Seminar: What Causes Gender Inequality?

The Top­ics

I. In­tro­duc­tion.  What do we mean by gen­der in­equal­ity?

To an­a­lyze the causes of gen­der in­equal­ity, we need to know what we mean by gen­der in­equal­ity.  How can we con­ceive of and talk about gen­der in­equal­ity in ways that are gen­eral enough to apply across the range of rel­e­vant phe­nom­ena, con­sis­tent enough to min­i­mize con­cep­tual am­bi­gu­i­ties, and pre­cise enough to be an­a­lyt­i­cally ef­fec­tive?  Gen­der in­equal­ity has been ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily di­verse and wide spread.  Women and men are un­equal in every con­ceiv­able way in end­less cir­cum­stances, both im­me­di­ate and en­dur­ing, by both ob­jec­tive cri­te­ria and sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence.   So, what counts as gen­der in­equal­ity? Can we char­ac­ter­ize it in ways that let us con­fi­dently and im­par­tially as­sess when there is more or less of it?

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • No task for the in­tro­duc­tory meet­ing.
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Down So Long:  Why Is It So Hard to Ex­plain Gen­der In­equal­ity? 
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Chafetz, Janet Saltz­man. "Fem­i­nist The­ory and So­ci­ol­ogy: Un­der­uti­lized Con­tri­bu­tions for Main­stream The­ory." An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy 23, no. 1 (1997): 97-120. [doi:10.1146/an­nurev.soc.23.1.97]; or Chafetz, Janet Saltz­man. "The Va­ri­eties of Gen­der The­ory in So­ci­ol­ogy." In Hand­book of the So­ci­ol­ogy of Gen­der, edited by Janet Saltz­man Chafetz, 3-23. Boston, MA: Springer US, 2006. [doi:10.1007/0-387-36218-5_1]
  • Rosen­feld, Rachel A. "What Do We Learn About Dif­fer­ence from the Schol­ar­ship on Gen­der?." So­cial Forces 81, no. 1 (2002): 1-24. [doi:10.1353/sof.2002.0057]
  • Des­tined for Equal­ity: Egal­i­tar­ian Im­pulse
• Re­lated Read­ings
  • ...
  • ...

II. Causal­ity - What are causes, mech­a­nisms, and the like?

We ca­su­ally refer to causes and ef­fects in nor­mal in­ter­ac­tions all the time.  We all con­duct our lives – choos­ing ac­tions, mak­ing de­ci­sions, try­ing to in­flu­ence oth­ers – based on the­o­ries about why and how things hap­pen in the world.  From the early stages of child­hood we at­tribute causes, build­ing a vi­sion of the so­cial (and phys­i­cal) world that makes it un­der­stand­able.  Every ac­tion, every choice about what to do, is based on our an­tic­i­pa­tion of its ef­fects, our un­der­stand­ings of con­se­quences.  An­a­lyt­i­cal and sci­en­tific rea­son­ing has a sim­i­lar form, but re­quires that we ap­proach cau­sa­tion more sys­tem­at­i­cally and self-con­sciously.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem.  In this and other so­ci­eties, women and men com­monly dress dif­fer­ently.  Pre­pare a causal analy­sis that seeks to ex­plain why women and men dress dif­fer­ently.
    • Our an­a­lyt­i­cal task this week is to at­tempt a "sim­ple" causal analy­sis of a gen­der dif­fer­ence that is ob­vi­ous but not often ques­tioned - the way we dress.  The pur­pose of this ex­er­cise is to get us think­ing about causal­ity. 
    • To the de­gree that we can, we want to try to think of dif­fer­ent kinds of causes based on var­ied ways of fram­ing the causal ques­tion.  Re­al­is­ti­cally, one could eas­ily write a book about all the pos­si­ble ways of in­ter­pret­ing this causal ques­tion and an­swer­ing it.  We are just try­ing to de­velop some sen­si­ble in­sights in a cou­ple pages. 
  • Think­ing Tools.  The start­ing point of most causal analy­ses is a com­par­i­son.  When we start with the gen­eral ques­tion "what causes X?" we turn it into pos­si­ble com­par­isons to pro­duce an an­swer.  Ex­am­ples of such ques­tions might be "why do peo­ple in group A do X more than those in group B?," "why does X occur more often in sum­mer than win­ter?," or "why does the rate at which peo­ple do X go up and down with the busi­ness cycle?" 

