About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about how to define gender, focusing in particular on: (i) the historic discrimination against many forms of identity; (ii) gender as a key example of an identity which has been used as a method of discrimination; (iii) some limitations that women faced, financially, legally and socially, in the recent past; (iv) methods of measuring gender, starting with recognising differences between women and men’s societal roles and presence; (v) the gender pay gap as evidence for gender inequality, which can be tackled through passing new laws; (vi) understanding transgender people to be those who do not identify as the gender they were identified as at birth, which is in contrast to cisgender people; (vii) differentiating transgender and non-binary gender experiences in society; (viii) the process of ‘coming out’, which represents a great social difference between cisgender and non-cisgender individuals; (ix) the case that some researchers choose not to acknowledge transgender and non-binary genders in their research, due to personal views or research relevance; (x) the fact that, due to the low numbers of transgender and non-binary people, there might not be a sufficient sample in a study to provide meaningful results.

About the lecturer

Dr Rosie Nelson is a lecturer in gender in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Dr Nelson’s research interests are in LGBTQ+ sexualities, trans and non-binary identities. Some of Dr Nelson’s recent publications include ‘What do bisexuals look like? I don’t know!’ (2020) and ‘Questioning identities/shifting identities’ (2020).