People often use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ interchangeably. They are different.

Sex is biological. We are determined to be either male or female at birth, based on the presentation of our external genitalia.  If we have a penis and testicles we are male. If we have a vagina, we are deemed female. The male genetic structure is XY and the female genetic structure is XX.

Gender is the socio-cultural construct that describes the role and expectations placed on a woman or man. What is expected of the person with the vagina and what is expected of the person with the penis. This is generally determined by the society and culture the child is born into, how that child is nurtured, and the subsequent expectations placed upon the child to fulfill the prescribed gender role.

Children begin to acquire concepts of gender, including knowledge of the activities, toys, and other objects associated with each gender and of how they view themselves as male or female in their culture, possibly from as early as 18 months of age. This is based upon how adults reinforce this behaviour.

Gender roles and expectations are generally shaped to benefit the dominant gender of that society and/or culture. Religion and history indicate that patriarchal man-centric norms, mores and attitudes emerged as the dominant force globally, there still remain matriliniual groups surviving to this day.

The terms masculine and feminine are generally aligned with masculine and feminine gender roles. Gender roles have become more flexible or fluid in some parts of the world, including in some parts of Sri Lanka; for example the breadwinner-homemaker dichotomy no longer necessarily positions the father as the person wholly responsible to earn and sustain the family, and the mother may not be wholly responsible for childrearing.

That said, men in our part of the world reportedly struggle in relationships where their female spouse earns more than them. Some also struggle with the role of being caregivers in the homes. Attitudes are changing, however, as seen with companies like John Keells Holdings, one of Sri Lanka’s largest conglomerates offering equal maternity and paternity leave for their employees, “recognising the importance of both parents’ roles in early childcare.”

Fossil and historical evidence is also emerging that challenges hitherto established gender constructs that suggest women gathered while men hunted.

“People have long said that in prehistoric foraging societies, labor was divided by gender: Women gathered and men hunted. But now, a new study adds to the growing body of work challenging this idea, suggesting that prehistoric women were just as skilled at killing game as men were.” – Smithsonian Magazine  

The BBC Future article – How did patriarchy actually begin? Lays out a rational that plots how it was in the interest of those in charge of early society to have men as warriors to protect and defend resources, and women as essentially baby-factories to produce those warriors.

The first clear signs of women being treated categorically differently from men appear much later, in the first states in ancient Mesopotamia, the historical region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Around 5,000 years ago, administrative tablets from the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia show those in charge taking great pains to draw up detailed lists of population and resources.

 

“Person power is the key to power in general,” explains political scientist and anthropologist James Scott at Yale University, whose research has focused on early agrarian states. The elites in these early societies needed people to be available to produce a surplus of resources for them, and to be available to defend the state – even to give up their lives, if needed, in times of war. Maintaining population levels put an inevitable pressure on families. Over time, young women were expected to focus on having more and more babies, especially sons who would grow up to fight.

 

The most important thing for the state was that everybody played their part according to how they had been categorised: male or female. Individual talents, needs, or desires didn’t matter. A young man who didn’t want to go to war might be mocked as a failure; a young woman who didn’t want to have children or wasn’t motherly could be condemned as unnatural.

Furthermore, neuroscience is now proving that the pink [female] and blue [male] divide of human brains is similarly a gendered construct that has no basis in fact. Brains differ from person to person, not from male to female.

In fact the pink and blue dichotomy itself is based on a late 19th century/early 20th century construct which often positioned PINK for boys and BLUE for girls.

In June 1918, for example, a trade publication called the Infant’s Department reported, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” – Smithsonian Magazine

The gender construct, with the advent of social media, algorythms and proliferation of artificial intelligence is super-charged in the 21st century to give rise to notions that men and women, boys and girls, think and feel differently, when in truth the human experience can be more unifying than divisive. Yet it is the difference and division that is celebrated in algorythm bubbles that lead children, young people and adults to harm each other and cause pain.

The award-winning British drama – Adolescence – that depicts the murder of a young girl by a young boy is emblamatic of this division and is a clarion call to parents, educators, and governments to wake up, challenge, redefine and reimagine the gender construct.