Social Constructionist Perspective

In July 2017 James Damore, a senior engineer at Google, released his memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which stated that women were biologically and psychologically not suited toward careers in technology. This memo did echo around, but not for the reasons Damore wished. Instead, once the memo gained traction, Damore was fired from Google. His memo reflects that people often see differences between men and women as natural and biological, and that it can have disastrous consequences for women in the workforce when their coworkers or bosses have these ideologies. Unlike what Damore states, gender differences and expectations are socially constructed not naturally existing. Damore's statement reflects why socially constructed notions

In order to understand the social constructionist perspective, it is important to understand the essentialist perspective first. The essentialist perspective assumes that “things are the way they are by nature” which serves as an explanation for why certain norms or phenomena exist (Roy 8). Roy uses the example asking why women often choose to stay at home and work there versus paid jobs, and a person from an essentialist perspective would say it is because it is in women’s nature, that it is the way things are (Roy 8,9). In fact, James Damore seems to exhibit an essentialist perspective as he suggests that women are not as skilled in technical fields like coding by nature. However, the social constructionist perspective directly challenges this essentialist perspective. Roy argues that this perspective is not correct because for example, while most societies differentiate between men and women, the expectations, rules, and responsibilities greatly differ between different societies. Also, some societies have more than two genders as well (Roy 9). If gender norms simply existed by nature, all societies would have the same ideals of men and women, and all societies would have the same genders as

Reification is the process of social construction, how things become reality. People place experiences into categories and then act based on those categories (Roy 19). Naming is also an important part of reification because the process of naming something makes it seem more real. Categories define what we see and how we see things in the world. There are two types of categories: gradient and bounded. Gradient categories can be defined on a continuum, while bounded categories have strict boundaries (Roy 14). In this case, gender is a bounded category in the United States because there are two separate dichotomous genders, male and female, although people are starting to recognize other