Gender

(gendered)

Gender is a term used to differentiate between the masculinity and femininity of people and their characteristics. It moves beyond dividing people into biological sexes of male or female. Gender is a social construction. It has been an important tenet of feminism that the social differences between men and women are not naturally occurring but are constructed by social practices, norms and beliefs.

For example, the gendered nature of parenting has been questioned and feminists have argued that it is not a natural occurrence for women to do the vast majority of child care in the home. Rather this occurs due to social expectations and the traditional practice of mothers' roles as primary carers and men's roles as ‘bread-winners’. This also relates to the social perception identified by feminists of a hierarchical divide between public- and private- sphere responsibilities. This means that private-sphere caring work is constructed by society as women's work and not as important as paid work and political work in the public sphere. Gendering is a dynamic process, not a static one, which means that our understanding of gendered practices changes over time. This can be seen with the increasing economic contribution that mothers make to families through undertaking paid work outside the home. Conversely, fathers now also spend more time with children doing caring work than at any other stage in Australian history.

Gender can also be seen in how we think about paid work in general in that some jobs are more likely to be seen as masculine jobs and some jobs as feminine.