Institution, Gender as

Explanation of Terms

Many theorists contrast the concept of gender with that of sex, which they use to refer to biological differences between men and women. In contrast, gender is considered largely a product of social construction. Thus, gender is not something a person is born with but, rather, something that an individual learns based on her or his experiences in society. Gender does not function in isolation; rather, it is created and enacted socially. It is also not static, meaning that it changes across time and space. The concept of an institution, central to sociology, has been understood in various ways during the past century. Feminist sociologist Patricia Yancey Martin sets out criteria for a contemporary understanding of institutions. She builds on traditional understandings of institutions as persisting over time, pertaining to groups, and regulating actions and behaviors. She complicates these criteria with contemporary scholarship that asserts that institutions are the product of both social structure and human agency. This means that institutions are created and sustained simultaneously by structural factors and individual practices. She also emphasizes that although institutions do persist over time, they are also subject to continual change. Institutions also embody specific belief systems or ideologies that enable some actions while restricting others. In contrast to common usage, a sociological understanding of institutions is not restricted to specific sites such as a prison or a school (though these are both examples of institutions). Rather, systems such as family and religion are also examples of institutions.

Prior Theoretical Approaches

Conceptualizing gender as a social institution provides theoretical tools to make sense of the social locations and inequalities between women and men. Within sociology, previous attempts to understand the place of men and women in society focused on [Page 465]biological differences and individual characteristics. For example, the sex differences approach assumed that innate biological differences explained the unequal social locations that women and men occupied. Within this approach, scholars could either emphasize or downplay “sex differences” by paying closer attention to intra-sex differences. Some scholars argued that the biological differences between men and women were relatively small compared with the biological differences within and among men and women. Even this approach, however, assumed essential biological difference, thus failing to emphasize the social meaning of biological difference.

The sex differences approach was largely replaced by a sex role approach in the 1970s, mainly because of work in history and anthropology that showed how gender characteristics that were assumed to be universal (and thus biologically determined) actually changed across time and space. Sex role research assumed a combination of nature and nurture factors, with an emphasis on early childhood socialization. Though the move to sex roles dramatically opened up the potential for sociological inquiry, this had some key limitations. The emphasis on psychological, individualized early childhood development hindered structural analyses. Scholars have also criticized the sex role approach for assuming that these roles are fixed during childhood and immune to change later in life. Although sociologists continue to do work guided by this approach, these limitations have led many feminist sociologists to abandon sex roles research in favor of a more fluid and analytically supple analysis of gender, as discussed earlier.

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