gender essay introduction

Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies. This non-exhaustive list introduces readers to scholarship in the field.

Gender studies asks what it means to make gender salient, bringing a critical eye to everything from labor conditions to healthcare access to popular culture. Gender is never isolated from other factors that determine someone’s position in the world, such as sexuality, race, class, ability, religion, region of origin, citizenship status, life experiences, and access to resources. Beyond studying gender as an identity category, the field is invested in illuminating the structures that naturalize, normalize, and discipline gender across historical and cultural contexts.

At a college or university, you’d be hard pressed to find a department that brands itself as simply Gender Studies. You’d be more likely to find different arrangements of the letters G, W, S, and perhaps Q and F, signifying gender, women, sexuality, queer, and feminist studies. These various letter configurations aren’t just semantic idiosyncrasies. They illustrate the ways the field has grown and expanded since its institutionalization in the 1970s.

This non-exhaustive list aims to introduce readers to gender studies in a broad sense. It shows how the field has developed over the last several decades, as well as how its interdisciplinary nature offers a range of tools for understanding and critiquing our world.

Catharine R. Stimpson, Joan N. Burstyn, Domna C. Stanton, and Sandra M. Whisler, “Editorial.” Signs , 1975; “Editorial,” off our backs , 1970

The editorial from the inaugural issue of Signs , founded in 1975 by Catharine Stimpson, explains that the founders hoped that the journal’s title captured what women’s studies is capable of doing: to “represent or point to something.” Women’s studies was conceptualized as an interdisciplinary field that could represent issues of gender and sexuality in new ways, with the possibility of shaping “scholarship, thought, and policy.”

The editorial in the first issue of off our backs , a feminist periodical founded in 1970, explains how their collective wanted to explore the “dual nature of the women’s movement:” that “women need to be free of men’s domination” and “must strive to get off our backs.” The content that follows includes reports on the Equal Rights Amendment, protests, birth control, and International Women’s Day.

Robyn Wiegman, “Academic Feminism against Itself.” NWSA Journal , 2002

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies, which consolidated as an academic field of inquiry in the 1970s. Wiegman tracks some of the anxieties that emerged with the shift from women’s to gender studies, such as concerns it would decenter women and erase the feminist activism that gave rise to the field. She considers these anxieties as part of a larger concern over the future of the field, as well as fear that academic work on gender and sexuality has become too divorced from its activist roots.

Jack Halberstam, “Gender.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition (2014)

Halberstam’s entry in this volume provides a useful overview for debates and concepts that have dominated the field of gender studies: Is gender purely a social construct? What is the relationship between sex and gender? How does the gendering of bodies shift across disciplinary and cultural contexts? How did the theorizing of gender performativity in the 1990s by Judith Butler open up intellectual trajectories for queer and transgender studies? What is the future of gender as an organizing rubric for social life and as a mode of intellectual inquiry? Halberstam’s synthesis of the field makes a compelling case for why the study of gender persists and remains relevant for humanists, social scientists, and scientists alike.

Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, “Defeating Bigenderism: Changing Gender Assumptions in the Twenty-First Century.” Hypatia , 2009

Scholar and transgender activist Miqqi Alicia Gilbert considers the production and maintenance of the gender binary—that is, the idea that there are only two genders and that gender is a natural fact that remains stable across the course of one’s life. Gilbert’s view extends across institutional, legal, and cultural contexts, imagining what a frameworks that gets one out of the gender binary and gender valuation would have to look like to eliminate sexism, transphobia, and discrimination.

Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories.” Social Problems , 2006

Judith Lorber identifies the key paradigm shifts in sociology around the question of gender: 1) acknowledging gender as an “organizing principle of the overall social order in modern societies;” 2) stipulating that gender is socially constructed, meaning that while gender is assigned at birth based on visible genitalia, it isn’t a natural, immutable category but one that is socially determined; 3) analyzing power in modern western societies reveals the dominance of men and promotion of a limited version of heterosexual masculinity; 4) emerging methods in sociology are helping disrupt the production of ostensibly universal knowledge from a narrow perspective of privileged subjects. Lorber concludes that feminist sociologists’ work on gender has provided the tools for sociology to reconsider how it analyzes structures of power and produces knowledge.

bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.” Feminist Review , 1986

bell hooks argues that the feminist movement has privileged the voices, experiences, and concerns of white women at the expense of women of color. Instead of acknowledging who the movement has centered, white women have continually invoked the “common oppression” of all women, a move they think demonstrates solidarity but actually erases and marginalizes women who fall outside of the categories of white, straight, educated, and middle-class. Instead of appealing to “common oppression,” meaningful solidarity requires that women acknowledge their differences, committing to a feminism that “aims to end sexist oppression.” For hooks, this necessitates a feminism that is anti-racist. Solidarity doesn’t have to mean sameness; collective action can emerge from difference.

Jennifer C. Nash, “re-thinking intersectionality.” Feminist Review , 2008

Chances are you’ve come across the phrase “intersectional feminism.” For many, this term is redundant: If feminism isn’t attentive to issues impacting a range of women, then it’s not actually feminism. While the term “intersectional” now circulates colloquially to signify a feminism that is inclusive, its usage has become divorced from its academic origins. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s based on Black women’s experiences with the law in cases of discrimination and violence. Intersectionality is not an adjective or a way to describe identity, but a tool for analyzing structures of power. It aims to disrupt universal categories of and claims about identity. Jennifer Nash provides an overview of intersectionality’s power, including guidance on how to deploy it in the service of coalition-building and collective action.

Treva B. Lindsey, “Post-Ferguson: A ‘Herstorical’ Approach to Black Violability.” Feminist Studies , 2015

Treva Lindsey considers the erasure of Black women’s labor in anti-racist activism , as well as the erasure of their experiences with violence and harm. From the Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter, Black women’s contributions and leadership have not been acknowledged to the same extent as their male counterparts. Furthermore, their experiences with state-sanctioned racial violence don’t garner as much attention. Lindsey argues that we must make visible the experiences and labor of Black women and queer persons of color in activist settings in order to strengthen activist struggles for racial justice.

Renya Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging.” Meridians , 2007

Renya Ramirez (Winnebago) argues that indigenous activist struggles for sovereignty, liberation, and survival must account for gender. A range of issues impact Native American women, such as domestic abuse, forced sterilization , and sexual violence. Furthermore, the settler state has been invested in disciplining indigenous concepts and practices of gender, sexuality, and kinship, reorienting them to fit into white settler understandings of property and inheritance. A Native American feminist consciousness centers gender and envisions decolonization without sexism.

Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.” Science & Society , 2005

Hester Eisenstein argues that some of contemporary U.S. feminism’s work in a global context has been informed by and strengthened capitalism in a way that ultimately increases harms against marginalized women. For example, some have suggested offering poor rural women in non-U.S. contexts microcredit as a path to economic liberation. In reality, these debt transactions hinder economic development and “continue the policies that have created the poverty in the first place.” Eisenstein acknowledges that feminism has the power to challenge capitalist interests in a global context, but she cautions us to consider how aspects of the feminist movement have been coopted by corporations.

Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran.” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Afsaneh Najmabadi remarks on the existence of sex-reassignment surgeries in Iran since the 1970s and the increase in these surgeries in the twenty-first century. She explains that these surgeries are a response to perceived sexual deviance; they’re offered to cure persons who express same-sex desire. Sex-reassignment surgeries ostensibly “heteronormaliz[e]” people who are pressured to pursue this medical intervention for legal and religious reasons. While a repressive practice, Najmabadi also argues that this practice has paradoxically provided “ relatively safer semipublic gay and lesbian social space” in Iran. Najmabadi’s scholarship illustrates how gender and sexual categories, practices, and understandings are influenced by geographical and cultural contexts.

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore’s “Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore map the ways that transgender studies can expand feminist and gender studies. “Transgender” does not need to exclusively signify individuals and communities, but can provide a lens for interrogating all bodies’ relationships to gendered spaces, disrupting the bounds of seemingly strict identity categories, and redefining gender. The “trans-” in transgender is a conceptual tool for interrogating the relationship between bodies and the institutions that discipline them.

David A. Rubin, “‘An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender.” Signs , 2012

David Rubin considers the fact that intersex persons have been subject to medicalization, pathologization, and “regulation of embodied difference through biopolitical discourses, practices, and technologies” that rely on normative cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Rubin considers the impact intersexuality had on conceptualizations of gender in mid-twentieth century sexology studies, and how the very concept of gender that emerged in that moment has been used to regulate the lives of intersex individuals.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs , 2005

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson provides a thorough overview of the field of feminist disability studies. Both feminist and disability studies contend that those things which seem most natural to bodies are actually produced by a range of political, legal, medical, and social institutions. Gendered and disabled bodies are marked by these institutions. Feminist disability studies asks: How are meaning and value assigned to disabled bodies? How is this meaning and value determined by other social markers, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, national origin, and citizenship status?

The field asks under what conditions disabled bodies are denied or granted sexual, reproductive, and bodily autonomy and how disability impacts the exploration of gender and sexual expression in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood historical and contemporary pathologization of genders and sexualities. It explores how disabled activists, artists, and writers respond to social, cultural, medical, and political forces that deny them access, equity, and representation

Karin A. Martin, “William Wants a Doll. Can He Have One? Feminists, Child Care Advisors, and Gender-Neutral Child Rearing.” Gender and Society , 2005

Karin Martin examines the gender socialization of children through an analysis of a range of parenting materials. Materials that claim to be (or have been claimed as) gender-neutral actually have a deep investment in training children in gender and sexual norms. Martin invites us to think about how adult reactions to children’s gender nonconformity pivots on a fear that gender expression in childhood is indicative of present or future non-normative sexuality. In other words, U.S. culture is unable to separate gender from sexuality. We imagine gender identity and expression maps predictably onto sexual desire. When children’s gender identity and expression exceeds culturally-determined permissible bounds in a family or community, adults project onto the child and discipline accordingly.

Sarah Pemberton, “Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes.” Signs , 2013

Sarah Pemberton’s considers how sex-segregated prisons in the U.S. and England discipline their populations differently according to gender and sexual norms. This contributes to the policing, punishment, and vulnerability of incarcerated gender-nonconforming, transgender, and intersex persons. Issues ranging from healthcare access to increased rates of violence and harassment suggest that policies impacting incarcerated persons should center gender.

Dean Spade, “Some Very Basic Tips for Making High Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies.” The Radical Teacher , 2011

Lawyer and trans activist Dean Spade offers a pedagogical perspective on how to make classrooms accessible and inclusive for students. Spade also offers guidance on how to have classroom conversations about gender and bodies that don’t reassert a biological understanding of gender or equate certain body parts and functions with particular genders. While the discourse around these issues is constantly shifting, Spade provides useful ways to think about small changes in language that can have a powerful impact on students.

Sarah S. Richardson, “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges.” Synthese , 2010

Feminist philosophy of science is a field comprised of scholars studying gender and science that has its origins in the work of feminist scientists in the 1960s. Richardson considers the contributions made by these scholars, such as increased opportunities for and representation of women in STEM fields , pointing out biases in seemingly neutral fields of scientific inquiry. Richardson also considers the role of gender in knowledge production, looking at the difficulties women have faced in institutional and professional contexts. The field of feminist philosophy of science and its practitioners are marginalized and delegitimized because of the ways they challenge dominant modes of knowledge production and disciplinary inquiry.

Bryce Traister’s “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies.” American Quarterly , 2000

Bryce Traister considers the emergence of masculinity studies out of gender studies and its development in American cultural studies. He argues that the field has remained largely invested in centering heterosexuality, asserting the centrality and dominance of men in critical thought. He offers ways for thinking about how to study masculinity without reinstituting gendered hierarchies or erasing the contributions of feminist and queer scholarship.

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• Gender Equality Essay

Introduction to Gender Equality

In a society, everyone has the right to lead his/her life accordingly without any discrimination. When this state is achieved where all individuals are considered to be equal irrespective of their caste, gender, colour, profession, and status, we call it equality. Equality can also be defined as the situation where every individual has the same rights and equal opportunity to grow and prosper. 

Every individual of society dreams for equal rights and access to resources available at their disposal, but there is a lot of discrimination. This discrimination can be due to cultural differences, geographical differences, the colour of the individual, social status and even gender. The most prevalent discrimination is gender inequality. It is not a localised issue and is limited to only certain spheres of life but is prevalent across the globe. Even in progressive societies and top organisations, we can see many examples of gender bias. 

Gender equality can only be achieved when both male and female individuals are treated similarly. But discrimination is a social menace that creates division. We stop being together and stand together to tackle our problems. This social stigma has been creeping into the underbelly of all of society for many centuries. This has also been witnessed in gender-based cases. Gender inequality is the thing of the past as both men and women are creating history in all segments together.

