The New Gender Paradox. Judith Lorber

1998, 2005).

Gender as a social institution

According to Giddens, society-wide structural principles that extend over time and space can be considered institutions (1984). In Paradoxes of Gender (1994), I claimed that gender was a social institution based on three structural principles: the division of people into two social groups, “men” and “women,” the social construction of perceptible differences between them, and their differential treatment legitimated by the socially produced differences. In complex societies, the binary division by gender overrides individual differences and intertwines with other major social statuses – racial categorization, ethnic grouping, economic class, age, religion, and sexual orientation – to create a hierarchical system of dominance and subordination, oppression, and exploitation. The members of the dominant gender status, usually hegemonic men, legitimate and rationalize the gender order through politics, the media, the education system, religion, and the production of knowledge and culture. Gendered kinship statuses reflect and reinforce the prestige and power differences of the different genders and institutionalize heterosexuality as an intrinsic part of gender as a social institution (Butler 2002; Ingraham 2006).

      The concept of gender as a social institution makes change seem impossible, but institutions do evolve or are drastically altered through political movements. Through feminist political activism and other political and social forces, the institution of gender has certainly evolved in western societies: Women and men now have formal equality in all the major social spheres (Jackson 1998). No laws prevent women from achieving what they can, and many laws help them do it by preventing discrimination and sexual harassment. More and more countries are ratifying laws to protect women’s procreative and sexual rights, and to designate rape, battering, and genital mutilation as human rights crimes. However, despite formal and legal equality, discriminatory treatment of women still regularly occurs in the economy and in politics. Gender equality has not significantly penetrated the family division of labor, and conflicts over who takes care of the children spill over and are exacerbated by gender inequities in the paid job market. Women have not gained the power or economic resources in most western societies to ensure the structural bases of gender equality, and so their successes are constantly being undermined by the vicissitudes of the economy, a war, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, or a pandemic.

Conclusion

To review: The processes of doing gender and gender performance construct individual identity. Gendered individuals in interaction with others equally gendered construct gendered organizations. These are cemented by a gender-segregated and stratified job market, gendered political structures, family and kinship systems, cultural productions, religions, and educational systems into gendered regimes within which individual constructions of gender play out. It is this edifice of gender that is fragmenting in many ways and being sustained in other ways. The next two chapters will describe these two warring trends.