While it is generally accepted that sex is biologically determined, societies construct appropriate behaviour for each gender, thus producing local gender cultures (Jones (1998) Geoforum, 29, 4). Padmanabhan (2007) Sing. J. Trop. Geog. 28, 1 notes that in rural West Africa the gendered division of labour extends to labelling certain crops as ‘male’ or ‘female’; with the introduction of new crop varieties, these gendered plant constructions are renegotiated. Guyat (2005) NZ Geogr. 61, 3, writing on bar staff, sees that when ‘the dichotomized gender division [was disturbed], it was extremely contradictory and never straightforward because hegemonic performances of masculinities and femininities are so deeply ingrained’.

Gendered power relations often stem from poverty and entrenched structural inequality (McEwan (2000) Pol. Geog. 19, 2; see also Budlender (2000) World Dev. 28, 70). Bracken and Mawdsley (2004) Area 36, 3 argue that fieldwork is one of the key sites of gender discrimination for women in physical geography. Bankey (2001) Gender Place Cult. 8, 1 observes that ‘the fear of the hysterical woman is also a fear that implies that madness or deviance is rendered visible on and through the body…a “logic of visibility”…has bifurcated men and women’s bodies, spheres and spaces from one another’.

The ordering of space is strongly gendered, and may also reinforce gender stereotypes; when spaces (secluded woodlands, dark alleyways, ill-lit multi-storey car parks) make them feel unsafe, women feel vulnerable, and this will further constrain their movements, so fulfilling the stereotype that women are less adventurous than men. ‘While patriarchal structures of inequality often result in the spatial entrapment of women, the spatial boundedness of women’s lives can be both enabling and constraining’ (J. Lin and C. Mele 2005). Hmm.

Gender may be seen as arising from the norms of (hetero)sex; Robinson (2007) Gender Place Cult. 14, 4 finds that the space of international web-brokered marriages ‘is one in which women can be seen as active subjects in a transnational space that allows them to act outside, to certain degrees, of kinship-based power’. See Dua (2007) Gender Place Cult. 14, 4 on the importance of gender in constituting the racialized practices of Canada. See also Heynen (2008) ACME 7, 1.

The study of gender and development considers the importance of gender in development issues: the global diversity of gender roles, relations, and identities such as nation, race, class, age, and sexuality; and the need to integrate gender into research and policy agendas in less advanced economies. See V. Kinnaird and J. Momsen, eds. (2002).