Gender Equality builds a Nation

In this century, women and men enjoy the same privileges. The perception is changing slowly but steadily. People are now becoming more aware of their rights and what they can do in a free society. It has been found that when women and men hold the same position and participate equally, society progresses exclusively and creates a landmark. When a community reaches gender equality, everyone enjoys the same privileges and gets similar scopes in education, health, occupation, and political aspect. Even in the family, when both male and female members are treated in the same way, it is the best place to grow, learn, and add great value.

A nation needs to value every gender equally to progress at the right place. A society attains better development in all aspects when both genders are entitled to similar opportunities. Equal rights in decision making, health, politics, infrastructure, profession, etc will surely advance our society to a new level. The social stigma of women staying inside the house has changed. Nowadays, girls are equally competing with boys in school. They are also creating landmark development in their respective profession. Women are now seeking economic independence before they get married. It gives them the confidence to stand against oppression and make better decisions for themselves.

The age-old social structure dictated that women need to stay inside the home taking care of all when men go out to earn bread and butter. This has been practised for ages when the world outside was not safe. Now that the time has changed and we have successfully made our environment quite safer, women can step forward, get educated, pursue their passion, bring economic balance in their families, and share the weight of a family with men. This, in a cumulative way, will also make a country’s economy progress faster and better.

Methods to measure Gender Equality

Gender equality can be measured and a country’s growth can be traced by using the following methods.

Gender Development Index (GDI) is a gender-based calculation done similar to the Human Development Index. 

Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) is a detailed calculation method of the percentage of female members in decision-making roles. 

Gender Equity Index (GEI) considers economic participation, education, and empowerment.

Global Gender Gap Index assesses the level of gender inequality present on the basis of four criteria: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, health and survival .

According to the Gender Gap Index (GGI), India ranks 140 among 156 participating countries. This denotes that the performance of India has fallen from the previous years, denoting negative growth in terms of closing the gender gap. In the current environment where equality and equal opportunities are considered supreme, this makes India be at a significant disadvantage.

Roadblocks to Gender Equality  

Indian society is still wrecked by such stigmas that dictate that women are meant to manage the home and stay indoors. This is being done for ages, leading to neglect of women in areas like education, health, wealth, and socio-economic fields. 

In addition to that, the dowry system is further crippling society. This ill practice had led to numerous female feticides. It has created a notion that girls are a burden on a family, which is one of the primary reasons a girl child cannot continue her education. Even if they excel in education and become independent, most of them are forced to quit their job as their income is considered a backup source, which is not fair. New-age women are not only independent, but they are confident too. The only thing they demand from society is support, which we should provide them.  

Along with dowry, there is one more burning issue that has a profound impact on women's growth. It is prevalent in all kinds of society and is known as violence. Violence against women is present in one or another form in public and private spaces. Sometimes, violence is accompanied by other burning issues such as exploitation, harassment, and trafficking, making the world unsafe for women. We must take steps to stop this and ensure a safe and healthy place for women.  

Poverty is also one of the major roadblocks towards gender equality. It has led to other malpractices such as child marriage, sale of children, trafficking and child labour, to name a few. Providing equal job opportunities and upliftment of people below the poverty line can help bring some checks onto this.

Initiative Towards Gender Equality

Any kind of discrimination acts as a roadblock in any nation’s growth, and a nation can only prosper when all its citizens have equal rights. Most of the developed countries has comparatively less gender discrimination and provide equal opportunity to both genders. Even the Indian government is taking multiple initiatives to cut down gender discrimination. 

They have initiated a social campaign called “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana” to encourage the education of girl children. Besides this, the government runs multiple other schemes, such as the Women Helpline Scheme, UJJAWALA, National Mission for Empowerment of Women, etc., to generate awareness among the people. Moreover, as responsible citizens, it is our responsibility to spread knowledge on gender discrimination to create a beautiful world for wome n [1] [2] .

FAQs on Gender Equality Essay

1. What Makes Women Unequal to Men?

The social stigmas and beliefs that have been running deeply in the veins of all families make women unequal to men. Women are considered to be a burden by many families and are not provided with the same rights men enjoy in society. We are ill-informed regarding women’s rights and tend to continue age-old practices. This is made worse with social menaces such as the dowry system, child labor, child marriage, etc. Women can gather knowledge, get educated, and compete with men. This is sometimes quite threatening to the false patriarchal society.

2. How can We Promote Gender Equality?

Education is the prime measure to be taken to make society free from such menaces. When we teach our new generation regarding the best social practices and gender equal rights, we can eradicate such menaces aptly. Our society is ill-informed regarding gender equality and rights. Many policies have been designed and implemented by the government. As our country holds the second position in terms of population, it is hard to tackle these gender-based problems. It can only be erased from the deepest point by using education as the prime weapon.

3. Why should Women be Equal to Men?

Women might not be similar to men in terms of physical strength and physiological traits. Both are differently built biologically but they have the same brain and organs to function. Women these days are creating milestones that are changing society. They have traveled to space, running companies, creating history, and making everyone proud. Women are showing their capabilities in every phase and hence, they should be equal to men in all aspects.

4. Mention a few initiatives started by the Indian Government to enable gender equality.

The Indian government has initiated a social campaign called “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana” to encourage girls’ education. Besides this, the government runs multiple other schemes, such as the  Women Helpline Scheme, UJJAWALA, National Mission for Empowerment of Women, etc., to generate awareness among the people.

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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5 Powerful Essays Advocating for Gender Equality

Gender equality – which becomes reality when all genders are treated fairly and allowed equal opportunities –  is a complicated human rights issue for every country in the world. Recent statistics are sobering. According to the World Economic Forum, it will take 108 years to achieve gender parity . The biggest gaps are found in political empowerment and economics. Also, there are currently just six countries that give women and men equal legal work rights. Generally, women are only given ¾ of the rights given to men. To learn more about how gender equality is measured, how it affects both women and men, and what can be done, here are five essays making a fair point.

Take a free course on Gender Equality offered by top universities!

“Countries With Less Gender Equity Have More Women In STEM — Huh?” – Adam Mastroianni and Dakota McCoy

This essay from two Harvard PhD candidates (Mastroianni in psychology and McCoy in biology) takes a closer look at a recent study that showed that in countries with lower gender equity, more women are in STEM. The study’s researchers suggested that this is because women are actually especially interested in STEM fields, and because they are given more choice in Western countries, they go with different careers. Mastroianni and McCoy disagree.

They argue the research actually shows that cultural attitudes and discrimination are impacting women’s interests, and that bias and discrimination is present even in countries with better gender equality. The problem may lie in the Gender Gap Index (GGI), which tracks factors like wage disparity and government representation. To learn why there’s more women in STEM from countries with less gender equality, a more nuanced and complex approach is needed.

“Men’s health is better, too, in countries with more gender equality” – Liz Plank

When it comes to discussions about gender equality, it isn’t uncommon for someone in the room to say, “What about the men?” Achieving gender equality has been difficult because of the underlying belief that giving women more rights and freedom somehow takes rights away from men. The reality, however, is that gender equality is good for everyone. In Liz Plank’s essay, which is an adaption from her book For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity, she explores how in Iceland, the #1 ranked country for gender equality, men live longer. Plank lays out the research for why this is, revealing that men who hold “traditional” ideas about masculinity are more likely to die by suicide and suffer worse health. Anxiety about being the only financial provider plays a big role in this, so in countries where women are allowed education and equal earning power, men don’t shoulder the burden alone.

Liz Plank is an author and award-winning journalist with Vox, where she works as a senior producer and political correspondent. In 2015, Forbes named her one of their “30 Under 30” in the Media category. She’s focused on feminist issues throughout her career.

“China’s #MeToo Moment” –  Jiayang Fan

Some of the most visible examples of gender inequality and discrimination comes from “Me Too” stories. Women are coming forward in huge numbers relating how they’ve been harassed and abused by men who have power over them. Most of the time, established systems protect these men from accountability. In this article from Jiayang Fan, a New Yorker staff writer, we get a look at what’s happening in China.

The essay opens with a story from a PhD student inspired by the United States’ Me Too movement to open up about her experience with an academic adviser. Her story led to more accusations against the adviser, and he was eventually dismissed. This is a rare victory, because as Fan says, China employs a more rigid system of patriarchy and hierarchy. There aren’t clear definitions or laws surrounding sexual harassment. Activists are charting unfamiliar territory, which this essay explores.

“Men built this system. No wonder gender equality remains as far off as ever.” – Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Freelance journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan (whose book The New Normal is scheduled for a May 2020 release) is discouraged that gender equality is so many years away. She argues that it’s because the global system of power at its core is broken.  Even when women are in power, which is proportionally rare on a global scale, they deal with a system built by the patriarchy. O’Hagan’s essay lays out ideas for how to fix what’s fundamentally flawed, so gender equality can become a reality.

Ideas include investing in welfare; reducing gender-based violence (which is mostly men committing violence against women); and strengthening trade unions and improving work conditions. With a system that’s not designed to put women down, the world can finally achieve gender equality.

“Invisibility of Race in Gender Pay Gap Discussions” – Bonnie Chu

The gender pay gap has been a pressing issue for many years in the United States, but most discussions miss the factor of race. In this concise essay, Senior Contributor Bonnie Chu examines the reality, writing that within the gender pay gap, there’s other gaps when it comes to black, Native American, and Latina women. Asian-American women, on the other hand, are paid 85 cents for every dollar. This data is extremely important and should be present in discussions about the gender pay gap. It reminds us that when it comes to gender equality, there’s other factors at play, like racism.

Bonnie Chu is a gender equality advocate and a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur. She’s the founder and CEO of Lensational, which empowers women through photography, and the Managing Director of The Social Investment Consultancy.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Essay on Gender Equality

Students are often asked to write an essay on Gender Equality in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Gender Equality

Understanding gender equality.

Gender equality means that all genders have the same rights and opportunities. It’s about respecting everyone, regardless of whether they’re a boy or a girl.

Why is Gender Equality Important?

Gender equality is important because everyone deserves to be treated fairly. It helps us learn from each other and grow as a society. Without it, we miss out on the talents and skills of half the population.

How Can We Achieve Gender Equality?

We can achieve gender equality by treating everyone equally, regardless of their gender. This includes giving everyone the same opportunities in education, work, and life. It’s about fairness and respect.

Also check:

250 Words Essay on Gender Equality

Introduction.

Gender equality, a cornerstone of social justice, is more than a fundamental human right. It’s a prerequisite for a sustainable, peaceful, and prosperous world. It calls for equal opportunities and benefits for both men and women, challenging traditional norms that perpetuate inequality.

The Imperative of Gender Equality

Gender equality is not just about fairness but also about harnessing the untapped potential of half the world’s population. It’s about acknowledging the fact that men and women, despite their biological differences, are equally capable of contributing to society. The exclusion or marginalization of any gender hinders societal progress.

Challenges to Gender Equality

Despite strides made, gender inequality persists. Discriminatory laws, gender stereotypes, and institutional biases continue to impede gender equality. Women, for instance, often face wage gaps, underrepresentation in leadership positions, and disproportionate burden of unpaid care work.

The Path to Gender Equality

Achieving gender equality requires systemic changes. It starts with education, promoting gender-sensitive curricula to dismantle harmful stereotypes. Legal reforms are also crucial for ensuring equal rights and opportunities. Additionally, institutions must foster an environment that promotes gender diversity and inclusion.

Gender equality is not a women’s issue, but a human issue. It affects us all. The journey towards gender equality is complex and challenging, but it’s a journey worth taking. As we strive for a more equitable world, we must remember that every step, no matter how small, brings us closer to this goal.

500 Words Essay on Gender Equality

Gender equality, also known as sexual equality or equality of the sexes, is the state of equal ease of access to resources and opportunities, irrespective of gender. It is a critical aspect of a just and democratic society, and its importance cannot be overstated. This essay explores the concept of gender equality, its implications, and the role of society in achieving it.

The Concept of Gender Equality

Implications of gender equality.

Gender equality has far-reaching implications. Economically, it can lead to increased productivity and economic growth. According to the World Economic Forum, reducing the gender gap in employment could result in a GDP increase of up to 16% in some countries. Socially, gender equality can lead to healthier and more educated families, and it can promote peace and reduce violence. Politically, it can lead to more representative and effective governance.

Despite the clear benefits of gender equality, numerous challenges persist. Socio-cultural norms and beliefs often uphold gender inequality, making it difficult to change attitudes and behaviors. Moreover, institutional structures and practices can reinforce gender disparities. For instance, women are often underrepresented in leadership positions, and they are more likely to experience poverty and violence.

The Role of Society in Achieving Gender Equality

In conclusion, gender equality is a fundamental human right and a cornerstone of a just and democratic society. It has vast implications for economic growth, social wellbeing, and political effectiveness. While challenges persist, through education, legal reform, and individual action, we can work towards a more equal and just society. The path to gender equality may be long and fraught with obstacles, but it is a journey that we must undertake for the betterment of our society and future generations.

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• Gender Roles Essay Writing
• A Step-by-Step Guide for Writing an A-Grade Gender Roles Essay

What Is a Gender Roles Essay?

