A briefing paper prepared by Nicholas Velotta and Pepper Schwartz, University of Washington, for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Gender Matters Online Symposium (.pdf).

Not too long ago, women were considered “over the hill” once they reached middle age. Women in the 1960s recalled being told that their fate was to be “fat at 40, finished at 50.” But over the last two decades the U.S. has seen a massive shift in older adults’ attitudes towards sex, romance, and intimacy, with women in particular feeling emboldened to remain sexually and romantically satisfied throughout their entire life cycle, not just when they are young. Heterosexual partners tend to become more egalitarian as they age, and the majority of divorces that do occur after age 50 are initiated by women. Matchmaking sites have given older women far more chances to find partners than in the past, while men can now take Viagra or Cialis in order to keep their sex lives vibrant and healthy.

Desexualized? Who is on the hook for cosmetic surgery?

There are challenges of course, and many of those challenges are starkly gendered. After menopause, women are frequently seen as non-sexual beings, something we call the desexualization of older women. Men on the other hand have been given lifelong statuses as sexual beings and seldom face societal obstacles to romantic contact later in life. To compensate for this gender double standard, many women have resorted to surgical interventions to reduce the signs of age on their body—in fact, they make up the largest growing market for cosmetic surgery. Other women have decided to forgo relationships and sex entirely, relying on social networks of friends to support them emotionally instead of intimate partners. Fortunately for the many women who continue to date later in life, the research concludes that their sexual satisfaction and frequencies are fairly high.

Resexualized. Stars might suggest older faces that are sexy.

What our review, “Gender and Sexuality in Aging,” in The Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, best illustrates is that Baby Boomers have become far more liberal in regard to sex, and when older men and women prioritize lifelong sexual satisfaction they have a better shot at achieving it today than ever before. Gender, sexual orientation, race, and other demographic factors affect Boomers’ success at this, and U.S. culture as a whole is just beginning to value intimacy as a lifelong goal. But with older faces becoming “sexy” (think Alfre Woodard at 65, Meryl Streep at 69. Or  Denzel Washington at 63, Tom Selleck at 73) and more attention being given to the study of sex and aging (see the endowed professorship in sexuality and aging at the University of Minnesota), we are seeing progressive shifts in our mainstream culture towards making older bodies less stigmatized and more romanticized.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Nicholas Velotta, University of Washington, ndvelotta@icloud.com. Pepper Schwartz, Professor of Sociology, University of Washington. pepperschwartz@hotmail.com. They are authors of “Gender and Sexuality in Aging,” in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender.

A briefing paper prepared by Pallavi Banerjee, University of Calgary, for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Gender Matters Online Symposium (.pdf).

Imagine thousands of highly qualified women forced to stay home because they are not legally allowed to work. Sounds unreal in this day and age, right? And yet this has been the reality for many women who have legally migrated to the US on what are popularly known as dependent visas or H-4 visas. These are visas given to spouses and children of workers who migrate to the U.S. on H-1B visas to work in a “specialty occupation,” mostly in science, technology and engineering fields. The H-4 dependent visa forbids the spouse of a skilled worker to engage in legal employment for a term that could be as long as 20 years. These visas disproportionately affect Asian migrant families in the U.S., given that more half of the H-1B and H-4 visas go to Indians, followed by Chinese.

Dependent H-4 visas were originally designed with women in mind, as the extension of the 18^th-19^th century coverture doctrine that a wife had no legal identity outside that of her husband. The doctrine was generally accepted until the late 20^th century in accord with the male-breadwinner ideology of the 1950s in the US. However, the law in itself is not gendered. This means that men as well as women can be excluded from the labor market if they come in with a spouse who is on an H-1B visa. In practice, women are the majority of those affected. But either way, these policies leave lasting imprints, although in distinctly gendered ways, on the lives of spouses who come in with one H-1B and one H-4 visa holder. Families where the woman is dependent on the man have to live like 1950s nuclear families, even though many women are qualified to be co-providers and would prefer to be. In families where the man is excluded from the labor force, by contrast, gender power struggles within the families assume difficult and complex forms, generating ambivalence in both the working and the stay-at-home spouse.

Trailing wives and the reinvention of dependence.

Because the most common recipients of H-1B visas are male high-tech workers, women (their wives) are disproportionally affected by these policies. Approximately 80 percent of all H-4 visa holders are women, most of whom are highly-educated and were working before migration. A “housewife visa” or “vegetable visa,” as many of the dependent wives call the H-4 visa, forces these wives to become economically, socially, and psychologically dependent on husbands. My interviews with these women revealed that they experienced a loss of dignity and an increase in self-deprecation. They tried to cope by engaging in excessive cooking, cleaning, and decorating while also resenting it. These women told me they felt they were back in the days of the “traditional family” where women had no identity of their own and were devalued in society. They talked about being rendered invisible and feeling shackled and depressed. Some even reported contemplating suicide. In situations of domestic violence, women in such circumstances have no means to leave and support themselves. Accordingly, some women describe these visas as “prison visas.”

Trailing husbands and the loss of status.

