So we started to study gender in the same way that we began to look at the differences between men and women. This was a sort of standard process. And then we began to differentiate ourselves as a social science from the way other groups, particularly the way the biological sciences, were studying gender. And it became clear that we were really talking about two different things. When biologists study men and women or males and females, what they were studying was in some ways uniformities. What they were studying was the differences between males – all this group males, and all this group females. And what sociologists began to study was the differences between males and females, large or small, were less interesting to us than the ways in which societies understand those differences and develop ideas and policies that define them.
So instead – so we began to talk about gender, and we said, "What they study is biological sex," the biological fact-ness: the fact that you're female, the fact that I'm male. Now this could be about brain chemistry. It could be about chromosomes.
But what's interesting to us as sociologists is not that. We assume that people have pretty much the same brain chemistry all over the place, all over the world. We have similar hormones pretty much, I mean, 99-point-something percent of the time, all over the world. But what's different is how a culture decides what that means. What does it mean to have an XY chromosome? What does it mean to have a XX chromosome? What does it mean to be a man in this culture? What does it mean to be a woman in this culture? Then we started to study differences. What are the differences between what it means to be a woman in the United States in the early 21st century compared to what it means to be a woman in, let's say, Kenya in the early 21st century? What does it mean to be a woman in the United States in the early 21st century compared to what it meant in the early 19th century? What does it mean to be a woman in this culture when you're 17 compared to when you're 27 or 37 or 47?
So what happened was we began to study – what sociologists began to carve out for themselves is an idea that gender is about the changing meanings of the fact of being male or female, that those are culturally constructed, that they change from culture to culture, that they change over time, and that they change over the course of your life. So that's what's interesting to us, all the differences as opposed to the similarities between males and females.
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