    The un­der­ly­ing idea is sim­ple but pow­er­ful.  If we are try­ing to ex­plain some phe­nom­e­non, X, then we need to iden­tify vari­a­tions in the like­li­hood of X or the rate of X, and look for po­ten­tial causes that (1) vary across the rel­e­vant cir­cum­stances in a way that could ex­plain X and (2) that we can con­nect to the out­comes for X in some way.  For ex­am­ple, with the gen­der dis­tinc­tive cloth­ing ques­tion, some ways to bet­ter spec­ify the ques­tion and look at it through com­par­isons are:

    • What causes in­di­vid­ual con­for­mity to the cul­tural pat­tern?  What in­duces women and men to con­form to the ex­pec­ta­tions for dress­ing dif­fer­ently?  When­ever we ob­serve a con­sis­tent pat­tern of so­cial be­hav­ior, some com­mon con­di­tions or processes must be in­duc­ing peo­ple to act in a sim­i­lar way.  Fig­ur­ing out what en­cour­ages con­for­mity and dis­cour­ages de­viance al­lows us to pro­vide a causal ex­pla­na­tion.  Think about what hap­pens to peo­ple who do not con­form to the ex­pec­ta­tions about male and fe­male ap­pro­pri­ate cloth­ing.  And, just as im­por­tant, ask why it is that peo­ple pun­ish non­con­formists.  Here the basic com­par­i­son is be­tween peo­ple who con­form and those who do not, or be­tween the re­ac­tions of peo­ple to con­for­mity and non­con­for­mity.
    • What causes dif­fer­ences in dress "codes" across cul­tures? What cir­cum­stances could exist across so­ci­eties that con­sis­tently pro­duce gen­der dif­fer­ences in modes of dress?  The cloth­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of each sex varies greatly across so­ci­eties (and time).  Cloth­ing dif­fers be­tween "prim­i­tive" cul­tures and mod­ern ones, be­tween warm and cold cli­mates, and be­tween dif­fer­ent parts of the world.  But seem­ingly every­where men and women dress dif­fer­ently.  How can we ex­plain this pat­tern?  Here the pri­mary com­par­i­son is be­tween cul­tures that have dif­fer­ent cloth­ing.
    • Why do the ex­pec­ta­tions about cloth­ing dif­fer­ences vary by con­text?  Why are gen­der dif­fer­ences in dress greater in some cir­cum­stances than in oth­ers?  For ex­am­ple, both women and men may wear sim­i­lar cov­er­alls in a fac­tory, but women and men gen­er­ally wear dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent cloth­ing to for­mal dances.  Our ef­forts to find causes be­hind any phe­nom­ena are im­proved by look­ing at vari­a­tions.  If male and fe­male cloth­ing is just a lit­tle dif­fer­ent in some con­texts but greatly dif­fer­ent in oth­ers, we can use­fully focus on what might pro­duce this vari­ance in gen­der dif­fer­ences.  Here the pri­mary com­par­i­son is be­tween con­texts with greater dif­fer­ences in the ex­pected cloth­ing and con­texts with lesser dif­fer­ences.
  • Think­ing Tools 2.  While con­sid­er­ing how to ex­plain the dif­fer­ences in the ways women and men dress, it can also be help­ful to think through ways that this pat­tern could be con­sid­ered an ex­am­ple of a larger pat­tern.  The ex­pla­na­tion for the broader pat­tern may be dif­fer­ent or eas­ier to de­velop. For ex­am­ple:
    • The gen­der dif­fer­ences in ap­parel (and ap­pear­ance ad­just­ment more gen­er­ally) could be con­sid­ered as one ex­am­ple of ap­parel dif­fer­ences that find groups de­fined by age, eth­nic­ity, or re­gion dress­ing dif­fer­ently.  That is to say, it is not only women and men who con­sis­tently dress dif­fer­ently.  Dif­fer­ent ways of dress­ing also dis­tin­guish other groups.  If we think about those other groups, does it give us in­sights into ex­plain­ing the dif­fer­ence be­tween women's and men's cloth­ing?
    • The gen­der dif­fer­ences in dress could be con­sid­ered as one ex­am­ple of a wider range of be­hav­ioral dif­fer­ences be­tween women and men such as rules of proper deco­rum, speech pat­terns, or dis­plays of sex­u­al­ity.  That is, we can point to other pre­sen­ta­tional dif­fer­ences be­tween women and men.  If we think about the range of these pre­sen­ta­tional dif­fer­ences, do they sug­gest ideas that might help ex­plain dif­fer­ences in ap­parel?
• Com­mon Read­ings:
  • Maggetti, Mar­tino, Fab­rizio Gi­lardi, and Clau­dio M. Radaelli. De­sign­ing Re­search in the So­cial Sci­ences. Lon­don, 2013. {Read Chs. 1-3; Glance at rest which can be valu­able} [doi:10.4135/9781473957664]
  • Ger­ring, John. "Cau­sa­tion: A Uni­fied Frame­work for the So­cial Sci­ences." Jour­nal of The­o­ret­i­cal Pol­i­tics 17, no. 2 (2005): 163-98. [doi:10.1177/0951629805050859]
  • Ep­stein, Joshua M. " Why Model?." Jour­nal of Ar­ti­fi­cial So­ci­eties and So­cial Sim­u­la­tion 11, no. 4 (2008): 12. [Generic Link]
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Wikipedia. "Causal­ity"
  • Lit­tle, Daniel. 1991. Va­ri­eties of So­cial Ex­pla­na­tion: An In­tro­duc­tion to the Phi­los­o­phy of So­cial Sci­ence. Boul­der, CO: West­view Press. Pp. 1-87   
  • Richard Ham­ming, "You and Your Re­search", Bell Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Re­search Col­lo­quium Sem­i­nar (7 March 1986)
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  •   An­drew Ab­bott.  "The Causal De­vo­lu­tion." So­ci­o­log­i­cal Meth­ods & Re­search No­vem­ber 1998 27: 148-181.
  • Ernest Nagel.   1960. "De­ter­min­ism in His­tory."   Phi­los­o­phy and Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal Re­search 20:3:291-317. 
  • Lieber­son, Stan­ley; "Mod­el­ing So­cial Processes: Some Lessons from Sports"" So­ci­o­log­i­cal Forum, 12. March 1997:11-35.

