When did people stop saying "sex" and start saying "gender"?

[drspouse]

Just that really.
I am meaning when they started using it to mean "men and women" rather than when did the term "gender" emerge to refer to sex stereotyped roles etc.
Does anyone know if there's anything interesting/scholarly written about this (though I'd also be interested to know if anyone remembers being specifically told to use the term, or if they have seen a change through their working life)?
I cannot remember what was standard practice when I was younger (I'm early 50s) or if there was a change though my vague memory is that things used to say "sex: m/f".

I'm quite old and I agree with Moveable. Back in the 70s you'd say "sex" to refer to men and women - official forms would always ask for your "sex". Gender, a term previously mostly used in language teaching, began being used by feminists in the 70s and 80s to refer to socially constructed ideas about masculinity and femininity, and explicitly different from biological sex. It was a very useful distinction.

Hard to remember exactly when it started to change, but I think the 90s. I have always found it intensely annoying, and these days it seems universal.

I googled "Google tool to trace word usage over time". Well, I never said I was bright...

Screaming I was at school in the 80s and a few people knew that "rubber" was rude in the US but most of us didn't, and we all just said "rubber" because it was silly that it had another meaning (like Australians using Durex to mean sellotape - some of us knew but few of us cared).

Sorry, I missed drspouse excellent graph, which pretty much settled it!

I'd love to have the last 10 years' data!

(just outed myself as a geek and therefore NOT POSSIBLY a woman, according no doubt to the BACP.

That graph was interesting. I do find it annoying when people conflate sex and gender - cos they don't mean the same thing. I bet the last 10 years data shows an increase in the use of the word gender. Just a wild guess.

I didn't know that about Durex, dr, but I'm glad to learn :)

I remember thinking Essex was rude when I was little (1970s) - we’d snigger about our ‘Essex cousins’ because anything S.E.X was naughty!

I have drummed into the dds, that ‘gender’ is all the made up stuff that people tell you you should do or shouldn’t depending whether you are a boy or girl (you’re a girl, you must like pink....you’re a boy you must like football) and sex is what you’ve got between your legs that makes you a boy or girl.

There are some academic papers which scrupulously use 'sex' relating to biology and 'gender' to social matters.

There's some interesting advice here, I think.

www.editage.com/insights/should-i-use-the-word-sex-or-gender-in-my-scientific-research-paper

Re the 'gender pay gap' - Thats arguably appropriate usage. The gap appears mostly because of gendered thinking about women's role as nurturers and in the workplace. There is of course, a strongly biological underpinning to part of it - men's utter crapness at bearing offspring and milk production. But the fact that care for children past infancy (and adult dependents eg elderly parents) largely falls to women is pure gender. Biases against women in leadership roles is pure gender.

I remember thinking Essex was rude when I was little (1970s) - we’d snigger about our ‘Essex cousins’ because anything S.E.X was naughty!

But Essex kids could laugh louder at the preposterous 'middlesex'!

Well, no, Boy George et al were actually gender benders, not sex benders. They were men who wore the trappings of femininity

Put it into the context of the kids, parents/grandparents of the time. There was a lot of "is it a boy or a girl" "does it know what it is ?" dark muttering going on.

Most people would have blinked like a confused owl if "gender is a social construct" were presented to them.

Back in the day what you wore, what you did, how you expressed yourself had more acceptance as being a natural, normal, necessary part of your sex.

Which is why effeminate boys and men got a lot of "he thinks he's a girl/woman! Ha ha ha" style bullying going on in their obit. Same for less feminine women.

My poor cousin got a lot of stick. Her status as female was under constant attack. She got a lot of "well if you try to look like a boy we'll hit like you're a boy". For their perspective she was trying to step out her sex, not gender. Cos clothes and interests belonged to sexes.

Feminist theory didn't have a huge following in many circles and the media/technology of the time wasn't making it particularly accessible to the masses.

So for most people sex was gender and gender was sex. Two words, same thing, as far as a great deal of ordinary people were concerned.

The Red Tops may have known what they meant by the headline. But they also understood that most of the readership would conflate sex & gender, viewing them as having the same meaning, but one rhyming better with (the not so subtle dig laden use of) bender.

