Sex and Gender

Sex and gender are two terms that are used synonymously but one must learn to adopt the phraseology of many experts in the field of gender studies. They distinguish between the two words by using the following definitions.

Sex: Sex is based on the physiological and anatomical differences between men and women. It is purely biological and genetically determined.

Gender: The word gender deals with everything related to one’s sex. Specifically the roles, behaviors, preferences and other attributes that highlight what it means to be a man or a woman in a particular culture.

This essay will call attention to the differences between the two words by highlighting their origins.

Before one understands the differences, one must understand the importance of these words. It has been noted that one of the most crucial parts of personal identity is whether one classifies themselves as either female or male. Majority of us may not necessarily be too concerned with ethnic identity or social class, etc. However, in comparison, it is quite rare to find an individual who is indifferent towards being classified into one sex or another.  To highlight this point, Angier (1998) points out that on the Barney TV show for children, the cast has children from all ethnic backgrounds, disabilities and chubby and thin children. However, each of these children were unmistakably and unambiguously male or female. Nearly everything in our lives reminds us of our gender, such as first names, the clothes and how others treat us.

There has always been a disagreement on the origins of gender differences but it can be safely assumed that it most gender attributes are learned from what has been taught to the individual. For example, the relation between long hair and femininity or the relation between being a man and being able to fix a car. Barbara Mackoff said “...the biggest difference between boys and girls is in how we treat them.” Some other attributes could be based on biological or genetic determinants such as the presence or absence of chest hair or facial hair in men. It has been observed that young male mammals of varied species, even humans across many cultures, indulged in “play fighting” more often than young female mammals (Geary, 1999). Eleanor Maccoby recorded similar differences between varied species and concluded “the parallels are sufficiently strong, I believe, to give us some confidence that there is an evolved, genetic basis for several of the robust gender divergences that have been documented in human children.” Lastly, a few attributes can be influenced by an amalgamation of social learning and physiology. For an example of this, let’s look at young primates, including human children. It has been noted that young primates tend to play in the same-sex groups. This is called self-segregation and it seems to be based on physiology. But once placed in these groups, contrastingly, the young primates learn different skills, preferences and social styles. (Martin and Fabes, 2011).

In Bem, 1995, p. 334, an analogy from anthropologist Kathryn March makes an overall, more general point; “Sex is to gender as light is to color.” This sentence simply implies that light and sex are part of physical phenomena, in comparison to how color and gender are culture based classification that randomly divide light and sex into specific subgroups. With regard to color, a few cultures have only two classifications, maybe other few cultures three, but in India the classification can be made similar to a giant box of crayons with each of its own assigned name. In addition India, similar to majority of the world, gender is only expressed into the two, male and female, whereas a lot of other cultures have a giant box of crayon range, with the possibilities of bisexuality to different heterosexual behaviors to homosexual roles, behaviors and lifestyle.

To summarize, sex is distinguished by femaleness or maleness such determined by physiological factors gained at conception that will result in physiological and anatomical differences. Similarly, gender is distinguished by the behaviors, attributes, personality characteristics and expectancies related to an individual’s biological sex, within a selected culture. Differentiations made between gender can be based on physiology, social learning or a synthesis of both of them. 

Rachaita Vyas