Gender & Sexuality

Gender and sexuality are not the same things, though they have often been mistaken as synonymous. Gender can be defined as a social identity consisting of the role a person is to play because of his or her sex. There is a diversity in male and female roles, making it impossible to define gender in terms of narrow male and female roles. Gender is culturally defined, with significant differences from culture to culture. These differences are studied by anthropologists to ascertain the range of behaviors that have been developed to define gender and on the forces at work in the creation of these roles. The role of women in American society was conditioned by religious attitudes and by the conditions of life that

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a woman, and she learns that she is both because of her experience as a child and a woman and not in spite of it. Stephen Jay Gould considers the issue of sexual differentiation in terms of how men and women use their brains differently. Both are people, of course, and are such in part because they have brains of a certain size to differentiate them from the smaller brains of other primates. He discusses an earlier researcher, Broca, who tried to show that men were superior (he accepted this as a given) because their brains were somewhat larger than women's brains. Gould looks back at this earlier research and comes to a different conclusion: I have reexamined Broca's data, the basis for all this derivative pronouncement, and I find his numbers sound but his interpretation ill-founded, to say the least (Gould 753). One concern is that Broca simply had too little data on which to base any conclusion. Gould finally comes to a more sweeping conclusion: "I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant and highly injurious" (Gould 755). Women may indeed be different from men, but this is not a result of brain size and has nothing to say about the level of achiev
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1335
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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