{"id":1734,"date":"2019-04-30T07:00:15","date_gmt":"2019-04-30T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=1734"},"modified":"2019-04-30T07:00:15","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T12:00:15","slug":"gender-structures-every-aspect-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2019\/04\/30\/gender-structures-every-aspect-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender Structures Every Aspect of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Gender Matters Online Symposium<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(.pdf)\u00a0keynote essay was prepared for the\u00a0Council on Contemporary Families<\/a>\u00a0by Barbara J.\u00a0Risman<\/a>, University of Illinois-Chicago. Risman is co-editor, with Carissa Froyum and William Scarborough, of the recently released\u00a0<\/em>Handbook of The Sociology of Gender<\/a>\u00a0(Springer 2018),\u00a0which includes forty chapters examining new research on gender diversity and change on issues ranging from the gendering of childhood to the impact of gender on work and parenting to changes in sex for the over-sixty population<\/em>.\u00a0This essay summarizes some of that research, along with Risman\u2019s findings in\u00a0<\/em>Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure<\/a>\u00a0(Oxford, 2018). Risman\u2019s takeaway: Gender matters, now more than ever, because it structures\u00a0<\/em>every\u00a0aspect of life. And we benefit from knowing\u00a0<\/em>how\u00a0it matters.<\/em><\/p>\n

Questions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You cannot pick up a newspaper today without seeing debates about whether masculinity is in crisis, whether women are \u201copting out\u201d of work or choosing work over motherhood, and who can use which bathrooms. Why are so many young people today dissatisfied with familiar and traditional genders? Are they rejecting the stereotypes that demand boys to be tough and girls to take care of everyone\u2019s feelings? Are they rejecting the very categories of male and female, and the conventional demand that you can be only one or the other? Or are the debates just \u201cfake news\u201d at a time when most people perfectly happy with traditional gender categories?<\/p>\n

Answers: The undisputed changes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some things are pretty clear cut. First, women are never going back to the home.<\/strong>\u00a0The outward movement of women into the work force since the early 1970s has leveled off for now, but mothers are far more likely to\u00a0work for pay<\/a>\u00a0than in the past; they return to work earlier after having a child; and they work for longer periods of their lives. In my in-depth interviews with 116 Midwestern Millennials for\u00a0Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure<\/a><\/em>, almost no one, not even the most devoutly religious respondents, told me that mothers belong at home with their children.<\/p>\n

Second, feminism is no longer just a women\u2019s movement. The General Social Survey has been asking questions about people\u2019s support for gender equality since the mid-1970s. As of the\u00a0latest survey, in 2016<\/a>, support has reached an all-time high, and the gap between men\u2019s and women\u2019s opinions has sunk to an all-time low, with most of the change due to men\u2019s \u201ccatching up\u201d with women in their support for equality. Many men I interviewed were every bit as egalitarian as the most feminist women I talked to, and several were far\u00a0more<\/em>feminist than most women. A substantial portion of female and male feminist \u201cinnovators\u201d entirely reject gender expectations and stereotypes.<\/p>\n

Third, nearly all young adults today consider themselves libertarian about gender. They refuse to judge people who are different from themselves in terms of gender identity or expectations. Several male respondents told me that although they would never wear nail polish, they think other men should be free to do so without harassment. Even those very religious respondents who believed that men should have more authority than women in families\u00a0also<\/em>\u00a0believed that women and men should be equal at work.<\/p>\n

Disputed\u2014or at least unfamiliar\u2014changes from the view of older generations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While support for gender and sexual equality is now more prevalent, views of gender and sexuality have become more complicated. Millennials are increasingly supportive of transgendered individuals. Some Millennials reject any gender binary at all. These \u201cgenderqueer\u201d respondents do not want to switch their sex category\u2014neither biologically nor legally. They reject the belief that they must be gendered at all, even in how they adorn and inhabit their body. Some genderqueer Millennials are content to identify as a sex category (e.g. as female) but reject the gender category woman. Others just skip categories altogether. When Washington State recently allowed people to check an X option instead of male or female on their official forms, they noted that this option could be used by people who identified as\u00a0\u201dintersex, amender, amalgagender, androgynous, bigender, demigender, female-to-male, genderfluid, genderqueer, male-to-female, neutrois, nonbinary, pangender, third sex, transgender, transsexual, Two Spirit, and unspecified.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0These categories encompass very different people, with distinct identities, behaviors, and values. When it comes to gender and sexual identity, we have gone far beyond a mere 50 shades of gray.<\/p>\n

