Brief Communication: Gender and Sex: Vive la DifferencePHILLIP L. WALKER1* AND DELLA COLLINS COOK2

1Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara,California 931062Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405

KEY WORDS sex; gender; bioarcheology

ABSTRACT The distinction prevalent in the social sciences between theterms sex and gender is a useful one and ought to be preserved. Sex refers tothe anatomical or chromosomal categories of male and female. Gender refersto socially constructed roles that are related to sex distinctions. Use of theseterms as synonyms is becoming increasingly frequent in physical anthropol-ogy, especially among bioarchaeologists and primatologists. A failure to makethe distinction between gender and sex is analytically incapacitating in a fieldsuch as physical anthropology, whose strength lies in the integration ofbiological and cultural information. Am J Phys Anthropol 106:255–259,1998. r 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

At first with mild amusement but nowwith growing concern, we have watched theloss of the distinction between the termsgender (an aspect of a person’s social iden-tity) and sex (a person’s biological identity)in the pages of this and other scientificjournals. The distinction between genderand sex is especially useful for biologicalanthropologists and is worth preserving.While the failure to distinguish clearly be-tween these terms may have little effect insome disciplines, it is analytically incapaci-tating in a field such as biological anthropol-ogy. The strength of our field lies in theintegration of biological and cultural infor-mation, and we must communicate withcolleagues who use these terms in severaldistinct technical senses. This problem isanalogous in many ways to the conceptualdifficulties that arise when people confuseculture and biology in the term race.

In ordinary English discourse, gender hasbeen used as a synonym for sex, with second-ary and often humorous intent, since atleast 1387 (Oxford English Dictionary [OED],1989:100), but the two words have quitedifferent etymologies. Gender is from theLatin word genus, meaning kind or race,whereas sex is from the Latin sexus, ‘‘either

of two divisions of organic nature distin-guished as male or female respectively’’(OED, 1971:578). Gender is derived fromIndo-European roots related to kinship, asin generation, gene, and gentile; it refers to asystem of classification in which there maybe many categories. Sex is derived fromIndo-European roots related to separation,as in sect or dissect; it refers to dichotomousrelationships in which two categories aredivided one from another (Shipley, 1945).The loss of distinction between the termshas been variously lamented and abetted bygrammar mavens in the recent past (seeSteinmetz, 1991).

It is in technical English that distinctionsbetween sex and gender become most prob-lematic. On the one hand, among our col-leagues in linguistics, gender refers to ‘‘a setof mutually exclusive kinds into which alanguage categorizes its nouns and pro-nouns’’ (Pinker, 1994:476). English is un-usual in the degeneracy of this system. Thenotion that sex and gender are synonymous

*Correspondence to: Phillip L. Walker, Department of Anthro-pology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106.E-mail: walker@sscf.ucsb.edu

Received 4 September 1997; accepted 25 February 1998.

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 106:255–259 (1998)

r 1998 WILEY-LISS, INC.

would not arise in the mind of, for example,a speaker of German. The kinds of nounsmay have nothing to do with sex, as in manyAmerindian languages, where animate andinanimate beings are distinguished throughgender distinctions (Pinker, 1994). On theother hand, some social anthropologistsmake a distinction between sex, a biologicalgiven, and gender, a cultural construct notat all limited to two kinds (Ortner andWhitehead, 1981; Herdt, 1994). Other socialand biological anthropologists seem onlydimly aware of this technical distinction anduse the terms gender and sex as equivalentsor preferentially use one term (usually gen-der) because of the desirable social connota-tions doing so has to them. This last usagenicely fits the definition of what ElmanService (1969) called ‘‘mouthtalk’’: wordsused to advertise the speaker’s social iden-tity instead of to communicate about thematter at hand. Thus, for those of us inanthropology departments, in a walk downthe hall we may cross several frontiers in theuse of the terms sex and gender.

To some, the substitution of gender for sexmight seem a harmless way of emphasizingthe extent to which the gender roles thatmales or females assume are social con-structs. This well-intentioned desire to em-phasize the social influences on our sexualidentities is misguided. Without the distinc-tion between gender and sex, studying gen-der roles in ancient societies becomes avirtual impossibility. The sex/gender distinc-tion is especially important in bioarcheology,since it is possible to determine sex throughskeletal studies and obtain information ongender roles through artifact analyses. Bio-archaeological studies of gender are excitingbecause they promise to provide informationon similarities and differences among societ-ies in the evolution of gender roles. We areaware of only one attempt at attachingcultural meaning to sex/gender discordancein ancient burials (Roscoe, 1991), an intrigu-ing suggestion that these individuals repre-sent a third gender in the ancient South-west. A search for similar examples in nativeCalifornian remains was disappointingly un-productive (Hollimon, 1990). With the devel-opment of better techniques for extractingDNA from ancient bone, it may someday be

possible to explore the relationship betweenthe gender roles that people assumed andthe full range of sex chromosome configura-tions found in human populations.