How to structure a gender roles paper the right way, 6 simple tips for crafting a perfect essay on gender roles, essay on gender roles sample on the topic “how is the social gender formed”.

• Let's Conclude

A gender roles essay is a piece of writing where a student is expected to describe his/her understanding of gender roles that are specific to males and females. Both school and college teachers assign students to write this kind of paper to check how the modern generation treats the set of social and behavioral norms set by the generation of our ancestors.

Time passes and the gender roles change. If one is writing an essay on this topic, it is necessary to research how the set norms have changed in your society compared to other cultures. The topic of male/female gender roles has been discussed all over the world. It is still one of the most actual topics nowadays. In your work, you are supposed to tell about influences on the traditional attitudes to women (girls) /men (boys) in different cultures, society, at home as they may vary.

The major task of a student is to draw attention to the period of time when females didn’t have equal rights as males. In your essay, try to present evidence. Show that now the situation has improved but still one can witness discrimination of women at workplace, educational establishments, etc. Work about gender roles involves several aspects. You need to conduct social research based on interesting historical facts about a man’s life, his behavior and attitudes towards the woman playing different gender roles: the mother, wife, daughter.

Research the current situation on gender roles sharing your personal attitude to gender roles and the existing discrimination. Support gender role ideas. Have you been assigned to write a woman/man/children gender roles essay and you just have no idea on where to get started? Use this effective step-by-step essays guide. It is intended to be helpful for writing a paper on the role, which sex plays in the relationships between people living in one house. You’re expected to reveal the gender roles topic making it attractive to professors of the best educational institutions.

Before getting started with the gender roles paper, you need to have a clear picture of what a gender is. Most students mistakenly think that sex and gender have the same meaning. Is there any difference between sex and gender? The term “sex” refers to the biological features of a person while the gender means the role, which a person plays in a specific society.

In order to get an A-grade, check what you need to reveal in this type of essay.  The main idea of the gender roles essay is to check what a student thinks about cultural differences of the gender roles given to males/females on the birth day.

A teacher asks to write a gender roles paper expecting you to provide in-depth analysis of gender roles considering the economic, cultural, social sphere. Conduct research on gender roles giving sufficient evidence to prove your standpoint.

The topic of gender roles is broad and you need to choose an aspect for the deeper gender role research. Focus on the chosen problem writing a gender roles paper consisting of an introduction, the main body, and conclusion. The main principles will stay the same. A gender roles paper is a work about the problem of gender discrimination you should consider from different angles.

It should include careful gender research. Express your own thoughts on gender roles defined by the society the very 1-st day a girl or boy is born.

Writing a college/university gender research paper, you are expected to meet certain structural requirements not only concerning the number of pages. A well-structured logical gender roles paper can get an A-grade. Remember that at times when going to craft a gender essay, you need to check whether you know how to structure the gender roles text the right way. Have a closer look at must-have parts that affect  a gender roles essay’s quality:

• Introduction: The beginning of a gender essay should be interesting and eye-catching. It must be brief. A mistake many students make commonly is writing too long introductions making the reader bored. Don’t deprive readers of a wish to continue reading. Make your task to present the main idea of the further gender discussion. Introduce the topic in a way everyone would like to discover what is going to be next and Produce the best possible effect.

Imagine that this is a brand to sell. Write a gender paper introduction able to “sell” the rest of the work and give some facts/figures concerning the gender topic. Bear in mind that people like statistics. It is a good idea to start with gender figures starting your essay on gender roles with some intriguing question on gender roles everyone would like to answer.

• Thesis statement: Write a strong gender thesis statement at the end of an introduction. Craft a powerful sentence that consists of several words about gender roles and states the major ideas that will attract your target audience. Make it creative using various language means.
• The Main Body: Here, you are supposed to tell about the gender research conducted and the findings you have got. The work will be full if you research both positive/negative attitudes towards men/women due to their biological sex in the past and gender roles of a male/a female in the today's society, in the house environment. Provide your own understanding of the gender power. Find certain gender facts that will serve as convincing arguments for your standpoint and note that the number of gender paper paragraphs may slightly vary. Browse classification essay examples , they might help with your writing.

There are 3-4 paragraphs about the sex influence in all spheres of life.  To provide ideas on the traditional family roles, the household patterns of behavior, and the interconnection between the sex and the behavior, look for evidence of your thoughts.

• Conclusion: At the end, write a short paragraph with a brief paper summary. You are expected to set the major concept presented in the gender essay making it clear to the reader what position you occupy.

You should remember that the powerful conclusion is of the utmost importance. The reader may evaluate the entire work reading the last lines, it might matter a lot. Write the conclusion so that the reader doesn't have any additional questions on the topic. Finish only after making sure you have done a good job as finishing the main thought is a must.

• A bibliography list: Don't forget to place a list of references where you should provide all information sources that turned out to be useful for your research. Check all necessary formatting rules to write references the right way.

Every student knows that writing any kind of academic assignment is a time-consuming process. A gender assignment isn't an exception. It must be based on some facts, opinions of famous scientists. This doesn't mean there are no effective tricks that may help you to save time crafting an essay on gender roles. Check the list of the recommendations that can make your life easier helping to pass your essay on gender roles in the society with flying colors.

• Write an essay based on your own life experience. It is a good idea to think of your own life experience using it as a foundation as you can use examples of sexual discrimination your friends/acquaintances faced. The topic about roles of a man/a woman in the society provides freedom to express views or feelings towards gender roles determined by the society.  That's why you can benefit greatly from this opportunity to share your own life experiences.
• Check the availability of reliable information resources before choosing a topic. Haven't been assigned to write an essay on a certain issue? Then, you are free to choose any topic as the gender topic is broad.

For example, write about the influence of our society on the formation of boys/ girls’ behavior, explain why there is a discrimination between men/women at the workplace. Or you could explain how stereotyped sociaty is about driving skill and car knoledge dependong on gender, even though a lot of males use car manuals as much as females do to have an understanding about how vehicle works. When picking the topic, you should be guided by the main rule: choose the theme you are passionate about, the one, which can be researched successfully.

Include more facts, statistics, examples. Your essay will be more interesting if you include some facts that not everyone has heard about. Simply, look for the examples of the sex discrimination in different societies, search for the information in the media,  and give some numerical data to build trust. Check whether you understand all terms used in the text. Follow the informative essay format  to write such kind of a paper.

Assure that your essay contains in-depth analysis. Before submitting an essay, you are recommended to read it aloud to understand whether it sounds persuasive. If the research you have conducted is of the low quality, edit paragraphs to sound better and then leave your gender essay for 1-2 days before the submission. Read it once again to be sure it is well-researched. Hand it in if there is no need to add any kind of information.

Use grammar/plagiarism checkers: On the Internet, you’ll find many online software tools. They are aimed at helping writers to check whether the essay is of the high quality. Copy your essay’s text, check whether there are any grammar/spelling mistakes. If everything is fine, the next step is to check whether it is 100% unique or you’ve plagiarised somebody's thought with or without a special intention.  Make all necessary corrections before you demonstrate an essay to the teacher.

Make sure you have met all teacher's expectations concerning the essay style and formatting taking into account that there are many formatting styles - APA,  MLA format , Chicago, etc. You should ask your teacher which one it is better to give preference to. Check the requirements in the necessary styling guide and assure that you did everything the right way. If you lack time, then buy essay papers online composed by professional writers who can give a helping hand by editing/proofreading the work.

The formation of gender identity begins at an early age manifesting itself as a subjective feeling of belonging to baby-boys/baby-girls. Already at the age of three, kids start getting a kind of education on the gender role. Boys prefer to play with boys, girls - with girls. Joint games are present in the lives of both genders.

They are important for acquiring communication skills with each other. Preschoolers try to correspond to those ideas about the "right" behavior for the boy/ girl, which they learn from their family seeing at home - a place where they are living and are being raised.

For generations of girls, the image of both the woman, the main example of which is the mother, and the image of the man-father, is very important. For boys, the perception of the patterns of both male and female behavior is of the utmost importance.

Parents should give children the first example of an equal relationship between a husband and a wife, which largely determines their behavioral traits when dealing with people of two opposite sexes. While growing up, more importantly, it is essential for kids to get an idea of what equality is and which rights every member of the family has.

Up to 9-10 years, children are susceptible to the specific external impact of socialization. Close contact with peers of the opposite sex in school and other activities help the child to assimilate the behavioral gender status adopted in the modern society. Role-playing games that are taught in the kindergarten, with time become more difficult. Participation in them is important for children: they have the opportunity to choose the gender of the character in accordance with their own, they learn to match the gender role they have been shown.

Children represent men or women as individuals. They primarily reflect the acceptable stereotypes of gender behaviors adopted at home, in the families, and at school. They show those qualities that are considered in their environment feminine or masculine. In the prepubertal period (approximately 7-12 years old), children with very different personal qualities tend to unite in social groups in different ways, while avoiding representatives of the opposite sex.

During puberty, teenagers, as a rule, try to emphasize their gender qualities socially. In the list of those qualities which they begin to include communication with the opposite sex. An adolescent boy, trying to show his masculinity, shows determination, strength, but should actively care about girls.

The assimilation of gender roles and the development of gender identification is allowed as a result of the complex interaction of natural instincts, individual characteristics of a child and his/her environment, as well as actions in the society. If parents, knowing the norms of this process, do not impose their stereotypes on the child, but help him/her to reveal his/her individuality, then in adolescence/older age he/she will have less problems associated with puberty, awareness of the marriage, acceptance of his/her gender roles.

Let's Conclude

When crafting an essay on genders, you need to plunge into the history. Analyze whether the gender roles of men/ women have changed in a significant way or not. Provide your point of view on the basis of the public research available. Support your ideas with the good illustrative examples and refer to the works of the psychology/sociology, thinking over the scientists’ findings.

Stick to the correct essay structure that has been discussed in this article. Use the good quality sample as an example of the essay on the gender subject. If you follow all pieces of advice that are present here, you will enjoy the process of writing due to the fact that there are a lot of issues to concentrate the attention of your reader on.

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Essay on Gender Discrimination

• Updated on  
• Jul 14, 2022

One of the challenges present in today’s society is gender discrimination. Gender discrimination is when someone is treated unequally based on their gender. Gender discrimination is not just present in the workplace but in schools, colleges and communities as well. As per the Civil Rights Act of 1964,  gender discrimination is illegal in India. This is also an important and common essay topic in schools and competitive exams such as IELTS , TOEFL , SAT , UPSC , etc. Let’s explore some samples of essay on gender discrimination and tips for writing an impactful essay.

Tips for Writing an Impactful Essay

If you want to write a scoring and deep impact essay, here are some tips for writing a perfect informative essay:

• The most important and first step is to write an introduction and background information about and related to the topic
• Then you are also required to use the formal style of writing and avoid using slang language
• To make an essay more impactful, write dates, quotations, and names to provide a better understanding
• You can use jargon wherever it is necessary as it sometimes makes an essay complicated
• To make an essay more creative, you can also add information in bulleted points wherever possible
• Always remember to add a conclusion where you need to summarise crucial points
• Once you are done read through the lines and check spelling and grammar mistakes before submission

Essay on Gender Discrimination in 200 Words

One of the important aspects of a democratic society is the elimination of gender discrimination. The root cause of this vigorous disease is the stereotypical society itself. When a child is born, the discrimination begins; if the child is male, he is given a car, bat and ball with blue, and red colour clothes, whereas when a child is female, she is given barbie dolls with pink clothes. We all are raised with a mentality that boys are good at sports and messy, but girls are not good at sports and are well organised. This discriminatory mentality has a deeper impact when girls are told not to work while boys are allowed to do much work. This categorising males and females into different categories discriminating based on gender are known as gender discrimination. Further, this discriminatory behaviour in society leads to hatred, injustice and much more. This gender discrimination is evident in every woman’s life at the workplace, in educational institutions, in sports, etc., where young girls and women are deprived of their rights and undervalued. This major issue prevailing in society can be solved only by providing equality to women and giving them all rights as given to men.

Essay on Gender Discrimination in 300 Words 

Gender Discrimination, as the term signifies, is discrimination or discriminatory behaviour based on gender. The stereotypical mindset of people in the past has led to the discrimination that women face today. According to Kahle Wolfe, in 2015, women earned 83% of the income paid to men by working the same hours. Almost all women are not only discriminated against based on their salaries but also on their looks.

Further, most women are allowed to follow a certain dress code depending upon the work field and the dress women wear also decides their future career.

This dominant male society teaches males that women are weak and innocent. Thus women are mostly victims and are targeted in crimes. For example, In a large portion of the globe, women are blamed for rapes despite being victims because of their clothes. This society also portrays women as weaker and not eligible enough to take a stand for themselves, leading to the major destruction of women’s personalities as men are taught to let women down. This mindset of people nowadays is a major social justice issue leading to gender discrimination in society.

