section_path: Characteristics/Gender and kinship
section_name: Gender and kinship
paragraph_text: Gender and kinship
  
  The division of humans into male and female gender roles has been marked culturally by a corresponding division of norms, practices, dress, behavior, rights, duties, privileges, status, and power. Some argue that gender roles arise naturally from sex differences, which lead to a division of labor where women take on reproductive labor and other domestic roles. Gender roles have varied historically, and challenges to predominant gender norms have recurred in many societies.
  
  All human societies organize, recognize and classify types of social relationships based on relations between parents, children and other descendants (consanguinity), and relations through marriage (affinity). There is also a third type of familial relationship applied to godparents or adoptive children (fictive). These culturally defined relationships are referred to as kinship. In many societies, it is one of the most important social organizing principles and plays a role in transmitting status and inheritance. All societies have rules of incest taboo, according to which marriage between certain kinds of kin relations are prohibited; and some societies also have rules of preferential marriage with certain other kin relations.