What is Gender? Unpacking its Cultural and Social Meanings

Walk into any Indian household and you will notice something almost invisible yet powerful at work. A baby boy is handed a toy car; a baby girl is handed a doll. A son is told to “be brave”; a daughter is told to “be careful.” None of this is written into biology. It is written into culture. This invisible script is what sociologists call gender, and understanding how it differs from biological sex is the starting point of every serious conversation about equality, family, and society.

What exactly is gender? 🔗

In everyday language, “sex” and “gender” are used as if they mean the same thing. In sociology, they do not. Sex refers to the biological and physiological differences between males and females – chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs. Gender, on the other hand, refers to the social, cultural, and psychological meanings that a society attaches to being male or female.

The World Health Organization captures this distinction clearly. According to the WHO, gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed, including the norms, behaviours, and roles associated with each, as well as the relationships between them. Because it is a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time. Sex, by contrast, is largely fixed at birth.

This separation matters because it tells us something important: many of the differences we assume are “natural” between men and women – who cooks, who earns, who cries, who leads – are not biological facts. They are learned patterns.

Ann Oakley and the birth of the sex-gender distinction 🔗

The credit for formally introducing this distinction into sociology goes to the British sociologist Ann Oakley. In her landmark 1972 book Sex, Gender and Society, she argued that “sex” refers to the biological division into male and female, while “gender” refers to the parallel and socially unequal division into femininity and masculinity.

Oakley’s insight was revolutionary for its time. She was one of the first sociologists to extend ideas about socialisation to explain how femininity and masculinity are not inborn traits but socially constructed identities. Drawing on biology, anthropology, and the study of animal behaviour, she demonstrated that men and women are not two completely separate groups; instead, each individual falls somewhere on a continuous scale. Different societies, she showed, define masculinity and femininity in different and sometimes opposite ways.

Why this distinction was a turning point 🔗

Before Oakley, much of social science treated gender differences as if they flowed automatically from biology. A woman was “naturally” suited to caregiving; a man was “naturally” suited to leadership. Oakley dismantled this assumption. If gender roles were truly biological, they would look the same in every culture and every century. They do not. The fact that a “good wife” in one culture looks nothing like a “good wife” in another is, in itself, proof that gender is cultural.

Oakley also identified the specific mechanisms through which gender is built into children from a young age – what she called manipulation (encouraging “appropriate” behaviour), canalisation (channelling children towards gendered toys and activities), verbal appellation (using different language for boys and girls, such as “brave little man” or “pretty little girl”), and different activities (involving them in chores or play that match expected roles). Together, these processes turn small children into people who eventually believe their gendered behaviour is just “who they are.”

Gender as a societal construct 🔗

The idea that gender is a social construct is now mainstream in sociology. It means that gender does not exist naturally in the world the way mountains or molecules do; it is created and maintained by people through their interactions, institutions, and beliefs. According to the social constructionist view, gender roles are an achieved status in a social environment, which implicitly and explicitly categorise people and motivate social behaviours.

This perspective is reinforced by sociologists like Richard Appelbaum and William Chambliss, whose widely used textbook on sociology emphasises that behaviours, norms, and values associated with gender are learned through the process of socialisation – beginning in the family and continuing through school, peer groups, religion, and media. In other words, no one is born knowing how to “be a man” or “be a woman.” We are taught – every day, through countless small cues – what is expected of us.

Socialisation: the engine of gender 🔗

Socialisation is the lifelong process through which individuals internalise the norms and values of their society. For gender, this engine starts running the moment a baby is born – sometimes even earlier, with gender-reveal parties and pink-or-blue nurseries.

Consider a few everyday examples in the Indian context:

A daughter helping her mother in the kitchen while her brother watches television is not just a household scene; it is a lesson. A girl being told to sit “properly” while her brother is allowed to run wild is not just discipline; it is gender training. A boy being mocked for crying is not just a moment of teasing; it is a message that emotions are not for men. Over years, these countless small messages harden into what feels like instinct.

How culture shapes gender 🔗

If gender were purely biological, it would look identical everywhere. It does not. Anthropologists have documented enormous variation in what counts as “masculine” or “feminine” across cultures, and even within the same country, gender roles differ across regions, religions, castes, and classes.

In matrilineal communities of Meghalaya, for instance, property and family names pass through women. In most of mainland India, the opposite is true – sons inherit, and daughters move into their husbands’ homes after marriage. Both arrangements feel “natural” to the people living within them, but they are products of culture, not biology.

Indian gender roles in everyday life 🔗

A Pew Research Center survey of nearly 30,000 Indians found that traditional gender norms continue to shape family life in deep ways. Although a majority of Indians say child care should be shared, about a third of adults feel that child care should be handled primarily by women. When it comes to earning money, 43% of Indians see this as mainly the obligation of men, and eight-in-ten agree that when jobs are scarce, men should have greater rights to employment than women.

Son preference – the cultural inclination to value sons over daughters – is another powerful example of how gender expectations get woven into family life. Nearly two-thirds of Indians say sons should have primary responsibility for parents’ last rites or burial rituals, a belief tied to religious tradition but also to broader ideas about who “carries” a family forward.

These attitudes shape real outcomes. Girls are often steered toward careers in teaching or nursing while boys are pushed toward engineering or business. Boys are taught to be assertive and ambitious; girls are taught to be adjusting and accommodating. Even in highly educated urban families, subtle versions of these expectations persist – sometimes in who is expected to compromise on a career after marriage, or who takes on the “second shift” of housework after office hours.

Culture changes – and so does gender 🔗

One of the most important implications of the social-construction view is that gender norms are not fixed. Because they are made by society, they can be remade. Indian women today vote, fly fighter jets, lead corporations, and run panchayats – roles unimaginable to many a century ago. According to UN Women, gender norms continue to shape economic participation worldwide, but they are also actively being challenged across countries and generations.

Government initiatives like Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, run by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, attempt to reshape cultural attitudes that devalue daughters. Such campaigns work precisely because gender is a social construct: what culture has built, culture can also rebuild.

Why this definition matters 🔗

Understanding gender as a cultural and social concept, rather than a biological destiny, has practical consequences. It allows us to ask uncomfortable but important questions: Why are unpaid care responsibilities mostly assigned to women? Why are leadership roles still dominated by men? Why do boys face such heavy emotional restrictions in the name of “manliness”?

It also creates room for change. If gender is learned, it can be unlearned. If roles are assigned, they can be reassigned. The sex-gender distinction that Ann Oakley introduced more than five decades ago is not just an academic idea – it is the intellectual foundation of every movement for gender equality, from women’s rights to challenges against rigid masculinity to recognition of non-binary identities.

In short: sex is what biology gives us. Gender is what society makes of it. And what society makes, society can also change.

What do you think? Looking back at your own upbringing, what are some “rules” about being a boy or a girl that you were taught – and which of them do you now question? If gender roles in India were rewritten for the next generation, what would you keep and what would you change?

References

1. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender
2. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095846541
3. https://www.routledge.com/Sex-Gender-and-Society/Oakley/p/book/9781472435620
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_gender
5. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/03/02/how-indians-view-gender-roles-in-families-and-society/
6. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/03/02/gender-roles-in-the-family/
7. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/facts-and-figures
8. https://wcd.nic.in/bbbp-schemes