III.  How is gen­der in­equal­ity sym­bol­ized and re­pro­duced in every­day life?

To start our in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the causes of gen­der in­equal­ity, we will con­sider how peo­ple ex­pe­ri­ence and act out gen­der in their day to day lives.  We want to think about the most basic ques­tions.  Why and when do women and men act dif­fer­ently?  Why and when do peo­ple re­spond dif­fer­ently to women than men?  How do all these pri­vate in­di­vid­ual ac­tions when taken to­gether over time in­flu­ence the un­der­stand­ing of gen­der in a cul­ture and gen­der in­equal­ity?

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem.  Using a typ­i­cal set­ting where women and men meet, as­sess how Ridge­way's fram­ing ap­proach helps ex­plain the role of gen­der in these in­ter­ac­tions and where it might fall short.
    • For this task, we choose some fa­mil­iar (to us) set­ting or type of in­ter­ac­tion where women and men typ­i­cally en­gage each other.  For ex­am­ple, this could be a work­place, a bar, in­ter­ac­tions be­tween buy­ers and sell­ers, or par­ties.  We use this as our source of em­pir­i­cal data and focus our ar­gu­ment on ex­plain­ing gen­der in­ter­ac­tions there.
    • First, we need to read Ridge­way's ar­gu­ment care­fully.  Then we try to apply her ar­gu­ment to the set­ting we have cho­sen.  We want to as­sess how much we be­lieve peo­ple's ac­tions (in the con­text we chose) fit the ex­pec­ta­tions we can de­rive from her ar­gu­ment and when they might not.  As we work on our analy­ses, we are eval­u­at­ing Ridge­way's ap­proach as a tool. The right tool al­lows us to con­struct a bet­ter ed­i­fice with less ef­fort; the wrong tool does not.
  • Think­ing tools. The re­main­ing notes for this an­a­lyt­i­cal task look at some an­a­lyt­i­cal steps that allow us to think through this prob­lem ef­fec­tively.
    • Sys­tem­atic steps in the analy­sis.  Doing this kind of thought ex­per­i­ment, we want our think­ing to be as sys­tem­atic as pos­si­ble.  For all sys­tem­atic causal analy­ses, we want to con­sider how the phe­nom­e­non being ex­am­ined varies in reg­u­lar or pre­dictable ways across con­di­tions, set­tings, types of peo­ple, places, or the like. Then, we ask what con­di­tions or events typ­i­cally pre­cede or occur along with the out­comes that could plau­si­bly in­flu­ence those out­comes.
      • For ex­am­ple, first, we sim­ply con­sider pos­si­ble dif­fer­ences be­tween men's and women's ac­tions. 
      • Then we con­sider how their ac­tions might dif­fer be­tween op­po­site-sex and same-sex en­coun­ters. 
      • We can broaden the range of the ex­am­ples we use to think about these dif­fer­ences by con­sid­er­ing other char­ac­ter­is­tics that might af­fect in­ter­ac­tions, such as the age or race of the peo­ple, whether the in­ter­ac­tion is cor­dial or un­friendly, how well the peo­ple know each other, and so on. 
      • We want to ask our­selves if the gen­der as­pect of the in­ter­ac­tion will be in­flu­enced by these other cir­cum­stances that seem rel­e­vant to in­ter­ac­tions. For ex­am­ple, does gen­der in­flu­ence cor­dial in­ter­ac­tions dif­fer­ently from the ways it in­flu­ences con­fronta­tions in our set­ting? If we be­lieve the an­swer is yes, then we con­sider how and why. 
