Ann Oakley (1972) was one of the first sociologists to extend ideas about socialization to try to understand how gender is learned and how femininity and masculinity are socially constructed. She and other sociologists were suggesting that perhaps women and men were only as different as a society made them. Oakley started using the term gender in the early 1970s to distinguish biological sex from gender. The word
gender was borrowed from the social psychologist Robert Stoller who worked on individuals with ambiguous genital sex (Jackson, 1998b: 33). Oakley adapted the term to refer to the social classifications of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ (Oakley, 1985a: 16). Oakley (1972) assumes that sex (biological difference) is the basis of gender distinctions but disputes that biology is destiny. Boys and girls are treated and talked about differently from birth, with girls entering what Jessie Bernard (1981: 120) referred to as ‘the “pink world” of those up to five years of age’.There are different expectations about what is ‘normal’ for girls and what is ‘normal’ for boys. In explaining gender socialization sociologists have argued that the messages about how to be a boy and how to be a girl are communicated through social institutions. Here I want to briefly explain how sociologists have understood the role of social institutions in the early stages of gender socialization. Leaving the role of work for discussion later in the chapter, how do families and schools ‘make’ gender differences?