Relatively few men are on the H-4 visas, and typically these are the husbands of women who were granted work visas because of their training as nurses. Such men report a complicated relationship with their dependent status. While most claim to enjoy raising children as an equal caregiver with their wives, the loss of their culturally normalized head-of-household status leaves them sore and resentful. In order to compensate for this loss, dependent husbands find multiple ways to reassert their masculinities. For instance, they emphasize how they “allowed” their wives to be the main migrant. They also skirt around doing any of the everyday housework and control the family finances, while invoking the imagery of the “sacrificial father” who gave up his career “to ensure the well-being of the children and family.” Meanwhile, the breadwinning wives overcompensate for being the breadwinner by doing all household chores.

Executive Orders from Obama to Trump.

In 2015 Obama responded to research and a spurt of online activism around the issue of legal dependence by signing an Executive Order that made it possible for H-4 visa holders to obtain Employment Authorization Documents after being approved for permanent residency. H-4 visa holders without permanent residency approval remained stranded. But the EO did have positive effects on the lives of 179,600 spouses that year, and 55,000 additional spouses in subsequent years, as estimated by USCIS. Many H-4 visa holders attempted to return to work. Some with specialized degrees found work quickly. Others found it difficult to find jobs, as is common for women with a long employment hiatus. However, what was important is now they had the opportunity to look for work legally.

The Trump administration, by contrast, has announced its intent has to implement the Buy American and Hire American Executive Order. This will revoke the employment authorization for H-4 visa holders, threatening economic and family stability for many and perpetuating gendered dependencies and conflicts within and outside the families. These apparently gender-neutral visa policies harm women and men alike, by imposing either a male breadwinner family that subordinates women or a female breadwinner family that leads to ambivalence, resentment and conflict.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Pallavi Banerjee, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary, Canada, and author of forthcoming Dismantling Dependence: Gendered Migrations, Indian High-Skilled Families and the Visa Regime (NYU Press). Prof. Banerjee’s research on H-4 visa played a critical role in the Obama Administration’s reformulation of those rules. pallavi.banerjee@ucalgary.ca. Professor Banerjee is author with Raewyn Connell of “Gender Theory as a Southern Theory” in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender.

A new article published in Journal of Marriage and Family examines the relationship of cohabitation and divorce, and claims that recent research that finds that premarital cohabitation does not impact divorce rates is incorrect. They find that in the first year of marriage, premarital cohabitation is associated with lower divorce rates compared to those who directly marry (because those who would have divorced quickly are filtered out by premarital cohabitation), but that afterwards premarital cohabitation is associated with higher divorce rates. These effects “cancel each other out,” making it appear as if cohabitation is not associated with divorce, when, according to them, it still is; just not in very early marriage.

However this research makes an important omission. They account for the age at which women married their first husband, but don’t account for the age at which they moved in together.  As my past research has shown, accounting for age at marriage but not the age at which couples moved in together artificially inflates the association between premarital cohabitation and divorce for recent cohorts, compared to statistical models that account for the age at which couples moved in together, or even statistical models that do not account for age at all.

This inflation happens because the older that couples are when they move in together with the person they will eventually marry (whether at marriage or beforehand) the less likely they are to divorce.  When accounting for age at marriage only, researchers are comparing couples who married directly at, for example, age 24, to those who moved in together at perhaps age 21 and then married at age 24.

My research argues that a more accurate comparison would compare those who moved in together at, for example, 21 (and then eventually married) to those who both moved in together and married at age 21.  When doing so, the relationship between premarital cohabitation and divorce disappears for some cohorts; and in very recent cohorts, as I show in my recent CCF report, reverses, with premarital cohabitors having a lower risk of divorce compared to couples that marry directly. In other words, the reason premarital cohabitors seem to have a higher risk of divorce is not because cohabitation causes divorce; it’s because premarital cohabitors who eventually marry select partners and move in together at earlier ages compared to other couples who marry at the same age, when they are less prepared for the roles and responsibilities that are associated with eventual successful marriages.

To demonstrate the importance of how researchers account for age on research findings, I recalculated the odds ratios for the relationship of premarital cohabitation and divorce that I present in my recent CCF report on changing cohabitation over time (which accounts for age at coresidence), in statistical models that either account for age at marriage instead, or don’t account for age at all. As you can see in Figure 1 below, models that account for age at marriage show a stronger association between cohabitation and divorce. In the most recent cohort, this effect appears neutral, but when accounting for age at coresidence instead (or even if not accounting for age at all) premarital cohabitation is associated with a lower risk of divorce.

Figure 1: Odds Ratios for the Association Between Premarital Cohabitation and Divorce in First Marriages in Four Cohorts: The Importance of Age Controls

Note: Numbers calculated from the 1988 National Survey of Families and Households (1956-1985, N=3,594) and National Survey of Family Growth (1986-2015, N=9,420) using Cox regressions and based on women <36 at first marriage. Controls for raised not religious, religious attendance, race, education at marriage, mother’s education, prior cohabitations, lived with both biological parents at age 14, birth prior to coresidence, began coresidence while pregnant. Age at Coresidence models additionally control for age at coresidence and age at coresidence squared.  Age at Marriage models additionally control for age at marriage and age at marriage squared. †p<.10, **p<.01

In my new article recently published in the journal Marriage & Family Review I show that the length of time that couples live together before marriage has grown in recent decades (See Figure 2), increasing the importance of correctly accounting for the age at which couples move in together, as it grows further and further from the age at which these couples marry.

