In recent years, social scientists have gravitated to a broader definition of gender. Gender has come to be described as the way that societies are organized rather than just as attributes of individuals. Here, whether the differences between women and men are biologically or socially driven is less important than the ways that societies are organized around those differences. In most societies, for example, women and men occupy very different roles in the economy. For example, in most education systems around the world, women are much more likely to teach young children in the lower grades.
Men are more likely to teach at the secondary and tertiary levels and to be administrators.
Some argue that women are better with younger children, or that women do not make good leaders, and that this accounts for the differences in positions. Children grow up in families and are educated in school systems in which women play one role and men another. They accept and expect those divisions. Their early experiences influence how they view the roles of women and men later in their lives. Gender is viewed as a set of social and cultural practices that influences the lives of women and men in every society.