When we talk about gender inequality, we are not talking about a natural order of things – we are talking about a system. Women across the world continue to face barriers in the workplace, in politics, and within their own homes – barriers built not by biology, but by social structures that have been centuries in the making. Understanding these structures, and the thinkers who challenged them, is essential to understanding why gender equality remains an unfinished project today.
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What do we mean by “gender”?
Before diving into the politics of inequality, it helps to be clear about what “gender” actually means in a sociological context. Sex refers to biological characteristics – chromosomes, hormones, reproductive anatomy. Gender, on the other hand, is a social and cultural construct: the roles, behaviors, expectations, and identities that a society assigns to people based on their perceived sex. The distinction matters because it shifts the question from “what are women naturally like?” to “what has society made women into – and why?”
This distinction was powerfully captured by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in her landmark 1949 work The Second Sex. Her famous declaration – “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” – is not just a philosophical provocation. It is an argument that femininity is not a biological destiny but a social role, molded by the forces and expectations surrounding a person from birth. Womanhood, in other words, is learned, not given.
Simone de Beauvoir and the concept of “the Other”
De Beauvoir’s framework goes further than just separating sex from gender. She argued that in a patriarchal society, man is treated as the default, the norm, the universal human – while woman is defined as the “Other.” As an existentialist, she denied there was any fixed essence to womanhood: woman’s identity has been socially constructed by men, by ideological systems that prescribe her subordination, and by women’s own internalization of those systems.
This concept of “Otherness” has profound consequences. Women’s oppression limits their ability to act freely: their life projects are circumscribed by society, choices are constrained, and expectations are made to feel natural and inevitable. De Beauvoir identified three pathways for women’s liberation – through work and economic independence, through solidarity as a social group, and through transforming society toward greater equality. These were radical demands for 1949, and in many ways, they remain urgent today.
Kate Millett and “sexual politics”
Two decades after de Beauvoir, the American feminist writer and activist Kate Millett picked up and sharpened this analysis with her 1970 book Sexual Politics. The book, originally her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, defined patriarchy as a system whereby the female half of the population is controlled by the male half – an ideology that conditioned both men and women to accept a particular sexual hierarchy and develop an understanding of their role and status within it.
Millett’s key insight was that this hierarchy is political, not natural. She believed that “femininity” was a socially constructed idea imposed on women, and that all aspects of society functioned according to “sexual politics” – making women internalize their inferiority until they believed in it. The word “politics,” for Millett, did not mean elections or parties. It meant any power-structured relationship in which one group controls another. Sex, she argued, is precisely such a relationship.
Millett argued that male-dominated societies produce works of culture that degrade women and hinder progress toward gender equality, pointing to the writings of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer as literary evidence of how patriarchal values are woven into everyday cultural life. Psychologically, this system was reinforced through the infantilization of women and their internalized sense of inferiority – and it could also be seen in economic and educational systems that perpetuate women’s dependence.
Patriarchy and the socioeconomic status of women
The ideas of de Beauvoir and Millett are not merely theoretical – they help explain patterns that persist in the real world today. One of the most documented is the gender pay gap. On an hourly basis, women in the United States were paid 18% less than men in 2024, even after controlling for race, education, age, and marital status. Globally, the picture is similar: women worldwide earn approximately 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, and at the current rate of progress, it will take an estimated 134 years to achieve full global gender parity.
The wage gap is not just about individual choices or qualifications. In 2024, full-time year-round working women were paid just 80.9 cents for every dollar earned by men – the worst ratio since 2016 – as men’s earnings rose significantly while women’s remained largely flat. The gap is even wider along racial lines. A typical Latina working full-time year-round earned $33,620 less than a typical white man. These are not anomalies – they reflect deep structural inequities rooted in how society values, or devalues, women’s labor.
Occupational segregation compounds the problem. Women are disproportionately concentrated in caregiving, education, and service sectors – fields that tend to pay less, in part because they are associated with femininity. Women were paid less than men across all of the 20 largest occupations employing women in the United States. Meanwhile, high-paying fields in finance, technology, and management remain disproportionately male, not by accident, but because of barriers in hiring, promotion, and workplace culture.
