Gender is a fluid construct. It is not determined by our biology, but is a product of our environment, our performance, our choices, and our society. <\/p>\n
Our society sets up gender as a dichotomy: masculine and feminine. Masculinity includes traits like brave, noisy, and strong. Femininity includes being timid, quiet, fragile, and nurturing. Nothing is genetically inherent in men to make them masculine, or in women to make them feminine. Global variations in behaviour and expectations show that gender is a cultural construct. <\/p>\n
From early childhood, we condition members of our society to believe that sex determines gender. Dressing girls in lace and pink clothing that restricts movement is standard. Boys are dressed in camouflage and dark colours, and when they get dirty, we forgive quickly with statements that actually encourage this behaviour. <\/p>\n
Physiological girls who display \u2018masculine\u2019 characteristics and physiological boys who act \u2018feminine\u2019 are censured for crossing gender lines. Intersexed individuals often struggle with gender identity issues. The cisgendered do not often realize how challenging and unclear gender identity can be.<\/p>\n
Socially constructing gender is problematic. When gender defines acceptable behaviours and interests, it limits an individual. If a girl is \u2018supposed to be\u2019 interested in nurturing, not machines, she may not receive a full range of choices and opportunities to develop her interests. <\/p>\n
On a larger scale, society also suffers. Fields like computing, which have historically excluded women, neglect half of a potential pool of knowledge and skills. When entire groups of individuals are discouraged from exploring and developing interests in an area, these fields develop internal biases and are skewed to the interests of a non-representative group of the population.<\/p>\n
When society is constructed such that only women are nurturers, men are also unfairly limited. The public sphere, which has been historically male dominated, has little accommodation for the needs of the family and men are unsupported in their role as caregivers. As women have entered the paid workforce in greater numbers, working for change in terms of parental leave or leave for caring for sick children or parents has illustrated the bias against men as nurturers.<\/p>\n
Society benefits from encouraging individuality, rather than relying on stereotypes to determine each person\u2019s potential contribution to the community. Gender dichotomies create a hierarchy, preferencing one element over the other. This preference is then used to esteem one group at the expense of the other when with cooperation, both group\u2019s contribution could be valuable, if the society were open to it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gender is a fluid construct. It is not determined by our biology, but is a product of our environment, our performance, our choices, and our society. Our society sets up gender as a dichotomy: masculine and feminine. Masculinity includes traits like brave, noisy, and strong. Femininity includes being timid, quiet, fragile, and nurturing. Nothing is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,5,17,12,10,30,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}