Race, Ethnicity and Gender

Chapter 7 ended by saying that this chapter would look at social construction, discrimination and how categories intersect with each other and with class. The categories of race, ethnicity and gender are used to sort people and, as Chapter 6 showed with ascribed status, they are often treated as fixed at birth. Sociologists ask a different question: how did these categories come to mean what they mean, what effects do they have in everyday life, and what happens when a person belongs to several of them at once? The sections below follow that order. "Constructed" does not mean "unreal" here, and the chapter tries to keep that point visible throughout.

What "Social Construction" Claims

Wikipedia's Race (human categorization) article says that modern science treats race as a "social construct", an identity assigned by society's rules, and that race has no inherent biological meaning. The same article says that most scholars agree race has real material effects through institutional preference and discrimination, and that scholars still debate how far racial categories are biologically warranted. So the claim has two halves that must be kept together: the categories are made by societies, and the consequences of using them are real.

Race: A Short History and What Genetics Says

The Race article says the term was used in 16th-century Europe for various geographic and kinship groups, often ranked in a hierarchy, and that by the 17th century it began to refer to physical traits. It dates François Bernier's classification to 1684, Linnaeus's division of Homo sapiens into continental varieties to 1735, and Blumenbach's five divisions, with no hierarchy among them, to 1775. From Bernier to Linnaeus is 51 years and from Linnaeus to Blumenbach is 40 (computed in Python). The article reports Bancel and colleagues placing the invention of the modern concept between 1730 and 1790. It also says Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu challenged the concept on empirical grounds, and that in 2023 the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine formally renounced its use in genetics.

The three shares add up to 100 (computed in Python), so about 15% of the variation lies between groups of any kind in this breakdown. The page also quotes Witherspoon and colleagues (2007): "most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them." It quotes Craig Venter (2000): "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one." Disagreement is also reported on the same page: David Reich is paraphrased as saying that differences in genetic ancestry which happen to correlate with racial constructs are real. The page presents both views, and I cannot tell from the part I read how the full article resolves them.

Ethnicity: Identity and Boundaries

Wikipedia's Ethnic group article defines the term as "a group of humans who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes", which may include language, culture, ancestry and religion. It notes that ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with race, but that "not all ethnicities identify as racial groups". It reports that before Max Weber race and ethnicity were largely treated as two aspects of one thing, and that Weber's view of ethnicity as a social construct helped separate them. It credits Robert E. Park, in the 1920s, with an ethnicity theory that treats race as one of several factors in ethnicity alongside religion, language, customs, nationality and political identification. Michael Omi and Howard Winant are named as critics of that theory in Racial Formation in the United States; I do not know their argument beyond the title.

Gender as a Social Construction

Wikipedia's Social construction of gender article calls it a theory in the humanities and social sciences that examines how gender perception and expression arise from cultural origins, mechanisms and social interaction. It says gender is distinct from biological sex, that it is learned through socialisation from early childhood (Chapter 4) and reinforced through education, family and media, and that gender roles vary across time, culture and context. It describes the view that gender roles are "an achieved status" in a social environment. That is the status vocabulary from Chapter 6, and it is worth noticing that Chapter 6 listed race as an ascribed status while this page treats gender as achieved through interaction, so the two chapters' pages do not use one simple rule.

• West and Zimmerman (1987): gender as an accomplishment, "doing gender", which is situational and interactional.
• Goffman (1956) and Garfinkel (1967): early interactionist work treating gender as performance and ongoing achievement. This links to the symbolic interactionism of Chapter 2 (my own link) (check).
• Judith Butler (1990): in Gender Trouble, introduced gender performativity, the claim that gender is produced through repeated acts rather than expressing a pre-existing self.
• Disagreement: the page also lists critics. Steven Pinker accepts some socially constructed categories but rejects social constructionism as the sole explanation; Elizabeth Grosz argues the sex-gender distinction is itself essentialist; and several trans studies writers object that social construction oversimplifies embodiment. I read these only as short summaries.

