Transcript Gender Inequality

Gender Inequality
Who will be better off in the
future, men or women?
By: Lexi Hertling
 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.
Explaining Gender…
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, maleoriented 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.
OCCUPATION
 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
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 nonmothers. 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 interaction
Women 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.