Lecture: Sex, Gender & Sexuality
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 11
Opening
Picture three people. A student is comparing two job offers. A coach is writing rules for a mixed youth league. And someone in a human-resources office is reading the company's own pay data. Each of them runs into this week's ideas: the difference between sex and gender, how gender is learned and done every day, and what a pay figure does and doesn't show.
Week 2 taught you the four questions you ask of any figure. Week 4 named the agents of socialization and promised that gender would get its own week. Week 5 showed that people build reality together, and Week 7 gave you the median. Week 8 added the level-of-analysis habit, and Week 10 read race as a category people built. In this lecture I want to read a second built category, gender, with those same tools. Next week, in Week 12, the course turns to family and marriage.
We'll tell sex from gender, watch gender being taught and done, try three lenses, read sexuality as a social category, and then read a real pay figure and weigh what it can explain. Let's start with a clinic form that asks two questions.
1. Tell sex from gender
Imagine a clinic intake form. One line says "Sex." The next line says "Gender." Aren't those the same thing? A sociologist says no, and the whole week rests on why.
Start with the body. Bodies differ in anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones. That's what a doctor measures. So sex is the physical and physiological characteristics, such as anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones, that are used to classify bodies as female or male.
Now think about everything a society adds on top. Who's expected to wear a suit to a wedding. Who gets praised for being tough, and who for being sweet. Who's expected to leave work to pick up a sick child. None of that is written in a chromosome. So gender is the behaviors, traits, and social positions that a society associates with being a woman or a man, which vary across cultures and change over time.
There's a third idea. A person also has their own sense of who they are. Gender identity is a person's own inner sense of their gender, as distinct from the sex characteristics of their body and from the expectations other people hold.
So: sex is the body, gender is the script a society writes, and gender identity is how a person knows themself.
Pause and try this. A family expects its sons to mow the lawn and its daughters to set the table. Is that about sex, gender, or gender identity?
Ask whether it's about a body, an expectation, or an inner sense.
Here's the answer. Gender. It's an expectation a family attaches to being a son or a daughter, not a fact about anyone's body or anyone's inner sense.
2. See gender as built
Picture two villages on opposite banks of a river. On the east bank, weaving cloth is men's work and selling at the market is women's work. On the west bank, it's the other way around. Kids on each bank grow up sure their way is natural, and they can't both be right about nature.
That's the evidence sociologists use. Expectations about gender differ from one culture to another, and they change over time inside one culture. When something moves as you cross a border or a generation, people built it.
So we call gender socially constructed, which describes a category whose meaning comes from the shared expectations of people in a society rather than from nature alone, which is why the category differs between societies and changes over time. You met the same idea with race in Week 10.
The expectations come in bundles, a lot like Week 5's roles. A gender role is the set of behaviors and duties a society expects from a person because of their gender, such as who cooks, who leads, or who shows feelings in public.
One caution. Built doesn't mean fake, and it doesn't mean easy to change. Week 5's Thomas theorem still holds: a category people define as real is real in its consequences.
Pause and try this. A rule says men shouldn't cry in public. What three checks would tell you whether that rule is socially constructed?
Think borders, generations, and who enforces it.
Here's the answer. Ask whether it differs across cultures, whether it has changed over time, and whether people have to enforce it. If it varies and needs enforcing, people built it, because bodies don't need reminders.
3. Learn it: gender socialization
Think back to Week 4. Socialization is the lifelong process of learning a culture and becoming a self, and six agents do the teaching: family, peers, school, media, religion, and the workplace. Now point all six at one subject. Gender socialization is the lifelong process of learning the expectations a society attaches to gender, taught by family, peers, school, media, religion, and the workplace.
Let's walk through a few scenes. At a birthday party, a relative hands one cousin a toolbox set and the other a play kitchen, based on which cousin is a boy. That's the family, teaching which work belongs to whom. On a youth basketball team, a player cries after a loss and gets told to toughen up while the bench laughs. That's peers, teaching who's allowed to show sadness. A feed runs cleaning ads with only women in them and power-tool ads with only men. That's media.
