"Review of Literature on Gender in the Family

Academy of Marketing Science Review,  2003  by W, James,  Commuri, Suraj,  Jun, Sunkyu

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James W. Gentry is Professor, Department of Marketing, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln NE 68588-0492, (402) 472-2328, (402) 472-9777 (fax), jgentry@unl.edu. Suraj Commuri is Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia Mo 65211, (573) 884-9710, commuris@missouri.edu. Sunkyu Jun is Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, Hongik University, Seoul Korea 131-792, (82) 2-320-1739, skjun@hongik.ac.kr. Direct correspondence to any of the three authors. This article is a part of a special issue on "Gender Issues in Consumer Research" edited by Jim Gentry, Seungwoo Chun, Suraj Commuri, Eileen Fischer, Sunkyu Jun, Lee McGinnis, Kay Palan, and Michal Strahilevitz. Joseph A. Cote served as the editor for this article. The authors would like to extend thanks to the editor, several of the special issue co-editors, the three reviewers, and to Julia McQuillan and Diana Niaghi for their helpful comments.

Sex is differentiated from gender in terms of its biological determinism. In other words, while some (sexual) differences between men and women appear to be biologically inevitable, others (gendered) are clearly social constructions that have been knit together to serve various purposes at various periods in time. However, in commentaries on how men and women differ, there is frequently a lack of attention to distinguishing differences that are biologically inevitable from those that do not bear any such biological determinism. The purpose of this paper is to document extant research to date on differences between men and women in the context of household. In documenting the extant research, it is hoped that the reader's attention may be drawn to the fact that many differences observed in such research do not appear to be biologically inevitable and therefore must be qualified in terms of the gendered lens that has been used to both document and interpret such differences.

WHAT IS GENDER?

Gender is the symbolic role definition attributed to members of a sex on the basis of historically constructed interpretations of the nature, disposition, and role of members of that sex. It differs from a classification based on sex in that there is little evidence to suggest that gendered differences are biologically inevitable (while sexual differences are largely biologically determined); gendered differences are only sociologically inevitable, and that "inevitability" may diminish with time.

An interest in gender has been persistent and gender issues have been investigated in many domains, including workplace, marketplace, and leisure activities. Support for the socially constructed nature of gender lies in the evidence that gender is a malleable concept. For example, an assertive woman executive may enact her gender quite differently in the workplace than at home, or as Risman (1998, p. 2) writes, "the same person may display passive and subordinate 'femininity' in a love affair yet be a tyrant at the office." At other times, for marital harmony to exist, partners must please each other by behaving in ways that are at odds with their gender socialization and which they would not find pleasing themselves (Thompson and Walker 1989). Traditionally, the most basic form of gender was observed within a household, where the expectations for the fulfillment of various specialized household obligations were prominent. Yet, more recently, with the changing compositions of households and many emergent household structures, gender has evolved into a dynamic construct (Firat 1994) even within the household and a marketer must understand the changing nature of how gender is played by spouses in order to understand fully the rapidly changing nature of the household itself.

PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER

Risman (1998) identified three distinct theoretical traditions that help understand sex and gender. A first tradition focuses on gendered-selves - whether the sex differences are due to biology or socialization. This focus is on the individual level of analysis, and encompasses social identities. Risman (1998, p. 16) noted that all theories of the gendered-self posit that by adulthood, most men and women have developed very different personalities: women have become nurturant, person oriented, and child-centered while men have become competitive and work-oriented. This perspective has been widely embraced in consumer behavior and marketing; for example, consistent with the gendered-self tradition, Meyers-Levy's (1988) selectivity hypothesis (which has been questioned by both Hupfer (2002) and Putrevu (2001) in this special issue) asserts that the male agentic role is characterized by concern for self, while the female communal role typically embraces concern for both self and others. Such coupling of male and "masculine" and female and "feminine" has been criticized by many researchers, largely because "gender" is seen to be dynamic in nature (Allen and Walker 2000; Risman 1998), changing for the individual on an almost continuous basis.