Further, gender-based discrimination is evident across the globe in a plethora of things, including sports, education, health and law. Every 1 out of 3 women in the world is abused in various forms at some point in their lives by men. This social evil is present in most parts of the world; in India, women are burnt to death if they are incapable of affording financial requirements; in Egypt, women are killed by society if they are sensed doing something unclean in or out of their families, whereas in South Africa baby girls are abandoned or killed as they are considered as burden for the family. Thus gender discrimination can be only eliminated from society by educating people about giving equal rights and respect to every gender.

Top Universities for Gender Studies Abroad

UK, Canada and USA are the top three countries to study gender studies abroad. Here’s the list of top universities you can consider to study abroad for Indian students if you planning to pursue gender studies course abroad:

We hope this blog has helped you in structuring a terrific essay on gender discrimination. Planning to ace your IELTS, get expert tips from coaches at Leverage Live by Leverage Edu .

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

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Free Gender Studies Essay Examples & Topics

A gender studies essay should concentrate on the interaction between gender and other unique identifying features. Along with gender identity and representation, the given field explores race, sexuality, religion, disability, and nationality. Gender is a basic social characteristic that often goes unnoticed.

Some people understand the importance of gender studies only when it relates to women and their issues. However, the concept itself involves basically everyone who lives in a society. The clothes we wear, the jobs we do, the way we act – it’s all gendered. Therefore, gender directly influences our socioeconomic status in everyday life from the moment we become a part of society.

You can explore this subject in detail by reading gender studies essays below. There you will see how the topic was considered and covered by other students. Also, our experts have prepared some valuable tips for writing such papers and have collected gender and sexuality essay topics for you.

To write a perfect gender studies essay, you need to understand the appropriate structure, style, and ways of developing your thesis and argumentation. Here we will briefly tell you everything you need to know to start and finish such a task.

For a gender roles essay or any gender-related paper, you need to do the following:

• Find a researchable topic of interest. Then, skim through the necessary sources and take notes.
• Do in-depth research. You can find the relevant info in literary works, scientific journals, interviews, popular magazines, etc.
• Organize the information . Create a working outline to make the writing process more manageable and structured.
• Create a hook for an introduction . Write it to engage the reader from the start, then provide background information about the topic.
• Include a thesis statement in your intro . Here you convey your central message to the reader. If you’d like to facilitate the process, let our thesis generator formulate one for you.
• Write body paragraphs . These usually consist of topic sentences, your arguments with proof, and concluding remarks. Organize the supporting evidence in a logical order before listing it in the body.
• Craft your conclusion. It is the most important part of a gender studies essay. You don’t need to write a lot, just a restatement of your thesis and a few strong sentences summarizing the whole piece. You can use our summary generator for this purpose.
• Revise and edit. Check the grammar, punctuation, logical flow of ideas, word choices, spelling. Make sure you’ve used the correct citation style.
• Read the draft aloud. This way, you are more inclined to notice the parts where you must make improvements. Try to exclude such words as “I,” “me,” my,” passive constructions, and verb contractions.

Here we have collected topics that you can use to write your gender equality essay. They are original, so you can practice your writing skills with them or even use them for your homework. Our topic generator can create more ideas for your writing if you need some.

You can try the following ideas:

• Gender studies: what it is, its goal, and development.
• The comparison of gender discrimination laws in different countries.
• Promotion of gender equality in the workplace.
• Gender stereotypes in different aspects of life.
• What are the differences between gender and sexuality?
• How does media influence the breaking of gender role stereotypes?
• Why do women have limited opportunities in sports in comparison to men?
• Gender inequality in American history.
• How can education help solve the problem of inequality?
• In what ways can cities become safer for women to live in?
• How do gender roles influence children’s games?
• Women’s contribution to the world’s economic growth.
• Biological differences between men and women.
• Career growth opportunities for men and women in the military.
• Do feminine and masculine personality traits exist?
• What is a feminist theory in sociology?
• Is there a necessity for men to fight for their rights as women do?
• The differences in salaries between sexes in different countries.
• The main factors of inequality between men and women.
• How gender discrimination influences early childhood development.

Thanks for your attention! Now you can look at the free gender essay examples and write your work with confidence.

817 Best Essay Examples on Gender Studies

Gender studies: “i want a wife” by judy brady.

• Words: 1170

Role of Women in Society

• Words: 1031

Men Are Superior to Women

• Words: 1412

An Ideal Woman in the Contemporary Society

Comparisons between men and women.

• Words: 1114

Gender is a Social Construct Essay

• Words: 1623

Analysis of Miss Representation

Pornography as a social problem in the modern world.

• Words: 1473

Should Women Go to Work?

To what extent is sexuality socially constructed.

• Words: 2304

Should Sports Be Segregated by Gender?

• Words: 1160

Ann Oakley’s Gender Socialization Theory Essay

• Words: 1097

“Plain Sex” by Alan H. Goldman

Definition of being a man, the concept of gender in cinema.

• Words: 1683

Gender Studies and Society

• Words: 1124

The Position of Women in Society and Social Change

• Words: 2872

Significance of Women’s Education

• Words: 2058

“The Female Body” by Margaret Atwood

Women: their careers and family lives.

• Words: 1621

“The Egg and the Sperm” by Emily Martin

Gender in cross-cultural perspective by brettell & sargent.

• Words: 1392

Women in Engineering

• Words: 1920

Human Sexuality. Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism

• Words: 2236

Advantages and Disadvantages of Working Women

Human sexuality: personal reflection.

• Words: 1469

Gender difference

Women in sports.

• Words: 1456

Defining the Woman from Various Perspectives

• Words: 1363

Have You Met a Superwoman?

• Words: 1196

“The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir

• Words: 1235

The Role of Women in Antigone

Xaniths as a transgender in omani culture, ways in which girls are disadvantaged in school, women and beauty.

• Words: 1328

Observations in Group Conversations: All Male, All Female and Mixed Groups

• Words: 1569

Saudis in Bikinis

Gender reversal and it usage in social order maintaining, sex, gender, sexuality, and genitals, the “brave” intercultural film analysis, gender treatment: changing role of women in modern society, the sexual revolution.

• Words: 2718

Gender Issues: Education and Feminism

Women involvement in business.

• Words: 3241

Society’s Construction of Masculinity

• Words: 1834

The Concepts of Gender Roles and Sexuality by John Money and Judith Butler

• Words: 1157

Equity in Men and Women Participation in Sport at College

Careers of women in punjab and modernization.

• Words: 5673

Gender as a Social Structure

• Words: 1459

Gender Socialization

• Words: 2291

The Gender Idea of “The Gaze” Film

“if men were seeking the franchise” article by jane adams, “gender role behaviors and attitudes” by holly devor, gender roles and stereotyping in education, gender and politeness.

• Words: 1680

Ideology of Gender Roles

• Words: 1134

Homosexuals and Heterosexual Brain Structure Differences

• Words: 1351

Cultural Diversity in Women and Sport Participation

• Words: 1121

Gender Differences in Cognitive Abilities

• Words: 2966

Sexuality and Gender in the Film “Provoked: A True Story”

• Words: 1159

The Book, “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man” by Steve Harvey

• Words: 1464

Gender Bender: Definition & Meaning

• Words: 1250

Hegemonic Masculinity

• Words: 1887

Roles of Women in Society

• Words: 2219

Gender Studies: Lesbian Sadomasochism

Women exploitation in advertising, hookup culture, men’s and women’s differences and similarities, women and power, “introduction to women, gender, sexuality studies” kang, m., lessard, d., heston, l., & nordmarken, s..

• Words: 3093

Prostitution and Controlling Strategies

Male and female characters in films and shows.

• Words: 1102

Male and Female Attitudes Towards Cars

• Words: 1191

“Ideal Woman” in the Assessment of Jia Tolentino

The ideal relationship, homosexuals should not be allowed to adopt children, women and girls in armed conflicts, biology and gender roles in society, sexual harassment at workplace.

• Words: 2543

Culture and History: Gender Roles Over the Past 50 or So Years

• Words: 1106

Gender Theories Paper “Interpersonal Theory”

• Words: 1555

Kenneth MacKinnon‘s ‘Masculinity in the Movies’

• Words: 1080

The Smurfette Principle: Summary and Response

Challenging sexuality: “brokeback mountain” and “boys don’t cry”.

• Words: 2217

Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?

Marianne weber’s views on marriage, sex and gender distinction: imaginary body.

• Words: 1120

Gender and Educational Level: Chi-Square Study

• Words: 1143

Social Science Theory and How it relates to Social Phenomena

• Words: 1389

Moral Panic: Nudism or Naturism

Sexual education among teenagers, the implicit association test result analysis, the importance of reading and hearing women’s voices.

• Words: 1177

Essence of Gender Inversion and Its Impact on Society

“the gender blur: where does biology end and society take over” by blum deborah, gender-neutral bathrooms on campus: a whim or a necessity.

• Words: 1109

Gender Differences and Consumer Behaviour

• Words: 2024

Gender Mainstreaming: Taking Action, Getting Results

• Words: 1358

Homosexuality – Nature or Nurture?

• Words: 1284

Gender Studies: Penis Size and Breast Augmentation

Gender stereotypes in disney princesses.

• Words: 1218

Sexuality According to Playboy

Campaign against gender-based violence in the uae.

• Words: 1682

Gender Inequality in Afghanistan

• Words: 1745

Does Gender Affect Leadership?

Dr. stacy smith’ view on women gender stereotypes, judith butler’s feminist theory, “history of sexuality” by michael foucault.

• Words: 4165

“My Son Looks like a Girl. So What?” by Catherine Newman

• Words: 1095

Representation of gender in media

• Words: 1629

Thinking Sex: Notes for A Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality

Gender stereotypes of superheroes.

• Words: 1980

Negative effects of media on teenage girls and women

• Words: 1021

Sexuality in the Elderly Population

• Words: 1119

Traditional Femininity in the Understanding of Fast-Talking Dames

“embracing your inner slut” by grosskopf, women involvements in politics.

• Words: 1087

Do Women Talk Too Much? Differences in Patterns

• Words: 1772

Gender Roles and Family Systems in Hispanic Culture

Women’s features in administrative leadership.

• Words: 2203

Gender Discrimination Essay

500 words gender discrimination essay.

Gender discrimination is when there are unfair rights between male and female. It differs because of their gender roles which ultimately leads to unequal treatment in life. Gender discrimination has been around for many centuries. However, as we are evolving, it is time to do away with such notions of gender roles. Thus, gender discrimination essay will take us through it in detail.

Causes of Gender Discrimination

There are many causes of gender discrimination. The first one has to be illiteracy . When people do not educate themselves, they continue to live in the old times. Thus, they follow the old-age sexist traditions and norms.

Education can bring about a change in this mindset because educated people will less likely partake in gender discrimination. Further, poverty is also another reason which is interlinked in a way.

It is the root cause in many places because the economic dependence remains on the male counterparts mostly. Thus, women suffer a lot from it because of the same reason. They never get out of this and stay financially dependent on men.

Furthermore, the patriarchal setup in our society plays a big role. In this setup, the male dominates almost every aspect of life. Thus, they consider themselves to be superior to others.

This way, a lot of violence and injustice is meted out against females. Thus, when there is a gender considering themselves to be superior, it becomes difficult for everyone to avail equal opportunities.

Impact of Gender Discrimination

Gender discrimination has a deep impact on society as a whole. It does not just impact a specific section of the society but every part of it. First of all, it impacts children as they fall prey to gender stereotypes from a young age.

Further, it impacts young people because it impacts their behaviour, study choices, ambitions, attitudes and more. Thus, many girls do not participate in many sports and women experience physical violence more than men.

Next up, we have gender discrimination affecting adults because there is a gender pay gap between the working class. Men earn more for doing the same work as women. In addition, older women have more risk of becoming homeless than men.

It also impacts the aboriginal women because they have it a lot worse. It is more likely to happen that they can die from family violence, 11 times more than men. Even for men, it is not beneficial as it sets difficult standards for men to follow.

It draws a line on men being emotional. Thus, they can never showcase their emotions truly without being judged. Similarly, men do not parental leave in many places. Ultimately, all this results in more suicide in men. Thus, it impacts everyone.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of Gender Discrimination Essay

Gender discrimination must be checked at every stage so that no person should be denied a chance to learn and grow. Thus, everyone, no matter male or female, must get a start in life in terms of educations and other opportunities. We must come together as a society to do this.

FAQ on Gender Discrimination Essay

Question 1: Who is affected by gender inequality?

Answer 1: Gender inequality affects everyone, which includes men as well. Stereotypes about how women and men, girls and boys should be, start from their childhood and follow us to adulthood. Thus, it does not affect just one but all.

Question 2: Give an example of gender discrimination.

Answer 2: There are many examples of gender discrimination. For instance, restriction on clothing. If a man wears shorts, no one will bat an eye. However, if a woman wears shorts, she will be seen in a bad light and be called names. Similar is the case for housework.

