3.3 Gender and Sexual Orientation

Keep these terms separate. Sex is about biology, gender identity is about how you understand yourself, gender roles are about society's expectations, and sexual orientation is about attraction. Knowing one of these about a person doesn't tell you the others.

• Sex: biological characteristics, such as chromosomes, hormones and anatomy, that are used to classify people as male or female, or in some cases intersex.
• Gender: the social and psychological characteristics, roles and behaviors a culture associates with being male, female or another gender.
• Gender roles: a culture's expectations about how people of each gender should act, dress and think, such as which jobs or chores are seen as appropriate.
• Gender identity: a person's own internal sense of their gender, which may or may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.
• Sexual orientation: a lasting pattern of romantic or sexual attraction, such as to people of a different sex, the same sex, more than one sex, or to no one (asexuality).
• Socialization: the process by which people learn the norms, roles and behaviors expected in their culture.

Children begin to recognize gender categories very early, and by preschool many show strong preferences for toys and activities their culture links with their gender. Socialization comes from many sources: parents, siblings, peers, teachers, books, media and the wider culture.

Several ideas from elsewhere in the course explain how this works. Through operant conditioning (3.8), children may be praised for behavior that fits gender roles and discouraged from behavior that doesn't. Through social learning (3.9), they imitate models, especially models who seem similar to them. Through schemas (2.2), they build mental frameworks for what each gender 'is like' and then notice and remember information that fits those schemas, a view known as gender schema theory.

Gender roles vary widely across cultures and change over time within cultures. For example, which jobs are seen as typical for men or women has shifted a great deal in many countries over the last century. This variation is strong evidence that gender roles are learned, not fixed by biology alone.

Sexual orientation is about attraction, which is different from gender identity. Research has not found a single cause of sexual orientation. Evidence from twin studies and from studies of prenatal factors suggests biology plays a role, alongside other influences scientists are still studying. Major psychological and medical organizations agree that sexual orientation is not a disorder; the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual in 1973 (5.3).

Researchers can't randomly assign people to a sex, gender or orientation, so most studies in this area are non-experimental: surveys, naturalistic observations, case studies and correlational research. That means they can show relationships, such as a link between the toys parents buy and the activities children prefer, but they usually can't prove cause and effect. Samples also matter: results from one culture or age group may not generalize to others. And because the topic is personal, researchers must protect participants' confidentiality and get informed consent.