Gender is the wide set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female entities, extending from one's biological sex to, in humans, one's social role or gender identity.

Index of articles, click here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender

Gender is the wide set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female entities, extending from one's biological sex to, in humans, one's social role or gender identity.

Gender is the wide set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female entities, extending from one's biological sex to, in humans, one's social role or gender identity. As a word, it has more than one valid definition. In linguistics, it refers to characteristics of words. In ordinary speech, it is used interchangeably with "sex" to denote the condition of being male or female. In the social sciences, however, it refers specifically to social differences such as gender roles. The World Health Organization (WHO), for example, uses "gender" to refer to "the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women". People whose gender identity feels incongruent with maleness or femaleness sometimes refer to themselves as "intergender." Some cultures have separate sets of gender-related social roles (distinct from those for men and women) for certain types of intergendered people, such as those covering the hijra of India and Pakistan.

Many languages have a system of grammatical gender, a type of noun class system—nouns may be classified as masculine or feminine (for example Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and French) and may also have a neuter grammatical gender (for example Sanskrit, German, Polish, and the Scandinavian languages). In such languages, this is essentially a convention, which may have little or no connection to the meaning of the words. Likewise, a wide variety of phenomena have characteristics termed gender, by analogy with male and female bodies (such as the gender of connectors and fasteners) or due to societal norms.

While the idea of gender as a social construct is favored in many social sciences, especially gender studies, in the hard sciences, research links biological and behavioral differences in males and females as determining factors for gender (here meaning "the state of being male or female") in humans and other species; this is assisted by debate regarding the extent to which the various biological differences necessitate differences in gender identity, which has been defined as "an individual's self-conception as being male or female, as distinguished from actual biological sex".

Index of articles, click here.

Fidel Priestonn,
39 Bartok Bela korut Szombathely,
Szombathely 9700
Hungary
Last updated: October 14, 2010