      • Anal­o­gously, we want to think about the ways that peo­ple's goals in gen­dered in­ter­ac­tions vary in these kinds of cir­cum­stances, and how these goals in­flu­ence their ac­tions.  For ex­am­ple, in the same set­ting, a per­son seek­ing sex will com­monly act dif­fer­ently than some­one try­ing to curry favor or sell a prod­uct.
      • When we apply a sys­tem­atic logic to the analy­sis, we usu­ally do not want to write about all the pos­si­bil­i­ties we think about.  In­stead, we use the ones that we find telling.  But we will not iden­tify those telling pos­si­bil­i­ties un­less we sys­tem­at­i­cally work through all the rel­e­vant pos­si­ble in­flu­ences.
    • Gen­der con­text. We can take the analy­sis of in­ter­ac­tions an­other step by con­sid­er­ing how the in­flu­ence of gen­der on these in­ter­ac­tions is po­ten­tially af­fected by con­di­tions like:
      • the pres­ence or ab­sence of on­look­ers (i.e., the rel­a­tive pri­vacy of the in­ter­ac­tion) or
      • the gen­der dis­tri­b­u­tion of other peo­ple pre­sent (i.e., mostly male, mostly fe­male, or mixed)
    • Con­for­mity.  When­ever we try to ex­plain pat­terns like this, we want to con­sider the ex­cep­tions.  When will peo­ple vi­o­late the im­pli­ca­tions of gen­der ex­pec­ta­tions and what fol­lows when they do?  Are there cir­cum­stances that make it more likely peo­ple will de­part from con­ven­tional be­hav­ior?  Vi­o­la­tions of norms or com­mon ex­pec­ta­tions are valu­able for causal analy­ses be­cause cracks in the ve­neer of so­cial order can re­veal its struc­ture and dy­nam­ics.
  • Bring it to­gether.  After work­ing through the steps above, we try to as­sess when Ridge­way's ap­proach does a good job ex­plain­ing how gen­der in­flu­ences be­hav­ior in our cho­sen set­ting, and when her ap­proach seems to fall short.   Do we see ways that her ap­proach ne­glects or mis­un­der­stands im­por­tant causes in­flu­enc­ing the gen­der char­ac­ter of be­hav­ior in the con­text we ex­am­ine?  Our cen­tral goal here is to ex­plain how and why gen­der or­ga­nizes in­ter­ac­tions in our cho­sen ex­am­ple. We are not at­tempt­ing a gen­eral eval­u­a­tion of Ridge­way's ideas, but a fo­cused as­sess­ment of their ef­fec­tive­ness in the set­ting we have se­lected to try them out.
• Com­mon Read­ings:
  • Ce­cilia L. Ridge­way, Framed by Gen­der, Chs. 1-2 {I rec­om­mend buy­ing Ridge­way's book, but it is also avail­able on line through the li­brary via this link}; If any of Ridge­way's pre­sen­ta­tion seems un­clear, try read­ing Ridge­way's ar­ti­cle listed under the rec­om­mended read­ings for this week.
  • Hyde, J. S. (2005). The Gen­der Sim­i­lar­i­ties Hy­poth­e­sis. Amer­i­can Psy­chol­o­gist, 60, 581-592.
  • Ros­a­beth Moss Kan­ter.  "Some Ef­fects of Pro­por­tions on Group Life: Skewed Sex Ra­tios and Re­sponses to Token Women"    Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 82, No. 5 (Mar., 1977), pp. 965-990
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Erv­ing Goff­man, "The Arrange­ment be­tween the Sexes" The­ory and So­ci­ety, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Au­tumn, 1977), pp. 301-331 
  • Deniz Kandiy­oti, "Bar­gain­ing with Pa­tri­archy." Gen­der and So­ci­ety," Vol. 2, No. 3 (Sep 1988), pp. 274-290
  • Ce­cilia L. Ridge­way, "Framed Be­fore We Know It: How Gen­der Shapes So­cial Re­la­tions".  Gen­der & So­ci­ety 2009 23:145-160   
  • Can­dace West and Don H. Zim­mer­man " Doing Gen­der" Gen­der & So­ci­ety 1987 1: 125-151.
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  • Ce­cilia Ridge­way.  Framed by Gen­der.  Ox­ford: 2011.
  • ...

