This section contains a list of key terms that appeared throughout the chapter. See how many of these key terms you can reframe within the context of the chapter content that was discussed around each concept.

• culture: a group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, and norms.
• figuration: the process of simultaneously analyzing the behavior of an individual and the society that shapes that behavior.
• gender: a social identity ascribed to individuals on the basis of their biological sex that dictates appropriate status, roles, and norms for behavior.
• gender analysis: a way of looking at things with the lens of gender to understand relationships between humans, their activities, relations to government, employment, access to resources, and social problems.
• gender binary: a limited system of gender classification that includes only males or females.
• gender roles: are all the things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman in the context of socially constructed gender.
• institutionalized discrimination: policies and practices favorable to a dominant group and unfavorable to another group that are systematically embedded in the existing structure of society in the form of norms.
• intersectionality: an approach originally advanced by women of color that finds it critical to look at how identities and characteristics (such as ethnicity, race, gender, etc.) overlap and influence each other to create complex hierarchies of power and oppression.
• Patriarchy: is the idea that characteristics associated with men and masculinity hold more power and authority than those associated with women.
• scientific method: the process of conducting research that involves these basic steps: (a) formulating a hypothesis, (b) measuring and gathering data to test the hypothesis, (c) analyzing these data, and (d) drawing appropriate conclusions.
• social facts: the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and cultural rules that govern social life
• social institution: a large-scale social arrangement that is stable and predictable, created and maintained to serve the needs of society.
• social problem: any behavior or issue that has a negative impact or consequence on members of society – one that is large enough to need to be addressed.
• social structures: a set of long-lasting social relationships, practices and institutions that can be difficult to see at work in our daily lives.
• sociological imagination: an awareness of the relationship between a person’s behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person’s choices and perceptions.
• sociology: the scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups (micro) to very large groups and institutions (macro).
• sociology of gender: the scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups, micro, to very large groups and institutions, macro through the lens of gender.