Figure 2: Average Duration of Premarital Cohabitation with First Husband among Premarital Cohabitors who Married before Age 36 (Months)

While the overall pattern in this new research of lower divorce rates in the first year of marriage after cohabitation seems plausible, accounting for age at marriage rather than age at coresidence artificially inflates the divorce rates of premarital cohabitors across all marriage durations, calling into question whether premarital cohabitation is in fact associated with higher divorce risks at later marriage durations, as found by the authors. A comparison that accounted for age at coresidence instead of age at marriage would likely have led to significantly different findings.

Arielle Kuperberg is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sociology and Cross-Appointed Faculty in the Women and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg and reach her at atkuperb@uncg.edu.

A briefing paper prepared by Kenly Brown, University of California, Berkeley, for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Gender Matters Online Symposium (.pdf).  

Since the 1970s and early 1980s, feminist criminologists have explored the ways in which the distribution of justice and punishment varies, based on people’s marginalized (or privileged) identities, their vulnerability to state violence, and their exposure to interpersonal violence  (Potter, 2015; Riche, 2012; Chesney-Lind, 2006 ; Burgess-Proctor, 2006; Bertrand, 1969; Heidensohn, 1968). In my chapter with Berkeley’s Nikki Jones, “Gender, Race, and Crime: The Evolution of a Feminist Research Agenda,” in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, we argue that feminist scholars must “examine the relationship between interpersonal violence and institutional violence, as well as the feminist movement’s relationship to the state” (p.456). Ultimately, institutional violence shapes the conditions and outcomes of the interpersonal violence that marginalized groups navigate on a daily basis.

In my study, The Disciplinary Dumping Ground: The Construction of Black Girlhood in an Alternative School, I use a similar intersectional analysis to study the ways in which alternative education creates inequitable conditions of learning and access for Black girls who are vulnerable to exclusion, neglect, and violence in their everyday lives. I extend literature on exclusionary discipline (i.e. disproportionate levels of harsh punishment sanctioned against Black and Latinx students) to consider the significance of exclusionary spaces in education: alternative schools.

Benign intent, harmful result.

California has seven types of alternative schools: independent charter, community, juvenile court, opportunity, school of choice, community day, and continuation. Continuation schools enroll 75 percent of the 136,000 students enrolled in alternative schools, ostensibly providing a more positive environment for students who have difficulty learning in large school settings, are at-risk to not graduate, and/or have disruptive behavioral issues (Taylor, 2015 & Velasco and Gonzales, 2017). Despite this benign intent, teachers, students, and practitioners colloquially refer to alternative schools as dumping grounds used to warehouse students of color from under-resourced neighborhoods that traditional high schools find disruptive and/or underperforming (Dunning-Lozano, 2016; Kelly, 1993). Indeed, Elder’s qualitative research found that continuation schools were less like a learning community than a correctional institution for students stigmatized as “outsiders” — academically failing, on parole, pregnant, and /or working (Elder, 1966).

My research explores how alternative schools contribute to the further isolation of marginalized students, particularly low-income Black girls, who are the most vulnerable to violence and neglect in their interpersonal lives. Studies have shown that Black girls are perceived as less innocent than white girls and are more harshly punished in school for not meeting mainstream expectations of middle-class white girls (Epstein, Blake, and González, 2017). Using ethnographic methods including direct and participant observations and semi-structured interviews, I find that the compounding effects of isolation, neglect, and danger in low-income communities render Black girls more vulnerable to be pushed into learning environments that are also isolated, lack stable funding, and have limited resources. An intersectional vulnerabilities framework shows how stereotypes associated with Black girls and women perceived as aggressive, domineering, or hypersexual increase their exposure to interpersonal violence in their everyday day lives and structural violence at the hands of institutions.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Kenly Brown, Ph.D. candidate in African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. kenly@berkeley.edu. Nikki Jones, Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, author of Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence and recently published The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. njones@berkeley.edu. They are authors of “Gender, Race, and Crime: The Evolution of a Feminist Research Agenda,” in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender.

Imagine that your 75-year-old mother has fallen and broken her ankle. She lives alone in a third-floor apartment in a city not far from where you live, but this accident means that she cannot manage on her own for several weeks, if not longer. What would you do? Would you take her into your home? Would you move into her apartment to help her until she healed? Would you pay someone to come in daily to help her cook, bathe, clean house, run errands? What if your mother had broken her hip instead of an ankle? Would that change what you would do? What if she showed signs of the early stages of dementia? What would you do then?

Suppose that your mother had divorced your father when you were 10 and moved far away from you and your father. Suppose also that you and she had not been close for years. Would that affect how you answered the questions above about helping her? What if I had substituted the word stepmother for mother, would that have made a difference to you? What if this stepmother had raised you since you were 11? Would that make a difference? What if it was your aging father who broke a hip? Your stepfather?

