Gender in the Twenty-First Century: The Stalled Revolution and the Road to Equality
312
Gender in the Twenty-First Century: The Stalled Revolution and the Road to Equality
312Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520291393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 07/18/2017 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Gender as an Institution
Shannon N. Davis, Sarah Winslow, and David J. Maume
Marcia, age 18, is a senior in high school, while her brother Mark, age 16, is a junior. They live with their biological parents. Both are planning to attend college; Marcia has been accepted at the best liberal arts college in her state. She does well in school, but is so overscheduled that she is tired frequently, leading her parents to make comments about how she needs to worry more about how she looks each day. Mark does well in school, too, but his parents have been pushing him to be more involved in sports so he can look more well-rounded in his college applications. Being president of the Chess Club is important, they say, but he needs to show that he has athletic skills as well. Both Marcia and Mark have many friends, though neither has a steady dating partner. One of the key points of contention in their household is that they have the same curfew, even though Marcia is only a few months away from living on her own.
DEFINING GENDER
If we were writing a script for a twenty-first-century situation comedy about a middle-class white American family, the vignette above would be the ideal backstory for our main characters. The family dynamics that underlie Marcia and Mark's life likely sound familiar. The daughter and son live in the same household but have different expectations placed upon them by their parents. However, their parents are simply trying to encourage them to be the best young woman and man they can be given their presumed natural talents. What is interesting about this vignette is that we find it so normal. Of course young women are going to be interested in the liberal arts. Those disciplines focus on communication and consensus, ideas and collaboration. And shouldn't young men be active in sports? Don't they channel men's natural tendencies to be aggressive and competitive? Young women need to be protected more than young men do, so having the same curfew is simply their parents' way of making sure that Marcia is safe.
These underlying assumptions are gendered assumptions. They presume that because Marcia is female and Mark is male that there are normal, biologically based ways in which they should behave that need to be encouraged through socialization by their parents. However, decades of scholarship in sociology and other disciplines have documented the difference between biological sex (or what we're referring to when we say people are female or male) and gender. Indeed, one of the key contributions of the late twentieth century to the study of gender is that we no longer say that there are sex or gender roles (that is, specific, biologically based roles in society that women and men are supposed to play). Instead, scholars have made the case that gender is socially constructed, with specific meanings for relationships between and among women and men that are temporally and contextually specific and that have implications for individuals, interactions, and societies and social institutions. Importantly, scholars have also highlighted the ways in which differences between males and females and men and women are linked to inequality. It is not just that we ascribe different meanings to being a man or a woman but that these differences are associated with unequal opportunities, constraints, and, ultimately, outcomes. Let's return to Marcia and Mark. Marcia's relatively earlier curfew given her age may limit the employment and extracurricular activities in which she is able to engage, both of which may have negative implications for her future academic and professional achievements. Mark, on the other hand, is encouraged to increase his involvements, including participation in sports, all with an eye toward enhancing his academic and professional prospects. In these seemingly small and taken-for-granted ways, gendered assumptions contribute to unequal outcomes for this brother-sister duo.
In this volume, the chapter authors build on much sociological scholarship to make the case that gender is a social institution, what some have called a social structure, that has implications for individuals, interactions, and institutions themselves. When we say that gender has implications for individuals, we mean that individuals' sense of self, their identity, their personalities, and their actual physical bodies are gendered. In the Western world, we tend to think of gender along a continuum, with women/femininity on one end and men/masculinity on the other. There is the presumption that individuals live their lives at the poles of this continuum, a concept known as gender polarization, as evidenced, for example, by the term "opposite sexes." Further, there is the presumption that biological sex, gender, and gender identity are aligned with one another.
