Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion

Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED AND ORIGINAL ESSAY PAPERS ON Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion Can you help me understand this Communications question? provide a brief paragraph (250-300 words) descirbeing what you think ties the day’s readings together and the contribution of this set of readings to our understanding of gender, rhetoric, and social relations. Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion englandthegenderrevolution.pdf reshaping_the_work_family_debate_why_men_and_class…_______3._masculine_norms_at_work_.pdf THE GENDER REVOLUTION: Uneven and Stalled Author(s): PAULA ENGLAND Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 24, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 149-166 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. 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Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Gender and Society This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Lecture THE GENDER REVOLUTION Uneven and Stalled PAULA ENGLAND Stanford University In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities orjobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that women should have access to upward mobility and to all areas of schooling and jobs. But persistent gender essentialism means that most people follow gender-typical paths except when upward mobility is impossible otherwise. Middle-class women entered managerial and professional jobs more than working-class women inte grated blue-collar jobs because the latter were able to move up while choosing a “female ” occupation; many mothers of middle-class women were already in the highest-status female occupations. The author also notes a number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled. Keywords: education; race; class; gender; work/occupations e sometimes call the sweeping changes in the gender system since V V the 1960s a “revolution.” Women’s employment increased dramati cally (Cotter, Hermsen, and England 2008); birth control became widely available (Bailey 2006); women caught up with and surpassed men in rates of college graduation (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004, 23); under graduate college majors desegregated substantially (England and Li 2006); more women than ever got doctorates as well as professional degrees in law, medicine, and business (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004,22-23; England et al. 2007); many kinds of gender discrimination in employment and education became illegal (Burstein 1989; Hirsh 2009); women entered AUTHOR’S NOTE: / thank Maria Charles, Shelley Correll, David Cotter, Myra Ferree, Joan Hermsen, Joya Misra, Cecilia Ridgeway, and Reeve Vanneman for comments and Karen Powroznik for research assistance. GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 24 No. 2? April 2010 149-166 DOI: 10.1177/0891243210361475 ? 2010 Sociologists for Women in Society 149 This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 150 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2010 many previously male-dominated occupations (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004, 10-14); and more women were elected to political office (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004, 25). As sweeping as these changes have been, change in the gender system has been uneven?affecting some groups more than others and some arenas of life more than others, and change has recently stalled. Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion My goal in this article is not to argue over whether we should view the proverbial cup as half empty or half full (arguments I have always found uninteresting) but, rather, to stretch toward an understanding of why some things change so much more than others. To show the uneven nature of gender change, I will review trends on a number of indicators. While the shape of most of the trends is not in dispute among scholars, the explanations I offer for the uneven and halting nature of change have the status of hypotheses rather than well documented conclusions. I will argue that there has been little cultural or institutional change in the devaluation of traditionally female activities and jobs, and as a result, women have had more incentive than men to move into gender-nontraditional activities and positions. This led to asymmetric change; women’s lives have changed much more than men’s. Yet in some subgroups and arenas, there is less clear incentive for change even among women; examples are the rela tively low employment rates of less educated women and the persistence of traditionally gendered patterns in heterosexual romantic, sexual, and mar ital relationships. I also argue, drawing on work by Charles and Bradley, that the type of gender egalitarianism that did take hold was the type most compatible with American individualism and its cultural and institutional logics, which include rights of access to jobs and education and the desideratum of upward mobility and of expressing one’s “true self (Charles forthcoming; Charles and Bradley 2002, 2009). One form this gender egalitarianism has taken has been the reduction of discrimination in hiring. This has made much of the gender revolution that has occurred possible; women can now enter formerly “male” spheres. But co-occurring with this gender egalitari anism, and discouraging such integration is a strong (if often tacit) belief in gender essentialism?the notion that men and women are innately and fun damentally different in interests and skills (Charles forthcoming; Charles and Bradley 2002, 2009; Ridgeway 2009). A result of these co-occurring logics is that women are most likely to challenge gender boundaries when there is no path of upward mobility without doing so, but otherwise gender blinders guide the paths of both men and women. This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms England / THE GENDER REVOLUTION 151 DEVALUATION OF “FEMALE” ACTIVITIES AND ASYMMETRIC INCENTIVES FOR WOMEN AND MEN TO CHANGE Most of the changes in the gender system heralded as “revolutionary” involve women moving into positions and activities previously limited to men, with few changes in the opposite direction. The source of this asym metry is an aspect of society’s valuation and reward system that has not changed much?the tendency to devalue and badly reward activities and jobs traditionally done by women. Women’s Increased Employment One form the devaluation of traditionally female activities takes is the failure to treat child rearing as a public good and support those who do it with state payments. In the United States, welfare reform took away much of what little such support had been present. Without this, women doing child rearing are reliant on the employment of male partners (if present) or their own employment. Thus, women have had a strong incentive to seek paid employment, and more so as wage levels rose across the decades (Bergmann 2005). As Figure 1 shows, women’s employment has increased dramatically. But change has not been continuous, as the trend line flattened after 1990 and turned down slightly after 2000 before turning up again. This turndown was hardly an “opt-out revolution,” to use the popular-press term, as the decline was tiny relative to the dramatic increase across 40 years (Kuperberg and Stone 2008; Percheski 2008). But the stall after 1990 is clear, if unexplained. Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion Figure 1 also shows the asymmetry in change between men’s and wom en’s employment; women’s employment has increased much more than men’s has declined. There was nowhere near one man leaving the labor force to become a full-time homemaker for every woman who entered, nor did men pick up household work to the extent women added hours of employment (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006). Men had little incen tive to leave employment. Among women, incentives for employment vary. Class-based1 resources, such as education, affect these incentives. At first glance, we might expect less educated women to have higher employment rates than their better-educated peers because they are less likely to be married to a high-earning man. Most marriages are between two people at a similar This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 152 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2010 Figure 1 : Percentage of U.S. Men and Women Employed, 1962-2007 SOURCE: Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman (2009). NOTE: Persons are considered employed if they worked for pay anytime during the year. Refers to adults aged 25 to 54. education level (Mare 1991), so the less educated woman, if she is married, typically has a husband earning less than the husband of the college gradu ate. Her family would seem to need the money from her employment more than the family headed by two college graduates. Let us call this the “need for income” effect. But the countervailing “opportunity cost” factor is that well-educated women have more economic incentive for employment because they can earn more (England, Garcia-Beaulieu, and Ross 2004). Put another way, the opportunity cost of staying at home is greater for the woman who can earn more. Indeed, the woman who did not graduate from high school may have potential earnings so low that she could not even cover child care costs with what she could earn. Thus, in typical cases, for the married college graduate, her own education encourages her employ ment, while her husband’s high earnings discourage it. The less educated woman typically has a poor husband (if any), which encourages her employment, while her own low earning power discourages her employ ment.2 It is an empirical question whether the “need for income” or “opportunity cost” effect predominates. This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms England / THE GENDER REVOLUTION 153 Recent research shows that the opportunity-cost effect predominates in the United States and other affluent nations. England, Gornick, and Shafer (2008) use data from 16 affluent countries circa 2000 and show that, in all of them, among women partnered with men (married or cohabiting), those with more education are more likely to be employed. Moreover, there is no monotonie relationship between partner’s earnings and a woman’s employ ment; at top levels of his income, her employment is deterred. But women whose male partners are at middle income levels are more likely to be employed than women whose partners have very low or no earnings, the opposite of what the “need for income” principle suggests. In the United States, it has been true for decades that well-educated women are more likely to be employed, and the effect of a woman’s own education has increased, while the deterring effect of her husband’s income has declined (Cohen and Bianchi 1999). For example, in 1970, 59 percent of college graduate women, but only 43 percent of those with less than a high school education, were employed sometime during the year.Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion In 2007, the figures were 80 percent for college graduates and 47 percent for less than high school (the relationship of education and employment was monotonie such that those with some college and only high school were in between college graduates and high school dropouts) (figures are author’s calculation from data in Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2009).3 Women Moving into “Male” Jobs and Fields of Study The devaluation of and underpayment of predominantly female occupa tions is an important institutional reality that provides incentives for both men and women to choose “male” over “female” occupations and the fields of study that lead to them. Research has shown that predominantly female occupations pay less, on average, than jobs with a higher proportion of men. At least some of the gap is attributable to sex composition because it persists in statistical models controlling for occupations’ educational requirements, amount of skill required, unionization, and so forth. I have argued that this is a form of gender discrimination?employers see the worth of predominantly female jobs through biased lenses and, as a result, set pay levels for both men and women in predominantly female jobs lower than they would be if the jobs had a more heavily male sex composition (England 1992; Kilbourne et al. 1994; England and Folbre 2005). While the overall sex gap in pay has diminished because more women have moved into “male” fields (England and Folbre 2005), there is no evidence that the devaluation of occupations because they are filled with women has This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 154 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2010 diminished (Levanon, England, and Allison 2009). Indeed, as U.S. courts have interpreted the law, this type of between-job discrimination is not even illegal (England 1992, 225-51; Steinberg 2001), whereas it is illegal to pay women less than men in the same job, unless based on factors such as seniority, qualifications, or performance. Given this, both men and women continue to have a pecuniary incentive to choose male-dominated