Where does gender collide?

In many languages a noun belongs to a class that controls the form of the words agreeing with it, such as articles, adjectives, and verbs; these classes are traditionally labelled masculine, feminine, and neuter, though many languages divide nouns on other lines such as animate and inanimate. This is the oldest use of the word, which comes from the Latin genus, meaning kind or class, and it was treated by ancient grammarians long before the modern period; Jespersen's 1924 The Philosophy of Grammar set out the difference between this grammatical classification and biological sex, and Corbett's 1991 reference work Gender surveyed how the world's languages assign and mark it. The referent is a property of a language's grammar, a system of noun classes and agreement, not a social role a person performs or a mental framework in an individual's mind.[1][2]

Unit

A noun's assignment to a gender class and the agreement it triggers

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by agreement patterns on articles, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs, and catalogued in grammatical description

John Money introduced the term gender role in 1955 to name the outward behaviour and social presentation by which a person is recognised as a boy or girl, man or woman, marking it off from biological sex; sociology developed this into gender as something people actively produce in daily conduct rather than a fixed trait they carry. Goffman's 1977 The arrangement between the sexes described how routine social arrangements sort people by sex, and West and Zimmerman's 1987 Doing Gender recast gender as an ongoing accomplishment managed in interaction and held accountable by others. The referent is a social practice enacted between people, not a class of nouns in a grammar or a schema inside one mind.[3][4][5]

Unit

An instance of gendered conduct performed and read in social interaction

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through observation of interaction, ethnomethodology, and conversation and discourse analysis

Kohlberg's 1966 cognitive-developmental account proposed that a child first forms a stable concept of being a girl or a boy and then organises learning around that concept, a framework later named gender schema. Bem's 1981 Gender schema theory in Psychological Review described this schema as a network in memory that sorts incoming information into gender-linked categories and guides attention, recall, and self-description. The referent is a cognitive structure inside an individual's mind that processes information, not a grammatical class of nouns or a social role performed between people.[6][7]

Unit

An individual's gender schema, a cognitive structure for gender-linked information

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed with instruments such as the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and tasks measuring gender-based encoding and recall