By Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, professor at Centre for Gender research, University of Oslo.

Some weeks ago, Indaba-Network published an article on gender and gender prejudices. A large discussion started.  Today, Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, professor at the Centre for Gender research, University of Oslo, tells us more on Gender. Let us hope that this will sharpen our debate and encourage youth groups to challenge gender prejudices and engage on issues related gender equity.

What is gender? Girls and boys, women and men, of course! Certainly, but is it so simple? Not all women are like each other, nor are all men. Different ways of being and behaving often cut across the gender divide. It is also a common observation that men and women may appear and behave in ways that do not match the different cultural expectations of what is seen as appropriate in relation to biological classifications. So to what degree does gender belong to the body, to self-presentation – or to the eyes of the beholder? The question arises because gender has many facets.  It is a dimension of bodies and physical reproduction, individual identities and personal experience, social relations and everyday interaction. It is central to divisions of labor, to the structuring of institutions such as families, schools, markets, and states. Last, but not least, it is also a forcefull frame of interpretation in our minds that imposes hierarchical dichotomies on differences that are actually much more varied and distributional. The personal, symbolic, social relational, and structural dimensions of gender are deeply entangled with other lines of difference and inequality, such as age, sexuality, social class, nationality, and racialized-ethnicity.  These entanglements contribute to shape the organization, salience, and meanings of gender in specific contexts.

Gender differences are distributional rather than categorial

A source of confusion is that gender as a concept is used to signify two quite different things: a categorical difference (meaning either/or) and a distributional or statistical difference (meaning more or less of something). The only close-to-dichotomous observable gender trait -  often named as the core of biological sex – is genital difference. All other gender dimensions — whether they are biological (hormone levels, secondary sex attributes, brain structure, motor performance), psychological (differences in motivations or cognitive capacities) or behavioural (differences in preferences, and ways of being and behaving) — involve complex variation, not dichotomy.  In most cases the variation within each gender group is bigger than the average difference between the two groups. Thus, almost all gender differences are distributional rather than dichotomous or categorical, most gender traits seem to be socially influenced and changeable over time, and they do not come in neat and one-dimensional packages in the person. A boy or a girl may be “typical” in some respects and “atypical” in others. So what is gender if what we see as  “masculine” and “feminine” traits can be found in both girls and boys? Questions like these have led gender researchers to conclude that divisions and hierarchies of gender do not follow from the difference between women and men.  It is rather the opposite: when gender is constructed as a difference empirical variation in its many dimensions becomes reduced to a simple dichotomy (Magnusson and Marecek 2012).

This does not mean that gendered patterns of behaviour are a mirage or that the patterns that do exist have no sort of biological basis (even if we do not know exactly what that basis is). The point is that there is no clear or straightforward connection between near-dichotomous dimensions of biological sex and the complex, multi-dimensional and context-dependent nature of gender differences.  Gendered patterns — with or without a biological basis — inform cultural norms and expectations about what is seen as typically feminine and typically masculine. Instead of recurring arguments concerning more or less biological determination, it has been suggested by Simone de Beauvoir and Toril Moi to view the body as part of our situation in the world. It means something what bodies we are born with – as it would mean something if I were born with one arm or eyes in my neck – but what it means depends on how it is interpreted in a given culture and society, and on my own actions. Biology does not have any meaning in itself.

Gender as cultural norm

Distributive gender patterns are found both on structural, symbolic and personal levels although they may vary both between and within societies and social contexts. Different cultures have different norms for what counts as desireable masculinity and femininity. However, also within the same culture there will often be several ways in which one can be masculine or feminine. Different social classes, ages and ethnic groups, for instance, will often have different ideas about what a real man/boy or a real woman/girl is. Within a society there will be ongoing symbolic struggles between such masculinities to gain hegemony, for instance by ridiculing or morally criticising each other. Some become dominant, while others are subordinated or marginalized.

Personal gender concerns the ways we fit into, identify with or protest against available cultural models of gender. Gender is a personal matter and a reality for each and every one of us, but it is also a dimension of social relations created between people and shaped through processes of interaction. While the individual perspective frames gender as something we “are,” the interactional perspective emphasizes gender as something we “do”. This perspective calls attention to the dynamics of power in social constructions of meaning. Gender as doing and gender as difference are not mutually exclusive perspectives; when children learn to “do” gender in their families, in schools, and with peers, they also “become” gender in certain ways and this will again form their responses to new social situations.

Gender as hierarchy

What characterizes gender as a frame of interpretation is not only the  tendency to split and dichotomize phenomena into two distinct groups, but also the tendency to read this dichotomy as a hierarchy: Things defined as feminine also tend to be seen as secondary or even inferior to things defined as masculine. This is also sometimes called the male norm: Men and boys represent the universal norm from which women and girls deviate. Gender as framework of interpretation may lead to gender stereotyping. This is the case if a gendered pattern of distribution is interpreted as a categorical distinction. Here the variation within each group and overlap between girls and boys is ignored.

People often tend to believe that the specific gender system their culture endorses is natural and even biologically founded. Why do we have this inclination to naturalize our own norms of gender? One reason could be related to the fact that in all known societies, structural and symbolic gender play an important role in the stability of the society. To question the naturalness of a society’s gender system challenges the stability, power distribution and values of that society. Gender arrangements are also important elements of cultural and personal identity – and thus also invested in emotionally. But ideas of desirable gender orders belong to the normative field, not to nature. There is a world of difference between saying ‘this is natural’ and saying ‘this feels natural to me’.

If you have been interested with this blog article, you can discover more about gender in a brilliant resource developed by Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen: Just click on this link.