{"id":1724,"date":"2018-08-28T08:12:22","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T13:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=1724"},"modified":"2018-08-28T08:12:22","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T13:12:22","slug":"why-gender-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2018\/08\/28\/why-gender-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Gender Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reposted from Psychology Today<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This is adapted from my keynote essay for the\u00a0CCF Gender Matters Online Symposium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How and Why Gender Matters In Even More Ways Then You Knew<\/h3>\n

You cannot pick up a newspaper today without seeing\u00a0an article about who can use which bathrooms, and the choice of \u201ccategory X\u201d for Driver\u2019s licenses<\/a>.\u00a0Why are young people today so dissatisfied with their\u00a0gender<\/a> categories?\u00a0Are they rejecting the label of male or female?\u00a0Or are they rejecting the stereotypes that demand boys to be tough and never cry, and girls wear sparkles as they take care of everyone\u2019s feelings?\u00a0Or are they rejecting the wage gap and sexual harassment? To understand what\u2019s happening, we need to talk about what we mean by the word \u201cgender.\u201d You may think you know, but I am betting you do not know the half of it.<\/p>\n

In my new book,\u00a0Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford, 2018),\u00a0<\/a>I explore the meaning of gender to young people today.\u00a0In interviews with 116 mostly Chicagoland Millennials, I identify some trends among the generation soon to age into\u00a0leadership<\/a>\u00a0in American society. First, women are never going back to the home. While women\u2019s\u00a0workplace<\/a>\u00a0participation is as high as it has ever been, at the moment, the trend is stalled.\u00a0But mothers are still far more likely to work for pay then in the past.\u00a0There 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\u00a0religious<\/a>\u00a0\u201ctrue believers\u201d\u00a0think 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.\u00a0Second,\u00a0feminism is no longer just a women\u2019s movement.\u00a0Among 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 \u201cinnovators\u201d expect to change the world by how they live their lives rejecting gender expectations and stereotypes.<\/p>\n

I also interviewed some Millennials who rejected not only\u00a0sexism<\/a>\u00a0and gendered expectations, they also reject the gender binary itself.\u00a0Perhaps there is something new under the sun! These genderqueer respondents do not want to switch their\u00a0sex<\/a>\u00a0category\u2014instead, they reject the belief that they must be gendered at all, even in how they adorn and inhabit their body.\u00a0Some genderqueer Millennials are quite content to identify as a sex category (e.g. as female) but reject the gender category “woman.” Others don\u2019t use a sex category either.\u00a0With 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\u00a0identity<\/a>\u00a0is neither male nor female.<\/p>\n

Still, there are some patterns among the chaos of a diverse generation.\u00a0Nearly 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.\u00a0Indeed, my colleagues and I have presented survey research that shows most of today\u2019s young adults believe women and men should be equal both inside the home and outside of it.<\/a>\u00a0My 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.\u00a0There are shades of grey, beyond 50, when women and men are confused by a changing gender structure.\u00a0In today\u2019s world everything is in flux.\u00a0Research on Millennial\u2019s has been contradictory, with some finding that high school seniors today are more conservative about mothers remaining in the workplace while other research \u2013 like mine \u2014 suggests a generation that takes for granted gender equality as a goal.\u00a0Will these new trends among Millennials turn the tide and bring us closer to the shore of equality?\u00a0Is there really change afoot?\u00a0Or is it the case that the more things seem to change, the more they stay the same.\u00a0As any social scientist, my answer is, let\u2019s do more research\u00a0 to make gender more visible and find out.<\/p>\n

What we know for sure is that our gender structure is changing, unevenly, and without any clear guidelines.\u00a0We also know that while most Americans think gender is an identity, something deeply felt internally, gender is far more then that.\u00a0Gender doesn\u2019t begin nor end with individual feelings of authenticity.\u00a0In our new\u00a0Handbook of the Sociology of Gender,<\/a>\u00a0my 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.<\/p>\n

Gender matters to individuals, of course.\u00a0But 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0And to justify all the inequities involved, we have developed beliefs that explain, and justify sexist institutions.\u00a0Gender matters not just as identity, or stereotypes, but is also at the core of how our social world is organized.\u00a0Just like every society has an economic and political structure, so too, every society has a gender structure.<\/p>\n

First, for those of you far past college age, let me share some language now widely used on campus.\u00a0Sex 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.\u00a0Even 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\u2019s individual sex category, but is far more than simply that.\u00a0Gender is also a social construct that is used to display and claim one\u2019s sex category.\u00a0Few of us actually can judge someone\u2019s sex by inspecting naked bodies, but all of us assess each other\u2019s gender identity during interaction.\u00a0At the same time, we are all evaluated by how well we \u2018do gender.\u2019\u00a0Some 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.\u00a0Whatever our ideologies, we must all adapt to organizations and institutions that are based on the presumption that\u00a0 \u201cideal\u201d 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.\u00a0In the next few weeks, I will be writing about concrete examples from everyday life with the authors from the Handbook.\u00a0 Stay tuned\u2026<\/p>\n

Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.\u00a0 She is also a Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Families.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reposted from Psychology Today This is adapted from my keynote essay for the\u00a0CCF 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\u00a0an article about who can use which bathrooms, and the choice of \u201ccategory X\u201d for Driver\u2019s licenses.\u00a0Why are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[8959,55,36199,261,3093,1528],"class_list":["post-1724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-families","tag-gender","tag-genderqueer","tag-intersex","tag-millennials","tag-sexism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1730,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724\/revisions\/1730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}