These are the kinds of questions we have been asking Americans for over two decades in more than 20 studies about beliefs regarding intergenerational responsibilities to older (and younger) family members. The beliefs we examined may be unique to the United States, although we suspect they are not.

It might surprise you to know that in an abstract way most Americans believe that adult children have responsibilities to their aging parents and other older kin. In fact, most Americans agree with the broad statement that ‘adult children should take care of their parents when they get old’. In fact, this belief is so widespread that most states have filial responsibility laws that define younger family members’ obligations to provide care for aging parents and grandparents.

Critics of these laws, however, argue that these and other U.S. social policies about intergenerational assistance are based on outdated assumptions that family ties are always emotionally close and loving, that families are able and willing to assist older kin, and that family membership is stable. These assumptions do not reflect the experiences of many, if not most, families in the 21^st Century. Families vary in the degree to which members are emotionally involved in each other’s lives and, with most adult men and women in the paid work force, there are few families with available kin to provide aid. Moreover, longer life spans and lowered reproduction has meant that there are fewer young people and more old people in extended families. Family membership is not constant; families in the United States have experienced decades of structural changes due to divorce, remarriage, and cohabitation and these changes make connections among kin more tenuous than in the past.

U.S. policy makers are therefore faced with laws and social policies that are designed for a mid-Twentieth Century extended family at a time when multi-generational family structures are becoming more complex. We began investigating whether beliefs and attitudes about intergenerational responsibilities also were becoming more complex. We began a research program to investigate how divorce and remarriage affected beliefs about intergenerational assistance to genetic and step-kin, and we examined beliefs about aid given to both older and younger family members.

Consensual beliefs about intergenerational family relationships and support are important to examine because such beliefs function as parameters within which individuals define and negotiate their responsibilities to kin, they serve as criteria to measure how well individuals are functioning as family members, and they provide a framework that people use to justify and explain their conduct to others. What people actually do in relationships is based partly on personal beliefs about appropriate actions between kin and partly on widely held expectations about what should be done regarding family responsibilities. Normative beliefs about intergenerational responsibilities also are important to understand because such beliefs influence the development and application of public policy.

Our studies were random samples drawn regionally or nationally. We used phone surveys, mailed surveys, and face to face interviews. We can’t tell you about all the findings from these studies, so instead we summarize them.

In general, genetic bonds among generations denote greater intergenerational obligations than do affinal bonds. This means, all other factors being equal, people believe that genetic kin should receive more assistance than affinal kin (step-kin or in-laws).

Genetic kinship is not enough to attribute obligations to assist. For most people genetic kinship was relevant but did not automatically mean adult children and grandchildren should help.

Relationship quality is important in attributing obligations to assist, regardless of the type of relationship (genetic or affinal). Parents and adult children were thought to be much more obligated to help each other when relationships were emotionally close. When relationships were distant or hostile, any help was discretionary and more limited than when bonds were close. Step-kin who develop emotionally close relationships were perceived to be obligated to assist each other at levels similar to genetic kin who had close bonds.

Beliefs about helping older kin are stronger when the older kin have helped family members in the past. For most people, adult children are obligated to help parents only if the parents had fulfilled parental responsibilities to children when they were young. Family obligation norms no longer applied when genetic kin had not observed the norm of reciprocity between generations. Genetic kinship had significance, but without past histories of mutual helping it was as if the responsibilities attendant to kinship were unimportant. Without a history of financial, tangible, and emotional support from parents, adult children were seen as having lesser debt to repay than they would have had if parents had provided more for them. Divorced and remarried older parents who were perceived to have broken the reciprocity “contract” lost their “rights” to receive help from adult children.

Stepparents and stepchildren who had helped each other in the past were perceived as obligated to assist each other at levels similar, but not quite equal, to older parents and adult children who had reciprocal exchanges. Stepparents who help raise stepchildren thus can “earn” assistance later in life.

Intergenerational assistance is limited for relationships formed later in life. Step-relationships formed in later-life have less time to build close bonds and exchange resources, which reduced the likelihood of them being perceived as kin and having responsibilities to help each other.

For middle-generation adults, helping children takes precedence over helping elders. There is a hierarchy of intergenerational assistance, with children at the top as targets of aid.

Intergenerational assistance is conditional for most Americans. For most of the thousands of respondents in our studies, perceptions about intergenerational obligations were not automatic, but were related to several factors – relationship closeness/quality, reciprocity, resource availability, and other demands on family members’ resources were important when making judgments about helping.

Clearly, there is a lot we don’t know yet about how structural family changes affect intergenerational obligations to assist kin. This issue is relevant in societies with loose social safety nets, such as the United States. In six of our intergenerational obligation studies, we found that attitudes about helping kin were significantly related to participants’ helping behaviors in their own family networks. Our studies suggest that the final years of older adults who were less than stellar parents, stepparents, or in-laws may be in jeopardy when they need help to care for themselves. As a nation, we seem ill-prepared to deal with the rising number of Baby Boomers who are becoming our “senior citizens.”

Lawrence Ganong is a Chancellor’s Professor of Human Development and Family Science and Emeritus Professor of Nursing at the University of Missouri. Marilyn Coleman is a Curator’s Professor Emerita of Human Development and Family Science at the University of Missouri. They have studied post-divorce family relationships and stepfamily relationships for over four decades. They may be reached at ganongl@missouri.edu and colemanma@missouri.edu. 

