Undoing Sex Classification in Survey Research

• In Event: 557 - Theory Section Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 09. From Empirics to Theory

Abstract

Our sex classifications in everyday interactions and in the survey interaction in particular are not our own. In the process of classifying others and presenting ourselves as classifiable bodies, we are “undone” in the sense that this classification process involves external gender norms, is continuously produced and reproduced through interactions with others, and judgments of our own sex classification are made by others on a routine basis. Therefore, “sex,” like “gender,” is something that we do through this process of sex classification. The performative view of sex classification requires us to rethink its application in survey research and the interpretation of the results. Interviewers typically sex classify respondents as “female” or “male” during interviews, and quantitative researchers misrecognize this variable as “biological sex.” In this paper, we argue that what is recorded is a sex classification, which requires a relational interpretation given that we classify others based on characteristics defined in relation to one another, these classifications are emergent properties of social interactions rather than mere reflections of inner essences, and sex classifications are context-dependent rather than static across time and space. We illustrate this relational reinterpretation of sex classification in survey data using an example of the sex classification gap in earnings from the 2014 GSS. We also discuss several problems associated with the practice of sex classification in survey research, including the fact that survey researchers are doing more than “recording sex” in binary terms. They are creating a binary “reality” where it previously did not exist.

Authors

• Andrew S. Fullerton, Oklahoma State University

• Dakota Kane Tangent Raynes, Oklahoma State University