Understanding the Concept of Gender: Cultural Roles, Responsibilities, and Privileges

Walk into any Indian household on a weekday morning and you will likely notice patterns that feel almost automatic. The mother packs lunches, the father drives to work, the daughter is reminded to dress modestly, and the son is told not to cry. These are not biological reflexes. They are cultural scripts so deeply rehearsed that they feel natural. The concept of gender helps us understand exactly how these scripts are written, performed, and passed down across generations, and why they look so different in different parts of the world.

What gender really means 🔗

In everyday conversation, the words sex and gender are used interchangeably. Sociologists and public health scholars treat them as two very different ideas. Sex refers to the biological and physiological characteristics, like chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy, that classify a body as male, female, or intersex. Gender, on the other hand, refers to the roles, behaviours, expressions, and identities that a society assigns to people based on their perceived sex.

Put simply, sex is what the body is. Gender is what society makes of it. The clothes considered appropriate for a “boy”, the careers considered suitable for a “girl”, the emotions a “man” is allowed to express, and the freedoms a “woman” is granted are all products of culture, not chromosomes. This is why sociologists call gender a culturally and socially constructed system that organises power, labour, and identity.

Why this distinction matters 🔗

If gender differences were purely biological, they would look the same everywhere. They do not. A woman driving a truck in Punjab, a man performing classical Bharatanatyam in Chennai, or a Khasi family in Meghalaya passing property through the youngest daughter all challenge the idea that there is one “natural” way to be a man or a woman. Recognising gender as a construct is the first step towards understanding inequality, because anything constructed by society can also be reconstructed by it.

Culturally constructed roles and responsibilities 🔗

Every society develops a script for how men and women should behave. These scripts cover almost every domain of life, including who earns, who cooks, who inherits, who marries whom, and who speaks in public. Anthropologists and sociologists call these gender roles, and they are learned through a lifelong process of socialisation that begins the moment a baby is wrapped in a pink or blue blanket.

In most Indian households, this script still assigns the domestic sphere to women and the public, economic sphere to men. Studies of changing gender roles in India show that despite rising female literacy and workforce participation, the responsibility of housework, childcare, and elder care continues to fall disproportionately on women. A daughter who becomes a software engineer is still often expected to return home and help in the kitchen. A son who barely knows how to make tea is rarely judged for it.

The same role looks different across cultures 🔗

What feels obvious in one society can feel absurd in another. In parts of West Africa, women dominate marketplace trade. Among the matrilineal Khasi and Garo communities of Meghalaya, lineage and property pass through women. In Scandinavian countries, fathers routinely take months of paid paternity leave. None of these arrangements is biologically impossible elsewhere. They simply reflect different cultural choices about what men and women should do.

This cross-cultural variation is the strongest evidence that gender roles are not hardwired. They are taught, rehearsed, and rewarded by families, schools, religious institutions, media, and the state. Change the teachers, and you change the script.

Juliet Mitchell and the separation of sex from gender 🔗

The British psychoanalytic feminist Juliet C.W. Mitchell was one of the most important thinkers to formalise the distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender. Writing in the late 1960s and 1970s, Mitchell argued in Woman’s Estate (1971) and Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) that women’s oppression could not be explained by biology alone. It was instead produced by four interlocking social structures, namely production, reproduction, sexuality, and the socialisation of children.

Mitchell’s contribution was revolutionary for two reasons. First, she insisted that gender is a cultural construct, not a biological destiny. Her reading of psychoanalytic theory led her to argue that fantasy rather than fact determines gender, meaning that the meanings attached to male and female bodies are produced in the psyche and through culture, not delivered intact by biology.

When gender swallows biology 🔗

Mitchell also made a subtler observation that scholars continue to build on. The concept of gender was originally introduced to distinguish social attributes from biological ones. Over time, however, it expanded so much that even biology came to be seen as filtered through culture. The way we measure hormones, the way we interpret chromosomes, the way medical textbooks describe “male” and “female” bodies, all of these are shaped by cultural assumptions about what counts as normal. In other words, even our science of sex is not free from gender.

This insight became foundational for later feminist theorists. It explains why studies on gender inequality in India repeatedly find that biological arguments, such as “women are naturally more nurturing” or “men are naturally more rational”, are used to justify discrimination that is in fact maintained by upbringing, schooling, and institutions.

