A premature farewell to gender? Young people 'doing boy/girl'

Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002: xxiv) suggested that it was possible that ‘elements of a gender-specific socialisation’ were still at work in a late modern society, with gender being sometimes referred to as a zombie category (ibid.: 113 and 203). For Connell (2005: 13), ‘One of the most important circumstances of young people’s lives is the gender order they live in’. The family is widely seen as a crucial institution in constructing and reproducing that gender order. Families through their structures, processes and practices, create gendered individuals; perpetuate ways of ‘doing boy/girl’ and legitimate gendered constructions of masculinity and femininity, while obscuring their hierarchical elements. Such gendered constructions are then depicted as ‘natural’, and are seen as inevitably leading to horizontal and vertical segregation in paid employment and in differential participation in other parts of the public arena. The underlying question of whether the gender order is legitimating unequal relationships is rarely raised. Wharton (2012) suggested that gendering as a process operates at three levels. The first of these refers to the construction of a gendered person, not only through socialization, but also through, for example, identification occurring in a context where the main care giver is typically female, so that girls’ early identification with that care giver reinforces their sense of connectedness (and their behaviour and attributes as ‘little women’), while boys’ identification with a ‘cultural stereotype of the masculine role’ (Chodorow 1978: 176) heightens their sense of separateness (and frees them up to be children rather than ‘little men’). Second, Wharton refers to various aspects of the interactional context which build on gender categorization, through encouraging children to absorb gender coding, so that they enact and reinforce appropriate ways of doing boy/girl and absorb the gendered meaning attached to housework and caring activities. Finally, she refers to the institutionalized aspects of creating and maintaining gender differences through social and cultural arrangements as regards the gendered allocation of power and privilege as well as the wider context provided by organizational and state policies related to parental leave and child care.