While there is a growing understanding of how each of these possible continua does not match people's experiences, researchers cannot ignore that many individuals think of themselves as existing along each continua. So when we talk about gender as a social structure or social institution having implications for individuals, we mean that individuals think of themselves as more or less feminine or masculine, identify as female/male (and that may or may not match their sex category), and craft a sense of self that is an extension of what they see their sex category and gender identity as being, and that these may or may not align with one another neatly. Marcia, therefore, thinks of herself as a young woman, sees herself that way, and has crafted a sense of self that is (in her mind) consistent with femininity. Mark has done the same for himself, focusing instead on constructing his sense of self around being a young man and masculine. However, while cultural beliefs may allow us to presume that this process of constructing a sense of self reflects the simultaneity of biological sex, gender, and gender identity, some of the chapters in this volume document the more complicated nature of how these continua intersect in our lives.
Gender also has implications for interactions that are based in part on our understanding of individuals. How would we know that Marcia thinks of herself as a young woman? We could ask her but if we were around her we may see that she presents herself as a young woman. She may wear her hair in ways that are consistent with what young women in the United States do, she may dress in a particular way, she may also act in ways that are consistent with how women are expected to act in the contemporary United States. The concept of "doing gender" was coined to explain (in part) this performative component of gender. Individuals expect to be held morally accountable for presenting themselves as a gendered individual. So people who are thought to be women are expected to present themselves as women, and the same for men. Not only present themselves physically (manner of dress and other physical aspects) but also in their mannerisms, interaction style, and general behavior. And when individuals do not conform to what others think a woman or man should be, they are penalized. An example of this comes from recent research on teaching evaluations in college classrooms. Women are held to higher standards for being expected to care for their students than are men, and when they are perceived to be cool or standoffish (or focused more on their research than their students), women are penalized by receiving lower teaching evaluations. Another example is that women who are perceived to be both mothers and employees are penalized with lower salaries in part because they are not living up to their cultural expectations of being focused more on their families than on their work. Indicative of the extent to which gendered expectations are both embedded in interactions and seen as diametrically opposed, men who do not live up to expectations for appropriate masculinity — by, for example, engaging in typically feminine behaviors like dancing or being concerned with their appearance — are chastised and ostracized.
The cultural expectations that we hold individuals to are one of the ways gender has implications for the institutional level. Through our collective attitudes and interactions, we as a culture have general ideas about how women and men are supposed to behave. Individuals internalize those beliefs and they are used to guide our actions and reactions in interactions with others (reflecting how gender at the individual, interactional, and institutional levels is interconnected). Other ways in which gender has implications at the institutional/structural level are through laws that regulate what individuals can do and opportunities of which they are allowed to avail themselves. The United States regulates gender by emphasizing that men are expected to be available to be soldiers, being violent and willing to kill, by requiring that only men register for the Selective Service. In addition, organizations are structured in ways that highlight how there are culturally different expectations for women and men. The ideal worker norm that is a key organizing principle of many organizations is a norm that presumes that workers are devoted only to their work and have no competing interests vying for their time. Historically, this has meant that men could live up to the ideal worker norm but women were penalized (and still are) for focusing on work and not on any family obligations.
INTERSECTIONALITY
This volume highlights how gender is implicated in our social interactions and our social institutions, thus making it one of the key ways in which our everyday lives are organized. However, we do not just experience the world as women or men, nor are interactions and institutions stratified by gender alone. Gender is connected to other forms of inequality, including race and ethnicity, social class, sexuality, nativity, religion, age, and ability.
One important theoretical perspective that highlights the ways that gender and power are intertwined and implicated differently in people's lives is the perspective called intersectionality. Rather than trying to explain experiences as connected to only gender, intersectionality recognizes that gender operates differently when it is intersected with other forms of inequality. Therefore, there are differing expectations and experiences for women and men based upon race and ethnicity, social class, sexuality, nativity, religion, etc.
