IVY KENNELLY: Gender as a process is something that's going on all the time. Your parents, your siblings, your peers, your educators, all these people, not to mention the pervasive television, do gender to you all the time, and you gender yourself as well.
BARRIE THORNE: We enact it by how we sit, how we move, how we dress, how we talk.
IVY KENNELLY: When you walk down the street, the way you walk, whether you swivel your hips, or whether you keep your shoulders still, or whether your waist is involved, that's doing gender. When you put on eyeliner, that's doing gender.
SCOTT COLTRANE: Men have to act masculine and women have to act feminine. People have coined the term doing gender to capture this process. That is, we act, and we are held accountable for how we act, as a man or as a woman. So if you're a policeman, it's not enough to act as a police person. You have to act like an image of what a police man or a police woman is doing.
WOMAN: The fact that gender is a very different experience for males and females might suggest that men and women are fundamentally very different. But according to many of those who study gender, this is a fallacy.
SCOTT COLTRANE: Men and women are more alike than they are different. They're not programmed to be automatically different from each other. So even those differences that we keep hearing about—men are more mathematical, women are more verbal—when you look at the magnitude of those differences, it's a few percentage points. These are small differences.
JANET SHIBLEY HYDE: Women actually get better grades than men in mathematics. If you look at something like self-esteem, which has had a lot of publicity, girls, adolescent girls having self-esteem problems, in fact, those differences are small, too.
IVY KENNELLY: One of the things sociologists like to talk about is how these categories of gender are sort of silly because sure, there are some anatomical differences between people with male bodies and people with female bodies. But in actuality, there's more variation within any one of those categories than there is between.
JANET SHIBLEY HYDE: My research, and the research of a lot of other people, shows that actually, the psychological gender differences between men and women are quite small despite what you see in the popular media like John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. It's not at all based on the scientific evidence. Somebody once said, actually, it's more like men are from South Dakota and women are from North Dakota, rather than being from two separate planets.
SCOTT COLTRANE: We tend to think that women are soft, nurturing, cuddly, kind, and caring. And we tend to think that men and boys are rough, tough, tumble, domineering, in charge, sharp, quick, and witty. Well, in fact, all people are all things. There are overlapping tendencies.