In this segment, Jason Rosario explores the historical roots of gender roles, arguing that many indigenous societies were matriarchal and that patriarchal gender binaries were introduced through European colonialism and religious influence. He emphasizes that gender is a social construct distinct from biological sex, noting that gender assignment begins as early as pregnancy and is reinforced through cultural practices such as baby showers, gender reveals, and other rites of passage. Rosario contends that these early socialization mechanisms create a persistent gender wedge that contributes to contemporary disparities in education and economic outcomes between male‑identified and female‑identified individuals. He calls for a critical examination and decoupling of gender from sex to address these systemic inequities.
Chapters
If I may, you know, one of the things, just kind of to take it a little bit further back to, you know, the genesis of this idea of gender and masculine versus feminine boys and girls, I've, you know, just started to kind of dig into the research and look at where did this all begin. And when you look at indigenous societies and, you North America and Latin America or South America, and even Africa, they've always been, or a lot of them have been matriarchal, right? And so where was this idea of patriarchal society, gender, male, female introduced? And I think a lot of that came through when religion kind of swept throughout the continents, when certain European influences swept throughout the continent, a lot of that stuff was introduced. But what I'd like to see is for all of us that are doing this work and on this call is if we can start to analyze what a decoupling of gender from sex looks like. Gender being a social construct, we're taught boy, boy-ness or maleness, we're taught what it means to be a woman, and that's different than sex, right? You're not born a boy or a girl, you're assigned that gender at some point. And I would argue that that starts as soon as the woman says she's pregnant. You know, what are you having? You're having a boy or a girl? And then everything from there kind of starts to kind of socialize that child as a boy or a girl, whether it's a baby shower, a gender reveal. So all these rites of passages that reinforce what we are and what we wind up performing, I think, is what I'd like to start to challenge, right? Do we even need some of those rites of passage to begin with. And I think you make a good point as far as what the disparity in terms of education, in terms of economic success that exists right now between quote-unquote men and women or male-identified versus female-identified. But I think there's a deeper issue here that needs to be addressed, and that is what does that even mean and how do we address the human, the very basic human need of education and kind of closing that gap. And I think it starts with the way we socialize young people, young humans, from the very beginning that starts us off with this big wedge in between us. And then we're spending the rest of our lives trying to kind of bring that, close that gap.