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• Published: 01 August 2024

The use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Saudi EFL male and female college students: the case of a gender-sensitive topic

• Ghuzayyil Mohammed Al-Otaibi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9369-2602 1 &
• Abeer Abdulhadi Hussain 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  988 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Language and linguistics

A few studies have explored the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing by male and female college students. More importantly, none explored the topic of metadiscourse resources with respect to gender-sensitive topics. Thus, the present study aims at examining the exploitation of interactional metadiscourse markers by Saudi male and female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students in their writing about ‘Who are Better Drivers, Men or Women?’. The study is corpus-based on students’ essays. The corpus consists of four sub-corpora: (a) men favouring men, (b) men arguing for women, (c) women arguing for men and (d) women writing in favour of women. We followed a qualitative and quantitative approach to data analysis. Using AntConc and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model of interactional markers, the results reveal that female writers employed attitudinal lexis, hedges, self-mentions and boosters more than male writers. As for the variables of gender and stance choice, females arguing for men’s driving significantly utilised hedges more than the other three groups. Additionally, female writers writing in support of female drivers significantly used self-mentions more than male writers arguing for men’s driving. This study shows that sensitive topics may cause a difference in the distribution of metadiscourse markers used by people of both genders, and it provides some pedagogical implications for EFL instructors and curriculum developers.

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Introduction.

Writing is a complicated skill that requires more than full understanding of the grammar rules in the target language. Efficient writing necessitates knowledge of writing as a social and communicative activity. It involves cognitive, psychomotor and linguistic abilities (Bazerman, 2009 ; Byrnes and Manchón, 2014 ). The communicative function of writing becomes even more evident in argumentative writing where the author has to carefully utilise appropriate rhetorical structures that reflect conventional practices in a community for the purpose of persuading someone. It requires logical reasoning, sequencing thoughts and linguistic features to build some relationship with readers (Hyland, 2005 ; Jones, 2011 ).

As noted above, writing becomes more challenging if the task involves argumentation. Though argumentative writing, defined as a piece of writing that ‘attempts to support a controversial point or defend a position on which there is a difference of opinion’ (Richards and Schmidt, 2002 , p. 337), is one of the most common genres (Hyland, 1999 ), it is the most difficult for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and English as a Second Language (ESL) learners (Lee and Deakin, 2016 ; Yoon, 2021 ). It requires taking a position in an argument over a controversial topic for the purpose of persuading a group of people of the validity of one’s claim. More importantly, it involves agreeing or disagreeing with previous, current and prevailing opinions (Swales, 1990 ). Thus, EFL and ESL learners have to employ argumentative writing resources used by professional writers, such as evidentiality (Chafe and Nichols, 1986 ), metadiscourse markers (Crismore, 1989 ; Hyland, 2005 ), stance (Biber, 2006a ; Biber and Zhang, 2018 ) and voice (Thompson, 1996 ). Speaking of metadiscourse markers and their benefits, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) argued that metadiscourse is a useful linguistic resource that enables authors to communicate their attitude towards a specific proposition to their readers.

Metadiscourse has been labelled stance (Biber and Finegan, 1989 ; Hyland, 1999 ), evaluation (Hunston and Thompson, 2000 ), attitude (Halliday, 1994 ), appraisal (Martin, 2000 ), epistemic modality (Hyland, 1998 ) and metadiscourse markers (Crismore, 1989 ; Hyland, 2005 ; Hyland and Tse, 2008 ). The term metadiscourse has been proposed by Harris ( 1959 ) to describe how texts’ recipients perceive a piece of writing as intended by writers or speakers. As noted by Hyland ( 2005 ), metadiscourse refers to ‘self-reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community’ (p. 37). It is the umbrella term that includes linguistic elements used to establish a rapport between the writer and reader and signal the writer’s stance. Stance involves the writer’s position or attitude towards the content being discussed. Stance can be studied from the perspectives of evaluation, attitude, appraisal theory and epistemic modality (Xie et al., 2024 ). Evaluation performs three functions: (a) it expresses a language user’s opinion and reflects the value system of people and their community; (b) it constructs and maintains relations between producer and receiver of the language; and (c) it organises discourse. Appraisal and attitude are related concepts in that both refer to linguistic features language users utilise to express their subjective attitude towards an entity. The words horrible and fantastic are typical examples. Epistemic modality refers to speakers or authors’ confidence or lack of confidence about their message, which can be expressed through hedges and boosters (Pearson and Abdollahzadeh, 2023 ).

There is a dearth of studies that have examined metadiscourse markers in the argumentative writing of EFL and ESL students (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Papangkorn and Phoocharoensil, 2021 ; Yoon, 2021 ). Though some research (cf. Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ) showed that there are differences in writing between male and female EFL writers, only few (Aziz et al., 2016 ) have explored the distribution of metadiscourse markers in argumentative essays written by male and female writers. This necessitates further exploration of this area, especially if some researchers such as El-Dakhs ( 2020 ) and Yoon ( 2021 ) suggest that topic choice may affect students’ utilisation of metadiscourse markers. Further, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) explain that the use of metadiscourse resources may differ across gender and discipline and that the relationship between gender and language is never predictable. Hence, we chose to analyse essays written by Saudi male and female EFL students on a gender-sensitive topic like the superiority of either gender in driving cars. Middle Eastern women are expected to be less assertive when they argue for themselves (cf. Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ). Alanazi et al., ( 2023 ) reported that though Saudi women are allowed to play more powerful roles than before, they ‘still perceive themselves as lacking in assertiveness and leadership skills compared to men’ (p. 3).

There are a number of social factors that forced Saudi women to develop a less assertive personality. Before the new reforms, for example, Saudi women were not allowed to travel without the permission of a male guardian (Alanazi et al., 2023 ). As for women’s right to drive cars, Saudi women were not permitted to drive for decades. Although Saudi women were given the chance to hold high-status occupations such as doctors, managers and academics, they had to rely on a male chaperone or driver to get them around (Saleh and Malibari, 2021 ). The ban on car driving by women was lifted in 2018 following King Salman’s 2017 statement (BBC, 2017 ). In addition, as part of the Saudi 2030 Vision, the Saudi government encouraged women to drive, issued a number of legislative reforms and launched a few programmes to ensure women’s empowerment and equality with men (Saudi Vision 2030, 2023 ). When the researchers were collecting the data for the present study, more than 3 years passed and as most of the community allowed their female relatives to drive, there were a few Saudi citizens who were reluctant and doubtful of the whole experience. Thus, the topic of who is better at driving cars is a bit sensitive and debatable nowadays. Based on the argument above, gender, topic and stance choice may have an effect on the type, frequency and distribution of interactional metadiscourse resources. Thus, the present study addresses the following questions:

How do Saudi EFL students of male and female writers use interactional metadiscourse markers in their argumentative writing about car driving?

How do Saudi EFL students use interactional metadiscourse markers when writing about a gender-sensitive topic?

How do male writers use metadiscourse markers to argue in favour of their own driving or in favour of women driving?

How do female writers use metadiscourse markers to argue in favour of their own driving or in favour of men driving?

Review of literature

Recent research on the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by EFL writers has focused more on research articles (Al-Zubeiry and Assaggaf, 2023 ), including abstracts (Alghazo et al., 2021 ; Assassi, 2023 ; Assassi and Merghmi, 2023 ) and discussion sections (Asadi et al., 2023 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ), dissertations and theses (Fendri, 2020 ; Jabeen et al., 2023 ), virtual lectures (Rabab’ah et al., 2024 ), etc. However, a small number of studies have explored interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing by undergraduates. In addition, studies examining the distribution of interactional metadiscourse markers in writings by both genders considered reviews, opinion columns, dissertation acknowledgements, consultations and disciplines. This section elaborates on the findings of some key studies.

Studies on the use of metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing

Studies on metadiscourse use in argumentative writing have been conducted by Mahmood et al. ( 2017 ), Papangkorn and Phoocharoensil ( 2021 ) and El-Dakhs ( 2020 ). Researchers examined the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse markers in relation to some variables such as those of proficiency (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Handayani et al., 2020 ; Yoon, 2021 ), nativeness (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Lee and Deakin, 2016 ; Papangkorn and Phoocharoensil, 2021 ), learning context (El-Dakhs, 2020 ), topic variation (Yoon, 2021 ) and first language (L1) differences (Yoon, 2021 ). Some researchers such as El-Dakhs ( 2020 ) recommend exploring other factors such as culture, prompts and essay types.

Considering topic selection as a variable, Yoon ( 2021 ) examined metadiscourse features in writing samples by EFL students with different L1 backgrounds (i.e. Chinese, Korean and Japanese). Besides L1 differences and topic choice, the last variable that has been examined was the effect of L2 proficiency (A2, B1.1 and B1.2) on students’ use of interactional markers. Students were asked to write about two topics: the importance for college students to have a part-time job and banning smoking at restaurants. The researcher’s analysis of the data showed no significant two-way interaction effect between L1 background and L2 proficiency nor between L2 proficiency and topic. However, Yoon ( 2021 ) demonstrates a significant interaction between different topics and L1 differences. Since El-Dakhs ( 2020 ) and Yoon ( 2021 ) drew attention to the effect of topic choice as a variable, there is a need to explore the effect of a gender-sensitive topic on undergraduates’ argumentative essays with a focus on stance selection. Additionally, the importance of the present study stems from the fact that there are few studies that have addressed the use of metadiscourse markers with respect to topic and stance variation.

Gender-based differences in the use of interactional metadiscourse markers

Previous studies (Morris, 1998 ; Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ) focusing on differences in writing between male and female ESL students show that female writers in general perform better than male writers and more specifically in terms of their adherence to writing guidelines. However, Zare-ee and Kuar ( 2012 ) and Yeganeh and Ghoreyshi ( 2015 ) argue that male EFL Iranian writers are more assertive and argumentative in their writing compared to female students. Zare-ee and Kuar ( 2012 ) explain that the difficulty in expressing a more assertive attitude is mainly because of cultural reasons, where Iranian women are expected to be less talkative and a bit submissive.

Research addressing the role of gender in the use of metadiscourse markers has been conducted with undergraduates (Mokhtar et al., 2021 ; Pasaribu, 2017 ), professional writers (Latif and Rasheed, 2020 ; Zadeh et al., 2015 ), EFL males and females writing argumentative (Aziz et al., 2016 ) and personal essays (Puspita and Suhandano, 2023 ). More importantly, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) have investigated metadiscourse resources in reviews written by natives of both genders. In other words, they have analysed reviews of philosophy and biology books written by male and female reviewers. The books themselves are written by professional writers of both genders. Nevertheless, despite the many studies on gender and metadiscourse markers, such studies have revealed conflicting results.

As some (Latif and Rasheed, 2020 ; Mokhtar et al., 2021 ; Zadeh et al., 2015 ) found that male writers use boosters more than female writers, others (Pasaribu, 2017 ; Latif and Rasheed, 2020 ) reported that females hedge more than males. Nonetheless, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) and Puspita and Suhandano ( 2023 ) note that male writers hedge more when they write a review or a personal essay. In addition, Pasaribu ( 2017 ) argues that males foreground themselves in academic writing. Further, Zadeh et al. ( 2015 ) reported that female writers used a more engaging style compared to male writers. Moreover, Azlia ( 2022 ) notes that female speakers employed hedges, boosters and attitudinal resources more than male speakers in TED Talks (i.e. talk videos by influential people). In terms of disciplines, Azher et al. ( 2023 ) argued that professional female writers hedged more in social sciences, whereas males used more boosters in humanities. In addition, Farahanynia and Nourzadeh ( 2023 ) found that engagement and attitude markers were commonly used by female researchers in applied linguistics. On the other hand, boosters and self-mentions were significantly found in male writers’ research articles in the same discipline. Nevertheless, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) and Zadeh et al. ( 2015 ) claim that male writers use engagement markers more than female writers when they write about biology and translation. Moreover, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) state that male reviewers produce more evaluative critiques when they review writings by male writers. This illustrates that topic choice, discipline and stance towards or against one gender play a role in the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse markers in writings by both gender members.

Studies on the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Arabs

Studies on the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Arabs have focused on professional writers (Alghazo et al., 2021 ; Alsubhi, 2016 ) and postgraduates (Ahmed and Maros, 2017 ; Alotaibi, 2018 ; Fendri, 2020 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ). They considered the genres of column writing, academic consultations, research article abstracts, dissertation acknowledgements, dissertation discussion sections, full dissertations and internship reports. Speaking of gender as a variable in acknowledgements, Alotaibi ( 2018 ) reported that there are no differences between the two genders in terms of boosters and attitudinal resources. However, Saudi female writers used boosters more in recognition of moral support, whereas men utilised boosting devices more frequently when they acknowledged academic assistance. The opposite is true in case of both genders’ use of attitude markers. Saudi females used attitude markers more in thanking for academic assistance. Moreover, Alsubhi ( 2016 ) notes that Saudi male writers hedge more when they write a column. Yet, Alsubhi ( 2016 ) found that female columnists used self-mentions and engagement markers more than male columnists. In addition, Ahmed and Maros ( 2017 ) state that females used hedging devices more than males in verbal consultations. Further, focusing on the discussion sections in applied linguistics master’s theses, Merghmi and Hoadjli, ( 2024 ) reported that boosters are mainly associated with Algerian male postgraduates, whereas hedges are linked with their female counterparts. Focusing on genre as a variable, Fendri ( 2020 ) found that Tunisian EFL academic writers used hedges more in dissertations but employed more of self-mentions, engagement resources and attitudinal lexis in internship reports. As for language as a variable, English abstracts include more of hedges and engaging resources compared to those written in Arabic (Alghazo et al., 2021 ). As shown above, no study has explored the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by EFL Arab college students.