What research tells us about how the new diversity matters.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To understand this new diversity, we need to talk about exactly what the word \u201cgender\u201d means. In the\u00a0Handbook of the Sociology of Gender<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(co-edited with Carissa Froyum and William Scarborough), 65 scholars analyze specific ways that people are doing \u2013 and undoing \u2013 gender, and report on\u00a0how it matters<\/em>. Unless otherwise noted, the research evidence I cite here is from the\u00a0Handbook<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with new vocabulary, and how it matters. Sex is the\u00a0presumably<\/em>\u00a0biological category you were labeled at birth, male or female. I say presumably because the biological categories are not always clear. Some children are born with internal female organs, but an extended clitoris that appears to be a micro-phallus. Even\u00a0intersex<\/em>people, who have both male and female body parts, are usually, if mistakenly, labeled male or female at birth. The very definition of biological facts is shaped by an assumption that there are two and only two possible sex categories. But even when children meet the biological definition of male or female, sometimes that sex category doesn\u2019t fit with their identity, and they reject it.\u00a0Transgender<\/em>\u00a0people reject the sex category they were raised in, and identify as male or female despite their childhood label and rearing. As mentioned above,\u00a0genderqueer<\/em>\u00a0people reject their categorization as women or men: Rather than identify as the other category, they reject categories, and identify as between the binary. At this moment in time, the language for describing gender is as\u00a0fluid<\/em>\u00a0as gender itself has become.<\/p>\n

Biology does not determine all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

All this shows that gender is based on a lot more than sex organs or biology. Those who are skeptical about gender equality movements often argue that men and women evolved biologically to exhibit different kinds of behaviors that are driven by their genetic heritage. Yet genes don\u2019t work that way. To wit: the new field of epigenetics shows how genes are triggered by environmental factors and lead to different outcomes in different contexts. In their chapter for the\u00a0Handbook<\/em>, Davis and Blake show that while bodies play a role in people\u2019s sense of self, most of the differences social scientists can measure between women and men are not choreographed by genes or hormones. Hormones exist in the body, but adult experiences shape hormones as well as vice versa. For example, winning a competition can raise testosterone levels, while taking care of a baby lowers it. This is true for men\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0women. Biology simply doesn\u2019t explain how different gender identities are created or how the workplace is organized and jobs are distributed according to gender. Taking care of preschoolers in a nursery requires more energy, upper-body strength, and ability to respond rapidly to emergencies than parking cars at a hotel, yet the former jobs are typically held by women and the latter by men. Guess who gets paid more?<\/p>\n

How we train boys and girls into gender.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As symposium and\u00a0Handbook\u00a0<\/em>contributors Gansen and Martin show in \u201cNot Just Kid Stuff: Becoming Gendered<\/a>,\u201d boys and girls are systematically raised to become different kinds of people. This task involves parents, peers, media, and often even daycare center staff. Raising girls who love dolls and boys who love vehicles can be as obvious as steering girls to the kitchen and boys to the trains, but the socialization that creates feminine girls and masculine boys is often nowadays\u00a0far less obvious<\/em>. Girls are shamed for being \u201cunladylike\u201d while boys are shamed for being \u201cunmanly.\u201d Female-bodied children are taught to \u201cthrow like a girl\u201d while male-bodied children are corrected when they do so.<\/p>\n

Kane\u2019s\u00a0Handbook\u00a0<\/i>article, updated in the symposium\u2019s \u201c<\/span>Parenting and the Gender Trap<\/span><\/a>,\u201d illustrates how when partners become parents they reproduce such gender socialization and pass it on to the next generation. Despite mothers and fathers both working for pay outside the home, mothers often continue to manage the household and provide more nurturing for children. And so the circle continues: By just watching their own parents, many children learn that it is women who take care of other people. Kenly Brown\u2019s research on alternative schools (e.g. schools for children who cannot attend conventional ones) in \u201c<\/span>Gender, Race, and Girls in California\u2019s Alternative Schools<\/span><\/a>\u201d<\/span>\u00a0suggests that such gender socialization and expectations interact in complex ways with racial stereotypes, however, contributing \u201cto the isolation of marginalized students, particularly low-income Black girls, who are the most vulnerable to violence and neglect in their interpersonal lives.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Doing gender 24\/7.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gender is not just about how people are raised. In\u00a0everyday,<\/em>\u00a0routine activities, gender organizes people\u2019s lives even more directly. People use their gender training to display and claim they are male or female, and they watch for cues to assess the gender of others. We don\u2019t really judge someone\u2019s sex by inspecting naked bodies. Instead, we assess other people\u2019s gender identity by their dress and behavior. Everyday interaction looks natural, but it is highly choreographed. People are nearly all evaluated by how well they \u201cdo gender.\u201d People expect you to \u201cact your age\u201d \u2014 and your gender. Parents and romantic partners are expected to do and be different things according to whether they are male or female. We assume mothers, wives, and girlfriends will provide emotional comfort, and that fathers, husbands, and boyfriends will be physically assertive, whether as protectors or aggressors. And if real people don\u2019t conform to gender stereotypes, their\u00a0public images are often reworked<\/a>\u00a0to do so. For example, sociologist Philip Cohen found that images of Princess Diana showed her six inches shorter than Prince Charles, despite the fact that they were actually the same height.<\/p>\n

