This distinction is now even noted in our law. In a 1994 case, Justice Antonin
Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote:
The word gender has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal char-
acteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say,
gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male. (Scalia, 1994)Biological sex varies little—males everywhere have a Y chromosome, for example—
but gender varies enormously. Specifically, gender varies in four crucial ways:
1.Gender varies from culture to culture. What it means to be a man or a woman
in one culture may be quite different from in another. In some cultures, women
are thought to be passive and dependent; in other cultures decisive and compet-
itive. In some cultures men are supposed to be aggressive and stoic; in others, car-
ing and emotionally responsive.2.Definitions of gender change over time. What it may mean to be a man or a
woman in the United States today is different from what it meant in 1776. Take
hairstyles, for example—at that time, the “in” style was for men to wear their
hair set in ringlets or in a windswept look of loose confusion on top, with locks
falling over the forehead—that is, if they didn’t wear a longish wig with a pony-
tail down the back (the style for many white-collar professionals).3.Definitions of gender vary within a society. Within any one society it may mean
different things to be a man or a woman depending on race, religion, region, age,
sexuality, class, and the like (see Kimmel, 2003). Imagine, for example, two
“American” women: One is 22 years old, wealthy, Asian American, Buddhist,
heterosexual, and living in suburban San Francisco; and the other is a poor, White,
75-year-old Irish Catholic in Boston. Do you think they would have the same idea
of what it means to be a woman?4.Gender varies over the life course. What it means to be a man or a woman at
age 20 is probably quite different from what it will mean to you at age 40 or at
age 70. These ages correspond to changes in our life experiences, and masculin-
ity and femininity will mean different things if you are entering the labor force
or if you are retiring from it, if you are prepubescent, a young parent, or a grand-
parent (Rossi, 1985).Each of the social and behavioral sciences contributes to the study of gender.
Anthropologists can help illuminate the cross-cultural differences, while historians can
focus our attention on the differences over time. Developmental psychologists explore
how definitions of masculinity and femininity vary over the course of one’s life. And
it has been sociology’s contribution to examine the ways in which our different expe-
riences, based on other bases of identity—class, race, and the like—affect our defini-
tions of gender.
Gender identityrefers to our understanding of ourselves as male or female, what
we think it means to be male or female. Sociologists are aware that other identities,
like class or race, dramatically affect gender identity. Sociologists who observe the
intersectionof these identities speak, then, of gender identities as plural: masculinities
andfemininities. In fact, the differences amongmen and amongwomen are often
greater than the differences that we imagine betweenwomen and men. So, for exam-
ple, although there are small differences between girls and boys in math and language
abilities, we all know plenty of boys who are adept at languages and can barely learn
the times tables and plenty of girls who whiz through math class, but can’t conjugate
a Spanish verb.
SEX AND GENDER: NATURE ANDNURTURE 281