Gender inequality in theoretical perspective

GENDER:
There is increasing consensus among gender scholars that gender is not primarily an identity or role that is taught in childhood and enacted in family relations. Instead, gender is an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting people as two significantly different categories, men and women, and organizing social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference
Cultural Beliefs about Gender:
. In general, contemporary stereotypes describe women as more communal and men as more agented and instrumental. In addition to this horizontal dimension of difference, gender beliefs have a hierarchical dimension of status inequality. Men are viewed as more status worthy and competent overall and more competent at the things that “count most” (e.g., instrumental rationality). Women are seen as less competent in general but “nicer” and better at communal tasks even though these tasks themselves are less valued. As these descriptions make clear, gender beliefs represent themselves as universal depictions of women and men defined by a narrow set of features. This is, in itself, odd since no one ever has the experience of interacting with a concrete person who is just a man or just a woman in a way that is not affected by a host of other attributes such as the person’s race or level of education. The deeply held cultural belief in the inherent difference between men and women appears to somehow disaggregate the concrete experience of interacting with real men and women into simpler, abstract categories. Given the cultural resources and power available to members of dominant groups, the descriptions of men and women that become inscribed in these simple, abstract, cultural categories are ones that most closely describe white, middle-class, heterosexual men and women, if anyone. These gender beliefs