B. Gender

• What’s the difference?

• Gender inequality

What’s the difference?

• Sex: biological differences between men and women

• Even some debate on this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gender/

What’s the difference?

• Gender: psychological, social, and cultural differences between men and women

• Gender identity is a social construction– Cultural comparison shows variation– Research and analysis show process of

socialization constructs gender

Doing gender (Lorber)

• Gender signs and signals everywhere– Learn to walk, talk, gesture acc. Gender– Gender as status: “both ascribed and

achieved”

• Evidence of boundaries: gender bending– Transvestite (dress)– Transsexual (sex-change surgery)

Sexual orientation

• Not gender or gender bending

• Inheritance or “preference”?– Evidence for both– Spectrum?

• Culture clearly at issue in status

Gender inequality

• Labor force participation of women rising – shift from unpaid to paid work

Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2007 7

Gender inequality

• Gender typing affects both occupation opportunities and comparative pay (figures 8.3 and 8.4)

• Comparable worth tries to equalize pay in similar female-dominated and male-dominated jobs

Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2007 11

Explaining gender inequality

• Biological determinism claims that males are naturally dominant

• But this doesn’t explain cultural variation and change over time

• Feminism is a movement to facilitate change toward more equality

Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2007 14

Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2007 15

Hochschild: working wife as urbanizing peasant

• Pattern: – Farm woman fifty years ago– Urban housewife thirty years ago– Working mother now

• All worked• New:

– Childcare for pay– Massive spread of the double day– Struggle within marriage to equalized the load at home

Urbanizing peasant

Gender struggle for equal pay at work, equal time at home.