Gender Vs Sex
Dear Colleagues,
The differences between gender and sex: Sex refers to the biological differences between women and men that are universal and do not change. For example, men can impregnate a women and only a women can carry and give birth a baby and breast feed a baby while gender refers to the social differences and relations between girls and boys, between women and men that are learned and change over time within a society and between societies.Gender is socially created ideas and practices of what it is considered to be female or male while sex is universal, biological differences between men and women.Gender is imposed by human society, which generates some deep and far-reaching sense of inequality between the sexes and sex is the basic fact of the nature and does not unfair assign its biological
Gender roles is what men and women can do without any discrimination of sex.Gender roles are socially-defined roles for women and men.For example, most cultures define child rearing as a female role, although there is no biological reason why men cannot do it.
Dear Simonda, Thanks for moderating this interesting topics. I am totally in agreement with the above positing by Janet. In addition there are two main groups of gender theories: non-feminist and feminist, importantly , gender is one of the most important approach to understand issues and problems related to women, as well as women’s entrepreneurship issues. On the other hand, there are no significant difference in the source of assistance used by men and women but yet women enterprises face a higher failure rate than men’s because men are significantly more likely to have access to several outside resources of required business development services and women’s roles and responsibilities become imbued with the ideal of the domestic. Therefore the proper understanding the role of Gender on youth entrepreneurship is most critical
Dear Ekanath, Another reason why some entrepreneurial ventures for women fail is because they face opposition from men. In Kisumu, Kenya for instance, I learned that some women who were given seed funds to set up their own businesses suffered losses when their husbands would want to control the moneys and use them for their own activities like alcohol abuse. In such cases a woman is faced with a dilemma, to divorce and grow in business, or to lose the business and keep her marriage. A choice no woman should be made to make, EVER!
Dear Remmy, Thanks for your response on my posting above. There are many barriers for women entrepreneurs when facing the prospects of starting a new business as well as to sustain their enterprises. The issues you raised is one of the critical barriers for women to be successful entrepreneurs. when I was in south Sudan I saw the situation even worse. What I realised that to promote women led entrepreneurship, we need to develop some gender awareness to the men to find their supportive role as well - what I used to advocate for holistic gender awareness.
Ekanath, Sensitizing the men can go a long way to promote and support women led entrepreneurship but I also think we are now in an era where women must be very assertive to fight for the course.--Kafuiaheto 22:34, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
