Gender Inequality

By: Lexi Hertling

Who will be better off in the future, men or women?

Explaining Gender…

Humans develop gendered personality structures and sexual orientations through schools, parents, peers, and mass media. This is seen in practices of everyday life and has created the social construction of gender to be stereotyped as men being “the breadwinner” and the masculine or dominant gender and women to be the “caretaker” or weaker (Grusky 320).

Gender signs and signals have become so universal that we usually fail to note them.

HISTORY

▪ History has created certain “expectations” of how women and men are supposed to act

▪ Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes. Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life.

▪ Sewell and Hauser 1975; Sewell and shah 1977 found that IQ, SES, and gender strongly and independently affected the graduates chances of attending college… for example.. a boy with below average intelligence might go to college if he came from a high status family. A boy from a low status family was unlikely to continue his education unless he had a very high IQ. Girls however smart they were, had slim prospects of attending college (148).

▪ since 196o sweeping changes in family patterns have reinforced levels of high unemployment

▪ Americans have become less likely to marry and more likely to divorce

▪ children are six times more likely to be born to unwed parents

▪ families with children are almost two times as likely to be headed by females

▪ the proportion of the poor population living in female-headed families has nearly doubled from 18- divorce and unwed motherhood are no longer stigmatized as they once were, Americans have become much more tolerant in this regard- single mothers face a number of difficulties that have an effect on their job earnings

…

Over the past two decades, global competition and inflation have lowered the buying power of the male wage. In

response, many women have gone to work in order to maintain the family income. But the legacy of patriarchy has given cultural shape to this economic story. As women have

joined men at work, they have absorbed the views of an older, male-oriented work world at a much faster rate than

men have absorbed their share of domestic work and culture. One reason women have changed more than men is

that the world of “male” work seems more honorable and valuable than the “female” world of home and children.

PROBLEMS CREATING INEQUALITY IS SHOWN IN SCHOOLING, OCCUPATION, AND POWER…

▪ Stereotyping- an inferential process in which we attribute traits that we habitually associate with a group to individuals that belong to that group

▪ Attribution Error-How we expect others to perform affects the meaning we assign to their behavior.

▪ When people’s performance conforms to our expectations, we attribute it to their stable, internal traits (ability); when it contradicts our expectations, we attribute it to transient, external causes (task difficulty or luck)

▪ We expect members of socially preferred groups to succeed and members of devalued groups to fail.

Congress outlawed intentional discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although the enforcement of Title VII has reduced employment discrimination, thousands of Americans continued to not be employed for this reason

We have seen in the past attempts to repress stereotyping can backfire, but if employment structures can curb the biasing effects of these cognitive processes, thus inhibiting the discrimination

Effect of Blind Study on the Hiring of Women When blind audition round is done we see 5% more likely

women to be hired than men. When a completely blind audition is done the likelihood a female will be hired raises 7.5% , an overall average the likelihood a female would be hired is 25%

The more economic resources, such as job opportunities that are available, the more they tend to be monopolized by men

OCCUPATION

MOTHERS IN THE WORKPLACE

▪ The pay gab between mothers and non-mothers under age 35 is larger than the pay gap between men and women (Crittenden 2001).

▪ Budig and England (2001) find that interruptions from work, working part time and decreased experience collectively explain no more than one third of the penalty of being a mother.

▪ Human capital and occupational and household resource variables collectively account for 24% of the total penalty for one child and 44% for women with two or more children (Grustky 366).

▪ A cultural norm that mothers should always be on call for their children coexists in tension with another widely held normative belief in our society that the “ideal worker” be unencumbered by competing demands and “always there” for her employer.

▪ Bielby and Beilby found no differences in the workplace commitment of mothers and non-mothers. Instead it is perceived tension between these two roles that leads us to suggest that motherhood is a devalued status in the work place. ,

A NEW MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL

▪ It is presumed that the best occupations will always be dominated by men, either because women have responsibilities that reduce their incentives to invest in demanding careers (children) or because employers practice discrimination through personal policies or other forms of male-biased queuing in the labor market.

▪ Steep positive slope= men advantage in the competition for desirable occupation

▪ Negative slope (logically possible but empirically unlikely) indicating that women are advantaged

This model assumes that

1.The cultural tenet of male primacy undergirds vertical segregation

▪ represents men as more status-worthy than women and better suited for positions of authority and domination

2.The complementary cultural tenet of gender essentialism undergirds horizontal segregation

▪ represents woman as more competent than men in personal service, nurturance, and social interaction

ESSENTIALISM

Why do women usually fill non-manual occupation sectors, and men manual?▪ Women are presumed to excel in personal service, nurturance, and

interpersonal interactionWomen make up…▪ 99% secretaries▪ 98% child care▪ 93% nurses▪ 3% Construction/electricians/plumbers ▪ 3% mechanics/repairers▪ 10% engineers▪ Men are presumed to excel in interaction with things (rather than people)

and in strenuous or physical labor▪ Institutional change is inevitably prolonged and that full integration will

ultimately be achieved through ongoing reform efforts (Jackson 1998). Although we cannot rule out the possibility of full integration in the distant future, we would stress that this outcome is by no means inevitable under prevailing policies, practices and commitments.

MALE PRIMACY

Why are men allocated to the best-paid and most desirable occupations in both non-manual and manual sectors?

▪ Despite the rise of universalistic ideals, there persist deeply rooted and widely shared cultural beliefs that men are better suited than women for all forms of labor outside the family (Deaux and Kite 1987)

▪ Because they are regarded as the primary breadwinners, they should make substantial investments in human capital (supply), thus leading the recognition among employers as commitment to the labor force and hence there is a greater payoff to investing in them rather than in women—meaning employers reward men with better jobs not just because they assume that men have a greater commitment to the labor force, but also because they regard men as intrinsically more competent.

▪ Within our cultural domain today, the diffusion of egalitarianism is an important development that will continue to develop. Although the future looks bright, women will never have it “better” than men. Although women have come a long way in opportunity and considered more as equals in today’s society, the differences between men and women will never allow women as a whole to be better off in the future.

WAGE INEQUALITY

▪ Women continue to earn considerably less than men on average

▪ 41% of the gender gap cannot be explained even when gender differences in education, experience, industries, occupations and union status are taken into account (Grusky 427).

▪ Even if women had the same human capital characters (education and experience) women still earn less than men even when all characteristics are taken into account = questionable to the extent that they may be influenced by discrimination

▪ “Taking all factors into account, our best guess is that we are going to have further changes in the direction of convergence, but that it is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY that we will see a reversal of the gains in relative wages and labor force participation women have experienced over the past 25 to 30 years” (Grusky 442).

REFERENCES

▪ Gilbert, Dennis L. "The Poor, The Underclass, and Public Policy." The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 215-40. Print.