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• Carol Ember – Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender Men and Women in the World CulturesThe central aim of this encyclopedia is to give the reader a comparative perspective on issues involving conceptions of gender, gender differences, gender roles, relationships between the genders, and sexuality.
• We do this in two ways.
• First, we have invited scholars to write comparative overviews about what may be universal, what is variable, and to discuss theory and research that might explain those patterns.
• Second, each of 82 specific cultural articles provides a “portrait” of what it is like for boys and girls to grow up and become men and women in that society. Some societies have other gender classes and where these occur, or where boys and girls can cross into other roles, these are discussed.Our portraits also discuss important male-female relationships and a culture’s sexual attitudes and practices.
• We deliberately chose to include cultures from the widest possible spectrums–from egalitarian to stratified, from foragers to intensive agriculturalists, from those with kin groups structured around males to those structured around females, from those where the status of women and men is relatively equal to those where status is mostly unequal.