Gender identity is the gender that a person identifies with. If you are born biologically female, and you identify with females, women, and femininity, then your gender identity would likely be a woman. Someone born a female but doesn’t closely identify with female/feminine/woman, but also doesn’t identify clearly with male/masculine/man may identify as non-binary, as in they do not fit into or identify with binary gender. For more on gender identity, review the Genderbread person illustration in Chapter 2.

What do you think of when you consider gender and the colors pink and blue? You most likely associate pink with the feminine and blue with the masculine. As a society and culture, we created that norm, but it wasn’t always this way. These color associations have changed drastically in the last hundred years. According to the Smithsonian, an article for June 1918 explained, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. 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, 2011). Until the 1940s, it was the norm for babies of all genders to wear dresses. Society makes and maintains the meaning of gender through its norms, values, roles, and institutions; in this way, we uphold the gender binary.

Black and white. Masculine and feminine. Rich and poor. Straight and gay. Able-bodied and disabled. Binaries are social constructs composed of two parts framed as absolute and unchanging opposites. Binary systems reflect the integration of these oppositional ideas into our culture. This results in an exaggeration of differences between social groups until they seem to have nothing in common. An example of this exaggerated difference is the saying, “men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” Ideas of men and women as complete opposites invite simplistic comparisons that rely on stereotypes: men are practical, women are emotional; men are strong, women are weak; men lead, women support.

Binary notions mask the complicated realities and variety in social identity. They also erase the existence of individuals, such as multiracial or mixed-race people and people with non-binary gender identities, who may identify with neither of the assumed categories or with multiple categories. We know very well that men have emotions and women have physical strength, but a binary perspective of gender suggests that men and women have nothing in common. They are defined against each other; men are defined, in part, as “not women” and women as “not men.” For example, the existence of transgender people, or individuals who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, challenges the very idea of single-sex gender identity. Transgender women, whose bodies were assigned male and who identify as women, show us that not all women are born with female-assigned bodies. The fact that trans people exist contests the argument that biological sex predicts gender identity.

3.2.1 Identity Formation Process from a Sociological Perspective

In sociology, identity formation is a combination of all that surrounds someone and goes into their identity. It includes an individual’s personality and defines how individuals connect to others and themselves. Identity formation relates to one’s presentation of self, or how one portrays oneself to society through actions, expressions, and affiliations with others.

You might not be surprised that men and women approach self-presentation differently. Men typically assertively present themselves by speaking and interrupting others, by visually focusing on the other person when they are speaking, and by leaning their bodies into the conversation. On the other hand, women typically act more modestly; they create status by laughing, smiling, and reacting positively to the statements of others (Dovidio, Brown, Heltman, Ellyson, & Keation, 1988).

Gender differences are, in large part, the result of different social reinforcements around self-presentation. Self-promoting by speaking out and acting assertively can be more effective for men than it is for women because stereotypes tend to depict assertiveness as more desirable in men. These stereotypes have significant consequences in the real world. The “glass ceiling,” the invisible discriminatory barrier that keeps women from reaching top positions in organizations, exists because many people react negatively to women presenting themselves assertively, even though this is considered an essential trait for career advancement (Eagly & Carli, 2015).

3.2.2 Sociological Theories of Self-Development

We are born with a genetic makeup and biological traits. However, who we are as human beings develops over time, often through social interactions. Many scholars in psychology and sociology have crafted theories on identity development, as discussed in the previous section. Psychologists tend to look inward at the qualities of individuals (mental health, emotional processes, cognitive processing). In contrast, sociologists tend to look outward to qualities of social context (social institutions, cultural norms, interactions with others) to understand human behavior.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) first made the connection between psychology and sociology, when he attributed differences in suicide rates among people to social causes (religious differences) rather than to psychological causes (like their mental well-being) (Durkheim 1951). We see this same distinction today. A sociologist studying how a couple arrives at their first kiss on a date might focus their research on cultural norms for dating, social patterns of romantic activity in history, or the influence of social background on romantic partner selection.

One of the pioneering contributors to sociological perspectives on self-development was Charles Cooley (1864–1929). He stated that people’s self-understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them—a process termed “the looking glass self” which is thoroughly social (Cooley 1902). It is based on how we imagine we appear to others. This projection defines how we feel about ourselves and who we feel ourselves to be. Therefore, the development of a self involves three elements in Cooley’s analysis: “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.” For example, how we express gender is based on how we think society and others will view us, and we internalize the positive or negative and reflect that later.

Later, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) advanced a more detailed sociological approach to the self. He agreed that the self, as a person’s distinct identity, is only developed through social interaction. He further noted that the crucial component of the self is its capacity for self-reflection, its capacity to be “an object to itself” (Mead 1934). He broke the self down into two components or “phases,” the “I” and the “me.” The “me” represents the part of the self in which one recognizes the “organized sets of attitudes” of others toward the self. It is who we are in other’s eyes: our roles, our “personalities,” our public personas. The “I,” on the other hand, represents the self that acts on its initiative or responds to the organized attitudes of others. Mead developed a sociological theory about individual development. Think of how young children play-act the “roles” of work or home life as you look at the chart below (figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. Mead’s development-of-self theory