Women and political decision-making
The barriers women face are not limited to the workplace. Political power – the ability to shape laws, budgets, and public policy – remains heavily skewed toward men. Women are underrepresented at all levels of decision-making worldwide, and at the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.
Women represent just 23.3% of Cabinet members heading ministries globally, and continue to be primarily assigned portfolios related to gender, family, and social affairs – while areas like economic policy, defense, justice, and home affairs remain dominated by men. This is a telling pattern: even when women gain access to power, they are frequently channeled toward “soft” portfolios deemed appropriate for their gender, while the levers of economic and security policy stay largely in male hands.
In 2024, the growth in female parliamentary representation was the slowest in two decades, registering only a 0.03% increase. Structural barriers – from financing constraints to entrenched social norms – continue to limit women’s entry into politics, even in countries that have made formal commitments to gender equality.
How gender norms are reproduced
One of the most important contributions of feminist sociology is the insight that gender inequality does not simply happen – it is actively reproduced, generation after generation, through institutions, culture, and socialization. Children are taught early what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl,” not through nature, but through clothing, toys, language, and expectations. Schools, media, religious institutions, and families all play a role in transmitting these norms.
Millett described the family as a key site of patriarchal reproduction – arguing that the family not only encourages its members to conform, but acts as a governing unit that rules women through domestic structures rather than through any direct formal relationship with the state. De Beauvoir similarly identified how the myth of the “eternal feminine” – the idea that there is some natural, universal essence to womanhood – traps women in socially constructed roles by making those roles appear inevitable rather than chosen.
The result is what sociologists call the social construction of gender: the process by which society shapes, enforces, and reinforces ideas about what men and women should be, do, and want. The Second Sex was important precisely because it challenged the belief in natural causes for differences between men and women and called for a transformation of gender relations across the economy, society, politics, and culture.
The feminist challenge and its legacy
Both de Beauvoir and Millett represent a tradition of feminist thought that refuses to treat women’s subordination as natural, inevitable, or trivial. Their work helped establish the intellectual foundations for second-wave feminism – a movement that pushed for legal rights, workplace protections, reproductive freedoms, and a fundamental rethinking of gender roles.
Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes gains including legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes, and expanded sexual freedom in part to Millett’s efforts. De Beauvoir’s framework, meanwhile, influenced not only feminist activists but also subsequent theorists like Judith Butler, whose work on gender performativity extended de Beauvoir’s insight that gender is something one does – performs – rather than something one simply is.
Yet the work is far from complete. The data on wages, political representation, and occupational segregation make clear that the structural conditions Millett and de Beauvoir identified in the 20th century have not disappeared – they have evolved, adapted, and in some cases deepened. The persistence of the gender pay gap, the underrepresentation of women in leadership, and the continuing burden of unpaid domestic labor on women all reflect a social order that still, in significant ways, organizes itself around the subordination of women.
Understanding gender through sociology means recognizing that these outcomes are not the result of individual failure or natural limitation – they are products of systems. And because systems are built by human societies, they can also be changed by them.
What do you think? If gender is a social construct rather than a biological given, what does that mean for how we design schools, workplaces, and political institutions? And given that feminist thinkers like de Beauvoir and Millett identified these patterns over half a century ago, why do the structural inequalities they described continue to persist – and what would it actually take to change them?
References
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
- https://hist259.web.unc.edu/secondsex/
- https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/The_Second_Sex
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Millett
- https://theconversation.com/kate-millett-pioneered-the-term-sexual-politics-and-explained-the-links-between-sex-and-power-her-book-changed-my-life-227376
- https://breakingdownpatriarchy.com/episodes-35-36-sexual-politics-by-kate-millett/
- https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/sexual-politics-kate-millett
- https://www.epi.org/blog/gender-pay-gap-2024/
- https://www.equalpaytoday.org/gender-pay-gap-statistics/
- https://iwpr.org/iwprs-new-national-annual-womens-wage-gap-analysis-shows-second-consecutive-year-of-decline-2/
- https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Occupational-Wage-Gap-2024-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf
- https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-womens-leadership-and-political-participation
- https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2024/06/poster-women-political-leaders-2024
- https://anfrel.org/power-and-parity-womens-representation-in-global-politics-in-2024-and-beyond-data-dive-issue-no-14/
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