Regarding rubber and condom, I do know someone who tried so hard not to ask for a rubber to erase her work, she actually asked for a condom. No, it wasn’t me.

Re the 'gender pay gap' - Thats arguably appropriate usage.

I can see that though last few times I've heard it discuss on Radio 4 the biological underpinning was at the fore front - pg bf rather than societal expectations.

Though I wonder if the term helped word gender gain exposure and possibly contributed to confusion that seems so prevalent around gender and sex definitions.

At a work meeting (medical/biology/pharma related) recently where everyone was not an English speaker (and I was the only one there who lives in an English-speaking country and speaks it daily) I noticed that everybody used gender, even in presentations of data where sex mattered. I asked one of the presenters (Italian, and one of the leading experts in his field of medicine) later why he uses gender and he said he thought it was the polite term to use in English. I had a long chat with him about trans and sex/gender and he said he would try to use the term sex where approbriate in future but he didn't think it would catch on, it's too ingrained by now.

Interesting. When I had my eldest c. 2005 there was an uptick in the offering of private ‘gender’ scans - maybe it was deemed more palatable in terms of branding than ‘sex.’
I’m regularly in the company of first time parents and they all refer to gender. (And then go on to demonstrate they’ve fully bought into genderism which should render finding out the gender in utero impossible but they’re not big on logic, as we know.)

Article by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper
'Gender is not a spectrum
The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling'
(extract)
"What is gender? This is a question that cuts to the very heart of feminist theory and practice, and is pivotal to current debates in social justice activism about class, identity and privilege. In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and processes that this bifurcation entails.

The word ‘gender’ originally had a purely grammatical meaning in languages that classify their nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. But since at least the 1960s, the word has taken on another meaning, allowing us to make a distinction between sex and gender. For feminists, this distinction has been important, because it enables us to acknowledge that some of the differences between women and men are traceable to biology, while others have their roots in environment, culture, upbringing and education – what feminists call ‘gendered socialisation’. (continues)
aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison

It'll be a shame if we have to give up the distinction between gender and sex as lost - it's a useful one. I'm generally in favour of language evolving, but not when it means that you have to use more words to make it clear what you mean, which is what tends to happen when you can't use one word in the expectation that it will be clearly understood to have a precise meaning.

I work in an industry where we produce a lot of forms for the public to fill in with personal details.

The majority say gender and have done for ages.

I had a chat with someone at work years ago (before the trasns thing) and said why do the people always put gender when they mean sex? He said, they are the same, aren't they? My response at the time was that gender = sex roles and sex = sex. Now, who knows? There is no single defiition of gender >> most people will take it to mean sex.

Of course the confusion around terminology is helping certain matters e.g the idea that most people are "cis" which will be backed up by people saying they are the gender they were assigned at birth becasue they don't know what the questions are actually asking.

They have never actually checked to see whetehr in reality most people are "cis" AFAIK >> I suspect most people aren't. And where does that leave things? A free for all is where, and when things are in flux / chaos, it's an opportunity that predators always take advantage of.

I think it's seen as more polite and most people think sex = gender >> the words means the same.

Does the MN profile still have a choice of 'gender' rather than sex? I've mentioned this (many times) before, but it really is ridiculous for a parenting site (which couldn't exist without sex!) to be using a coy euphemism. It obviously did mean sex as there were only M/F or 'prefer not to say' options, IIRC.

Re 'gender pay gap' Though I wonder if the term helped word gender gain exposure and possibly contributed to confusion that seems so prevalent around gender and sex definitions.

That may be true. I suspect in addition to the possible rationale for 'gender' in this context, 'sex pay gap' really could be a bit errrrr what? - is there a better way of putting it? (More succinctly than 'Male/female pay discrepancy' or suchlike)

My French teacher in the mid 90s had a pet rant about everyone conflating sex and gender. It annoyed him very much that people were too prudish to use sex when that is what they meant. It stuck with me that rant because I think it was the beginning of my conscious realisation that gender is a social construct.

Errol Male/female pay gap isn't too bad. Sex-based pay gap?

I saw Caroline Criado-Perez say she wished people would stop telling her to say "sex pay gap".
My take is, we only have gender as a result of sex, so if we were not of different sexes following on from which society decides we should conform to different gendered behaviours, we would not have a pay gap.