Cultures commonly allow a range of ways in which men can be men and women can be women.  Culture also tells us how different activities should be conducted, such as how one should act as a husband, wife, parent, child, etc.  These rules of permissible behavior are usually flexible to a degree–there are some alternatives rather than hard rules.  In North America, for instance, culture tells us how we should dress based on our gender, but it allows us to dress in different ways in different situations in order to communicate varied messages and statuses.  The clothing patterns of women in this society can be particularly rich and complex.  Their clothing can be intentionally business-like, recreational, as well as sexually attractive, ambiguous, neutral, or even repulsive.  North American women are generally more knowledgeable than men about the subtleties of using clothing and other adornment to communicate their intentions.  The wide range of permissible ways of being a woman in North America today makes women somewhat unpredictable as individuals when others are trying to understand their intentions but do not fully comprehend the cultural patterns.  It is particularly hard for men from other cultures to comprehend the subtle nuances.  This at times can result in awkward or even dangerous situations.  For instance, the easy friendliness and casual, somewhat revealing dress of young North American women in the summertime is sometimes interpreted by traditional Latin American and Middle Eastern men as a sexual invitation.  What messages do the clothes and body language of the women in the pictures below communicate to you?  How do you think they might be interpreted by members of the opposite gender and by people in other cultures?  Do you think that the age of the observer might play a part in their interpretation?

The range of permissible ways of dressing and acting as a man or woman are often very limited in strictly fundamental Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Hindu societies.  In Afghanistan under the Taliban rule during the late 1990’s, men were expected to wear traditional male clothing and were beaten or jailed by morality police for not having a full beard, playing or listening to music, or allowing female family members to go out in public unchaperoned.  Women were similarly punished for being in public without wearing a plain loose outer gown that covered their face and entire body including their feet.  They also were not allowed to go to school or to work outside of the home.  To the surprise of Europeans and North Americans, many of these conservative cultural patterns did not disappear with the end of Taliban control.  They are deeply ingrained in the Islamic tradition of Afghanistan and in the more conservative nations of the Middle East.

No one knows everything about his or her own culture.  In all societies, there are bodies of specialized cultural knowledge that are gender specific–they are known to men but not women or vice versa.  In many societies there are also bodies of knowledge that are limited largely to particular social classes, occupations, religious groups, or other special purpose associations.

Gender based skills, knowledge, and perceptions largely stem from the fact that boys and girls to some extent are treated differently from each other in all societies.  While there may be considerable overlap in what they are taught, there are some things that are gender specific.  In the Western World, for instance, it is more common to teach boys about the skills of combat and how machines work.  Girls are more often exposed to the subtleties of social interaction and the use of clothing and makeup to communicate intentions.  Not surprisingly, men are more likely to know how to fix their car or computer, while women generally are better at predicting the outcome of social interaction and make finer distinctions in fabric and color terms.  You can test your own gender related cultural knowledge with the following pictures of relatively common items from North America:

There are many professions in large-scale societies.  Each one usually has its own terminology and specialized tools.  Lawyers, medical doctors, soldiers, and other specialists use numerous technical terms in their professions.  To make it even more obscure for outsiders, these professionals often use abbreviations to refer to their technical terms.  For instance, orthopedic surgeons commonly refer to a particular kind of knee operation as ACL surgery.  ACL stands for anterior cruciate ligament.  Most people outside of the medical fields who have not had this surgery are unlikely to know where this ligament is and what it does, let alone know what the abbreviation means.

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