IV. Why have women ap­par­ently oc­cu­pied a sub­or­di­nate po­si­tion in all so­ci­eties?  And how does ex­plain­ing the "ori­gins" of gen­der in­equal­ity re­late to ex­plain­ing the "per­sis­tence" of gen­der in­equal­ity?

Al­though some schol­ars may ques­tion if women have been sub­or­di­nate in all so­ci­eties, all agree that men have been dom­i­nant in most so­ci­eties al­though the de­gree of dom­i­nance varies greatly.  This raises the very tricky ques­tion, how do we ex­plain the preva­lence of male dom­i­nance?  This ex­ceed­ingly elu­sive ques­tion con­tin­ues to elude any an­swer that will evoke a con­sen­sus. 

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • An­a­lyt­i­cal Task Al­ter­na­tive 1: An an­a­lyt­i­cal cri­tique.  As most of us lack the sub­stan­tive knowl­edge needed to de­velop even sim­ple analy­ses of gen­der in­equal­ity's pos­si­ble ori­gins, we will ex­plore the causal pos­si­bil­i­ties by re­spond­ing to the ar­gu­ments of peo­ple who are knowl­edge­able.
    • Please read the "Ba­sics of Causal De­scrip­tions" on a sep­a­rate page for some sim­ple, be­gin­ning ideas about de­scrib­ing a causal analy­sis.
    • Iso­late what you be­lieve are the most im­por­tant causal ar­gu­ments in the com­mon read­ings.  Give a crit­i­cal asisess­ment of their dif­fer­ent ap­proaches.  In doing this, try to pay at­ten­tion to what it is that makes you find the causal ar­gu­ments more or less per­sua­sive.  The rec­om­mended and re­lated read­ings pro­vide a range of ma­te­r­ial that you can look at as you need to deepen and sharpen your ar­gu­ments.
    • It can be help­ful to look back at the ma­te­r­ial from Topic II, es­pe­cially Ger­ring's list of cri­te­ria for causal ar­gu­ments.
  • An­a­lyt­i­cal Task Al­ter­na­tive 2: A hy­po­thet­i­cal sce­nario.  When we can­not hope to re­search a so­cial phe­nom­e­non with em­pir­i­cal ob­ser­va­tions, we can some­times gain some trac­tion by try­ing to think through hy­po­thet­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties.  Here is an ex­am­ple.
    • As­sume that some­time in the near fu­ture we launch a rocket into space with a crew of 1,000.  This crew is evenly di­vided be­tween women and men, the women and men have sim­i­lar cre­den­tials and ac­com­plish­ments, and the two sexes are about equally rep­re­sented at each level of au­thor­ity.  The crew mem­bers' cul­tural un­der­stand­ings are sim­i­lar to those of col­lege stu­dents today.
    • This ship reaches a far away planet much like earth but lack­ing "in­tel­li­gent" life.  Un­for­tu­nately, the ship's en­gines have be­come un­sta­ble and the crew must aban­don it. So they must start life on this new planet.  While they pos­sess much ad­vanced knowl­edge, they have no tech­nol­ogy.  They must start from scratch, pro­duc­ing food, or­ga­niz­ing them­selves into a com­mu­nity, pair­ing off to re­pro­duce, slowly build­ing to­ward some kind of tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ment over gen­er­a­tions.  [Note: If the dis­tant planet sce­nario seems un­nerv­ing, we could have the same ef­fect by drop­ping a 1,000 peo­ple on a re­mote is­land that is iso­lated as a so­cial ex­per­i­ment.]
    • Under these con­di­tions, what are the al­ter­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties for women's sta­tus?  What might de­cide which al­ter­na­tive oc­curs?
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Down So Long:  An­a­lyz­ing the Per­sis­tence of Gen­der In­equal­ity: How to Think about the Ori­gins
