1. Sex and Gender Roles

• Make copies of Handout 3.1a, Handout 3.1b, Handout 3.1c and Activity 3.1a.
• Reflect on discussion questions – particularly your own conditioning regarding gender roles during your childhood and how those roles have changed during the course of your life. What brought the changes?
• Create a presentation based on Handouts

3.1a and 3.1b.

• Prepare copies of discussion questions and assignments for small group work.
• If possible, have a flip chart available to record responses to the “role” question posed in the introduction to this session.

Handouts and Activities

• Handout 3.1a, Sex and Gender Roles

• Handout 3.1b, Contrasting Sex and Gender Roles

• Handout 3.1c, Gender roles in Motion – 3 stories

• Activity 3.1a, Sex or Gender?

Sex and Gender Roles

Sex and Gender

GAD theory proposes to transform gender relations so that women and men benefit equally from development projects. The concept that gender roles are socially determined and can, therefore, be changed is central to this goal.

To avoid confusion, the term “sex” is defined to mean the biological differences between men and women. “Gender” refers to the social relationships between men and women that vary from one society to another and at different points in history. Gender roles, therefore, are learned from the time of birth and are reinforced by parents, teachers, peers and society. These gender roles are based on the way a society is organised and also vary by age, class, and ethnic group.

Gender Roles

Division of labour in societies illustrates both biological and gender differences. Men are often responsible for activities that require their physical strength, such as house building. Because only women can bear children, many societies use this biological role as the basis on which to allocate other roles. Such related roles often include caring for children and domestic chores.

According to current development theory, most communities recognise three distinct types of work: reproduction, production and community management.17 A survey of this widely used theory and the part gender roles play in each type of work is included in Session 3.4. In brief, this theory identifies reproductive roles as all tasks related to the household. Production includes tasks or work done for pay, in cash or in kind. Community management roles include activities such as organising a religious festival or participating in community groups and politics.

In differentiating between “sex” and “gender”, it is useful to explore different cultural perspectives on gender roles to see how these are socially conditioned. “Socially conditioned” need not imply that no natural differences exist between men and women. There are differences, and these are open for discussion. Nevertheless in many societies, roles considered innate and natural to one gender or the other often are actually culturally determined.

An interesting example of the difference between particular European and African concepts of gender roles: colonial British culture considered women weaker than men, both physically and intellectually. Women were thought to be fragile and, therefore, were not permitted strenuous activity, such as working in fields. When the British colonised the Port of Natal in South Africa, they were in need of men to work on their sugar cane farms. But Natal was made up of mostly Zulus, who had developed different gender roles. In Zulu culture, as in many African cultures, women do the agricultural work. The British colonialists could not persuade the Zulu men to work on their farms, and their cultural ideas about women engaging in strenuous physical activity would not permit them to have women work in the fields. So the British brought over men from India to work in the sugar cane fields, and now the population of the city of Durban in Natal is more than a quarter Indian. The British considered women too weak for agricultural work, and Zulu men considered themselves too “manly” to work in the fields. Different assumptions about women’s “natural qualities” led to different gender roles.

In the mid-1800s, early in what is now called the “women’s movement”, American culture considered women to be “morally superior” to men. Just as men were thought to have greater physical capacity, women were thought to possess greater moral capacity. Because women were assumed to be morally upright (unless considered “corrupted”), the presence of women among men was thought to “civilise” otherwise unruly men. Arguments for granting women’s rights were sometimes based on this moral superiority, to bring moderation and peace to politics and public discourse.18 These ideas no longer hold sway over most Americans, which illustrates how gender roles change over time even within the same culture.

17 Caroline O.N. Moser, Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training (London: Routledge, 1993).

18 H.H. Van Amringe, “Arguments on Women’s Rights,” as reprinted in the Proceedings of the 1850 National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Mass.

Contrasting Sex and Gender Roles