again. The advocate does not only stop in the public sphere such as giving women the right to vote, the right to speak in front of public, and the right to
own the property but it goes deeper to the domestic life such as giving fair treatment in term of marriage and divorce.
1. Equality and Inequality in Gender
a. Gender and Sex
People live with gender role every day. People are habituated by it from any places: houses, schools, religious institutions, job places and so on.
Moreover, g ender role exists from people’s everyday behavior and talks. As a
result, people see that gender role is something common in life and there is nothing problematic with the idea of gender role.
However, people often get mistaken about the difference between sex and gender. They often assume gender as sex. Actually sex and gender have
different meaning. According to Maccoby, Bem and Eagy in Archer and Lloyd, 2002: 17, sex is the binary classification of male and female while
gender is the quality or characteristic of being feminine and masculine rather than female and male. Furthermore, sex is related to the biological
characteristic which men and women posses while gender is cultural quality because of having one particular sex Maggio in Archer and Lloyd, 2002: 17.
In other words, sex is identified as biological traits which differentiate women and men. It cannot be changed because people have possessed it since they are
born. On the other hand, because gender is cultural, it means that gender is created by the society’s construction. The facts which state that the obligation
of women is cooking and men’s is working are constructed by society. It is called as gender role.
This idea is supported by West and Zimmerman in Penelope and Sally, 2003: 1 who state that “Gender is not something we are born with, and not
something we have, but something we do.”West and Zimmerman emphasize that gender is how people behave and act in the social life. It is not related to
what people are born with but how people put certain action in the social life. The example is when a girl chooses to wear pink skirt because she sees her
mother always wears pink clothes. What the girl does is not because she is born to be a creature that should uses pink skirt but it is because her mind is
constructed by her habitual surrounding, her mother. Wearing pink skirt for girl is a form of action or behavior. Therefore it is gendered.
Furthermore, Penelope and Sally 2003: 2 explain that sex is distinguished by different ‘reproductive potential’. It means to say that sex is when women
biologically can get period while men cannot or when women can do breast feeding while men cannot. However, gender is social result of having one
particular sex. For example, because women have breasts, they are often assumed to do the children rearing, while men are not. Gender is form of
exaggeration of sex difference that results to behavior segregation between men and women.
b. Gender Equality
