gender

n. 1. The condition of being female, male, neuter, or androgynous. In recent times there has been a differentiation between sex and gender in describing human beings and to a lesser extent other animals such that sex refers to the biological aspects of femaleness and maleness while gender refers to the cultural, social, and psychological aspects of being defined as female or male. 2. The categories into which nouns are divided and marked as having gender in some languages such as French and Spanish. Thus house is feminine (la maison) and cat (le chat) is masculine in French.