Based on the review above, only one study (i.e. Yoon, 2021 ) explored the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in relation to two different neutral topics. However, there is only one (Aziz’s et al., 2016 ) that focused on gender differences in using such markers in argumentative essays by EFL students. Further, there is only one important study by Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) that explored the use of metadiscourse resources across gender and disciplines. Hence, because of this methodological gap, there is a need to examine differences between male and female writers in using metadiscourse markers in relation to a gender-sensitive topic, especially if the topic is about one gender’s ability in driving cars. Hence, this study aims at exploring the use of metadiscourse markers across genders and stances on a gender-sensitive topic.

The methodology used in this study was both quantitative and qualitative, a mixed-methods approach. In the quantitative analysis, we looked at the frequency of metadiscourse markers, while in the qualitative stage, we explored the context in which each metadiscourse marker occurred to code each marker with respect to interactional metadiscourse categories. In the qualitative phase, we also interpreted the occurrence of the most frequent metadiscourse markers. In other words, the explanatory sequential mixed methods model was selected because the phase of interpretation of significant occurrences followed that of counting frequencies (Toyon, 2021 ).

Participants

A total of 144 (59 males and 85 females) undergraduate students majoring in English translation participated in the study. During their intermediate and high school years, they all studied English as a foreign language as a compulsory subject. In other words, participants received an average of around 6 years of English instruction.

Data collection tool

To investigate how the participants employed metadiscourse markers, a writing task on a gender-sensitive topic was given. The writing task took the form of an argumentative essay, consisting of four paragraphs in which students had to argue whether Saudi men drive better than Saudi women or whether Saudi women drive better than Saudi men. The students were required to write an argumentative essay (i.e. an introduction, two body paragraphs, a conclusion) of no less than 400 words on that trendy topic and choose a stance and present arguments that would convince the reader (their instructor) as to why Saudi men are superior drivers to women and vice versa. The corpus was collected during the Autumn Semester of 2021 when students took this task as part of their final exam for the course of Academic Writing (TRAJ 221), offered as a compulsory course to Level-Four students.

Data collection procedure

Prior to the final exam, students received instruction in different types of writings including the argumentative essay, mainly on how they develop and organise ideas, but they did not receive any explicit instruction in using metadiscourse markers. Further, before starting the procedure of data collection, students of all groups were given a writing exam of a different argumentative topic to make sure that there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of their writing ability. Essays were corrected by experienced writing instructors. Students’ scores were analysed using Independent Samples t Test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results of the statistical tests are given in the Results Section.

After the essays had been collected, they were typed by the researchers and sorted according to the stance taken by the writers, i.e. into four sub-corpora. The following table shows the details of these corpora.

As illustrated in Table 1 , the corpus compiled was composed of 144 essays and 46,453 tokens (i.e. the total number of words in the corpus). The essays were written by 59 males and 85 females. The total number of words in the corpus by male writers is 14,888 words, and the total number of that of female writers is 31,565 words. Table 1 also shows the number of word tokens and types (i.e. unique word forms in a corpus) in each sub-corpus.

Apparently, the number of participants contributing to the corpus of male writers (i.e. 59 students) is smaller than that of female writers (i.e. 85 students). Hence, the number of words in the corpus of male writers is also proportionally smaller than the corpus of female writers. This is mainly because the number of male students registering for the course is smaller than that of female students. To account for such differences, the researchers normalised frequencies by dividing the raw frequencies of tokens by the number of words in a corpus; and then, multiplying the total by 1000 words.

Analytical framework

Hyland’s ( 2005 ) analytical framework was used to examine metadiscourse use. In spite of the subjective nature of metadiscourse identification, Hyland’s ( 2005 ) model has proved its objectivity and comprehensiveness. Researchers (cf. Alghazo et al., 2023 ; Alqahtani and Abdelhalim, 2020 ; Peng and Zheng, 2021 ; inter alia) relied heavily on this framework for their metadiscourse research. Hyland’s ( 2005 ) model of interaction is made up of two dimensions: interactive and interactional. The interactive dimension is concerned with guiding the reader through the text using transitions (i.e. expressing relations between clauses using in addition , but , etc.), frame markers (e.g. markers referring to discourse acts such as to sum up , finally , etc.), endophoric markers (e.g. markers referring to different information mentioned in different parts of a text such as see the table below , as noted above , etc.), evidentials (i.e. markers referring to information sources, e.g. according to , X stated , etc.) and code glosses (i.e. markers clarifying meaning, e.g. such as , in other words , etc.). However, the interactional dimension involves the reader in the argument through the use of hedges (i.e. markers that withhold one’s commitment towards a proposition, e.g. may , perhaps , etc.), boosters (i.e. markers that emphasise certainty in a proposition, e.g. certainly , definitely , etc.), attitude markers (i.e. resources used to express one’s attitude towards a proposition, e.g. I agree , surprisingly , etc.), self-mentions (i.e. resources that give explicit reference to the text’s author(s), e.g. we , I , etc.) and engagement markers (i.e. resources meant to establish a relationship with the reader, e.g. note, consider, etc.). Since the latter dimension is concerned with reader-writer interaction, it has been the focus of many studies (see Hyland, 2000 , 2005 ; Park and Oh, 2018 ). By the same token, the focus of this study is only on interactional discourse resources.

Analytical software

The data were analysed with the concordance software, AntConc, developed by Laurence Anthony, which permitted counting frequencies of hits and examining context as it proved to be necessary to do so because not all hits had metadiscourse value. For instance, the word ‘pretty,’ which could have been counted as an attitude marker, was in fact a booster in the sentence: It is easier for them to master it pretty quickly. Another example is the word ‘way’ which was found to be a booster in the sentence: Men are way better at driving. The researchers used mainly the Word List Feature, which provides information on word frequency and the Keyword-in-Context Feature, which helps in showing concordances or contexts of words in question (Anthony, 2022 ). The Programme was used by several researchers (cf. Ardhianti et al., 2023 ; Khattak et al., 2023 ) in their metadiscourse analysis.

Reliability

The two researchers initially coded 25% of the data (i.e. the corpus of essays written by male Saudis). For this sub-corpus, the categorisation of words and their frequency results have been verified and checked against reliable resources on Hyland’s ( 2005 ) Model of Metadiscourse Markers. However, 20% (i.e. part of the written corpus by female Saudis) of the data was used to measure inter-rater reliability. Inter-rater reliability is defined as the extent to which two coders (i.e. the researchers) agree on assigning the same code to the same data item (Krippendorff, 2004 ). Cohen’s kappa was used to achieve inter-rater reliability. It is calculated by counting instances of agreement and disagreement given by both coders. In other words, it helps in computing the average number of agreements for a certain amount of data. Cohen’s kappa was selected because it reduces the possibility of assigning the same category to the same item by mere chance.

The results showed that the researchers agreed to include 1215 of the tokens and excluded 107 of them. Nevertheless, the first researcher included 64 of the occurrences, whereas the second chose to include only 34. Results of Cohen’s kappa (0.647) showed substantial agreement. Disagreement between researchers was on coding some words which have been coded differently by previous researchers such as cannot as a booster (Yoon and Römer, 2020 ) or as a hedge (Hyland, 2005 ), specifically as a code gloss (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Yoon and Römer, 2020 ), should as a hedge (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Macintyre, 2013 ; Yoon and Römer’s, 2020 ), find as an engagement marker (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Yoon and Römer’s, 2020 ), still as a transition marker (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Macintyre, 2013 ), see as think and see as find . However, as mentioned above, we followed Hyland’s Model and checked context in case of any doubts.

Data analysis

The basic features of the data in the study, such as minimum, maximum, skewness, kurtosis, mean and standard deviation (M ± SD), were described using descriptive statistics. Secondly, inferential statistics was used to measure the difference between the writing groups in the study. First, prior to conducting any statistical analysis, the assumptions of parametric statistics were inspected using the Shapiro-Wilk test, which was used to check the statistical significance of the normal distribution of continuous variables. Depending on the outcomes of the test, parametric or non-parametric statistics were used.

More importantly, in the present study, Independent Samples t Test, an inferential statistical test (Ruxton, 2006 ), was used to compare the means of both groups of participants (i.e. male and female writers). Independent Samples t Test is essential to make sure that there were no significant differences between male and female students in terms of their writing ability based on a test given to them before starting the process of data collection. Independent T Test was also performed to determine whether or not there was a statistically significant difference in the number of words (i.e. boosters, attitude markers, hedges, engagement markers and self-mentions) used by the two groups of male and female writers in support of their point of view. Additionally, we used one-way ANOVA, another inferential statistical test (Alexander et al., 2019 ), to compare the four independent samples (i.e. the four groups of writers) in terms of their writing ability. If a significant difference between the four groups is found, the LSD (least significant difference) test will be used. It will help pinpoint exactly which groups are different from each other. It does this by figuring out the smallest difference between any two groups’ averages that will be considered statistically significant (Ruxton, 2010 ). ANOVA test was also used to determine whether or not there was a statistically significant difference in the number of words (i.e. boosters, attitude markers, hedges, engagement markers and self-mentions) used by the four groups of writers in support of their point of view. P values that are less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant.

With large enough sample sizes per group (>30 or 40), the violation of the normality assumption should not cause major problems (Pallant, 2020 ); this implies that we can use parametric procedures even when the data are not normally distributed (Elliott and Woodward, 2007 ). In other words, if we have samples consisting of hundreds of observations, we can ignore the distribution of the data (Altman and Bland, 1995 ). In addition, according to the central limit theorem, the sampling distribution tends to be normal in large samples (>30 or 40) regardless of the shape of the data (Field, 2009 ). In contrast, a distribution is considered normal if it has skewness indices of less than 2 and kurtosis values of less than 7 (West et al., 1995 ). We used kurtosis and skewness to examine if the data were normally distributed for all the variables in the study to compare between males ( n  = 59) and females ( n  = 85). The results showed that all skewness values were less than 2, and all kurtosis values were less than 7 for all the variables, so the parametric T test was used (see Table 2 below).

To make sure that the two groups of male and female writers were equivalent, Independent Samples t Test was performed and the results illustrate that male writers have a mean score of (16.85 ± 6.232) compared to that of (18.29 ± 3.386) by female writers with a small difference of 1.44 out of 25 degrees. This indicates that there was no significant difference between male and female writers in terms of their writing ability before starting the procedure of data collection. Table 3 below is illustrative.

As for comparing the four groups in terms of their writing ability, assumptions of parametric statistics were considered for the four groups: (a) males writing in favour of males: n  = 39, (b) males writing for females: n  = 20, (c) females arguing for males: n  = 19 and (d) females in support of female drivers: n  = 66. The results showed that all skewness values were less than 2, and all kurtosis values were less than 7 for all the variables, so the data were approximately normally distributed among the four groups (see Table 4 below). Hence, the researchers used the parametric test of ANOVA to compare the four groups in terms of their writing ability.

Table 5 below shows that the test result of ANOVA is (F-ANOVA = 1.685, p  = 0.047 < 0.05). It indicates that there was a significant difference between the four groups of writers with regard to their writing ability. After finding a significant difference between some groups using ANOVA, the LSD test was used to figure out the difference between which two groups’ averages would be considered statistically significant (Ruxton, 2010 ). Further, pairwise tests showed that the group of male writers arguing for female writers had the lowest mean score (15.70 ± 5.849) with a significant difference between it and that of females favouring women’s driving (18.38 ± 3.048). However, this would not have any effect on students’ use of metadiscourse markers, as previous researchers (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Yoon, 2021 ) note that there is no significant relationship between language proficiency and students’ use of metadiscourse markers.

Gender differences in writers’ use of interactional metadiscourse markers

Independent Samples t Tests were performed again to determine whether or not there was a statistically significant difference in the number of words (i.e. boosters, attitude markers, hedges, engagement markers and self-mentions) utilised by male and female writers to support their point of view. Table 6 below shows that there was a statistically significant difference ( p  < 0.05) in using boosters, attitude markers, hedges and self-mentions by male and female writers in favour of female writers. Male writers scored 12.59 ± 6.349 in using boosters compared to female writers whose score is 22.34 ± 7.893 and achieved a score of 15.24 ± 5.937 in employing attitude markers in comparison to female writers whose mean score is 24.01 ± 8.430. The same applies to the use of hedges and self-mentions. Female writers employed hedges (females: 10.33 ± 4.917; males: 8.51 ± 4.337) and self-mentions (females: 5.39 ± 3.704; males: 3.59 ± 3.696) more than male writers. However, there was no significant difference between the two groups in their use of engagement markers. It is important to note that measures of association (Eta Square, η 2 ) were performed to find the effect size. Cohen ( 1988 ) defined effects as small at ( η 2 = 0.01), medium at ( η 2  = 0.06) and large at ( η 2  = 0.14). Quantitative results are supplemented with qualitative and contextual analysis given in this section.