Reposted from The New York Times.

If you strolled by the playgrounds of Flushing, Queens, this summer, you would have seen throngs of Chinese immigrant women tending to their American-born grandchildren.

The moms and dads were at work, all through these long summer days. For those who cannot afford expensive day care and camps, in a country that does almost nothing to help working families care for their kids, grandparents are a lifeline. And increasingly, these grandparents are immigrants.

One of us, Xuemei, recently spent time with a Flushing family who moved here from rural China years ago. Each day the mother, father and grandfather board buses arranged by their employers to take them to work at Chinese restaurants. They leave their home around 10 each morning and return around 10 each night. In their absence, the grandmother performs all of the housework and cares for the couple’s two American-born children.

The Trump administration is now threatening those care-taking arrangements.

President Trump has been pushing for a law that would end family-based immigration — what he calls “horrible chain migration.” He even used the migrant children separated from their parents on the border as bargaining chips to try to get Democrats to agree to such a proposal, before a judge ordered them returned to their families.

In June the House defeated a plan by Representative Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, that would have restricted legal immigration through the family reunification program so that only the spouses and minor children of American citizens could immigrate — barring grandparents. A week later, the so-called compromise G.O.P. bill on immigration was also defeated. It would have effectively cut the sponsorships of spouses, minor children and parents of American citizens by about 215,000 over the next two decades, according to analysts at the Cato Institute. But Republicans haven’t given up.

The Trump administration’s determination to separate families has formed the backbone of its immigration policy since Day 1. These proposals reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of 21st-century American families and contradict the principle of family unity that has guided American immigration policy for the last 50 years. (In fact, a few weeks ago President Trump’s in-laws became American citizens thanks to the family reunification program.)

According to data from the Department of Homeland Security, the number of legal permanent residents admitted as parents of United States citizens rose to about 174,000 in 2016 from about 56,000 in 1994, an increase to 15 percent from 7 percent of all admissions.

America needs these late-life immigrants. Older parents serve as valuable resources, often helping with the down payment on homes and with child care and household chores as younger immigrants juggle tight work schedules. Their assistance is free and reliable, allowing adult children to work, improve their English and further their educations, thus integrating faster into American society.

A briefing paper prepared by Emily W. Kane, Bates College, for the Council on Contemporary Families Families’ Gender Matters Online Symposium (.pdf).

Despite fifty years of significant change in gender relations, social definitions of good parenting remain so deeply gender-based that we still think of mothering and fathering as very different activities, and we continue to valorize white, upper-middle class, heterosexually-partnered mothering and fathering. The gender of our kids also plays a pivotal role in how we parent them, a trap we continue to fall into even though many parents want to loosen gender constraints on their sons and daughters. All these patterns take place in the context of an increasingly privatized family, with each American household expected to do the hard work of raising the next generation with less public support than in the past, and much less than in other affluent industrialized democracies.

Adaptations to pressures from everyday life.

The transition to parenthood still leads to inequality in the division of household labor between mothers and fathers. Women take on more hours of housework and child care as well as coping with the expectations of “intensive motherhood.” Parenthood also heightens the gender wage gap for women, because their earnings are hit by what social scientists call a “motherhood penalty.”

These gender inequalities are not so much the result of choices made based on personal preferences as they are adaptations to pressures from the everyday world and the lack of institutional support for shared care-giving and breadwinning from employers and government. The most economically privileged families can buy themselves out of some of these constraints by outsourcing household labor and child care, often to poorly-paid women of color, sometimes undocumented immigrants. In these privileged families, heterosexual partners lessen gender inequalities by taking advantage of intertwined inequalities of race, class, and gender elsewhere in the population.

Intersections between inequalities of gender, race, and class.

Focusing only on the work-family issues of economically advantaged, heterosexually partnered families leaves out the vast majority of parents, from single parents to LGBTQ parents, from low-income parents to non-residential parents, and from transnational parents to incarcerated parents, all of whom face similar constraints from gender expectations that are compounded by other intersecting inequalities. The inadequate levels of public support available to low-income women raising children on public assistance force them to operate with “both hands tied.” Non-residential fathers in low-income neighborhoods face stereotypes about “dead-beat dads” even as they struggle to “do the best they can.” Incarcerated mothers are vilified with little recognition of the social factors that contribute to their problems and little support offered to help them establish more secure lives for themselves and their children. African-American mothers navigate treacherous terrain as they try to protect their sons from dangerous racist stereotypes about Black masculinity. Immigrant domestic workers try to offer emotional as well as material support to children left behind in their home countries as they care for the children of affluent American families. Meanwhile, diminished public services and a declining safety net leave individual American families “cut adrift” to survive on their own, a trend that burdens families across the economic spectrum but leaves low-income households especially vulnerable, widening inequalities in the educational and enrichment activities to which children have access.

At the same time that these gender and other inequalities shape the work of parents, children’s gender also shapes the way we parent. My research demonstrates that even the many parents who want a less gender-constrained world for their kids often find themselves trapped into reproducing gender patterns in the way they raise their sons and daughters, with particularly limiting expectations placed on sons. At the same time, scholars are beginning to document the paths forged by parents of transgender children, as they follow their children’s lead in new and less constrained directions.