  • Joan N. Huber. "Re­pro­duc­tive Bi­ol­ogy, Tech­nol­ogy, and Gen­der In­equal­ity: An Au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal Essay"  An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 34 (2008) : 1-13
  • Sharon Smith. "En­gels and the Ori­gin of Women's Op­pres­sion"  In­ter­na­tional So­cial­ist Re­view Issue 2, Fall 1997
  • Rose­mary L. Hopcroft. "Gen­der In­equal­ity in In­ter­ac­tion - An Evo­lu­tion­ary Ac­count." So­cial Forces  87.4 (2009): 1845-1871.
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  • Sapol­sky, Robert.  "Testos­terone rules" Dis­cover. Chicago: Mar 1997. Vol. 18, Iss. 3; p. 44 
  • Wood, W., & Eagly, A. H. (2002). A Cross-Cul­tural Analy­sis Of The Be­hav­ior Of Women And Men: Im­pli­ca­tions For The Ori­gins Of Sex Dif­fer­ences. Psy­cho­log­i­cal Bul­letin, 128, 699-727.
  • Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy and sim­i­lar ap­proaches:  The de­bates over evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy - in gen­eral and as ap­plied to gen­der in­equal­ity - are very im­por­tant but often dif­fi­cult to fol­low and as­sess.  Here are some start­ing points for learn­ing the ba­sics.  Buller's sup­plies a so­phis­ti­cated overview and cri­tique of the most in­flu­en­tial par­a­digm in evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy (while sup­port­ive of the more gen­eral ven­ture), Downes and Wal­ter pre­sent guided views of the field, and other pieces pro­vide fur­ther com­men­taries and some stud­ies that ex­plore key is­sues fac­ing this ap­proach.
    • Downes, Stephen M., "Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy", The Stan­ford En­cy­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy (Sum­mer 2014 Edi­tion)
    • Sven Wal­ter, "Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy," The In­ter­net En­cy­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy 2009
    • Bol­ger, Diane. "In­tro­duc­tion." In A Com­pan­ion to Gen­der Pre­his­tory, edited by Diane Bol­ger, 1-19. Hobo­ken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2012. [doi:10.1002/9781118294291.ch0]
    • Buller, David J. "Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy: A Cri­tique." In Con­cep­tual Is­sues in Evo­lu­tion­ary Bi­ol­ogy, edited by El­liott Sober. Cam­bridge, MA: A Brad­ford Book, 2006. [also, com­pare David Buller. "A Guided Tour of Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy" (In A Field Guide to the Phi­los­o­phy of Mind. Eds. Marco Nani and Mas­simo Mar­raffa. "An of­fi­cial elec­tronic pub­li­ca­tion of the De­part­ment of Phi­los­o­phy of Uni­ver­sity of Rome" 2000.) Also by Buller see: "Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy: The Em­peror's New Par­a­digm," Trends in Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences 9 (2005): 277-283 and for a full treat­ment his book Adapt­ing Minds: Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy and the Per­sis­tent Quest for Human Na­ture. Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press/Brad­ford Books, 2005.]
    • Fausto-Ster­ling, Anne. "Be­yond Dif­fer­ence: A Bi­ol­o­gist's Per­spec­tive." Jour­nal of So­cial Is­sues 53, no. 2 (2010): 233-58. [doi:10.1111/j.​1540-​4560.​1997.​tb02442.x]
    • Good­man, Madeleine J., P. Bion Grif­fin, Agnes A. Es­tioko-Grif­fin, and John S. Grove. "The Com­pat­i­bil­ity of Hunt­ing and Moth­er­ing among the Agta Hunter-Gath­er­ers of the Philip­pines." Sex Roles 12, no. 11-12 (1985): 1199-209. [doi:10.1007/bf00287829]