The ideal worker and your unconscious.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fisk and Ridgeway\u2019s\u00a0Handbook<\/em>\u00a0essay notes that people instantly and unconsciously sex categorize each other, and in doing so, they invoke deep cultural beliefs without even knowing it. Men are seen as more effective as leaders, accorded higher status than women, and given more influence in group settings. But gender matters beyond these stereotypes because we have quite literally built schools, workplaces, and the economy around traditional genders. Gender matters not just as identity or ideology, but as a core component of how our social world is organized. Just as every society has an economic and political structure, so too every society has a gender structure.<\/p>\n

Some people may operate in social contexts where they are evaluated more positively if they reject doing gender traditionally, but the expectations remain in both conservative and progressive settings. And whatever people believe, all must adapt to organizations and institutions that are based on the belief that \u201cideal\u201d workers are entirely and uniquely committed to the business at hand, which rewards the typically male life course and the historically masculine privilege of having a domestic wife. Women who return to their paid labor a few weeks, or months, after adopting or birthing a child are commonly asked how they can bear to leave their infant, while fathers often stigmatized if they do not increase their efforts to earn a larger paycheck.<\/p>\n

When one thinks about gender structures encountered every day, the world of work is an obvious place to start. Everyone needs to earn a living, or lives with someone who does, and so workplaces are significant in everyone\u2019s life. The most obvious way gender structures work is by assuming that the \u201cideal worker\u201d does not experience pregnancy and has no moral or practical responsibilities for taking care of anyone but himself (and perhaps has a wife to do even that).\u00a0 Any organization that assumes workers are available from nine to five (or often, nowadays, 24\/7) over a lifetime, has baked gender expectations \u2013 and gender discrimination \u2014 into its very DNA.<\/p>\n

This is a caregiving penalty, and it translates into a motherhood penalty. Even so, this is not the only way workplaces disadvantage women. Wynn and Correll\u2019s \u201cCombating Gender Bias in Modern Workplaces<\/a>\u201d shows how stereotypes limit women\u2019s success in the corporate sector. Women and men hold stereotypes that men are more competent and women more nurturing. When it comes to hiring and promotion, those biases hurt women\u2019s chances by increasing the scrutiny women face. On the one hand, highly competent women are seen as less likeable. On the other, if they are mothers, employers often believe they will not be committed to their work. Chavez, in \u201cGender, Tech Jobs, and Hidden Biases that Make a Difference<\/a>,\u201d notes that even in industries where women and men are equally likely to be hired, women are often hired for different reasons than men. Women are hired for their \u201cpeople\u201d skills, for example, rather than their technical ones \u2014 and this may decrease their chance of promotion.<\/p>\n

These biases not only decrease women\u2019s workplace opportunities; they\u00a0increase<\/em>\u00a0men\u2019s. In effect, unconscious bias and workplace family policies are affirmative action policies for men \u2014 especially white men with wives. Chavez\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0how gender stereotypes do not operate entirely the same for Blacks, Whites, Latinx, and Asians. White men with wives are the primary beneficiaries of this organizational affirmative action for men while men of color often are not.<\/p>\n

