I don’t understand how so many people seem to understand the concept just fine. It sounds oddly complicated to me. The concept to me sounds like collectively concluded delusion or like if society collectively concludes something to be objectively real, that means it’s objectively real. Maybe I’m not understanding correctly?
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At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion…
You’ll hear the term “social construct” used a lot in conjunction with “X studies” conversations- gender studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, etc. It’s a shorthand for the idea that what many people consider essential aspects of our culture – “facts” of life – are in reality things that we have agreed to agree on as a culture. In the context of examining how our culture treats marginalized people the question can be asked, if X thing is something that we agreed is true, what would happen if we agreed something else was true? Abstracting ideas out as social constructs allows us to have a conversation about the value of those ideas without resorting to, “well, that’s just the way it’s always been.”
In the field of Women’s Studies, Elizabeth Spelman’s “Inessential Woman” is a foundational work in the argument that much of what it means to be a woman is a social construct rather than being “essential”, or inherent in the nature of women. That concept has been extended to gender as a whole, with many modern scholars agreeing that many elements of gender are social constructs rather than being inherently linked to biological sex. The same sort of lens has been applied to race, sexual orientation, etc.
TL;DR – social constructs are things we’ve agreed as a society are true.
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