The concept of gender underlines the cultural construction of sexual difference, that is, the fact that the different behaviors, activities and functions of women and men are culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. As a category of analysis, gender has been used in the social sciences since the anthropologist John Money proposed, in 1955, the term gender role to describe the behaviors socially assigned to men and women. In 1968, in his studies on disorders of sexual identity, the psychologist Robert Stoller defined gender identity and concluded that it is not determined by biological sex, but by the fact of having lived experiences, rituals and customs from birth. attributed to a certain genre.

Anglo-Saxon academic feminism promoted the use of this concept in the 1970s to emphasize that inequalities between women and men are socially constructed and not biological. Clearly distinguishing sexual differentiation - determined by people's chromosomal, gonadial, hormonal, anatomical and physiological sex - from the interpretations that each society makes of it, allowed a better understanding of social reality and pursued a political objective: to demonstrate that the human characteristics considered feminine are acquired by women through a complex individual and social process, instead of being derived naturally from their biological sex.

Later, in the 1980s, gender began to be used by various disciplines of the social sciences because it proved to be a useful category to delimit more precisely how the (biological) difference becomes inequality (economic, social and political) between women and men, placing the determinants of inequality between the sexes in the symbolic, cultural and historical terrain.

The adoption of gender as a category of analysis has meant the most important epistemological rupture of the last decades in the social sciences, since it has implied the recognition of a social inequality that had until then been subsumed in the economic dimension, both by the theory of classes as well as those of social stratification.

From anthropology, gender has been defined as the cultural and historical interpretation that each society elaborates around sexual differentiation. Such an interpretation gives rise to a set of social representations, practices, discourses, norms, values and relationships - in other words, a sex / gender system - that give meaning to people's behavior based on their sex. Consequently, gender structures both the perception and the concrete and symbolic organization of all social life.

For psychology, the gender concept refers to the process by which biologically different individuals become women and men, through the acquisition of those attributes that each society defines as characteristic of femininity and masculinity. Gender is, therefore, the psychosocial construction of the feminine and the masculine.

The Issue:
Many formal peacebuilding activities and policies suffer from an insufficient understanding or acknowledgment of the diverse communities in which they operate.
Men tend to dominate the formal roles in a peacebuilding process; there are mainly male peacekeepers, male peace negotiators, male politicians, and male formal leaders. Power is unequally distributed between men and women and the majority of women do not have a voice in local and national decision-making processes.
Women do play an important, oftentimes unrecognized role, in peacebuilding however, many arguments, towards gender inclusivity in peacebuilding, are instrumentalist in their approach, seeing women as instrumental in bringing about sustainable peace, and focusing narrowly on ‘what women can do for peace’, while neglecting the issue of what peace can do for women.
Numerous peacebuilding initiatives and movements employ essentialist definitions of women, confining them to their roles as mothers and caregivers, and thus denying them access to the broader agenda of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. (Puechguirbal, 2010, p.177).