And it doesn't stop when school ends. In the first week at an office job, a new hire notices who's expected to bring snacks to meetings. That's the workplace, teaching adults.
Pause and try this. A middle school dress code lists many more rules for skirts and tops than for shorts and T-shirts. Which agent of socialization is teaching, and what's the lesson?
Name the agent first, then the lesson.
Here's the answer. The school. Its lesson is that some students' bodies need more rules than others', part of the hidden curriculum you met in Week 4.
4. Do it: doing gender
Now picture a meeting at a small software company. Two new coworkers sit down, one a man and one a woman. The manager asks for a volunteer to take notes. The woman glances around and picks up a pen. The man starts the discussion. Nobody mentioned gender. But the moment ran on a gender script, and everyone in the room helped it run.
In 1987, Candace West and Don Zimmerman published "Doing Gender" in the journal Gender & Society. Their idea is in the name. Doing gender is Candace West and Don Zimmerman's 1987 idea that gender is something people continually do in everyday interaction, and that others notice and respond to, rather than something a person is.
That flips how you might think about it. Gender isn't only inside a person, waiting to come out. It's something a person does, in how they sit, speak, dress, and offer to help. And it's shared, because other people react. If the man had picked up the pen, someone might have made a joke. That joke would be doing gender too.
Here's an analogy. Doing gender is like speaking a language in a room full of fluent speakers. You can change your accent, but everyone around you still hears it, and they answer back.
Pause and try this. A friend says, "If gender is something we do, I'll stop doing it." What's the problem with that?
Think about who else is in the room.
Here's the answer. The doing happens in interaction, with people who notice and respond. You can change how you do gender, but you can't step outside a world that reads you through it.
5. Name the structure, then use three lenses
Let's zoom out from one meeting to a whole country. Picture a country where, generation after generation, most top elected offices and most company boards are held by men, and most unpaid care at home is done by women. No single meeting made that pattern. It's a pattern of the whole.
Sociologists have two words for patterns at this level. Patriarchy is a social system in which men as a group hold more power and resources than women as a group, across families, workplaces, and government. The gender order is the society-wide pattern of gender arrangements across institutions: who tends to do which work, hold which positions, and carry which expectations. Both describe groups. Neither describes any one man or woman, and reading them that way is Week 8's ecological fallacy.
Now the three perspectives. Structural functionalism, at the macro level, in the tradition of Parsons, reads traditional gender roles as complementary roles: two different but matching sets of duties that fit together and help the family run. Conflict theory, also macro, joined by feminist theory, reads gender as a structure of unequal power and resources and asks who benefits. Symbolic interactionism, at the micro level, reads gender meanings as made and remade in everyday interaction.
Run one case. A high school dress code bans tank tops and short skirts and says little about what most boys wear. The functionalist sees clear expectations that keep order. The feminist and conflict reader sees rules that cost girls class time and are written by adults they don't affect. The interactionist sees a hallway moment that teaches a student what her body is supposed to mean.
Pause and try this. Which of those three readings works at the micro level, and why?
Find the one that happens between two people.
Here's the answer. The interactionist reading. It looks at one face-to-face moment in a hallway. The other two read the whole school and society, at the macro level, and no lens is declared correct.
6. Read sexuality as a social category
Think about the words people use for relationships, from a school dance to a wedding announcement. A society offers a set of labels. It attaches meanings to them. And it sets rules about who may show affection, and where.
Sexuality is the part of human life that involves sexual desire, attraction, and relationships, which sociologists study as a social category as well as a personal experience. Sexual orientation is the pattern of a person's emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to people of a particular gender or genders.
Why would sociology study something that feels so personal? For the same reason it studies gender. Attraction is felt by a person. But the labels on offer, the meanings attached to them, and the reactions people meet are taught through socialization and enforced in interaction. A school rule that every couple at a dance must be one boy and one girl is an institution setting a rule. Jokes in a locker room about which relationships deserve mocking are peers teaching a meaning.
I'll be honest about the limits here. The research on sexuality is deep, and it belongs to specialized courses. In this course, we name the category and practice the habit of reading it socially.