    • Rigby, Nic­hole, and Rob J. Ku­lathi­nal. "Ge­netic Ar­chi­tec­ture of Sex­ual Di­mor­phism in Hu­mans." Jour­nal of Cel­lu­lar Phys­i­ol­ogy 230, no. 10 (Oct 2015): 2304-10. [doi:10.1002/jcp.24979]
    • Stulp, Gert, and Louise Bar­rett. "Evo­lu­tion­ary Per­spec­tives on Human Height Vari­a­tion." Bi­o­log­i­cal Re­views 91, no. 1 (Feb 2016): 206-34. [doi:10.1111/brv.12165]
    • Joseph Hen­rich. "A cul­tural species: How cul­ture drove human evo­lu­tion" Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence Agenda. Sci­ence Brief. 2009
    • Rose­mary L. Hopcroft. "Gen­der In­equal­ity in In­ter­ac­tion – An Evo­lu­tion­ary Ac­count." So­cial Forces  87.4 (2009): 1845-1871.
  • Ran­dall Collins. "A Con­flict The­ory of Sex­ual Strat­i­fi­ca­tion." So­cial Prob­lems, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Sum­mer, 1971), pp. 3-21
  • Rae Blum­berg. "A Gen­eral The­ory of Gen­der Strat­i­fi­ca­tion." So­ci­o­log­i­cal The­ory  2  (1984): 23-101
• Re­lated Read­ings
  • Rae Blum­berg. "Ex­tend­ing Lenski's Schema to Hold Up Both Halves of the Sky.”A The­ory-Guided Way of Con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing Agrar­ian So­ci­eties that Il­lu­mi­nates a Puz­zle about Gen­der Strat­i­fi­ca­tion" So­ci­o­log­i­cal The­ory 22:2 (June 2004):278-291
  • Matthew H. McIn­tyre, Car­olyn Pope Ed­wards.  The Early De­vel­op­ment of Gen­der Dif­fer­ences  An­nual Re­view of An­thro­pol­ogy, Vol. 38 (2009): 83-97
  • Lau­rie Wer­muth and Miriam Ma'at-Ka-Re Mon­ges. "Gen­der Strat­i­fi­ca­tion: A Struc­tural Model for Ex­am­in­ing Case Ex­am­ples of Women in Less-De­vel­oped Coun­tries." Fron­tiers: A Jour­nal of Women Stud­ies 23.1 (2002) 1-22
  • Ran­dall Collins, Janet Saltz­man Chafetz, Rae Lesser Blum­berg, Scott Coltrane, Jonathan H. Turner  To­ward an In­te­grated The­ory of Gen­der Strat­i­fi­ca­tion So­ci­o­log­i­cal Per­spec­tives, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Au­tumn, 1993), pp. 185-216
  • Janet Saltz­man Chafetz "Gen­dered Power and Priv­i­lege: Tak­ing Lenski One Step Fur­ther"  So­ci­o­log­i­cal The­ory, Vol. 22, No. 2, Re­li­gion, Strat­i­fi­ca­tion, and Evo­lu­tion in Human So­ci­eties: Es­says in Honor of Ger­hard E. Lenski (Jun., 2004), pp. 269-277
  • Joan N. Huber. "Com­par­a­tive Gen­der Strat­i­fi­ca­tion." Hand­book of the So­ci­ol­ogy of Gen­der, 1999, p65-80
  • Mau­rice Gode­lier, "The Ori­gins of Male Dom­i­na­tion" New Left Re­view, May-June 1981, pp. 3-17
  • William Tulio Di­vale, Mar­vin Har­ris. "Pop­u­la­tion, War­fare, and the Male Su­prema­cist Com­plex." Amer­i­can An­thro­pol­o­gist, New Se­ries, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 521-538 [See also: William Di­vale, Mar­vin Har­ris, Don­ald T. Williams. "On the Mis­use of Sta­tis­tics: A Reply to Hirschfeld et al."  Amer­i­can An­thro­pol­o­gist, New Se­ries, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 379-386; William Di­vale, Mar­vin Har­ris.  "The Male Su­prema­cist Com­plex: Dis­cov­ery of a Cul­tural In­ven­tion" Amer­i­can An­thro­pol­o­gist, New Se­ries, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 668-671
  • C C Mukhopad­hyay, and P J Hig­gins. "An­thro­po­log­i­cal Stud­ies of Women's Sta­tus Re­vis­ited: 1977-1987". An­nual Re­view of An­thro­pol­ogy Vol. 17 (1988): 461-495
  • Naomi Quinn. "An­thro­po­log­i­cal Stud­ies on Women's Sta­tus".  An­nual Re­view of An­thro­pol­ogy Vol. 6 (1977): 181-225 
  • Chris Hann. "Re­pro­duc­tion and In­her­i­tance: Goody Re­vis­ited." An­nual Re­view of An­thro­pol­ogy, Vol. 37 (2008): 145-158

