Table of Contents

• What is sex typing?
• How does sex typing happen?
• Sex typing and the family: a functionalist view
• Sex typing as an ongoing performance
• Examples of sex typing
• Why sex typing matters
• Sex typing versus gender roles: what is the difference?
• Is sex typing changing?

Sex typing is the process through which individuals are taught, encouraged, and expected to adopt the behaviours, attitudes, interests, and personality traits that a society considers appropriate for their biological sex. It is a key concept in the sociology of gender, and it explains why boys and girls so often end up liking different toys, choosing different subjects at school, and behaving in noticeably different ways, even though there is little evidence that these differences are rooted in biology alone.

What is sex typing?

To understand sex typing properly, it helps to separate two words that are often used interchangeably in everyday speech: sex and gender. Sex refers to the biological characteristics that distinguish male and female bodies, such as chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy. Gender, by contrast, refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, and identities that a culture attaches to being male or female. This distinction was popularised by Ann Oakley, a British sociologist who argued in the 1970s that while sex is largely fixed at birth, gender is learned. Sex typing sits at the meeting point of these two ideas: it is the social mechanism by which a person’s biological sex becomes the basis for assigning them a gendered identity and a set of expected behaviours.

The term itself originates in psychology before being absorbed into sociology. Sandra Bem, an American psychologist, developed gender schema theory in the late 1970s to explain how children become sex typed. According to Bem, children build mental frameworks, or schemas, that help them sort the world into ‘things for boys’ and ‘things for girls’. Once this schema is in place, a child will actively seek out toys, clothes, and activities that match their own sex category, and will avoid or dismiss anything coded for the opposite sex. Bem’s theory is important because it shows that sex typing is not simply imposed from outside; children themselves become active participants in sorting and reinforcing gendered categories once the schema has taken hold.

How does sex typing happen?

Sex typing does not occur through a single event. It is the cumulative result of socialisation, which is the lifelong process by which individuals learn the norms, values, and expected behaviours of their society. The family, the school, peer groups, and the media all act as agents of socialisation, and each one nudges a child towards behaviours considered fitting for their sex.

Ann Oakley identified four specific processes through which parents socialise children into sex-typed roles. The first is manipulation, where parents shape a child’s behaviour to conform to gender expectations, for example by telling a boy not to cry because crying is ‘for girls’. The second is canalisation, where children’s attention is directed towards particular objects, such as giving dolls to girls and toy vehicles to boys. The third is verbal appellation, the use of gendered language and nicknames, such as calling a boy ‘tough’ and a girl ‘pretty’ for the same action. The fourth is differing activity exposure, where boys and girls are encouraged towards different games, chores, and pastimes from an early age. Oakley’s four processes remain one of the clearest sociological explanations of how sex typing is transmitted within the family before a child has any independent capacity to question it.

Beyond the family, the school plays a significant role. Teachers, sometimes without realising it, often praise boys for assertiveness and girls for neatness, and subject choices at school continue to show stark patterns by sex, with boys overrepresented in physics and computing and girls overrepresented in languages and the caring professions. Peer groups intensify this further, since children police one another’s behaviour and quickly mock anyone who steps outside the expected category. The American developmental psychologist Eleanor Maccoby spent decades studying how children segregate themselves by sex in play, finding that even when adults make no effort to separate boys and girls, children do so themselves from around the age of three, reinforcing sex-typed behaviour through their own social world rather than only through adult instruction.

Sex typing and the family: a functionalist view

Not every sociologist sees sex typing as a problem. Talcott Parsons, an American sociologist working in the functionalist tradition, argued that a clear division between male and female roles in the family was not arbitrary but functional, meaning that it served a useful purpose in keeping the family unit and wider society stable. Parsons described the male role as ‘instrumental’, oriented towards paid work and providing for the family, and the female role as ‘expressive’, oriented towards emotional support and childrearing. From this functionalist perspective, sex typing within the family is a form of early training that prepares children to step smoothly into these complementary adult roles when they grow up. Parsons’s account has been heavily criticised since the 1970s for assuming that this division is natural and beneficial rather than questioning who benefits from it, but it remains an important reference point because it shows how sex typing was once defended as socially useful rather than restrictive.

Sex typing as an ongoing performance