Gender Construction within Social Institutions

Keywords: social institutions, Gender practices

Social Institutions

Masculinities and femininities are formed in all social institutions, especially in the family, the school, the media, the street, the workplace, the State, and the cultural discourse. Genders are, in their turn, thoroughly vital to these six important institutions that have created them. Here, I’ll discuss the first five institutions and leave the cultural discourse for the next section.

1. The family

The family as an integral part of the society and its product, embodying several complex and profound emotional relationships, also exercises the first and strongest influences on a person's gender role through one’s parents. In this institution, gender roles and identities and the expectations and perceptions towards masculine and feminine roles are socialized within the parents-children relationship from the early years of one's life. The family is the social and symbolic place in which sexual differences are believed to be fundamental, while at the same time, and ironically so, gender differences are constructed.

The sexual division of labour is a major factor in the construction of gender within the space of the family: men as the main provider - having certain paid employments outside of home in the capitalist society, and generally not much participation in unpaid home labour but benefitting from the result of women’s free home services as wives.  The family is maintained by the patriarchal ideology of male dominance and female subordination to the male. The division of labour is reinforced by men’s domestic power, which in turn is reinforced by their careers and incomes. The role of the male in the family is to accomplish a successful career, while the wife’s duty is the preservation of the family through housework and child-rearing work, which are not acknowledged and paid by the capitalist system, yet are essential to it.

Restrictions on women’s career potentials, due to their unpaid housework and child-rearing chores and financial reliance on their husbands, lead to the differences in women’s and men’s capacities, manners and genders in general. Women have no choice but to adopt attributes connected to domestic and family life. Thus, in this unequal division of labour, women’s personalities and personas are chosen by men who decide the extent to which they should be limited or given a chance for a certain degree of social or economic success.

The family maintains this unjust male-female relationship, generates a clear-cut separation of roles and basically endorses a patriarchal gender structure and gender relational system within which both women and men are restricted.

2. The school

Social institutions and public places such as schools, workplaces and streets are important spaces for gender construction and the reinforcement of gender roles. In the school, teachers and school administrators pass along cultural construction and expectations about genders. Moreover, the strong influence that the peer groups have on gender roles cannot be overlooked.  

Public spaces such as schools are where we frequently observe gendered demeanors. (1) As schools have the intentional and unintentional mandate for regenerating gendered culture, hierarchies, dominant ideologies, they are major spaces for gender construction and reconstruction. The means of gender construction at school are age separation, selection of learning subjects, schedules, funds, forms of communication, expectations by teachers from students, hierarchical Organizations, and management of space.

The schools’ gendered practices and structures, as well as their capacity to carry out changes, create inequalities among students. For instance, The American primary schools did away with the illustrations of females in outmoded sex roles and brought in pictures of males in non-traditional sex roles, for the sake of countering sexism. This strong endeavour proved to be another kind of gendering and sexism. It sends, to this day, messages charged with values on appropriate forms of masculinity and femininity, and it is possibly somewhat responsible for the loss of social position of “stay at home” women or mothers. (2)

The politics of gender is at the core of school systems in many countries. Diverse extracurricular activities, pastimes and hobbies that take place inside the schools, such as sports, dancing, art, and debate, separate and identify gender roles, and elaborate fixed and inflexible examples of femininity and masculinity for the students to follow.

Peer pressure is another way of reinforcing a society’s conventional gender roles. It could consist of teasing or mocking children who do not adapt themselves to the conventional gender roles that other children in their peer group have internalized. It could even lead to the banning of these children from the peer group.

The staffs of schools are also part of specific gender regimes in their working milieus. Their class-room behaviour, correctness, selection of subject matters, administration and promotions influence the production and frame of gender boundaries, a clear-cut split between femininity and masculinity, and a sexual division of labour among the staffs.

