In his article concerning gender inequality and gender difference Michael Kimmel tries to prove that gender is not biologically inherent and that both men and women can have either feminine or masculine features. In fact, he provides several agents which greatly contribute to gender "creation". They are one's personality (which is what a person thinks of him- or herself), interaction with society and environment in general, and institutions a person has to work at. With the help of those agents Kimmel explains why there are a lot of cases when even males do not feel like being "powerful" or "in power". The thing is that gender is not something one has, but something one does and according to Kimmel, power cannot be one's property unless a person belongs to a powerful group.
Kimmel applied Social Construction Theory in order to show how limited weak are the views of biological determinism and that of the sex role theory. If to apply principles of the first method it would turn out that no male does not have problems with power acquisition while in the second case a male would have to follow only some well-known principles in order to maintain its gender role (which is not that easily changed as one may assume). Clearly, both assumptions are wrong since we have "powerless" males who do not even dare to compete for political influence for instance, while there are a lot of examples of females being at institutions of power (Indira Gandhi and so forth).
Society as a whole consists of different groups of people with different ideological, political or religious views; of different race, age, sex and ethnicity. In fact, Kimmel says that there are a lot more differences within a given race than between the opposite races. Therefore, it can hardly be referred to as a monolithic one since every subdivision of those groups has its own interests and goals to pursue. However, all those differences are not biologically inherited, but socially constructed. The main...