Public policy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Workplaces are not unique in having been built from the ground up with gender expectations embedded in their very design. Even apparently gender-neutral governmental regulations often incorporate gendered assumptions into their foundation. In her research on immigrant families, Banerjee (\u201c<\/span>Housewife Visas and Highly Skilled Immigrant Families in the U.S.<\/span><\/a>\u201d)<\/span>\u00a0shows that the visas for skilled workers were designed long ago for men with housewives. Skilled workers\u2019 spouses were admitted to the United States on \u201cdependent visas,\u201d because they were expected to be stay-at-home wives who neither needed nor deserved work permits. While that policy was jettisoned by the Obama Administration, it has recently been re-enacted. The result, Banerjee shows, is that wives of male high-tech workers \u2014 and husbands of female nurses \u2013 are forced to be economically dependent partners, and this negatively affects their families. In the future, it may disadvantage America, as new talent will choose other more family-friendly destinations.<\/span>\u00a0While gender inequality affects the experience of migration for the professional workers Banerjee studies, the high rate of migration globally has gendered consequences for workers at every level. As Choi, Hwang, and Parre\u00f1as report in \u201c<\/span>Separating Migrant Families, as Practiced around the Globe<\/span><\/a>,\u201d men and women migrate internationally for paid work at almost the\u00a0<\/span>same rate,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0but family separation leads to new inequalities: Women still solely face the expectations to hold the family together while they also provide financial support while men are considered good fathers for their remittances. Women even face shaming for leaving the caretaking work for their own children to other women left back home.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Seemingly family-friendly work policies remain gendered. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, women receive\u00a016 weeks of paid maternity leave<\/a>, while men get two days. The law still assumes\u2013and ensures\u2013that mothers take more responsibility for children than fathers. In that country, the right to work part-time has created a society where women are assumed to be on a mommy track, and the glass ceiling is really a glass floor that keeps women on a lower level because they never get\u2014or are expected to have\u2014intensive work experience.<\/p>\n

Reflections and resolution.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Overall, much work is left to do before we have a society where gender is not embedded in much of the law and most of the social institutions, along with the cultural beliefs that legitimate them. In fact, given the accumulating research highlighted in the\u00a0Handbook of the Sociology of Gender<\/a><\/em>, I believe that as long as we operate under a gender structure that assumes a male-female binary, none of us will be free from the historical constraints of institutionalized sexism, with its assumption that there are only two categories, and that those are opposites, conferring unequal capacities and justifying unequal treatment. For human beings to develop fully as effective rational actors and warm nurturing human beings, we need a world where the sex category assigned to babies won\u2019t dictate how they are raised or what we expect from them as children, teens, or adults.<\/p>\n

This is why sociologists spend so much time studying gender. As Judith Lorber has written, the\u00a0paradox of gender<\/a>\u00a0is that we must make it very visible before we can begin to dismantle it. My utopian goal is to eliminate the gender structure entirely. While not all feminists agree\u2013not even all the authors in the new\u00a0Handbook<\/em>\u2013I believe that full equality demands we create a world beyond gender.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, however, the research recounted here reveals progress and points to ways in which can continue the march toward gender equality. Most Americans now believe that men and women should have equal rights and responsibilities both in public and private spheres. My\u00a0own recent research<\/a>\u00a0with Ray Sin and William Scarborough suggests that the belief that women belong in the home and men in the public sphere is now nearly extinct. That indeed is a major feminist accomplishment.<\/p>\n

There is other good news as well. Velotta and Schwartz (\u201cThe Push and Pull of Sex, Gender, and Aging<\/a>\u201d) show us that women and men have more romantic and sexual options throughout the course of their lives than in the past, despite obstacles posed by the continued problems of ageism and sexism. In the world of work, the articles by\u00a0Wynn and Correll<\/a>\u00a0and Fisk and Ridgeway profile practices that reduce the impact of gender bias in hiring and promotion, which in turn breaks down sexist stereotypes. Recent data suggest that every generation of men is doing more child care than before, a process that accelerates\u00a0when governments adopt \u201cuse it or lose it\u201d paternity leave<\/a>. And as men in highly visible roles take parental leaves and share caretaking, this further erodes cultural stereotypes about masculinity. Our\u00a0Handbook<\/em>\u00a0discusses in more depth the challenges and opportunities facing the movement for gender equality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Gender Matters Online Symposium\u00a0(.pdf)\u00a0keynote essay was prepared for the\u00a0Council on Contemporary Families\u00a0by Barbara J.\u00a0Risman, University of Illinois-Chicago. Risman is co-editor, with Carissa Froyum and William Scarborough, of the recently released\u00a0Handbook of The Sociology of Gender\u00a0(Springer 2018),\u00a0which includes forty chapters examining new research on gender diversity and change on issues ranging from the gendering of childhood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30834],"tags":[55],"class_list":["post-1734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-reports","tag-gender"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734","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=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1989,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions\/1989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}