The term gender began to be commonlyused in the biomedical literature in the early1970s by researchers interested in the rela-tionship between a person’s sex as indicatedby his or her karyotype and the person’ssocial identity. Since then, there has been asteady spread in the use of the term genderthroughout biology (Table 1; Fig. 1). Some ofthis reflects a growing interest in the extentto which genetic and environmental vari-ables influence gender roles. However, muchof the recent popularity of the term genderappears to reflect a lack of understanding ofthe significance of the sex/gender distinc-tion. With increasing frequency, gender isbeing used to refer to an animal’s biologicalidentity (in other words, its sex). It is com-mon, for example, to find papers in whichthe genders of rats and monkeys are dis-cussed in physiological or histological stud-ies having nothing to do with social identity.In other cases, the terms gender and sex areused as equivalents by authors who appearto substitute one for the other simply as astylistic device to avoid repetition. Use of theterm gender for animals seems to be particu-larly prevalent in works on social behavior,where we discover that dogs (Serpell, 1996)and horses (Boyd and Houpt, 1994) havegender.

A review of the use of the terms genderand sex in the biomedical literature includedin the Melvyl Medline Plus database be-tween 1966 and 1997 reveals some interest-ing differences between physical anthropolo-gists and other researchers (Table 1). Only2% of the biomedical literature as a whole isindexed with sex as a key word. This con-trasts markedly with the American Journalof Physical Anthropology, in which 23% ofarticles are indexed on sex. There has beenconsiderable feminist criticism of the ab-sence of women as subjects of biomedicalstudy (Fausto-Sterling, 1985), a problemthat does not seem to afflict physical anthro-pology. Clearly, research on sex differences isof much greater interest to the physicalanthropologists than to other researchers.

256 P.L. WALKER AND D.C. COOK

Physical anthropology is similar to otherbiological sciences in that the proportion ofarticles indexed on sex has not changedappreciably during the past 30 years (Fig. 2;Table 1). In contrast, the frequency of ar-ticles indexed on gender has increased mark-edly in all disciplines and especially sincethe early 1980s. Although the sample ofphysical anthropological articles is small, italso appears that use of the term gender hasgrown in our discipline at a rate similar tothe 50% per year increase seen in otherareas of biological research.

A closer examination of how gender isused in the physical anthropological andbiomedical literature is disheartening. Sincearticles in which a useful distinction is madebetween sex and gender are likely to beindexed on both terms, we examined the useof gender in a sample of such articles (Table2). Almost all articles dating from the period

1966–1974, when researchers first becameinterested in the relationship between sexand gender, make a useful distinction be-tween the terms. Gender is used as theequivalent of sex in less that 4% thesearticles. Although there has been steadyincrease in the misuse of gender from themid-1970s onward, the situation has deterio-rated markedly during the last 10 years.Currently, more than half the articles in-dexed on both terms fail to exploit thedifference in their meaning. Unfortunately,physical anthropologists are among the worstoffenders. None of the articles indexed onboth terms that have been published in theAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropologyduring the past decade make a useful distinc-tion between gender and sex.

Why are we in this muddle? A look atabstracts of the annual meeting of the Ameri-can Association of Physical Anthropologists

TABLE 1. Growth in the use of the term gender in the biomedical literature

Year of publication

Total1966–1974 1975–1979 1980–1984 1985–1989 1990–1992 1993–1997

All References inMedline

Total number ofarticles 1,986,470 1,256,600 1,388,925 1,749,735 1,129,618 1,659,431 9,170,779

Gender a keyword

N 87 995 1,746 3,806 4,813 12,231 23,678% 0.004 0.079 0.126 0.218 0.426 0.737 0.258

Sex a key wordN 45,463 32,208 34,642 41,953 31,363 50,322 235,951% 2.289 2.563 2.494 2.398 2.776 3.032 2.573

