Sociology of gender

Sociology of gender is a prominent subfield of sociology. Social interaction directly correlated with sociology regarding social structure. One of the most important social structures is status. This is determined based on position that an individual possesses which effects how he/she will be treated by society. One of the most important statuses an individual claims is gender. Public discourse and the academic literature generally use the term gender for the perceived or projected (self-identified) masculinity or femininity of a person.

The term gender role was coined by John Money in a seminal 1955 paper where he defined it as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman."

A person's gender is complex, encompassing countless characteristics of appearance, speech, movement and other factors not solely limited to biological sex. Societies tend to have gender systems in which everyone is categorized as male or female. Some societies include a third gender role; for instance, the Native American Two-Spirit people and the Hijras of India. There is debate over the extent to which gender is a social construct or a biological construct .

During the 1970s, there was no consensus about how the terms were to be applied. In the 1974 edition of Masculine/Feminine or Human, the author uses "innate gender" and "learned sex roles", but in the 1978 edition, the use of sex and gender is reversed. By 1980, most feminist writings had agreed on using gender only for socioculturally adapted traits.

Liberal feminism is the belief that individuals should be free to develop their own talents and pursue their interests. Individuals seek to expand equality by removing the barriers in society. Socialist feminism thinks that capitalism strengthens patriarchy by concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few. The traditional family structure should be replaced by a collective revolution. In Radical feminism, they believe that patriarchy is so deeply rooted in society that even a sociological revolution would not end it; Society must eliminate gender itself.

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