Parents and children in the contemporary United States face a range of limitations, including gender-based expectations, economic inequalities, and other inequities based on race, sexuality, and citizenship status. Individual families need the kind of collective support that can allow us all to contribute to the socially critical work of raising the next generation with fewer constraints. The scholarship reviewed in my Handbook chapter, “Parenting and Gender,” helps chart a path toward that greater public support and more equitable, inclusive possibilities.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Emily W. Kane, Professor of Sociology, Bates College, ekane@bates.edu. She is author of “Parenting and Gender,” in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender.

A briefing paper prepared by Heidi Gansen, Northwestern University, and Karin Martin, University of Michigan for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Gender Matters Online Symposium (.pdf).

Children are gendered by parents before they are born. What does that mean? As soon as parents know if “it’s a boy!” or “it’s a girl!” they start to imagine different children and childhoods. From birth, children are treated differently by gender and learn to “do” their gender from families, peers, school, and media. Parents and families buy different clothes and toys for boys and girls and decorate their rooms differently. Observers ascribe different traits (e.g. tough, brave) to a baby that is assumed to be a boy (even if it’s not) than to a baby perceived to be a girl.

We don’t even know we are doing this.

Things we do not think of as constructing gender differences do, as we write in “Becoming Gendered” in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender. For example, preschools are heightened incubators of gender difference. Preschool teachers have differential responses to boys’ and girls’ behaviors, such as permitting informal behaviors for boys (lying down during circle time; loudness) and requiring more formal school behaviors for girls (indoor voices; sitting up straight).

Except when we do.

In some preschools, the curriculum is explicitly gendered. Beginning in preschool, some teachers see instructing children about their gender’s behavioral expectations or responsibilities as an explicit component of their curriculum and teaching practices. In work forthcoming in Sex Roles, Gansen interviewed and observed teachers in three preschools (nine preschool classrooms total). She found that teachers in the three preschools disciplined boys and girls differently and created gendered stories to account for and justify their gendered beliefs, expectations, and disciplinary practices.

For example, in all three preschools that Gansen observed, when girls were not following teacher instructions to clean up, girls were disciplined by having to clean up an area by themselves. In one classroom, if there was nothing left for girls to clean up, teachers would have a child or teacher dump a container of toys on the floor. These dumped-out toys were then the girls’ “responsibility” to clean up on their own. However, in none of the nine classrooms that Gansen observed did teachers discipline boys by having them clean up without assistance from their peers or a teacher. Instead, teachers in these nine classrooms frequently asked other children (almost always girls) to help boys clean up.

In another classroom, the teachers had boys do push-ups when they were physically fighting or being aggressive with their classmates. The teacher would ask the boys involved to take a break, come to the middle of the classroom, and do five push-ups. This teacher held gendered expectations for children’s behavior. She viewed boys as having physical energy they needed to release, and she implemented a gendered disciplinary practice (push-ups) to accommodate what she perceived as a behavioral “need” for preschool-aged boys. By contrast, in all nine classrooms, teachers immediately sent girls to timeout or moved them to a different play activity when they engaged in physical behaviors.

Freeing children from boy vs girl discipline creates stronger individuals.

Beginning in preschool, disciplinary interactions between teachers and students guide the construction of gender difference in young children. Gendered expectations and differential treatment of children at the young ages of three to five years old create and maintain gender inequality by constructing gender differences as natural, normal, and unchangeable. Perhaps if we change our gendered expectations and disciplinary responses to boys’ and girls’ behaviors in various contexts, such as at home and in school, we will open the door for children’s identities to be shaped in more individualized, and less gendered, ways.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Heidi M. Gansen, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, hgansen@umich.edu. Karin A. Martin, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, kamartin@umich.edu. They are authors of “Becoming Gendered,” in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender

CCF’s Online Symposium, Gender Matters, introduces you to some important new work featured in the newly published Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, in which a prestigious roster of contributors examines how gender affects childhood, parenting, work, and sexuality, and comments on the complex interactions between gender relationships, racial inequalities, and globalization. The lead essay in this symposium, by sociologist Barbara Risman, summarizes the extent to which gender continues to influence every aspect of life, despite real progress in breaking down traditional stereotypes and limits. Risman notes the increased normalization of non-binary ways of organizing personal identity and social life and argues — somewhat controversially even in feminist circles — that achieving true equality requires us to move beyond gender.

Changes in gender values and behaviors are not just making it to the mainstream, they are changing the mainstream. Consider this: Among the most popular—and intensively reviewed—Netflix comedy hours currently features Hannah Gadsby. Part of her routine, as described on her widely followed twitter feed, is to eschew “the concept of the gender binary.”

But what does it mean to reject the “gender binary”? And is that even possible? To explain what some gender researchers are arguing, CCF asked several of the contributors to the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender to summarize their current research. Barbara Risman, lead editor of the Handbook, gave an overview of the findings, including the evidence that gender identities and behaviors are not determined by biology, as so many people believe, and that they vary substantially by race, ethnicity, and class.

