The presidential debates have raised some interesting and important questions about gender inequality in the U.S. Specifically, the second debate (transcript) brought up the issue of fair pay and equal wages for American women. While Governor Romney’s response—which involved “binders full of women”—rightfully took a lot of heat, both candidates could have benefitted from a brief lesson in the sociology of gender discrimination. Perhaps their aides will pass this on.Gov. Romney’s answer focused on increasing women’s participation in the workforce by creating flexible jobs to account for women’s household responsibilities. President Obama positioned women’s labor as a family issue too, but added that we also need to address educational opportunities. I’d like to start with the issue of education, and then address the question of work-family balance.
Education is a key factor for increasing one’s income and class position. But, education doesn’t pay out equitably for everyone. Women’s low representation in high paying jobs is not necessarily a result of their low representation in higher education. In fact, there has been much uproar in the past five or more years about a crisis in boys’ education—some even insist that society has declared a kind of “war on boys”—but there just is no evidence to support this notion. Although women are earning slightly more college degrees than men, men are suffering very few consequences. In fact, women must advance their educational attainment significantly in order to earn equal pay—for example, on average, men with a BA will earn about the same as a woman with a PhD (see some very revealing charts here). And the gap in earnings is made worse when we consider women’s struggles in particularly high paying fields like science, technology, engineering and math (STEM fields). Increasing women’s presence in these fields could make a serious dent in the gender wage gap because these jobs are among the highest paying, and they have some of the lowest occupational wage gaps of any career (see Gwen Sharp’s analysis here). And yet, even as women pursue advanced degrees in these fields, they remain much less likely than men to get these jobs. Yes, women face barriers in education, especially in STEM fields (a lack of role models and mentors, for example), and these need to be addressed. But women’s equality and equal pay depend on much more than increasing their access to higher education.
If it isn’t about education, then what else contributes to women’s unequal earnings? In fact, a big part of the problem are precisely what Gov. Romney wants to encourage—the burden of women’s household and childcare responsibilities. The normative expectation that women be the primary caretakers of children and elderly or sick family members contributes significantly to women’s workplace discrimination. In his answer, President Obama mentioned the sociological phenomenon known as the “glass ceiling”—an invisible barrier that prevents women from advancing past a certain rank, regardless of training or education. But what kinds of things contribute to the glass ceiling? At least in part, stereotypes about women’s parental and household duties and desires. Oftentimes, employers blame women’s career stagnation on women’s “choices”: choosing to have kids; choosing not to work overtime, weekends or holidays; choosing not to relocate for promotions. But these are not necessarily choices; they are the result of demands made on women by the conventional heterosexual family structure.
If women are children’s primary caretakers, then it is women who must pick them up from school, stay home when they are sick, and be available for parent-teacher conferences. While Gov. Romney wants to ensure women’s flexible work schedules so they are free to make dinner, this is precisely the kind of discourse that produces the glass ceiling. Employers want unencumbered workers (read: men), not workers who need to get home to cook. Men are unencumbered workers because they have wives who will pick up this second shift. This is a contributing factor in the wage gap between mothers and childless women; childless women remain unencumbered, at least in the eyes of employers.
Families with children are forced to make difficult decisions about childcare. With rising childcare costs, the obvious financial choice is often for women to stay home. If their jobs pay less, then families lose less if women quit working. Yet again, this “choice” reflects women’s structural disadvantage.
While it seems to me that President Obama’s plans tend to be better for both women and their families, I think both candidates need to be better informed on the complex factors that produce workplace inequality. I’ve managed to list just a few, but there are many more. And I’ve only described the generic, predominantly white, middle-class woman’s experience and haven’t even touched on the impact of race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality discrimination that complicate the picture exponentially. I hope that women’s interests are reflected in the policies of the next four years.
Further Reading
Discourse surrounding feminism, feminist theory, and even Women and Gender Studies departments has grown increasingly skeptical. Questioning the need for feminism in this “post-feminist” world and citing the high attendance of women in universities, American society seems fixated on closing the door on calls for social justice based on gender. Two recent new stories however, highlight the decisive need for a reinvigorated gender-based movement. Gains in college attendance and females entering into all sectors of employment have overshadowed the continued pay gap (equal pay for equal work?), discrimination relating to maternity leave, and the clear lack of women in executive and leadership positions. In this dangerous ideology, if a woman can’t make it, its her own fault. Perhaps most disturbing is the story of a 15 year old girl gang raped in the alley behind her high school on Homecoming night for 2 1/2 hours. Rape and sexual abuse of girls and women, date rape,and domestic violence have not decreased but rather been steadily increasing. Is this what it means to live in a post-feminist world? We must renew our efforts at social justice, not simply for women but for all marginalized groups, this is the unfinished task of feminism.
For all of the talk about sexual expression and deconstructing gender categories, much of the public discussions regarding sexuality continue to reify the very concepts that tend to constrain us. Proponents and members of LGBTQ communities must practice what they preach: to end discrimination and challenge heternormative institutions we have to move beyond hard and fast sexual designations. A recent CNN article (see below) illustrates the pressures faced by bisexual and lesbian women to categorize themselves. But does advocating one strict category of homosexuality defined as female-female or male-male actually pose a challenge to our current social, cultural, and political gender system? The dichotomous categories of male/female, homosexual/heterosexual, masculine/feminine do not undermine power structures simply by placing value on the marginalized side of the coin. In other words, advocating homosexuality as an alternative to heterosexuality simply reinforces the same system of oppression. The logic of such behavior does not follow from the claims and slogans of freedom of expression and queer politics. Like any identity based movement, the goal should focus on both recognition as well as attention to the social system and power structures that support discriminatory practices in any area of identity.
One of the most popular (and frankly, easiest) methods of confronting issues of violence and discrimination among women and children has been financial assistance. In the recent special article in the New York Times, “women” are categorically viewed as the great moral challenge of the 21st century (see article below). Apart from the inherently problematic nature of presenting women as a monolithic and undifferentiated category, there is a more fundamental issue at stake. Attention to issues of discrimination, physical and sexual abuse, and other forms of social, economic, and political violence cannot be addressed solely through financial means.
Forty years after second wave women’s movements took to the streets demanding equal pay and legal protections we are finally seeing a move in the direction of parity and it is taking place in the bathroom. The recent decision by Yankee Stadium (see article below) to take gender into consideration in its architecture is both an historic and sobering moment. Gender, race, class, and sexual discrimination is not simply a matter of laws and codes, it is also culturally and physically embedded. In much the same way that Foucault describes power as a field of force relations, gender is inscribed here as architecture, as limits to our structural imaginations. Acts of equity such as the installation of more toilets for women, scholarships and incentives, and affirmative action, are meant to account for and achieve equality and parity of participation. Essentially, to achieve equality we must often pursue seemingly unequal strategies. Nancy Fraser (see below) reminds us that these kinds of strategies to overcome both economic and social injustices are not aimed at emphasizing and creating special treatment but rather to establish certain collectives of subordinated groups as full partners in social life. In the case of Yankee Stadium, however crass and seemingly insignificant, the installation of more toilets achieves at least one instance of parity. 
