life outcomes. Empirical studies show that gender stereotypes affect the way people attend to, interpret, and remember information about themselves and others. Considering the cognitive and motivational functions of gender stereotypes helps us understand their impact on implicit beliefs and communications about men and women. Knowledge of the literature on this subject can benefit the fair judgment of individuals in situations where gender stereotypes are likely to play a role.

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What Are Gender Stereotypes?

• How They Develop
• How to Combat

Gender stereotypes are preconceived, usually generalized views about how members of a certain gender do or should behave, or which traits they do or should have. They are meant to reinforce gender norms, typically in a binary way ( masculine vs. feminine ).

Gender stereotypes have far-reaching effects on all genders.

Read on to learn about how gender stereotypes develop, the effects of gender stereotypes, and how harmful gender stereotypes can be changed.

Davin G Photography / Getty Images

Meaning of Gender Stereotypes

Gender stereotypes are ideas about how members of a certain gender do or should be or behave. They reflect ingrained biases based on the social norms of that society. Typically, they are considered as binary (male/female and feminine/masculine).

By nature, gender stereotypes are oversimplified and generalized. They are not accurate and often persist even when there is demonstrable evidence that contradict them. They also tend to ignore the fluidity of gender and nonbinary gender identities.

Classification of Gender Stereotypes

Gender stereotypes have two components, which are:

• Descriptive : Beliefs about how people of a certain gender do act, and their attributes
• Prescriptive : Beliefs about how people of a specific gender should act and attributes they should have

Gender stereotypes can be positive or negative. This doesn’t mean good or bad—even stereotypes that seem “flattering” can have harmful consequences.

• Positive gender stereotypes : Describe behaviors or attributes that align with accepted stereotypical ideas for that gender, and that people of that gender are encouraged to display (for example, girls should play with dolls and boys should play with trucks)
• Negative gender stereotypes : Describe behaviors or attributes that are stereotypically undesirable for that gender and that people from that gender are discouraged from displaying (such as women shouldn’t be assertive, or men shouldn’t cry)

The attribute is undesirable for all genders but more accepted in a particular gender than others. For example, arrogance and aggression are unpleasant in all genders but are tolerated more in men and boys than in women, girls, or nonbinary people .

Gender stereotypes tend to be divided into these two generalized themes:

• Communion : This stereotype orients people to others. It includes traits such as compassionate, nurturing, warm, and expressive, which are stereotypically associated with girls/women/femininity.
• Agency : This stereotype orients people to the self and is motivated by goal attainment. It includes traits such as competitiveness, ambition, and assertiveness, which are stereotypically associated with boys/men/masculinity.

Basic types of gender stereotypes include:

• Personality traits : Such as expecting women to be nurturing and men to be ambitious
• Domestic behaviors : Such as expecting women to be responsible for cooking, cleaning, and childcare, while expecting men to do home repairs, pay bills, and fix the car
• Occupations : Associates some occupations such as childcare providers and nurses with women and pilots and engineers with men
• Physical appearance : Associates separate characteristics for women and men, such as women should shave their legs or men shouldn’t wear dresses

Gender stereotypes don’t exist in a vacuum. They can intersect with stereotypes and prejudices surrounding a person’s other identities and be disproportionately harmful to different people. For example, a Black woman experiences sexism and racism , and also experiences unique prejudice from the intersectionality of sexism and racism that a White woman or Black man would not.

Words to Know

• Gender : Gender is a complex system involving roles, identities, expressions, and qualities that have been given meaning by a society. Gender is a social construct separate from sex assigned at birth.
• Gender norms : Gender norms are what a society expects from certain genders.
• Gender roles : These are behaviors, actions, social roles, and responsibilities a society views as appropriate or inappropriate for certain genders.
• Gender stereotyping : This ascribes the stereotypes of a gender group to an individual from that group.
• Self-stereotyping vs. group stereotyping : This is how a person views themselves compared to how they view the gender group they belong to (for example, a woman may hold the belief that women are better caregivers than men, but not see herself as adept in a caregiving role).

How Gender Stereotypes Develop

We all have unconscious biases (assumptions our subconscious makes about people based on groups that person belongs to and our ingrained associations with those groups). Often, we aren’t even aware we have them or how they influence our behavior.

