Which of the following statement(s) is/are NOT correct? I. Gender is a…

Two different categories are at work here. Sex is the biological category — male or female — fixed by anatomy, physiology and genetics. Gender is the socio-cultural construct a society builds on top of that category: the roles, norms, expectations and institutions it assigns to each sex. Because gender is produced and sustained through social arrangements rather than by biology, it is gender that is described as relational, hierarchical, historical, contextually specific and systemic; sex, being biological, is not.

1. Statement I attaches 'socio-cultural construct' to gender. That is precisely the standard definition of gender, so Statement I is correct as written.

2. Statement II attaches 'systemic' to sex. 'Systemic' describes something produced and sustained through social institutions, hierarchies and norms — a property of gender, not of a biologically fixed category. Statement II therefore carries a property of gender across onto sex, and is not correct.

3. The question asks which statement(s) are NOT correct, so only the failing statement is to be named — and only Statement II fails.

• 'Only I' would need the gender-as-construct statement to be faulty, but that statement is the definition itself.

• 'Both I and II' would need that same gender statement to fail as well, which it does not.

• 'Neither I nor II' would need 'sex is systemic' to be sound, but systemic operation is a feature of the socially constructed category, not of the biological one.

• 'Only II' is the sole combination that matches the two statements' actual standing: the gender statement holds, the sex statement does not.

So the statement that is NOT correct is Statement II alone — 'Only II'.