gendered

1. 1
   adjective

   Having qualities or features that people associate with a particular gender.

   Like clothing styles that are read at a glance as masculine or feminine.

   Marketing teams often rely on gendered color schemes, like pink for girls and blue for boys.

   Her research examined how gendered expectations shape children's career choices.

   Similarstereotyped

   Oppositeunisex, neutral

   Note

   The sense social scientists lean on, as in Pat Kirkham's The Gendered Object (1996). There, gendered clothing for children "both reflects and reinforces" traditional gender representations. The word usually comes before nouns for objects and expectations, such as clothing, colors and toys. It often hints that the association comes from society and is passed on, not found in the thing itself.

2. 2
   adjective

   Separated or organized into distinct groups according to gender.

   Like a building with one wing set aside for men and another for women.

   The institution maintained gendered dormitories well into the modern era.

   Critics argued that the gendered seating arrangement reinforced outdated norms.

   Similarsingle-sex, segregated

   Oppositemixed, coed, unisex

   Note

   It grades freely: more gendered, most gendered. An activity becomes more gendered as its male and female roles grow more distinct, as parenting once was. What matters here is separation, meaning who does what or who goes where. Particular qualities are not the point. Dormitories, seating and chores are gendered in this way when they sort people into groups.

3. 3
   adjective

   Having a grammatical system that classifies nouns into classes such as masculine, feminine, and neuter.

   Like a filing cabinet where each noun must go into a labeled drawer before grammar lets you use it.

   French is a strongly gendered language, assigning every noun to one of two classes.

   Students often struggle with gendered nouns when the assigned gender seems arbitrary.

   Oppositegenderless

   Note

   In linguistics the term is strictly grammatical. Hebrew is gendered because every noun is masculine or feminine, whatever the noun refers to. The classes show up in agreement, as articles, adjectives and pronouns change to match the noun. Keep this apart from the social sense. Calling a language gendered here says nothing about its speakers' attitudes toward men or women.

4. 4
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of gender.

   The registration system gendered applicants based on their first names.

   Early census takers gendered each household member at the door.

   Note

   A regular verb form, so one spelling serves as both the simple past (the form gendered every applicant) and the past participle after have or be (she was gendered wrongly). The object is usually a person, gendered by name, pronoun or appearance. It can also be a thing, such as a text read as written by a woman or a man. Where nothing is being assigned, the word is the adjective of gendered traits.

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