Gender stereotyping comes from unconscious biases we have about gender groups.

We aren’t preprogrammed at birth with these biases and stereotypes. Instead, they are learned through repeated and ongoing messages we receive.

Gender roles, norms, and expectations are learned by watching others in our society, including our families, our teachers and classmates, and the media. These roles and the stereotypes attached to them are reinforced through interactions starting from birth. Consciously or not, adults and often other children will reward behavior or attributes that are in line with expectations for a child’s gender, and discourage behavior and attributes that are not.

Some ways gender stereotypes are learned and reinforced in childhood include:

• How adults dress children
• Toys and play activities offered to children
• Children observing genders in different roles (for example, a child may see that all of the teachers at their daycare are female)
• Praise and criticism children receive for behaviors
• Encouragement to gravitate toward certain subjects in school (such as math for boys and language arts for girls)
• Anything that models and rewards accepted gender norms

Children begin to internalize these stereotypes quite early. Research has shown that as early as elementary school, children reflect similar prescriptive gender stereotypes as adults, especially about physical appearance and behavior.

While all genders face expectations to align with the stereotypes of their gender groups, boys and men tend to face harsher criticism for behavior and attributes that are counterstereotypical than do girls and women. For example, a boy who plays with a doll and wears a princess dress is more likely to be met with a negative reaction than a girl who wears overalls and plays with trucks.

The Hegemonic Myth

The hegemonic myth is the false perception that men are the dominant gender (strong and independent) while women are weaker and need to be protected.

Gender stereotypes propagate this myth.

Effects of Gender Stereotypes

Gender stereotypes negatively impact all genders in a number of ways.

Nonbinary Genders

For people who are transgender / gender nonconforming (TGNC), gender stereotypes can lead to:

• Feelings of confusion and discomfort
• A low view of self-worth and self-respect
• Transphobia (negative feelings, actions, and attitudes toward transgender people or the idea of being transgender, which can be internalized)
• Negative impacts on mental health
• Struggles at school

Unconscious bias plays a part in reinforcing gender stereotypes in the classroom. For example:

• Educators may be more likely to praise girls for being well-behaved, while praising boys for their ideas and comprehension.
• Boys are more likely to be viewed as being highly intelligent, which influences choices. One study found girls as young as 6 avoiding activities that were labeled as being for children who are “really, really smart.”
• Intentional or unintentional steering of children toward certain subjects influences education and future employment.

In the Workforce

While women are in the workforce in large numbers, gender stereotypes are still at play, such as:

• Certain occupations are stereotypically gendered (such as nursing and teaching for women and construction and engineering for men).
• Occupations with more female workers are often lower paid and have fewer opportunities for promotion than ones oriented towards men.
• More women are entering male-dominated occupations, but gender segregation often persists within these spaces with the creation of female-dominated subsets (for example, pediatrics and gynecology in medicine, or human resources and public relations in management).
• Because men face harsher criticism for displaying stereotypically feminine characteristics than women do for displaying stereotypically male characteristics, they may be discouraged from entering female-dominated professions such as early childhood education.

Despite both men and women being in the workforce, women continue to be expected to (and do) perform a disproportionate amount of housework and taking care of children than do men.

Gender-Based Violence

Gender stereotypes can contribute to gender-based violence.

• Men who hold more traditional gender role beliefs are more likely to commit violent acts.
• Men who feel stressed about their ability to meet male gender norms are more likely to commit inter-partner violence .
• Trans people are more likely than their cisgender counterparts to experience discrimination and harassment, and they are twice as likely to engage in suicidal thoughts and actions than cisgender members of the Queer community.

Stereotypes and different ways of socializing genders can affect health in the following ways:

• Adolescent boys are more likely than adolescent girls to engage in violent or risky behavior.
• Mental health issues are more common in girls than boys.
• The perceived “ideal” of feminine slenderness and masculine muscularity can lead to health issues surrounding body image .
• Gender stereotypes can discourage people from seeking medical help or lead to missed diagnosis (such as eating disorders in males ).

