Newswise Throughout history, women have faced intense discriminationfrom a lack of legal rights and very little independence from their husbands, to being thought to have inferior brains. In many societies, women have long been viewed as less than fully human.

American society has come a long way in recognizing and protecting womens humanity and human rights. However, women will always be fundamentally different than men because of their ability to bear children. We are reminded of this by current political debates concerning abortion and contraception, which some have called a war on women.

What are the roots of gender inequality? How have the challenges faced by women changed over time? Sally Kitch, an Regents Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, has spent many years exploring the reasons why the world sees men and women so differently. To find answers, she has explored questions ranging from the gendered origins of race to American utopian communities.

The intersection of race and gender Kitch, who is also the director of ASUs Institute for Humanities Research, a research unit in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, covered 300 years of history tracing the connection between gender and race in her book, The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States (State University of New York Press, 2009). She discovered that gender inequities have been central to societies for centuries, but race is a very modern idea.

One thing we know about race is that it doesnt exist. Its not a biological category, Kitch says. Some believe that groups of people who share similar physiological characteristics constitute races, but race is really a system imposed by historical, cultural and political processes, Kitch says. Genetically speaking, a black and white person may have more in common than two people of the same race. How, then, did race become so significant?

European explorers of the sixteenth century noticed differences like skin color when they encountered natives of other continents, but they were even more interested in the unfamiliar sexual and reproductive practices of other cultures, Kitch says.

The Europeans thought that cultures in which men and women werent that different in terms of their behavior or appearance were uncivilized, Kitch says. Marriage customs, sexual practices, and even whether or not women experienced pain during childbirth (it was considered more civilized to feel pain) were all important distinctions used to disparage certain groups and, eventually, define races.

That gave me the insight that racial characteristics really evolved on the basis of comparative gender characteristics, Kitch says. My work provides the backstory of the concept of intersectionality by showing how race and gender judgments evolved together and influenced one another.

Differences in gender behavior also served as Europeans justification for using slavery to further their own economic interests. When Europeans began to enslave Africans, they didnt start with their skin color to explain why, Kitch says. Instead, they used observations on sexual behavior and religious practices to decide the African culture was inferior.

A history of discrimination To understand how gender continued to influence race over time, Kitch traced five racial groups in the U.S. from the Colonial period to the mid-20th century American Indians, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and European whites. After exploring the roots of racial formation, she focused on the categories of bodies, blood and citizenship, finding evidence that gender and sex were foundations of racial judgment throughout the centuries.

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What Are the Roots of Gender Inequality? Women's Rights, Race and Reproduction