Breaking down the question
The verb construct is deliberate and double-edged. It asks both how sociologists treat gender as an analytical category when studying inequality, and — pointedly — how they understand gender itself as socially constructed rather than biologically fixed. The examiner wants you to show that gender enters stratification analysis as a made, not given, basis of inequality.
The phrase in their analysis on social inequality tells you the frame. This is not a general question about women, but about how gender operates as a dimension of stratification alongside class and status, and how sociologists have brought it into a field that once ignored it.
At 10 marks, you should establish the sex-gender distinction, show how gender structures inequality through patriarchy and the division of labour, and note the move towards intersectionality.
How to approach it
Begin with Ann Oakley's distinction between sex and gender, which underpins the sociological claim that gender is a social construction learned through socialisation. This is the conceptual foundation of the whole answer.
Then show how gender functions as a dimension of stratification — through patriarchy, the gendered division of labour, differential access to power, property and prestige — and how feminist scholarship exposed the gender-blindness of classical stratification theory. Our note on the dimensions of stratification places gender alongside class and status.
Conclude with intersectionality — the recognition that gender inequality is shaped by its interplay with caste, class and race — as the current frontier of analysis.
Model answer
Sociologists construct gender, in their study of social inequality, first by insisting that it is a social rather than a biological category. Ann Oakley's distinction between sex and gender is foundational: sex refers to the biological differences between males and females, while gender refers to the culturally learned attributes of masculinity and femininity. Gender roles are not given by nature but acquired through socialisation in the family, school, media and peer group, and they vary across societies and over time. By treating gender as constructed, sociologists open it to critical analysis as a basis of inequality that could be otherwise.
Gender then enters stratification analysis as a distinct dimension of inequality. Where classical theory, from Marx to Davis and Moore, was largely gender-blind — treating the family as a unit and the male as its representative — feminist sociologists demonstrated that gender is itself a hierarchy. Sylvia Walby's concept of patriarchy names a system of social structures through which men dominate and exploit women, operating across paid work, the household, the state, culture, sexuality and male violence. Gender inequality is thus not incidental to stratification but one of its organising principles.
The mechanisms are concrete. The gendered division of labour assigns women disproportionately to unpaid domestic and care work, undervalued precisely because it is unpaid, while confining them in the labour market to lower-paid, less secure occupations — horizontal and vertical segregation, the wage gap and the glass ceiling. Access to property, credit and inheritance is often skewed against women, as is access to political power and public office. Cultural constructions of femininity legitimise these arrangements by casting them as natural, which is exactly the assumption the sex-gender distinction dismantles.
Sociologists have also refined the category over time. Rather than treating women as a homogeneous group, intersectionality — developed within feminist and Dalit scholarship — insists that gender inequality is always experienced through its intersection with caste, class, race and religion. A Dalit woman's disadvantage cannot be understood as gender plus caste added together, but as a distinctive location produced by their interaction. This move guards against a single-axis analysis and captures the plurality of women's experiences.
In constructing gender this way, sociologists shift the question from biological difference to social arrangement, and from individual disadvantage to structural inequality. Gender becomes a category that can be measured, compared across societies, and connected to power, work and property — a full dimension of stratification rather than a natural fact standing outside it.
In conclusion, sociologists construct gender in the analysis of inequality by treating it as a social construction, by identifying patriarchy and the gendered division of labour as structures of stratification, and by situating gender within an intersectional web of caste, class and race. This construction transformed stratification theory, exposing an axis of inequality that classical accounts had rendered invisible.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner is alert to whether the candidate reads construct in its full sense — both as bringing gender into the analysis and as the claim that gender is socially made. A weak answer describes women's disadvantage descriptively; a strong one begins from the sex-gender distinction and builds gender explicitly as a dimension of stratification.
The best responses connect the construction of gender to a critique of the gender-blindness of classical theory, deploy patriarchy and the gendered division of labour as structural mechanisms, and close with intersectionality. Naming Oakley and Walby, and showing how gender sits alongside class and status, demonstrates the theoretical control the examiner rewards within the 10-mark limit.