Risman presents three pieces of this new reality:

Women are never returning to domesticity. Mothers are far more likely to work for pay than in the past; they return to work earlier after having a child; and they work for longer periods of their lives. As highlighted in the interviews Risman conducted for her recent book, Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure, youth today overwhelmingly reject the expectation that women belong in the home specializing in the care of children.

Feminism is not just a women’s movement. The latest General Social Survey data show that gender equality – at home and at work — is embraced nearly as much by men as by women. In fact, the gap between men’s and women’s attitudes is now the smallest ever recorded.

Millennials are mainly gender libertarians: For the youngest generation of adults, the Millennials, Risman found that independence, autonomy, and self-determination are key features of how they identify themselves—and free will is what they expect for others. This aligns with research highlighted here where only a small fraction of survey respondents rated themselves “highly” gender typical: in other words, a representative sample showed that a gender “binary” (aka people are simply all this kind or all that kind) is not all that common.

But, Risman points out, remnants of the older gender system continue to be reproduced in family rituals, child-raising, educational institutions, public policy, and work. Several contributors to the symposium describe how.

In Not Just Kid Stuff: Becoming Gendered, Heidi Gansen (Northwestern University) and Karin Martin (University of Michigan show how differential discipline reinforces gender disparities in preschools. But as Kenly Brown (University of California at Berkeley) reports in Gender, Race, and Girls in California’s Alternative Schools, racism also creates differential discipline, sometimes masquerading as protection, that results in the marginalization of poor Black girls.

Emily W. Kane, in Parenting and the Gender Trap, reports on how parenting practices create inequalities in wages and housework between mothers and fathers, even those who share breadwinning, and how that imbues children with gendered expectations for their own futures. Immigrant families face added challenges, because many host countries grant one partner a work visa but forbid the other to work. In Housewife Visas and Highly Skilled Immigrant Families in the U.S., Pallavi Banerjee (University of Calgary), explains the hardships that will result from the current administration’s proposal to reinstate the H-4 visa, barring “trailing spouses” of high-skill workers (who come to the U.S. under an H-1B visa) from any kind of employment.

In other cases, immigration policies interact with gender inequalities to create widespread patterns of family separation that result in chains of displaced caregiving. Maria Hwang (Rice University) and Carolyn Choi and Rhacel Parreñas (University of Southern California) note in Separating Migrant Families, as Practiced around the Globe that “family separation is a central feature of international temporary labor migration policies that promote the recruitment of migrant workers but bar them from migrating with their families.” Often, women in third-world countries can support their own children only by migrating abroad to care for other women’s children, requiring female kin and friends at home to try to fill their shoes.

Two other briefs in the Gender Matters Online Symposium focus on hidden bias in the workplace. Indiana University’s Koji Chavez, in Gender, Tech Jobs, and Hidden Biases that Make a Difference, points out that even when tech firms hire equal numbers of males and females, they “tend to hire male engineers more for their perceived technical skills and female engineers more for their perceived ‘people’ skills.” This channels women into a track with fewer pay and promotion possibilities than those available to their male counterparts.

Yet Alison Wynn and Shelley Correll, from Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, report some good news in Combating Gender Bias in Modern Workplaces: “Research consistently shows that unconscious or implicit gender biases systematically hinder women’s advancement in the workplace,” especially when criteria for hiring and advancement are ambiguous or informal. Using a “small wins model” of organizational change, however, they were able to significantly reduce the role of implicit bias in hiring and promotion decisions.

The symposium also includes work on sexuality: Nicholas Velotta and Pepper Schwartz write about The Push and Pull of Sex, Gender, and Aging. Increasingly, women feel entitled to have a romantic and sexual life as they age. Although women face more pressure than men to retain youthful-looking sexiness, often making them feel they must have cosmetic surgery, Velotta and Schwartz point to a growing number of older Hollywood icons who still make it into the “sexy” category as evidence of change. Ironically, however, men as well as women now report pressure to maintain their youthful looks.

There’s much more. Reporters can find a host of other sources in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender. C.J. Pascoe writes about sex in high school. Virginia Rutter and Braxton Jones compile the latest work on the impact of gender fluidity on doing sex. Georgiann Davis writes about human rights for intersex people. Arielle Kuperberg profiles the latest work on hooking up. Katie Acosta examines gender non conformity in families. The entire table of contents is here, and CCF can help connect you to all authors.

“This research is just the tip of a very large iceberg,” says Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “CCF has been a focal point for research on the gender revolution, including setbacks and stalls that continue to be evident even in the context of historic change. But as many authors here point out, the advantages and disadvantages that men and women encounter in a gendered world are often modified, and occasionally counteracted, by the dynamics of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. Researchers need to explore the contradictions, trade-offs, costs, and benefits of our changing gender order.”

Reposted from Psychology Today

This is adapted from my keynote essay for the CCF Gender Matters Online Symposium.