Margaret Mead and the evidence from New Guinea 🔗

If Juliet Mitchell gave us the theory, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead gave us the empirical proof. In her landmark 1935 book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead documented her fieldwork among three communities in the Sepik River basin of Papua New Guinea, namely the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli (now Chambri).

What she found upended Western assumptions about masculinity and femininity.

Three societies, three very different scripts 🔗

Among the mountain-dwelling Arapesh, both men and women were gentle, cooperative, nurturing, and emotionally expressive. Traits that Western societies of the 1930s coded as feminine were simply considered human. Among the Mundugumor, both men and women were aggressive, competitive, and emotionally tough. There was little of the soft maternal warmth that the West assumed was natural to women. Among the Tchambuli, gender roles were reversed in ways that shocked Mead’s readers. Women were the dominant economic providers, while men spent their time on art, gossip, and personal adornment.

From these three contrasting cases, Mead drew a powerful conclusion. If neighbouring societies in the same geographic region could produce such radically different temperaments for men and women, then the personality traits associated with masculinity and femininity in any one society could not possibly be innate. They had to be products of cultural determinism, learned through child-rearing practices, rituals, and social expectations.

Why Mead’s work still matters 🔗

Mead’s findings have been debated and refined by later anthropologists, but her central insight remains influential. There is no single, universal way of being a man or a woman. The traits that one society treats as natural for one sex can be treated as natural for the other sex, or for both, or for neither, in a different society. This understanding became a cornerstone of the feminist movement and laid the groundwork for later thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, who famously argued that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Privileges, penalties, and the Indian context 🔗

Gender is not just about roles. It is also about privileges and penalties that come bundled with those roles. In a patriarchal society, being assigned male at birth typically grants access to inheritance, mobility, public space, economic opportunity, and decision-making power. Being assigned female often comes with restrictions on movement, dress, career choices, and bodily autonomy.

In the Indian context, these patterns play out in measurable ways. Women shoulder the bulk of unpaid care work. Female labour force participation remains low compared to global averages. Indian masculinity is often constructed around the ability to protect, provide for, and control women in the family, while femininity is constructed around marriage, motherhood, and domestic devotion. These scripts hurt both sexes. Men face enormous pressure to suppress emotion and become sole earners. Women face barriers to autonomy and ambition.

Where change is happening 🔗

Cultural constructs are not frozen. Urbanisation, education, digital media, and women’s movements are rewriting parts of the script. Younger generations in Indian cities are increasingly comfortable with women in leadership and men in caregiving. Legal reforms, from equal inheritance rights for daughters to protection against workplace harassment, have shifted the formal framework. Yet attitudes change more slowly than laws, which is why understanding gender as a construct, rather than a biological fact, matters so much. If it was built, it can be rebuilt.

Why understanding gender as a construct is liberating 🔗

Recognising gender as a cultural construct does not deny biological differences between bodies. It simply refuses to let those differences dictate destiny. It opens up space for a woman to be an engineer without apology, for a man to be a primary caregiver without shame, and for non-binary individuals to exist without erasure. It also forces us to look honestly at the privileges and penalties built into the gender system, and to ask whether they are arrangements we still wish to keep.

Both Mitchell’s theoretical framework and Mead’s anthropological evidence point in the same direction. The way we do gender today is one possibility among many. Other societies have done it differently. Our own society has done it differently in the past and will do it differently in the future. The script is in our hands.

What do you think? Looking at your own family and neighbourhood, which gender roles feel “natural” to you, and which ones do you now suspect are simply well-rehearsed cultural scripts? If you could rewrite one rule about how boys and girls are raised in India, which one would it be and why?

References

1. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11633985/
3. https://www.ijfmr.com/papers/2025/2/39598.pdf
4. https://literariness.org/2016/12/13/juliet-mitchell-and-psychoanalytic-feminism/
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277539521000364
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Temperament_in_Three_Primitive_Societies
7. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-sepik.html
8. https://www.simplypsychology.org/margaret-mead.html
9. https://pubadmin.institute/gender-sensitization/the-cultural-construction-of-femininity
10. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Cultural_Anthropology/Cultural_Anthropology_(Evans)/10:_Sex_and_Gender/10.05:_Margaret_Mead's_Gender_Studies