3. The media

The media has become an ever more powerful force in the socialization of genders and the construction of masculine and feminine roles, and people’s attitudes and behaviours toward women and men. In everything from advertising, television programming, newspaper and magazines, to comic books, popular music, film and video games, men and boys are exposed to Rambo-like images where masculinity is associated with machismo and violence. Women and girls are more likely to be shown in the home, performing domestic chores; as sex objects who exist primarily to service men; or as people unable to protect themselves against beatings, harassment, sexual assault and murder by men. Also, frequently, a small portion of the population, female fashion models and male sport figures, are presented as the ideal for feminine and masculine roles, respectively.

4. The street

Another major institution that similarly shapes the structure of gender is the street, with its mass culture and different social communications and relationships. The street is a discerning topic of study.

Women have an exceedingly restricted function in the street where strolling, shopping and prostitution are their main activities. Besides, the street is generally a location where women are extensively intimidated by men. During the night, on account of numerous hazards, such as verbal and physical harassment, and rape, women do not appear much on the street, even though there have been demonstrations by women on the streets of many major cities called “Taking Back the Night”. Therefore, generally the male sex dominates and controls the street.

Additionally, in Western countries, the street is a site of packed ads in the form of sexually oriented shop windows, posters and billboards. These adverts overtly use female sexuality for selling and by rough and shallow treatment of women, they usually humiliate them. As a result of these types of advertisements, one tends to negate respect towards women and their intellectual value. However, advertising in the street is not the only means for displays of sexuality.  

Different types of behaviour are displayed by people in their clothes, body movements and way of speaking, strongly express femininity and masculinity, and indicate and exhibit gender differences. The street is an immense theatre of sexuality and forms of femininity and masculinity. Consequently, the street, with all its characteristics, preserves a structure of power and division of labour, and further as an institution, it is all together comparable to the State and family. Subsequently, the disposition of the street with all its complexities facilitates the further creation and description of gender.

5. The State

The State is an often overlooked influence in establishing gender roles. However, it is powerfully involved in using, fostering and maintaining gender differences. People in positions of power are often men, while those in charge of less prominent and more subservient responsibilities, on the other hand, are women. The State elites are composed almost exclusively of men.

Strong States establish their diplomatic, military and colonial policy within the framework of ideologies of masculinity that places a reward on forcefulness and might. States make a great effort to standardize and control sexuality, and to shape gender. These types of efforts are illustrated by anti-woman laws (for instance, in countries where Sharia Law dominates) and anti-homosexual laws and many limitations on sex, for instance consensual age. As the State has many more functions than a plain allocation of profits, power in the state is calculated and planned. The institution of the State plays a leading role in constructing and sustaining patriarchal social arrangements.

The state, its functions and structures, including bureaucracy, are essential for the connection between the structure of power and the gendered division of labour and are thus completely in control of gender boundaries. As a result of biased staffing and promotion, these structures establish a unified system of gender relations where women are excluded from positions of power and the units of work in which mostly women converge,  are secondary and subservient.

By controlling many different relations and institutions, the State preserves power over gender structures as well. The State creates and perpetuates a gender order by using marriage and mothering. By controlling these two relations, the State succeeds in generating and perpetuating such social/gender groups as mothers, wives, husbands, and homosexuals. By means of managing identity, the State succeeds in controlling and regulating gender structure by way of political policy, ratification and application and misapplication of law. 

Conclusion

The five social institutions of the family, school, media, street and State define and control the configurations and functions of genders in a society. All five sustain divisions of labour and power structures and have great impact on the evolution, dominance and styles of femininity and masculinity.

In any structure and system of inequality, opposite interests develop. These interests classify groups of people who will benefit and lose in different ways by supporting or transforming the structure. A patriarchal gender order where men dominate women necessarily establishes men as a supporting interest group, and women as an interest group drawn to transformation. This is an organizational reality, no matter if individual men adore or despise women, are in favour of equality or  subservience, and no matter if women are now working at transformation (3).

To be continued.

Notes

1. Thorne, B. 1993. Gender and Play. Girls and Boys in School. Buckingham: Open University Press. PP.49-55.

2.  McKenna, E. 1997. When Work Doesn't Work Any More. Adelaide: Griffin Press. PP. 130-1

3. Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Polity Press,   Cambridge : UK. P.82