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Gender systems are the social structures that establish the number of genders and their associated gender roles in every society. A gender role is "everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male, female, or androgynous. This includes but is not limited to sexual and erotic arousal ...
Whilst XY sex determination is the most familiar, since it is the system that humans use, there are a range of alternative systems found in nature. The inverse of the XY system (called ZW to distinguish it) is used in birds and many insects, in which it is the females that are heterogametic (ZW), while males are homogametic (ZZ). [18]
[8] [76] [77] When a baby is born, society allocates the child to one gender or the other, on the basis of what their genitals resemble. [63] However, some societies have historically acknowledged and even honored people who fulfill a gender role that exists more in the middle of the continuum between the feminine and masculine polarity.
In the sociology of gender, the process whereby an individual learns and acquires a gender role in society is termed gender socialization. [9] [10] [11] Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two (boy/man and girl/woman), others recognize more.
Gender is used as a means of describing the distinction between the biological sex and socialized aspects of femininity and masculinity. [9] According to West and Zimmerman, is not a personal trait; it is "an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements, and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society."
The term gender is sometimes used by linguists to refer to social gender as well as grammatical gender. [103] Some languages, such as German or Finnish, have no separate words for sex and gender. German, for example, uses "Biologisches Geschlecht" for biological sex, and "Soziales Geschlecht" for gender when making this distinction. [ 104 ]
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In birds, the genes FET1 and ASW are found on the W chromosome for females, similar to how the Y chromosome contains SRY. [9] However, not all species depend upon the W for their sex. For example, there are moths and butterflies that are ZW, but some have been found female with ZO, as well as female with ZZW. [ 22 ]