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Mohammad: Well, sex is your biological femaleness or maleness, but gender is very different. It's your psychological and behavioral experience of maleness and femaleness.

Alayna: Gender is the kind of psychosocial expectations of what it is to be a man or what it is to be a woman, whereas sex is just the biological components of your primary and secondary sex characteristics.

I was raised by a single dad. I didn't really grow up being forced to, you know, you have to do ballet. One girl I grew up with, in particular, her parents were much more religious and conservative than mine were. They kind of forced that she wasn't to have ambitions besides getting married and being mom.

Not to say I didn't have gender limitations on myself, either. I mean, you know, when it came to power tools or whatever, it was always, let your brother do that, even though we were the same age. There was definitely always the expectation that I would get married and have children.

Mohammad: Growing up, pretty much my dad always encouraged me to do sports, and be involved in things like that, doing things that makes you male, like sports, doing hard work and learning to drive at a young age. In school, I think if I were to choose something like fashion design or anything like that, my male peers would be like, what are you doing? You're not supposed to be doing this. You're supposed to be interested in football or sports like that.

Mickala: Being a twin, me and my sister, we were constantly hearing, that's not ladylike, or, as a young lady, you shouldn't act like that. Definitely it instilled this kind of, OK, this is what it's supposed to be like to be a female.

Aleigh: I was the first born out of three. My dad very much wanted a boy. And my mom was very excited that I was a girl. She put me in dance, cheer, bows, curls. By age five, I was wearing makeup and hair curls, all the works.

My dad, on the other hand, put me in baseball practices, and took me to football games and stuff like that.

Mickala: Gender definitely approaches your dating life. Because it's like, OK, if I was supposed to be prim and proper and respectful, then I'm supposed to be with a male that's masculine, and he can provide, and he's strong and opinionated, and can make decisions. But I can be like that, but in a box. I can't fully express myself necessarily to the extent that males can. So it definitely has so much to do with how I personally react, and I know how a lot of my friends react to the world around us.

Alayna: Gender development can be influenced by your peers, and your family, and the media, just for the sole reason of, everyone, as a human being, wants to fit in. So when girls are young, girls will listen to their peers and be like, oh, all of a sudden, even though I've made straight A's in math my entire life up to this point, I must be horrible at math and science because I'm a girl and girls aren't good at it. Lots of boys will have the pressure to go be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a mechanical engineer, or a pilot, just like their dad.

Mohammad: Well, in media, I think, they tend to really make men appear as more authoritative or more masculine, or strong, or independent, whereas females are portrayed as kind of needy, or concerned about their sexual attractiveness.

Aleigh: I have boy-girl twins. They're 3. We just had their birthday party. My daughter got five dolls, and my son got all trucks. It's funny watching people assume what they want, when I even put on the list-- I was like, they love dress-up. And I put, as a group, what they love. They love puzzles, they love dress-ups. But they still identified with, oh, she's a girl, she needs all girly things, and he's a boy, he needs all boy things. They're very strict on how they view people's gender.