Sex role differentiation is a cultural recognition that males and females differ, but also unite to create what neither can produce alone. They are separate but cannot properly exist without each other; different but complementary; integral parts of a larger totality. In all societies these differences extend to social activity. This division of labour by sex is so pervasive, and seemingly ‘natural,’ that it is often taken for granted and assumed to be an inevitable consequence of physical difference. Only when dramatic inversions of normal sex roles occur is normality itself reconsidered. But ‘normal’ behaviour also varies between societies, and even between groups within the same society. It is now widely recognized that sexual differences impose few limits on behaviour. Sex roles are culturally constituted.

West Indians have specific ideas about the behaviour appropriate to males and females at various stages of the life cycle, at various positions within the social hierarchy, and within the occupational system. The distinctive features of sexuality are clear and unequivocal because they are physical rather than social; they do not vary from class to class, race to race, or at various stages of an individual's life cycle. Males and females are readily distinguished by the presence of male or female sexual organs, and it is by reference to these distinctive features that the sex of each individual is established at birth.