There is no single, coherent political philosophy that we can label as "feminist". Rather, there are a range of "feminisms" that begin with some common normative assertions and, for all but more libertarian and conservative feminisms, various descriptive assertions.

In the first place, all feminisms can unite around the principle that men and women are entitled to equal rights and respect. This may then be taken to mean that women and men should be formally equal (in law, a libertarian position), or that they ought to have equal opportunities (in practice, a liberal position) or that they ought to enjoy some kind of equality of outcome (requiring positive discrimination and redistribution, a socialist position).

Most feminists would also agree with the descriptive assertion that women are currently disadvantaged in terms of their rights and respect, compared to men. Libertarian, individualist and conservative feminists tend to disagree with this.

Feminisms that begin with both the normative and descriptive components can then be further divided by the focus of their attention. Where are women disadvantaged, for example? In their role in families? In the labour market? In their relations with men who tend towards sexual violence? In their biological role of reproduction? In discriminatory laws? In socially constructed gender roles backed up by social sanctions? Radical feminists, for example, tend to focus on social constructions and language.

The separation of "sex" (being biological) and "gender" (being a matter of identity) allowed feminists to argue for equality. However, some feminists have come to think of the emphasis on gender as misleading or overstated, emphasising instead the importance of race, age, ethnicity, class, religion and nationality as constituting an individual's or community's identity. Claims by the likes of Betty Friedan that women share a universal experience of their gender, that for example all housewives share their experience of domination, were criticised for speaking only to and about middle class white women in the West. Hence feminism has become subsumed into gender studies, which has in turn become part of a wider study of "identity politics".

Key questions that feminism addresses, then, are:

1. What does it mean to be a "woman", to be "female"?
2. What would count as justice and equality for women?
3. How are women currently disadvantaged, and how can those problems be overcome?
4. How do these issues intersect with other issues of identity such as race, class, etc?

The evolution of these feminisms is often explained historically with the analogy of "waves", where each major development or shift in focus constituted a new wave. Briefly, the first wave supposedly concentrated on formal equality (e.g. suffrage, property rights, etc.); the second wave concentrated on equality of experience throughout life (e.g. in education, the workplace, and at home), incorporating radical critiques of gender construction; the third wave encapsulates a wide range of positions, each responding to some shortcoming of second wave feminism (e.g. Queer Theory, the girlie movement to assert the positive in femininity, post-colonialist and anti-racist feminism addressing the issues of race, nationality, etc.)

Is gender biological, socially constructed or something we do?

Radical feminists explored the notion that gender is socially constructed, rather than being something innate in our biology. Thus social circumstances that may vary in different contexts define the norms and expectations associated with gender. One is not born but becomes a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir famously said. Socialisation processes include gender roles assigned (e.g. girls play with dolls while boys play with action figures) and gender roles learned (e.g. children grow up with the mother as a housewife and the father as the breadwinner). Socially constructed gender roles can then account for gender characteristics, such as women being more caring and men being more competitive.

The notion of context being important here can be expanded to explain cultural and structural differences such as race, ethnicity, etc. It also provides the obvious account of how gender roles will adapt to new socialisation processes, e.g. where both mother and father take equal share of the childcare and breadwinning roles.

Some have criticised the centrality of social construction, however. They argue that social constructionists see the human mind as a neutral entity that has gender mapped onto it, whereas in fact sexual differences will affect gender development. Radical feminists can accommodate a weak form of this argument that discusses how sexual differences may affect learning processes, e.g. procreative functions. They cannot, however, accommodate the idea that we are born with (weak) gender roles, that females and males are inherently different.
The only response to this is that, though some aspects of gender may be innate, that doesn't justify all aspects of gender being determined by biology, and that women and men ought to be able to define more equal gender roles that may even be completely disconnected from biology (e.g. transexuals).

An alternative approach to gender roles is to look at actions that emerge in social situations. Though inextricably linked to social constructions, this theory emphasises how we "do gender" through actions like putting makeup on, wearing dresses and skirts, following competitive sports and so on. Note that masculine gender activities and signifiers are increasingly the domain of women as well as men, whilst most female activities and signifiers remain the exclusive domain of women. This difference leads to an inequality whereby women have to put in more effort to "do" their gender, where that gender is socially constructed, and where they may be ostracised for "doing" masculinity in certain ways.