"Transformations presents a broad, comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding how the lives of all people, but particularly the lives of girls and women, are shaped by gender. Rather than conceiving gender as a collection of individual traits or attributes, this book presents gender as a social system that is used to categorize people and is linked to power and status. The gender system is analyzed throughout the book at three levels: sociocultural, interpersonal, and individual. Because conceptualizing gender as a social system is important from the start, the second chapter of the book is devoted to gender, status, and power. This chapter explains the gender system and how it works at each of the three levels and demonstrates how they are linked"-- Provided by publisher.