Pause and try this. A student feels drawn to a classmate. Is that the part sociology studies, or is there another part?
Split the feeling from the rules around it.
Here's the answer. The feeling is personal. Sociology studies the social part: the labels, rules, and reactions that shape how the student can act on that feeling and how others respond.
7. Read the earnings ratio four ways
Now a real number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its report on women's earnings in 2024, found this. Women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings that were 83% of men's. In 1979, the first year with comparable data, the figure was 62%.
First, three terms. The earnings ratio is women's median usual weekly earnings divided by men's median usual weekly earnings, multiplied by 100 and written as a percent. Median usual weekly earnings is the middle amount when the weekly pay that a group of workers usually receives is lined up from lowest to highest. And full-time wage and salary workers are people who work for an employer for pay, as opposed to working for themselves, and who usually work full time.
Let's run Week 2's four questions. What's measured? The middle woman's usual weekly pay as a percent of the middle man's. Over whom? Full-time wage and salary workers in the United States, in 2024, compared with 1979. What does it show? For every 100 dollars of men's median weekly earnings, women's median was 83 dollars, so women's median was 17 percent below men's. In 1979 that gap was 38 percent. The ratio rose 21 percentage points over 45 years, about a third higher than in 1979. The gap in 2024 was less than half of what it was. What doesn't it show? Women and men in the same job, with the same hours. And correlation or cause? Neither. It's a description of two years. The gender pay gap is the difference between women's and men's earnings, often stated as how far women's median earnings fall below men's.
Pause and try this. Someone says, "Women earn 83 cents for doing the same job." What's wrong with that?
Ask what the 83% actually compares.
Here's the answer. It isn't a same-job comparison. It's a ratio of medians across all full-time jobs together, so it describes a gap without saying anything about pay for one particular job.
8. Weigh raw against controlled, then weigh the explanations
That 83% is one kind of comparison. A raw ratio is an earnings ratio that compares the middle woman's earnings with the middle man's across all jobs together, with no adjustment for occupation, hours, or experience. A controlled estimate is a comparison of women's and men's earnings among workers matched on named factors, such as occupation, hours, and experience, so that it answers how pay differs among similar workers.
Here's a small firm to see the difference. It has two jobs. Job X pays 700 dollars a week and Job Y pays 1,000 dollars, and each job pays women and men the same. Four of the five women work in Job X, and four of the five men work in Job Y. So women's median is 700 dollars and men's median is 1,000 dollars, and the raw ratio is 70%. But inside each job, the ratio is 100%. Same firm, two honest answers to two different questions. The controlled comparison removes the part of the gap tied to job mix. What it can't tell you is why four of the five women ended up in the lower-paid job.
That's where the debate lives. The documented explanations of the gender pay gap come in five parts. Occupational segregation is the concentration of women and men in different occupations. Then there are differences in hours. The motherhood penalty is the earnings disadvantage mothers face compared with women who aren't mothers. The devaluation of women's work is paying less for kinds of work because women mostly do them. And last, there's discrimination. Each has supporters, and they overlap. Use Week 8's habit and name each explanation's level. This course declares no winner. You weigh them on further evidence.
Pause and try this. Someone says the 83% proves discrimination. Someone else says it proves it's all choices. What do both of them get wrong?
Ask what a raw ratio can do by itself.
Here's the answer. They both ask the raw number to explain the gap. It only describes it, so each explanation needs further evidence, such as a controlled estimate.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Sex is the body, gender is what a society expects, and gender identity is a person's inner sense. Gender varies across cultures and over time, so it's socially constructed. Six agents teach it, for a lifetime. People do gender in interaction, and others hold them to the script. Patriarchy and the gender order describe patterns of the whole, and the three lenses read gender inequality at their own levels. Sexuality is felt personally and organized socially. The 83% is a raw ratio of medians that describes a gap, and five explanations compete to account for it.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz, then the discussion, the assignment, and the Sociology in Action Workshop. Next week, in Week 12, the course turns to family and marriage, where you'll watch doing gender at home.
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