As advanced above, attitude markers were more commonly used by writers of each gender. Using normalised frequencies, there are 54,33 occurrences per 1000 words in males’ essays and 64,66 instances in females’ writings. Boosters came second (i.e. males: 44,26; females: 60,16), whereas the category of hedges (i.e. males: 29,95; females: 27,81) was ranked third. Self-mentions (i.e. males: 11,95; females: 14,50) came fourth and engagement markers (i.e. males: 11,08; females: 8,07) occupied the last place (see Table 8 in the Appendix ). As shown above, normalised frequencies confirmed T test results that there were differences between male and female writers in favour of the latter group in terms of their use of self-mentions, boosters and attitude markers.

To show a certain attitude towards the suggested topic, ‘good,’ ‘better,’ and ‘even’ are very common in essays by writers of both genders. Nevertheless, ‘easily,’ ‘important,’ ‘long,’ and ‘hard’ were preferred by male writers, whereas ‘bad,’ ‘important,’ and ‘careful’ were more utilised by female writers. As male writers wanted to prove that driving is hard and cannot be done easily by women (Examples 1 and 2), female writers’ attitude is best reflected by attitudinal lexis that manifests importance and which gender has proven to be careful in driving (Examples 3 and 4).

Firstly men are better at focusing and do not get distracted easily in my opinion. Plus, cars are made for men mostly, so women will be having a hard time driving on the streets because I think most of them are short, they cannot see the mirrors of the car.

(Male for males)

In my point of view the men drive better than women and men can control his car in any hard scenario and he can take care of his car.

In conclusion, I see that women have better skills in what is related to driving a car. Women responsibility while driving a car will perform less accidents. Moreover, that awareness that women have about never thought of drifting is strongly important .

(Female for females)

Another important thing is women have more discipline which means they can control themselves more than men who are known to have problems when it comes to controlling their feeling.

Concerning boosters, if writers wanted to boost their claims, females employed ‘think,’ ‘believe,’ ‘many,’ ‘a lot,’ and ‘all.’ On the other hand, males selected ‘more,’ ‘a lot,’ ‘know,’ ‘say,’ ‘think,’ and ‘all.’

I think men can drive better than women for two reasons.

A lot of people think that women cannot control a car without giving them a chance to try.

We did not see many women had car accidents.

In addition, both genders tended to use ‘all’ as a boosting device, but it has been used differently by both groups. For example, female writers generalised using ‘all’ to describe that females took all driving lessons, know all driving aspects and that all females cause fewer accidents, and all reports have proven that (Example 8). On the other hand, males used ‘all’ to emphasise that all men, with no exception, know how to drive better than women (Example 10) and learn it faster (Example 9).

All reports proved their ability to drive a car better than men.

All of men 1 week is the time for learning them.

We all know that we drive much more better than women do, but women refuse admitting it.

As for hedging by both writer groups, males and females preferred to use ‘can,’ ‘some,’ and ‘most.’ It is important to note that ‘most’ has been used by female writers to argue that most males use cell phones while driving, do not know driving rules and thus cause car accidents. On the other hand, for men, most women are slow at driving. Females’ frequent use of ‘can’ as a modal expressing ability illustrates how cautious they are, as manifested in ‘Women can do a lot ’ and ‘Women can do many things at one time.’ Regarding self-foregrounding, the results revealed that male and female writers preferred to use ‘I’ and ‘my’ more than other self-mentions. However, ‘me’ and ‘we’ (Example 11) were ranked third in males’ and females’ essays, respectively.

We need to drive to go to our work and to do our tasks.

To engage their readers, both groups of readers used ‘you’ more commonly than other markers and ‘we’ came second in writings by males, whereas ‘should’ came after ‘you’ in females’ essays. Further, ‘questions’ were mainly used by male writers. On the other hand, ‘your’ was more frequently used by female writers as an engaging word. Though there was no difference between both groups in terms of the use of engaging resources, female writers preferred to use ‘should’ as a deontic modal (Example 12), and males tended to use questions (Example 13) more often as they wanted to include their readers as participants in the argument (Hyland, 2005 ). However, they did not expect their readers to confirm their observations or to answer their questions because they assumed that such rhetorical questions tapped into common knowledge. On the other hand, ‘should’ was employed by females to pull readers into discourse at some important points and to refer to common knowledge.

Of course, that every capable adult should be allowed to practice one of their basic rights, which is driving.

Why people think that men drive better than women ?

The effect of gender, stance, and topic on writers’ use of interactional metadiscourse markers

As for differences in using metadiscourse markers by the four groups of writers with regard to a certain stance, ANOVA test was used again. Table 7 below illustrates the average number of words used and the standard deviation for each of the four groups of writers. ANOVA test results revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the four groups of writers ( P  < 0.05) in the number of boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, and hedging words used in support of their point of view on the topic of driving cars. Nevertheless, no significant difference was found between the four groups in using engagement resources ( p  > 0.05). This is due to the convergence of the mean values by small differences. Quantitative results are supplemented with qualitative and contextual analysis given in this section.

As illustrated above, Post-Hoc comparison tests showed significant differences between all pairwise groups in their use of attitude markers. In other words, the group of females arguing for male drivers scored the highest mean (i.e. 29.79 ± 10.649), whereas the group of male writers supporting men’s driving scored the lowest (i.e. 13.77 ± 3.943). Results of normalised frequencies also showed that the former group used attitude markers more than others. More specifically, they used attitudinal resources 75,86 times for every 1000 words. As for groups’ utilisation of boosting devices, Post-Hoc comparison tests and ANOVA showed significant differences between all pairwise groups except for the group of females who favoured women’s driving and the other group of female writers arguing for male drivers, as reflected by their mean scores. Results revealed that female writers arguing for female drivers scored higher (i.e. 22.82 ± 7.870) in comparison to the other two groups of male writers. Likewise, significant differences were found between the female group who wrote in support of male drivers (i.e. 20.68 ± 7.959) and the other groups of male writers. On the other hand, the group of males arguing for male drivers scored the lowest mean (i.e. 11.26 ± 4.284) in comparison to the other three groups. Further, there were significant differences between that group and the other group of males arguing for female drivers (15.20 ± 8.691). Results of normalisation confirmed that the group of females writing in favour of females used boosting devices more than others. That is, they used 62,47 boosters in every 1000 words (see Table 8 in the Appendix ).

Additionally, Post-Hoc comparison results on the use of hedges by the four groups showed significant differences between all the pairwise groups except for the two groups writing in support of women’s driving because their means are closer to one another. As shown in Table 8 in the Appendix , normalisation results showed that the two groups arguing for men’s driving had nearly similar normalised frequencies estimated to be 34 hedges in every 1000 words. However, in terms of statistically significant differences, the female group arguing for male drivers scored the highest average score (i.e. 13.47 ± 5.348) compared to that of males writing in favour of male drivers who scored the lowest mean (i.e. 7.56 ± 3.676). In other words, there was a significant statistical difference between the two groups (see Table 7 ).

As for utilising self-mentions by the four groups, normalisation results showed that the two groups who argued for their gender had almost similar normalised frequencies (i.e. 15 self-mentions in every 1000 words). However, Post-Hoc comparison tests showed significant differences between the group of female writers arguing for females and that of male writers writing for males in favour of the former group who obtained a higher average score (i.e. 5.65 ± 3.466). Finally, no Post- Hoc comparison tests were needed for engagement markers because there were no significant differences between the four groups of writers. However, after normalising frequencies, data revealed that the group of males arguing for men’s driving used engagement markers more than others. More specifically, they employed 13,40 markers in every 1000 words.

In general, attitude markers were more common than other metadicourse markers followed by boosters, hedges, self-mentions and finally engaging words in three writing groups (i.e. males writing in support of male drivers, males arguing for female drivers and females writing in favour of males). In other words, in terms of attitudinal lexis, there were 62,61 occurrences per 1000 words in males’ essays arguing for male drivers, 43,09 instances in males’ essays supporting women’s driving, 75,86 examples in females’ essays in favour of male drivers and 61,19 instances per 1,000 words in females’ writing in support of females (see Table 8 in the Appendix ). Frequent attitude markers employed by females supporting male drivers are ‘good,’ ‘better,’ ‘even,’ and ‘fast.’ In general, females’ assertive attitude and positive comments are emphasised through their use of positive adjectives such as ‘careful,’ ‘important,’ and ‘fast’ (Example 14).

I believe that women are excellent because they are very strict to the rules.

(Female for males)

As for boosting words, there were 51,18 boosters in males’ essays arguing for male drivers, 34,85 examples in males’ writing for females, 52,67 boosting instances in essays by females arguing for males, and 62,47 boosters per 1000 words in essays by females supporting females. However, females arguing for female drivers used boosters more than attitudinal words. The female group of writers writing in favour of Saudi female drivers preferred to use ‘many,’ ‘a lot,’ and ’think’ to show commitment to their viewpoint. On the other hand, the other group of female writers used ‘many,’ ‘all,’ ‘know,’ ‘more,’ and ‘think’ more commonly than other boosters. In general, boosting resources such as ‘many,’ ‘a lot,’ ‘all,’ ‘more,’ etc. are associated with positive comments (Examples 15 and 16). In addition, boosters such as ‘think,’ ‘believe,’ ‘noticed,’ and ‘know’ were used with self-mentions (Example 14).

Men drive better than women for many reasons such as confidence, experience and the ability to control the car at difficult situations.

They follow rules more than men.

Regarding hedging words, there were 34,39 words in essays by males supporting men’s driving, 23,92 instances in essays by males in support of females, 34,31 hedging devices per 1000 words in females’ essays favouring males, and 25,80 instances in essays by females preferring women’s driving. Hedging words such as ‘can,’ ‘some,’ and ‘most’ were more frequently used by the groups writing in support of male drivers (Examples 17 & 18).

Men can handle different things better when it comes to driving.

Men can be more used to traffic jams and tough situations over women.

As for self-mentions, there were 15,97 examples in essays by males for male drivers and 15,47 instances in essays by females for women’s driving. Though normalised frequencies showed no big difference between the two groups, statistical tests revealed that the latter group outperformed the former. Female writers arguing for females employed ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘we’ (Example 19) more frequently, whereas male writers writing for males utilised ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘me’ (Example 20) more than other self-mentions.

In the end and because all what is above I think men are better driver.

The research questions aim at exploring gender differences between EFL male and female writers in using interactional metadiscourse markers. Further, the focus of the present study is on investigating such differences with respect to different viewpoints on a gender-sensitive topic. Generally speaking, since EFL writers argue for a stance and support it with examples and evidence, attitude markers, boosters and hedges are more commonly utilised than other interactional resources. The type of essay, i.e. being an argumentative essay, dictates the type of markers found in students’ essays (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Hong and Cao, 2014 ). Thus, attitude markers are the most commonly used, whereas engagement markers are the least to be employed in argumentative essays. This finding is consistent with that of Puspita and Suhandano’s ( 2023 ), Azlia’s ( 2022 ), Merghmi and Hoadjli’s ( 2024 ) and Alotaibi’s ( 2018 ) who note that engaging resources are the least to be used in personal essays, TED Talks, discussion sections in theses and acknowledgements. Apparently, EFL students focus more on expressing their stance with ensured objectivity (Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ) than engaging their readers (El-Dakhs, 2020 ).

For the first research question, the results reveal that female writers used rhetorical resources of self-mentions, hedges, boosters and attitude markers more significantly than male writers. Such results are inconsistent with previous research by Latif and Rasheed ( 2020 ) and Azher et al. ( 2023 ), who state that females hedge more than males and males use boosters more than females; Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ), who claim that males use hedges and boosters more than females; Alsubhi ( 2016 ), who found that Saudi male columnists hedge more than female column writers; and Farahanynia and Nourzadeh ( 2023 ), who argue that professional male writers employ self-mentions and boosters more than female writers in applied linguistics. However, such results reflect Pasaribu’s ( 2017 ), who notes that females outperform males in their use of hedges and boosters; Puspita and Suhandano’s ( 2023 ), who reported that females employ attitudinal resources and boosters more than male writers; Merghmi and Hoadjli’s ( 2024 ), who state that female postgraduates employed self-mentions, hedges and attitudinal lexis more than their male counterparts in discussion sections; and Azlia’s ( 2022 ), who argues that females used hedges, boosters and attitude markers more than males in TED Talks. Such unexpected results can be attributed to the changes that affected the role of Saudi women as they have been given more voice and power recently. Apparently, Saudi female writers want to confirm their presence and visibility in the argument through common use of self-foregrounding devices and attitudinal resources (Fendri, 2020 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ).