Discrimination: Definition and Examples

Wikipedia's Discrimination article opens with "making unjustified distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories", which it says usually deprives people of legal or human rights. It adds that moral philosophers use a moralised definition, in which discrimination involves acts that "wrongfully impose a relative disadvantage or deprivation on persons based on their membership in a salient social group". Under that view, the page says, a person can be discriminated against without being harmed. The part of the page I read did not discuss direct versus indirect discrimination or statistical discrimination, so this chapter does not define them, and the same part gave institutional discrimination only as a link and a remark that discriminatory traditions, policies and laws exist in institutions worldwide.

These are figures as the page reports them. I did not follow them to the underlying studies, and a single study of one country does not tell us the rate everywhere (my own caution) (check).

The Gender Pay Gap

Wikipedia's Gender pay gap article defines it as "the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are employed". It separates the unadjusted gap, the average difference in yearly earnings between male and female workers, from the adjusted gap, the difference in pay for the same work after accounting for hours, occupation, education and experience. The article says the adjusted gap is much smaller, which means most of the overall gap comes from differences in jobs and hours rather than from pay for the same work. That does not make the difference harmless: the page lists occupational segregation, the "motherhood penalty", gender norms, glass ceilings and discrimination among the explanations, and says studies disagree about how large the discrimination part is.

Arithmetic on the US figures: 85 minus 81 is 4 points over 21 years (2003 to 2024), and 79 minus 56 is 23 points over 53 years (1963 to 2016), all computed in Python. If women earn 85 for each 100 earned by men, the gap is 15% of men's earnings, but men earn about 17.6% more than women (100 divided by 85, minus 1). The two statements are both correct and they are easy to mix up, which is a good habit to check for in any news report that quotes a "gap" (check).

Intersectionality

Wikipedia's Intersectionality article says Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, in the essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, and developed it in 1991. It describes intersectionality as "an analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities" produce combined effects of discrimination and privilege. The article names earlier writers who described overlapping oppressions, including Sojourner Truth (1851), Anna J. Cooper (1892) and Pauli Murray (1947). From Truth to Crenshaw's coinage is 138 years (computed in Python), so the idea is much older than the word.

The page also lists criticisms: that the concept is too broad or complex, that it can reduce people to demographic categories, that it is hard to apply in research, and that postcolonial and transnational feminists see it as reflecting WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) societies. A notice on the page, dated February 2025, says it focuses primarily on the United States. This chapter's other pages also lean towards the United States in their figures, which is a limit on how far the examples carry to other countries (my own observation) (check).

Linking back: Chapter 7 treated class as one way of ranking people. Intersectionality asks what happens when class, race and gender operate together, and it can be read as a challenge to treating each one as a separate row in a table. Whether it is a theory, a method or a framework for thinking is debated; the page calls it an analytical framework.

Where to Read More

• Pages used. Six Wikipedia pages: Social construction of gender, Intersectionality, Race (human categorization), Ethnic group, Discrimination and Gender pay gap. All six were cut off by the fetch tool at 100,000 characters.
• How much was read. Social construction of gender 100,000 of 195,413 (51.2 percent); Intersectionality 100,000 of 278,591 (35.9 percent); Race 100,000 of 285,922 (35.0 percent); Ethnic group 100,000 of 191,715 (52.2 percent); Discrimination 100,000 of 265,855 (37.6 percent); Gender pay gap 100,000 of 299,366 (33.4 percent). All percentages were computed in Python. The Gender pay gap page was read least, and the Race page nearly as little, so later sections that may qualify what is said here were not seen.
• Summaries. The fetch tool returns a summary by a small model, not raw page text, so quotations are only as exact as that summary.
• Primary sources. I have not read Crenshaw, Butler, Barth, Weber or any of the studies the pages cite.

Exercises