{"id":69682,"date":"2017-01-23T07:56:50","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T12:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=69682"},"modified":"2017-01-23T07:56:50","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T12:56:50","slug":"gender-gaps-and-the-stalled-gender-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/01\/23\/gender-gaps-and-the-stalled-gender-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender Gaps and the Stalled Gender Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gender gaps are everywhere.\u00a0 When we use the term, most people immediately think of gender wage<\/em> gaps.\u00a0 But, because we perceive gender as a kind of omni-salient feature of identity, gender gaps are measured everywhere.\u00a0 Gender gaps<\/strong> refer to discrepancies between men and women in status, opportunities, attitudes, demonstrated abilities, and more. A great deal of research focuses on gender gaps because they are understood to be the products of social<\/em>, not biological<\/em>, engineering. \u00a0Gender gaps are so pervasive that, each year, the World Economic Forum<\/em> produces a report on the topic: \u201cThe Global Gender Gap Report<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I first thought about this idea after reading some work by Virginia Rutter on this issue (here<\/a> and here<\/a>) and discussing them with her. \u00a0When you look for them, gender gaps seem to be almost everywhere. \u00a0As gender equality became something understood as having to do with just about every element of the human experience, we\u2019ve been chipping away at all sorts of forms of gender inequality.\u00a0 And yet, as Virginia Rutter points out<\/a>, we have yet to see gender convergence on all manner of measures.\u00a0 Indeed, progress on many measures has slowed, halted, or taken steps in the opposite direction, prompting some to label the gender revolution \u201cstalled<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 And in many cases, the \u201cstall\u201d starts right around 1980.\u00a0 For instance, Paula England showed<\/a> that though the percentage of women employed in the U.S. has grown significantly since the 1960s, that progress starts to slow in the 1980s.\u00a0 Similarly, in the 1970s a great deal of progress was made in desegregating fields of study in college.\u00a0 But, by the early 1980s, about all the change that has been made had been made already.\u00a0 Changes in the men\u2019s and women\u2019s median wages have shown an incredibly persistent gender gap.<\/p>\n

A set of gender gaps often used to discuss inherent differences between men and women are gaps in athletic performance \u2013 particularly in events in which we can achieve some kind of objective measure of athleticism.\u00a0 In Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree\u2019s Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions<\/a><\/em>, they use the marathon as an example of how much society can engineer and exaggerate gender gaps.\u00a0 They chart world record times for women and men in the marathon over a century.\u00a0 I reproduced their chart below using IAAF data (below).<\/p>\n

\"marathon-world-record-progression-by-gender\"<\/p>\n

In 1963, an American woman, Merry Lepper, ran a world recording breaking marathon at 3 hours, 37 minutes, and 7 seconds.\u00a0 That same year, the world record was broken among men at 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 28 seconds.\u00a0 His time was more than 80 minutes faster than hers!\u00a0 The gender gap in marathon records was enormous.\u00a0 A gap still exists today, but the story told by the graph is one of convergence.\u00a0 And yet, I keep thinking about Virginia Rutter\u2019s focus on the gap itself. I ran the numbers on world record progressions for a whole collection of track and field races for women and men.\u00a0 Wade and Ferree\u2019s use of the marathon is probably the best example because the convergence is so stark.\u00a0 But, the stall in progress for every race I charted was the same: incredible progress is made right through about 1980 and then progress stalls and a stubborn gap remains.<\/p>\n

Just for fun, I thought about considering other sports to see if gender gaps converged in similar ways. Below is the world record progression for men and women in a distance swimming event \u2013 the 1500-meter swim.<\/p>\n

\"1500-meter-swim-world-record-progression-by-gender\"<\/p>\n

The story for the gender gap in the 1500-meter swim is a bit different.\u00a0 The gender gap was smaller to begin with and was primarily closed in the 1950s and early 60s.\u00a0 Both men and women continued to clock world record swims between the mid-1950s and 1980 and then progress toward faster times stalled out for both men and women at around that time.<\/p>\n

One way to read these two charts is to suggest that technological innovations and improvements in the science of sports training meant that we came closer to achieving, possibly, the pinnacle of human abilities through the 1980s.\u00a0 At some point, you might imagine, we simply bumped up against what is biologically possible for the human body to accomplish.\u00a0 The remaining gap between women and men, you might suggest, is natural<\/em>. \u00a0Here\u2019s where I get stuck\u2026 What if all these gaps are related to one another?\u00a0 There\u2019s no biological reason that women\u2019s entry into the labor force should have stalled at basically the same time as progress toward gender integration in college majors, all while women\u2019s incredible gender convergence in all manner of athletic pursuits seemed to suddenly lose steam.\u00a0 If all of these things are connected, it\u2019s for social, not biological reasons.<\/p>\nTristan Bridges, PhD<\/a> is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-editor of<\/i> Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Inequality, and Change<\/a> with C.J. Pascoe and studies gender and sexual identity and inequality. You can follow him on Twitter here<\/a>. Tristan also blogs regularly at Inequality by (Interior) Design<\/a>.<\/i><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gender gaps are everywhere.\u00a0 When we use the term, most people immediately think of gender wage gaps.\u00a0 But, because we perceive gender as a kind of omni-salient feature of identity, gender gaps are measured everywhere.\u00a0 Gender gaps refer to discrepancies between men and women in status, opportunities, attitudes, demonstrated abilities, and more. A great deal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":69683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,22452,2103,8092],"class_list":["post-69682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-gap","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/01\/Marathon-World-Record-Progression-by-Gender.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69682"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69755,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69682\/revisions\/69755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}