In the vignette, if Marcia and Mark had been Julia and Julio or Tomeka and Taquan, would their experiences as young women and men have been the same? From your own experience you probably suspect that it is very unlikely that their experiences would have been identical. Indeed, research has shown that not only do parental expectations of young women and men differ by race and ethnicity; parents of Black and Latino youth talk to their children about the intersections of race/ethnicity and gender in ways that parents of white youth do not. Recent controversies around differing expectations among police officers regarding Black and Latino youth versus white youth highlight how race and gender intersect at the interactional level. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement and scholars alike have documented, among other things, the punitive response of law enforcement toward Black youth that is not demonstrated when white youth are accused of similar offenses. One outcome of these differential experiences with law enforcement is the significantly higher rate at which young men of color are incarcerated, which subsequently has deleterious consequences for their access to educational and employment opportunities. Access to education and employment are key examples of the institutional intersection of race/ethnicity and gender.
Similarly, although you may not have thought consciously about it, most readers of this volume likely assumed that Mark and Marcia are heterosexual. This presumption of heterosexuality is referred to as heterocentrism or heteronormativity. Moreover, just as sex and gender are presumed to be compatible, there is also a presumed connection between sex, gender, and sexuality. In other words, appropriately feminine women are expected to be attracted to men, while appropriately masculine men are assumed to be attracted to women. This cultural conception of a series of neat continua (sex, gender, sexuality) that are separate yet aligned does not, however, match the realities of many individuals' lived experiences. Nonetheless, these expectations are institutionalized in cultural norms and formal policies. Although the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal throughout the United States, if Marcia is gay she will face a legal climate that does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, and a host of other matters. Moreover, the typical assumption that sex and gender are compatible denies the lived realities of transgender individuals. Let's assume that Mark is transgender; that is, that his biological sex does not match his gender identity or presentation. North Carolina HB 2, a 2016 bill that required individuals to use restrooms that corresponded to the sex on their birth certificate rather than their gender identity, institutionalizes the link between sex and gender in a legal mandate. Both of these examples emphasize the institutional intersection of sex, gender, and sexuality.
The authors of this volume's chapters present original research investigating the implications of gender at the individual, interactional, and institutional level as it intersects with other forms of inequality. When we examine women's and men's lives, they are never only women and men. They are parents or nonparents, immigrants or native-born, heterosexual or LGBTQ, white, Black, Asian, Hispanic, or another racial/ethnic group, may or may not hold formal educational credentials, and may or may not be a professional worker, among other social characteristics. It is our goal to explore the varying ways in which gender has implications in the lives of individuals in the United States through the many ways it intersects with other forms of inequality while emphasizing the key role that gender plays overall in each of our lives.
STALLED REVOLUTIONS
Critics may say that in the United States, women and men are considered equal, that women and men have the same kinds of opportunities and experiences. If there are gender differences, those differences must be based on choices that individuals make. However, sociologists conceptualize these gender differences and the resulting unequal life chances and opportunities as functions not simply of individual choices and preferences. As noted above, interactional pressures lead to patterns of behavior among women and men that generally reinforce what is culturally expected for each gender (based on their race, social class, nativity status, sexual orientation, etc.). And sociologists also routinely document the institutional processes that lead to gender differences in experiences and outcomes, as well as how these gender differences are fundamentally linked to gender inequality. Sociologists acknowledge that some of the gender differences in educational attainment, labor force participation, pay, and political participation and power, among other experiences, may be in part the result of individual preferences. However, we also see those preferences as only part of the explanation for why gender gaps remain. Cultural norms shape interactions between individuals, leading to discriminatory practices based on stereotypes rather than actual experiences, even when the preferences between individuals are identical (like employers potentially paying mothers less because of the stereotype that they will not be as committed to their jobs and should not be because of the expected primacy of motherhood in women's lives). And institutional policies and practices provide women and men different opportunity structures for success, even when their experiences are the same (like the historic [but now changed] policy of preventing women in the military from being in combat roles, which had the consequence of limiting women's promotion opportunities within the military ranks). Moreover, there is evidence that even preferences themselves are shaped by larger social forces; for example, female faculty members prefer to spend more time on teaching relative to their male counterparts, although this can be largely attributed to educational gaps between the two groups, which are themselves partly shaped by historical barriers that made the pursuit of a doctoral degree more difficult for women.
(Continues…)
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