How and Why Gender Matters In Even More Ways Then You Knew

You cannot pick up a newspaper today without seeing an article about who can use which bathrooms, and the choice of “category X” for Driver’s licenses. Why are young people today so dissatisfied with their gender categories? Are they rejecting the label of male or female? Or are they rejecting the stereotypes that demand boys to be tough and never cry, and girls wear sparkles as they take care of everyone’s feelings? Or are they rejecting the wage gap and sexual harassment? To understand what’s happening, we need to talk about what we mean by the word “gender.” You may think you know, but I am betting you do not know the half of it.

In my new book, Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford, 2018), I explore the meaning of gender to young people today. In interviews with 116 mostly Chicagoland Millennials, I identify some trends among the generation soon to age into leadership in American society. First, women are never going back to the home. While women’s workplace participation is as high as it has ever been, at the moment, the trend is stalled. But mothers are still far more likely to work for pay then in the past. There is not now, nor has there ever been an opt-out revolution, although sometimes women are pushed out of the labor force but inflexible workplace demands and culture. Almost no one I interviewed, not even the most religious “true believers” think that mothers belong at home with their children. While women may be forced out of the workplace by inflexible policies, American Millennials do not presume motherhood involves leaving the workforce. Second, feminism is no longer just a women’s movement. Among young men, there is a great deal of support for gender equality. In my interviews, there were men who sounded every bit as feminist as any woman, and far more than many women even in this sample of young adults. Both women and men feminist “innovators” expect to change the world by how they live their lives rejecting gender expectations and stereotypes.

I also interviewed some Millennials who rejected not only sexism and gendered expectations, they also reject the gender binary itself. Perhaps there is something new under the sun! These genderqueer respondents do not want to switch their sex category—instead, they reject the belief that they must be gendered at all, even in how they adorn and inhabit their body. Some genderqueer Millennials are quite content to identify as a sex category (e.g. as female) but reject the gender category “woman.” Others don’t use a sex category either. With this new kind of gender fluidity afloat, it makes sense that there are others in this generation who are simply confused. So much has changed, and yet so much has stayed the same. As I have written about elsewhere, what has changed, and remarkably quickly, is the legal status for those who reject categories, with state after state, and now country after country, allowed a neither (or X box) for those whose identity is neither male nor female.

Still, there are some patterns among the chaos of a diverse generation. Nearly all young adults today are libertarian about gender, or at least they claim to be. They refuse to judge people who are different from themselves in terms of gender identity or expectations. Indeed, my colleagues and I have presented survey research that shows most of today’s young adults believe women and men should be equal both inside the home and outside of it. My interviews suggest that while beliefs have changed, there is still much confusion about gender when it comes to live our lives, and what to expect from others. There are shades of grey, beyond 50, when women and men are confused by a changing gender structure. In today’s world everything is in flux. Research on Millennial’s has been contradictory, with some finding that high school seniors today are more conservative about mothers remaining in the workplace while other research – like mine — suggests a generation that takes for granted gender equality as a goal. Will these new trends among Millennials turn the tide and bring us closer to the shore of equality? Is there really change afoot? Or is it the case that the more things seem to change, the more they stay the same. As any social scientist, my answer is, let’s do more research  to make gender more visible and find out.

What we know for sure is that our gender structure is changing, unevenly, and without any clear guidelines. We also know that while most Americans think gender is an identity, something deeply felt internally, gender is far more then that. Gender doesn’t begin nor end with individual feelings of authenticity. In our new Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, my co-editors Carissa Froyum and William Scarborough, and the authors of individual chapters, show just how much gender matters for every aspect of our social lives.

Gender matters to individuals, of course. But gender is very much alive in the expectations we have for one another, what it means to be a good mother versus a good father, a girlfriend versus a boyfriend.  Gender matters because of all those stereotypes, conscious and not, we all hold. But gender matters beyond even beyond those stereotypes because we have quite literally built those stereotypes into our schools, workplaces, and the economy. And to justify all the inequities involved, we have developed beliefs that explain, and justify sexist institutions. Gender matters not just as identity, or stereotypes, but is also at the core of how our social world is organized. Just like every society has an economic and political structure, so too, every society has a gender structure.

First, for those of you far past college age, let me share some language now widely used on campus. Sex is the (presumably) biological category you were labeled at birth, male or female. The biological categories are not always clear-cut, as some children are born intersex, with internal female organs, but an extended clitoris that appears to be a micro-phallus. Even intersex people (who actually have both male and female body parts) are usually, if mistakenly, labeled male or female at birth. This is a good example of how even our definition of biological facts are shaped by an ideological assumption that there are two and only two possible sex categories. Gender as a social structure includes one’s individual sex category, but is far more than simply that. Gender is also a social construct that is used to display and claim one’s sex category. Few of us actually can judge someone’s sex by inspecting naked bodies, but all of us assess each other’s gender identity during interaction. At the same time, we are all evaluated by how well we ‘do gender.’ Some of us may be in social contexts where we are evaluated more positively if we reject doing gender traditionally, but the expectations remain in both conservative or progressive settings. Whatever our ideologies, we must all adapt to organizations and institutions that are based on the presumption that  “ideal” workers should be entirely and uniquely committed to the business at hand, policies that reward the typically male life course, and historically masculine privilege of having a domestic wife. In the next few weeks, I will be writing about concrete examples from everyday life with the authors from the Handbook.  Stay tuned…

Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She is also a Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Families.