They discuss how gender is constructed by society as a feature that separates the human race into groups, and this separation affects us every day by discrimination, unequal treatment, or stereotypes. In a perfect world, all gender would be is a characteristic that people differ on, like hair color or height. But most would agree that this world is far from perfect, so therefore gender is made into such a bigger difference than hair color (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Structural functionalism suggests that instead of gender just being differences, it actually sets the stage for how people act in society. Men are more “instrumental”, meaning more intellectually involved, while women are more “expressive”, or emotional (Ferris and Stein, 2016: …show more content…
Deutsch does an excellent job of giving suggestions on how to undo gender by focusing more on the less discussed genders of transgender people. Ridgeway examines how gender creates the female and male roles in society, and how those roles can be changed. Gender is a social construct that is derived from biological differences. A single difference in appearance is made into differences in expected roles and behaviors by culture and society reinforcing them on people. Society’s view on gender may be a difficult view to change, but by simply refusing to do gender and to look at how we can change the way society works, we can change society as a whole. Gender inequality can end by changing the way social institutions and agencies of socialization view gender and gender