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In embracing the resulting ambiguities of identity³ construction and reconstruction that followed from the cultural turn, researchers have been able to uncover a spectrum of shifting – and even multiple (Saugeres, 2002) – gender identities formerly hidden within generalized categories (Bock, 2006). Biology is no longer considered the singular source of gender, with some feminist thinkers having labelled existing ideas of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as arbitrary (McCormack, 1993). Such labelling is understandable, given the fact that women’s ‘nature’ has in the past been used as a source of domination by those who would claim that women’s social roles are prescribed by biology and are therefore unchallengeable and unchangeable (Lawler, 1996).

According to Adrienne Rich, this biological stance has moulded society’s expectations of women into unrealistic ideals of tireless caregivers to children and adult males (Lawler, 1996). Some feminist writers would lodge this expectation firmly in the realm of the family, noting it as a place where the facilitation of alternative gender relations is a near impossibility (Finch, 1996). According to Chodorow (in Crowley and Himmelweit, 1992), this situation is reflective of women’s childhood relationships with their fathers (mediated through their mother, since fathers are remote), and exacerbated by the increasingly isolated nuclear family, which has diminished women’s access to their sisters and mothers. Saugeres (2002) also writes that identity formation begins in early childhood (the very years in which many children are receiving the tireless care mentioned above). However, she notes that it is continually shaped through relationships by the recognition of difference between self and others. Further, McNay (2004, p. 177) posits that gender identities may only be recognized in the ‘lived reality of social relations’. Thus, the formative role of relationships of all kinds is a particularly critical component in understanding the construction of gender identity (Brandth, 2002).

Rejecting the view of women’s gender identity as biologically produced (and men’s as socially produced), many feminists have come to name society as the construction site of gender differences (McCormack, 1993). Simultaneously, feminist scholars warn against going so far as to fictionalize the category ‘woman’, as such a deconstruction would ‘deprive us of a position from which to speak as women, and a collective basis for struggle’ (Jackson, 1993, p. 5). In a similar vein, Cosslett et al. (1996) write that the constructedness of identities in no way diminishes the reality of experiencing them – a reality that is often difficult for women to navigate, given the contradictory positions created by decades of equating the word ‘person’ with ‘male’ (Howell et al., 2002). In response, a number of feminist scholars have embraced the concept of ‘intersectionality’, which requires inequalities to be examined as they appear across different social contexts and in relationship with the vast variety of women’s lived experiences (Risman, 2004). Nevertheless, while women as individuals and in organizations have long fought against pervasive forms of domination, new forms emerge and become ensconced even as the old are torn down (Bartky, 1993).