Both sex andgender akey word

N 59 613 864 1,655 1,886 5,026 10,103% 0.003 0.049 0.062 0.095 0.167 0.303 0.110

Gender/sex ratio 0.002 0.031 0.050 0.091 0.153 0.243 0.100American Journal

of PhysicalAnthro-pology

Total number ofarticles 767 493 507 571 318 525 3,181

Gender a keyword

N 0 0 1 5 6 8 20% 0.000 0.000 0.197 0.876 1.887 1.524 0.629

Sex a key wordN 175 121 128 104 100 142 770% 22.816 24.544 25.247 18.214 31.447 27.048 24.206

Both sex andgender akey word

N 0 0 1 1 6 7 15% 0.000 0.000 0.197 0.175 1.887 1.333 0.472

Gender/sex ratio 0.000 0.000 0.008 0.048 0.060 0.056 0.026

257SEX AND GENDER

for 1995 is instructive, because in abstractsthe author’s linguistic creativity is unfet-tered by the efforts of curmudgeonly edito-rial voices such as ours. The use of the termgender is largely restricted to two subject

areas: primate behavior and bioarcheology.Students of primate behavior are probablyresponding to the usage trend among behav-ioral biologists. At the AAPA meetings, ba-boons have become quite genderfied. Bioar-

Fig. 1. Growth in the use of the term gender in the biomedical literature expressed as a ratio of thenumber of articles indexed on gender to those indexed on sex in the Medline database.

Fig. 2. Changes in the proportion of articles indexed on the word sex in Medline database for thebiomedical literature as a whole (all Medline articles) and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology(AJPA).

258 P.L. WALKER AND D.C. COOK

cheologists are perhaps more likely tointeract with social constructionists thanare other physical anthropologists becauseof their role in integrating biological informa-tion into reconstructions of past social behav-ior. Unfortunately, many of us have ab-sorbed only a part of the new technicallanguage in social anthropology, althoughwe note that several recent abstracts havemade an appropriate distinction betweengender and sex (e.g., Akins, 1995; Grauerand McNamara, 1995). It is surprising howfrequently the terms are avoided in AAPAabstracts; often subjects are referred to sim-ply as males and females or boys and girls.

It is doubly unfortunate that two recenthandbooks of skeletal biology refer to whatone determines by looking at a pubis or amastoid process as gender (Buikstra andUbelaker, 1994; Steele and Bramblett, 1988).We must brace ourselves for a generation ofstudents who consider sex and gender syn-onyms in the technical language of bioarche-ology.

In biological research on experimentalanimals, substitution of gender for sex iscomparatively benign since the rat’s socialidentity is clearly irrelevant to the researchthat is being described. In many areas ofphysical anthropological research, and espe-cially in bioarchaeology, maintaining thisdistinction is important because it makes itpossible to explore the relationship betweenthe biological and social forces that shapehuman behavior. Failure to make a distinc-tion between gender and sex will seriously

hobble communication with other branchesof our discipline. Vive la difference!

LITERATURE CITED

Akins NJ (1995) Contrasting gender adaptation in theGalisteo and San Juan Basins of New Mexico. Am. J.Phys. Anthrop. 20 (Supp.):56.

Boyd L, and Houpt KA (1994) Przewalski’s Horse: TheHistory and Biology of an Endangered Species. Al-bany: State University of New York Press.

Buikstra JE, and Ubelaker DH (1994) Standards forData Collection from Human Skeletal Remains. Fay-etteville, AR: Arkansas Archeological Survey Re-search Series No. 44.

Fausto-Sterling A (1985) Myths of Gender: BiologicalTheories about Women and Men. New York: BasicBooks.

Grauer A, and McNamara EM (1995) Health, diseaseand gender in a 19th century poorhouse population.Am. J. Phys. Anthrop. 20 (Supp):101.

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Pinker S (1994) The Language Instinct: How the MindCreates Language. New York: William Morrow.

Roscoe W (1991) The Zuni Man-Woman. Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press.

Serpell J (1996) The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behav-iour, and Interactions with People. New York: Cam-bridge.

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Steele DG, and Bramblett CA (1988) The Anatomy andBiology of the Human Skeleton. College Station:Texas A&M Press.

Steinmetz S (1991) Dictionaries recognize ‘gender’ for‘sex.’ New York Times Jan. 18, page A30.

TABLE 2. Use of Sex and Gender as equivalent terms in Medline articles indexed on both sex and gender

Year of publication

1966–1974 1975–1979 1980–1984 1985–1989 1990–1995

Number of titles examined 59 50 100 56 53Sex and gender used as equivalents

N 2 5 15 25 30% 3.39 10.00 15.00 44.64 56.60

259SEX AND GENDER