occupations. Thus, we should not be surprised that desegregation of occu pations has largely taken the form of women moving into male-dominated fields, rather than men moving into female-dominated fields. Consistent with the incentives embedded in the ongoing devaluation of female fields, desegregation of fields of college study came from more women going into fields that were predominantly male, not from more men entering “female” fields. Since 1970, women increasingly majored in previously male-dominated, business-related fields, such as business, marketing, and accounting; while fewer chose traditionally female majors like English, education, and sociology; and there was little increase of men’s choice of these latter majors (England and Li 2006, 667-69). Figure 2 shows the desegregation of fields of bachelor’s degree receipt, using the index of dissimilarity (D), a scale on which complete segregation (all fields are all male or all female) is 100 and complete integration (all fields have the same proportion of women as women’s proportion of all bachelor’s degrees in the given year) is 0. It shows that segregation dropped signifi cantly in the 1970s and early 1980s, but has been quite flat since the mid 1980s. Women’s increased integration of business fields stopped then as well (England and Li 2006). Women have also recently increased their representation in formerly male-dominated professional degrees, getting MDs, MBAs, and law degrees in large numbers. Women were 6 percent of those getting MDs in 1960, 23 percent in 1980, 43 percent in 2000, and 49 percent in 2007; the analogous numbers for law degrees (JDs) were 3, 30, 46, and 47 percent, and for MBAs (and other management first-professional degrees), 4,22, 39, and 44 percent (National Center for Education Statistics 2004-2008). Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion There was no marked increase in the proportion of men in female-dominated grad uate professional programs such as library science, social work, or nurs ing (National Center for Education Statistics 2009). As women have increasingly trained for previously male-dominated fields, they have also integrated previously male-dominated occupations in management and the professions in large numbers (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004, 10-13). Women may face discrimination and coworker resistance when they attempt to integrate these fields, but they have a This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms England / THE GENDER REVOLUTION 155 Figure 2: Sex Segregation of Fields of Study for U.S. Bachelor Degree Recipients, 1971-2006 SOURCE: Author’s calculations from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 1971-2003 and NCES 2004-2007. strong pecuniary incentive to do so. Men lose money and suffer cultural disapproval when they choose traditionally female-dominated fields; they have little incentive to transgress gender boundaries. While some men have entered female-intensive retail service jobs after losing manufacturing jobs, there is little incentive for voluntary movement in this direction, making desegregation a largely one-way street. What about employers’ incentives? There is some debate about whether, absent equal employment legislation, employers have an incentive to engage in hiring and placement discrimination or are better off simply hiring gender blind (for debate, see Jackson 1998; England 1992, 54-68). Whichever is true, legal enforcement of antidiscrimination laws has imposed some costs for hiring discrimination (Hirsh 2009), and this has probably reduced dis crimination in hiring, contributing to desegregation of jobs. The “Personal” Realm “The personal is political” was a rallying cry of 1960s feminists, urging women to demand equality in private as well as public life. Yet conventions embodying male dominance have changed much less in “the personal” than in the job world. Where they have changed, the asymmetry described above for the job world prevails. For example, parents are more likely to This content downloaded from 132.177.238.71 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:08:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 156 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2010 give girls “boy” toys such as Legos than they are to give dolls to their sons. Girls have increased their participation in sports more than boys have taken up cheerleading or ballet. Women now commonly wear pants, while men wearing skirts remains rare. A few women started keeping their birth-given surname upon marriage (Goldin and Shim 2004), with little adoption by men of women’s last names. Here, as with jobs, the asymmetry follows incentives, albeit nonmaterial ones. These social incentives themselves flow from a largely unchanged devaluation of things culturally defined as feminine. When boys and men take on “female” activities, they often suffer disrespect, but under some circumstances, girls and women gain respect for taking on “male” activities. What is more striking than the asymmetry of gender change in the per sonal realm is how little gendering has changed at all in this realm, espe cially in dyadic heterosexual relationships. It is still men who usually ask women on dates, and sexual behavior is generally initiated by men (England, Shafer, and Fogarty 2008). Sexual permissiveness has increased, making it more acceptable for both heterosexual men and women to have sex out side committed relationships. But the gendered part of this?the double standard?persists stubbornly; women are judged much more harshly than men for casual sex (Hamilton and Armstrong 2009; England, Shafer, and Fogarty 2008). The ubiquity of asking about height in Internet dating Web sites suggests that the convention that men should be taller than their female partner has not budged. The double standard of aging prevails, making women’s chances of marriage decrease with age much more than men’s (England and McClintock 2009). Men are still expected to propose marriage (Sassier and Miller 2007). Upon marriage, the vast majority of women take their husband’s surname. The number of women keeping their own name increased in the 1970s and 1980s but little thereafter, never exceeding about 25 percent even for college graduates (who have higher rates than other women) (Goldin and Shim 2004). Children are usually given their father’s surname; a recent survey found that even in cases where the mother is not married …Gendering Revolution of The Workplace Discussion Get a 10 % discount on an order above $ 100 Use the following coupon code : NURSING10

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