Heavy use of attitude markers, hedges, boosters and personal markers indicates a more personalised style of writing that is mainly associated with female writers (cf. Holmes, 1988 ). Further, after the Saudi Vision with its emphasis on women empowerment, women became bolder in arguing for their rights. Therefore, they used boosters more significantly than male writers to reinforce their point of view and employed positive attitude markers (e.g. good, better, careful, etc.) to emphasise praise of their own ability in driving (Herbert, 1990 ; Johnson and Roen, 1992 ).

It is important to note that females’ personalised style has been reinforced by their significant use of self-mentions (D’angelo, 2008 ) such as ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘we.’ As opposed to males who employed ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘me’ more commonly than other personal markers, Saudi female writers included themselves and other females to voice their opinion through the use of ‘we’ for the purpose of promoting solidarity (Alotaibi, 2018 ; Aziz et al., 2016 ). This also manifests that female writers want to convey a sense of togetherness, selflessness and cooperation (Aziz et al., 2016 ; Mason, 1994 ) to the reader, while males prefer to express an aura of authority and dominance by distancing themselves from their reader (Mulac et al., 2001 ).

Focusing on boosters, both groups of males and females preferred to employ boosters that strengthen a common belief through using ‘all’ and ‘think’ more than those showing solidarity (i.e. shared knowledge with the reader) such as ‘really,’ ‘actually,’ and ‘certainly,’ which are chiefly used by females. Using belief boosters indicates that both groups are convinced of their arguments. Such results contradict Mokhtar et al.’s ( 2021 ) and Holmes’ ( 1990 ) who note that males show some tendency towards boosters of solidarity. In this study, female writers are more forceful in emphasising their claims and more conscious of their readers. Additionally, as stated above, ‘think’ has been used more frequently by writers of both genders to reinforce one’s point of view. However, ‘think’ has occurred mainly with self-mentions in males’ academic essays as Saudi males establish themselves as credible sources of the driving experience and hence highlight their confidence in a judgement (Hyland and Tse, 2008 ; Mulac et al., 2001 ). On the other hand, ‘think’ is also associated with ‘people,’ ‘many,’ ‘they,’ etc. in females’ writing because female writers are more aware of others’ points of view and critiques and they are ready to refute them. In addition, they present their argument with a higher degree of assurance using belief boosters such as ‘prove’ and ‘show.’ Boosters used by females are generally associated with positive comments as highlighted by Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ). However, females’ heavy use of hedges indicates that the information discussed is presented as opinions and hence they are legible for negotiation and discussion. They respect their readers and they do not want to impose their point of view on them (Ahmed and Maros, 2017 ; Farahanynia and Nourzadeh, 2023 ; Hyland, 2005 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ). In general, females are more cautious (Fendri, 2020 ; Lakoff, 1973 ; Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ) and indirect in voicing their opinions.

As for the second question that is concerned with the effect of gender and the chosen stance on the distribution of interactional metadiscourse markers in students’ essays, the results show that a gender-sensitive topic can play a role in determining which rhetorical resources should be used the most for which stance. As reported above, the two groups of females arguing for women’s driving and men’s driving used boosters and attitude markers more significantly than the two male groups. On the other hand, the group of males writing in favour of their driving scored the least in terms of boosters and attitudes. However, the female group writing in favour of males outperformed others in terms of hedges. Further, there is no significant difference between the four groups with regard to engagement markers. More importantly, females preferring women’s driving employed self-mentions more significantly than males arguing for their driving.

Females’ significant use of boosters can be justified in terms of their desire to emphasise praise (Herbert, 1990 ; Johnson and Roen, 1992 ). Thus, boosting resources are associated with positive comments on both genders’ ability in car driving. Further, female writers used boosters more commonly with self-mentions. Apparently, female writers establish themselves as experienced individuals whose views are valued and well-considered. They are being firm in voicing their opinions regardless of which point of view might be pervasive among others. Though they are not the seniors in the field of car driving, Saudi females are more empowered nowadays and they are ready to follow an uncompromising approach no matter how the proponents of the opposite team think of them. Hence, females’ attitude is reflected in their use of positive adjectives such as ‘careful’ and ‘important.’

More importantly, the male group arguing for female drivers used boosters and attitudinal resources more than the other group of male writers to emphasise their stance. They believe that Saudi women are in need of support from males in particular. This indicates that such male drivers are aware of the opposition and the refutation they might encounter from other males. On the other hand, the group of male writers arguing for male drivers used the least of boosters and attitude markers because they believe that in a Middle Eastern society, they do not have to be that assertive in presenting their arguments. In fact, the majority of males and a great proportion of females support men’s driving. Compared to doing housework and taking care of children, driving cars is one of the tasks that traditionally belongs to the masculine domain and where men can demonstrate acts of manliness. Moreover, in Saudi Arabia, driving schools are basically operated by men and they shape its requirements. Thus, writers arguing for females are encouraged to present their arguments in a forceful manner (cf. Hyland and Tse, 2008 ).

Previous research (cf. Hyland and Tse, 2008 ) indicates that there is no direct relationship between gender and language and that topic or discipline dictates the projection of a specific identity. Similarly, in this research, hedges are not commonly used by females, whereas boosters are not frequently employed by males. Hence, females’ significant use of hedges in arguing for the opposite-gender members may suggest some correlation between language and stance. Some Saudi females arguing for men and overusing hedges as a result might be accustomed to being driven by their male family members. Their cautious nature and reluctance have been manifested through the use of hedges (Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ). Females’ exploitation of ‘can,’ as a modal of ability, is mainly used to refer to males’ capability in multitasking, controlling cars, concentrating, etc.; things that some female writers doubt women can do. Females arguing for males are tempted to project this gender identity as it is culturally typical and expected of them. They feel insecure and have to voice their opinion indirectly (Albaqami, 2017 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ). Additionally, males arguing in favour of their ability employed hedges more than the other group of male writers. This finding goes somewhat in line with Tse and Hyland’s (2008) who state that male reviewers tend to write more critical reviews and hedge if the author is a male. Further, the sensitivity of the topic and how personal it can be prompt males to use more hedges (Azizah, 2021 ). One may conclude that writers of both genders may tend to be cautious when they argue for or against males, as males are stereotyped to play dominant roles in society including academia and handling some tasks.

More importantly, the significant difference between females arguing for themselves and males writing in favour of their driving in their use of self-mentions is a bit surprising. It seems that females adopt a more personalised style especially when they argue for themselves and their rights. They want to sound firm in voicing their opinions (Hyland and Tse, 2008 ). On the other hand, males want to be objective (Alsubhi, 2016 ), and thus they do not need to use self-mentions in arguing for themselves. This shows their confidence and trust in their audience whose common knowledge will help them validate their arguments. Hence, they used engagement resources more than the other groups.

In general, in Saudi Arabia, driving cars as a task has been mainly associated with Saudi males for years. It is a sensitive topic for both genders. As Saudi females are pressurised to prove their ability in driving cars through the use of boosting devices and attitude markers, males do not feel the same pressure, and thus they do not employ a lot of boosters and attitudinal lexis to prove their point. More importantly, based on this research and previous studies, there is no specific stance marker that typically describes males’ or females’ language. Language users lean towards projecting a specific type of identity with respect to a certain discipline, topic, or stance. In argumentative writing, the use of metadiscourse resources is determined by whom you argue for and against.

The present study aims at bridging the gap and examines the effect of a gender-sensitive topic on Saudi EFL undergraduates’ use of metadiscourse markers in their argumentative writing. The results of the current study show that female writers used attitude markers, followed by boosters and hedges and finally self-mentions more than male writers. As for stance choice as a variable, it has been proven that it can influence one’s use of metadiscourse resources. The female group advocating men’s driving outperformed others in terms of hedges. However, one cannot attribute the use of hedges to females and that of boosters to males. Previous studies on the use of metadiscourse resources by both genders reveal unpredictable results. In fact, the use of one type of interactional markers by one gender is dependent on the type of topic and stance writers adopt.

Limitations and recommendations

Since this study explores the distribution of metadiscourse markers in Saudi students’ essays about a gender-sensitive topic, there are a number of limitations that should be considered in future research. First, the corpora utilised for discourse analysis are relatively small, especially the one written by male students arguing in support of females. This is mainly attributed to the fact that a few males support women’s driving. Further, the number of male students registering for the course is smaller than that of female students. Additionally, some students in some groups did not write 400 words in an essay but less. Second, only one institutional setting was selected for corpus compilation, namely King Saud University. A third limitation is that data collection was limited to one genre (i.e. argumentative writing), one gender-sensitive topic (i.e. the superiority of which gender in driving cars), and one age group. Therefore, future research should assess metadiscourse use in larger corpora containing larger pieces of writing and with different variables. Further, other institutional settings can be considered to account for cultural or regional differences. It is also possible to investigate other genres, including spoken genres, in particular debates on similar topics. In addition, metadiscourse analysis of argumentative writing by senior citizens of both genders would reveal different results. Considering that essays were collected from students under exam conditions, more relaxed settings would perhaps produce different essays than those written under time constraints and for grading purposes.

Suggestions for future research

Previous studies state that there are no certain rhetorical resources expected of one gender. Based on this study and previous research, a certain type of discourse and a specific group of topics with their respective stances dictate the kinds of rhetorical resources that should be used in writing to project a specific identity. Thus, future research is ought to explore the effect of other gender-sensitive topics on students’ writing, especially if such students live in a community where one does not expect 100% agreement on one stance. Similar topics addressing one gender’s capability in handling a specific task (e.g. occupying a leadership position) are still debatable, especially among Saudis (Alanazi et al., 2023 ). Moreover, as some have investigated the distribution and frequency of metadiscourse markers by writers of reviews of both genders across two disciplines, it would be insightful if further research examines reviews written on books of different topics if the gender of the professional book writer is revealed or hidden from the reviewer. In addition, some emphasise the significance of topic choice on the use of metadiscourse markers; thus, it would be enlightening if researchers examine the effect of choosing a gender-sensitive topic and one that is not addressing gender on writers’ use of metadiscourse resources. Further, it is recommended to explore how metadiscourse markers are employed by opinion columnists of both genders writing about women driving before and after ban lifting in 2017, as previous research shows that the type of genre determines which metadiscourse resources should be used the most by writers in support of their viewpoint. Moreover, the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in essays on a gender-sensitive topic can be explored across languages in translated or untranslated essays, as some (Alotaibi, 2018 ; Gholami et al., 2014 ) point out the Arabs do not use many interactional resources in Arabic as they do when they write in English. Thus, the role of L1 interference and cultural restrictions should be explored because Arab females are expected to hedge when they voice their opinions. However, culturally speaking, Arabs are advised to be direct when they argue for or refuse something (Alghazo et al., 2021 ; El-Dakhs et al., 2021 ). In general, since the present study proves that statistical tests can reveal significant differences in students’ use of metadiscourse rhetorical resources, it would be intriguing if future research utilises statistical measures besides normalised frequencies to draw defensible conclusions.

Pedagogical implications of the study

The findings of this study have significant implications for EFL instructors, syllabus designers and curriculum developers. They brought to our attention the significance of metadiscourse resources and the pressing need to support EFL students in gaining rhetorical knowledge in order to improve the quality of their argumentative academic writing. Saudi female writers are given more voice and power than before. However, their overuse of hedges when they argue for men’s driving denotes a less assertive nature. In light of this, the pragmatic functions of metadiscourse markers should be explicitly taught in EFL courses. Saudi EFL students should be taught how to argue effectively using boosters and attitude markers. Additionally, syllabus designers and learning material creators should think about adding metadiscourse markers to learning materials or presenting authentic English texts to students to assist them in projecting their views efficiently.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

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Acknowledgements

The authors give equal credit to the male instructors, Dr. Hamad Al-Shalawi, Mr. Abdulaziz Almuaibid and Mr. Shady Ibrahim, who participated in collecting exams of argumentative essays written by male writers. They also thank King Saud University for funding this research.

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The authors contributed equally to this paper. GM is the first and the corresponding author of the article. She designed the research, collected, analysed and interpreted the data, as well as drafted and revised the Introduction, the Review of Literature, the Data analysis Section, the Results and the Abstract. AH is the second author of the article. She participated in collecting, analysing and interpreting the data besides drafting and revising the Methodology, the Results, the Discussion, the Conclusion and the references.

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The methodology for this study was approved by the Committee of Research Ethics in Humanities and Social Sciences of King Saud University (Ethics approval number: KSU-HE-22-590).

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Before starting the procedure of data collection, the purpose of the study was explained to the participants. They were ensured that their argumentative essays can be withdrawn from the corpus upon their request and that their writing is only used for research purposes. Full written consent was obtained from students. To guarantee anonymity and confidentiality, argumentative essays have been coded with numbers to be analysed by researchers.

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Table 8 normalised frequencies of interactional metadiscourse markers in students' essays., rights and permissions.

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Al-Otaibi, G.M., Hussain, A.A. The use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Saudi EFL male and female college students: the case of a gender-sensitive topic. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 988 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03506-3

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03506-3

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