Sex refers to biological characteristics, while gender is socially determined based on those characteristics. When filling out official documents, you are often asked to provide your name, birth date, and sex or gender. But have you ever been asked to provide your sex and your gender? It may not have occurred to you that sex and gender are not the same.
By Peter Gabriel Filene. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Appendix, notes, essay on research, and index. Most users should sign in with their email address. If you originally registered with a username please use that to sign in. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
The belief that women and men are held to different standards of sexual conduct is pervasive in contemporary American society. According to the sexual double standard, boys and men are rewarded and praised for heterosexual sexual contacts, whereas girls and women are derogated and stigmatized for similar behaviors. Although widely held by the general public, research findings on the sexual double standard remain equivocal, with qualitative studies and early attitudinal surveys generally finding evidence of the double standard and more recent experimental vignette designs often failing to find similar results. In this study, we extend prior research by directly measuring the social status of sexually permissive youth.
A gender role , also known as a sex role , [1] is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their biological or perceived sex. The specifics regarding these gendered expectations may vary substantially among cultures, while other characteristics may be common throughout a range of cultures. There is ongoing debate as to what extent gender roles and their variations are biologically determined , and to what extent they are socially constructed. Various groups, most notably the feminist movements, have led efforts to change aspects of prevailing gender roles that they believe are oppressive or inaccurate. The term gender role was first used by John Money and colleagues in , during the course of his study of intersex individuals, to describe the manners in which these individuals expressed their status as a male or female in a situation where no clear biological assignment existed.