Globally, over 575 million girls live in countries where inequitable gender norms contribute to a violation of their rights in areas such as:

• Employment opportunities
• Independence
• Safety from gender-based violence

How to Combat Gender Stereotypes

Some ways to combat gender stereotypes include:

• Examine and confront your own gender biases and how they influence your behavior, including the decisions you make for your children.
• Foster more involvement from men in childcare, both professionally and personally.
• Promote and support counterstereotypical hirings (such as science and technology job fairs aimed at women and campaigns to gain interest in becoming elementary educators for men).
• Confront and address bias in the classroom, including education for teachers on how to minimize gender stereotypes.
• Learn about each child individually, including their preferences.
• Allow children to use their chosen name and pronouns .
• Avoid using gender as a way to group children.
• Be mindful of language (for example, when addressing a group, use “children” instead of “boys and girls” and “families” instead of “moms and dads,”).
• Include books, toys, and other media in the classroom and at home that represent diversity in gender and gender roles.
• View toys as gender neutral, and avoid ones that promote stereotypes (for example, a toy that has a pink version aimed at girls).
• Ensure all children play with toys and games that develop a full set of social and cognitive skills.
• Promote gender neutrality in sports.
• Be mindful of advertising and the messaging marketing sends to children.
• Talk to children about gender, including countering binary thinking and gender stereotypes you come across.
• Take a look at the media your child engages with. Provide media that show all genders in a diversity of roles, different family structures, etc. Discuss any gender stereotyping you see.
• Tell children that it is OK to be themselves, whether that aligns with traditional gender norms or not (for example, it’s OK if a woman wants to be a stay-at-home parent, but it’s not OK to expect her to).
• Give children equal household chores regardless of gender.
• Teach all children how to productively handle their frustration and anger.
• Encourage children to step out of their comfort zone to meet new people and try activities they aren’t automatically drawn to.
• Put gender-neutral bathrooms in schools, workplaces, and businesses.
• Avoid assumptions about a person’s gender, including children.
• Take children to meet people who occupy counterstereotypical roles, such as a female firefighter.
• Speak up and challenge someone who is making sexist jokes or comments.

Movies That Challenge Gender Stereotypes

Not sure where to start? Common Sense Media has compiled a list of movies that defy gender stereotypes .

Gender stereotypes are generalized, preconceived, and usually binary ideas about behaviors and traits specific genders should or should not display. They are based on gender norms and gender roles, and stem from unconscious bias.

Gender stereotypes begin to develop very early in life through socialization. They are formed and strengthened through observations, experiences, and interactions with others.

Gender stereotypes can be harmful to all genders and should be challenged. The best way to start combating gender stereotypes is to examine and confront your own biases and how they affect your behavior.

A Word From Verywell

We all have gender biases, whether we realize it or not. That doesn’t mean we should let gender stereotypes go unchecked. If you see harmful gender stereotyping, point it out.

YWCA Metro Vancouver. Dating safe: how gender stereotypes can impact our relationships .

LGBTQ+ Primary Hub. Gender stereotyping .

Stanford University: Gendered Innovations. Stereotypes .

Koenig AM. Comparing prescriptive and descriptive gender stereotypes about children, adults, and the elderly . Front Psychol . 2018;9:1086. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01086

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Gender stereotypes .

Hentschel T, Heilman ME, Peus CV. The multiple dimensions of gender stereotypes: a current look at men’s and women’s characterizations of others and themselves . Front Psychol . 2019;10:11. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00011

Eagly AH, Nater C, Miller DI, Kaufmann M, Sczesny S. Gender stereotypes have changed: a cross-temporal meta-analysis of U.S. public opinion polls from 1946 to 2018 . Am Psychol . 2020;75(3):301-315. doi:10.1037/amp0000494

Planned Parenthood. What are gender roles and stereotypes?

Institute of Physics. Gender stereotypes and their effect on young people .

France Stratégie. Report – Gender stereotypes and how to fight them: new ideas from France .

Bian L, Leslie SJ, Cimpian A. Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests . Science . 2017;355(6323):389-391. doi:10.1126/science.aah6524

Save the Children. Gender roles can create lifelong cycle of inequality .

Girl Scouts. 6 everyday ways to bust gender stereotypes .

UNICEF. How to remove gender stereotypes from playtime .

Save the Children. Tips for talking with children about gender stereoptypes .

By Heather Jones Jones is a freelance writer with a strong focus on health, parenting, disability, and feminism.