About Gender. Notice: You can find the original article here
GENDER AND SOCIETY
"Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them."
--Margaret Mead
In addition to age, gender is one of the universal dimensions on which status differences are based. Unlike sex, which is a biological concept, gender is a social construct specifying the socially and culturally prescribed roles that men and women are to follow. According to Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, gender is the "costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance" (p.238). As Alan Wolfe observed in "The Gender Question" (The New Republic, June 6:27-34), "of all the ways that one group has systematically mistreated another, none is more deeply rooted than the way men have subordinated women. All other discriminations pale by contrast." Lerner argues that the subordination of women preceded all other subordinations and that to rid ourselves of all of those other "isms"--racism, classism, ageism, etc.--it is sexism that must first be eradicated. For some specifics, see B. Deutsch's "The Male Privilege Checklist" and Nijole Benokraitis & Joe Feagin's "Overt/Subtle/Covert Sex Discrimination: An Overview."
Women have always had lower status than men, but the extent of the gap between the sexes varies across cultures and time (some arguing that it is inversely related to social evolution). In 1980, the United Nations summed up the burden of this inequality: Women, who comprise half the world's population, do two thirds of the world's work, earn one tenth of the world's income and own one hundredth of the world's property. In Leviticus, God told Moses that a man is worth 50 sheikels and a woman worth 30--approximately the contemporary salary differentials of the sexes in the United States. (Actually, according to one "Current Population Survey" of the US Census Bureau, American women in 1999 earned approximately 77% of what men made, in 2000, according to the Department of Labor, their median weekly earnings were 76% of the male median.) What might be the socio-cultural implications if men were to also be the child bearers? Follow the first human male pregnancy (well, not really) at www.malepregnancy.com.
And the significance of the stamps above? A recent U.S. Postal Service publication, "Women on Stamps", holds some interesting methodological possibilities. Putting a deceased individual's likeness on a stamp is one way by which political immortality is conferred. Of the hundreds of Americans so immortalized only a handful are women: 16, to be precise, through 1960; 19 through 1970; and 29 through 1980 (any connection between this 50% increase with the ERA movement of the seventies?). An enterprising student may wish to investigate and compare how this female proportion of immortalized citizens varies across countries and time.
Matters of gender are scattered throughout these pages, including gender differences in household duties, in in voting during the 1996 Presidential election, and in suicide rates cross-nationally. Take advantage of this site's search engine by first entering "gender" and next "sex" as the search words.
The State of the World Population 2000: Lives Together, Worlds Apart--Men and Women in a Time of Change from the United Nations Population Fund
GenderNet from the World Bank. Extensive international datasets