V.   What de­ter­mines men's and women's roles and po­si­tions within fam­i­lies?

Fam­ily and kin­ship are po­ten­tially rel­e­vant to gen­der in­equal­ity in var­ied ways and a lot of work had pur­sued such is­sues.  Prob­a­bly the two most im­por­tant gen­eral is­sues in­volve the ways that women and men are un­equal within fam­i­lies and the ways that fam­ily or­ga­ni­za­tion both con­tributes to and is in­flu­enced by gen­der in­equal­ity be­yond the fam­ily in­sti­tu­tion.  We will just touch the sur­face of these is­sues this week.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem.  We want to pro­vide an in­te­grated an­a­lyt­i­cal overview of the prin­ci­pal causal ar­gu­ments about gen­der in­equal­ity and fam­ily or­ga­ni­za­tion that ap­pear in the com­mon read­ings.
  • Each of the read­ings has var­i­ous causal ar­gu­ments about fam­ily or­ga­ni­za­tion, some di­rectly about gen­der in­equal­ity, some rel­e­vant to gen­der in­equal­ity but not di­rectly ex­plor­ing it.  Some of the causal ques­tions may re­ceive dif­fer­ent causal analy­ses by these au­thors.  Some­times two or more au­thors may use a sim­i­lar causal ap­proach to ex­plain dif­fer­ent causal prob­lems.  Our goal is to sort this out. 
  • Our overviews should be or­ga­nized around the causal ar­gu­ments, not a se­ries of sum­maries of what each au­thor wrote (see Think­ing Tools).
  • Think­ing tools.
    • We want to use one of the fol­low­ing two pos­si­ble ways to or­ga­nize the causal as­sess­ment (un­less one of us has a bet­ter way).  The first or­ga­nizes around what is to be ex­plained, the sec­ond around the causes.
      • First ap­proach.  We start by iden­ti­fy­ing the prin­ci­pal causal prob­lems ad­dressed by the group of pa­pers.  That is, we fig­ure out what they sug­gest needs to be ex­plained.  Then, we or­ga­nize these causal prob­lems in a sen­si­ble order (in­clud­ing con­sid­er­a­tion of some prob­lems po­ten­tially being sec­ondary or sub-prob­lems of oth­ers).  Under each causal prob­lem, we sum­ma­rize and as­sess all the rel­e­vant ex­pla­na­tions found in the read­ings.
      • Sec­ond ap­proach.  We start by iden­ti­fy­ing the prin­ci­pal causal frame­works used in the pa­pers.  That is, we fig­ure out what they sug­gest are the con­di­tions or processes that have the most im­por­tant in­flu­ence over the out­comes.  Then, we or­ga­nize these causal frame­works in a sen­si­ble order, tak­ing into ac­count which are en­tirely dif­fer­ent and which might be vari­a­tions of a sim­i­lar theme, and which are com­pet­ing ver­sus com­ple­men­tary.  For each of these, after sum­ma­riz­ing the causal logic of the frame­work, we show how it has been used by these au­thors, de­scrib­ing the range of out­comes the frame­work is sup­posed to de­ter­mine and how it has such ef­fects.
      • Note that re­gard­less which way we or­ga­nize our analy­sis of com­pet­ing causal ar­gu­ments, it can be valu­able to think about not only what is con­sid­ered by the au­thors being ex­am­ine, but also which the­o­ret­i­cal ques­tions and which causal frame­works seem rel­e­vant but ab­sent.
    • Please reread the "Ba­sics of Causal De­scrip­tions" on the start­ing point for de­scrib­ing a causal analy­sis.
  • Bring­ing it to­gether.  In short, our aim is to pro­duce a crit­i­cal overview of the prin­ci­pal causal ar­gu­ments con­cern­ing the fam­ily and gen­der in­equal­ity, start­ing with the ideas pre­sent in the com­mon read­ings for this week.  To do this ef­fec­tively, we need to iden­tify all the rel­e­vant causal ar­gu­ments, de­duce the log­i­cal struc­ture of each causal ar­gu­ment and de­ter­mine how to pre­sent that clearly (even if the orig­i­nal source is in­con­sis­tent or am­bigu­ous), de­tect how the causal ar­gu­ments (from dif­fer­ent sources) re­late to each other and pre­sent them in a way that makes those re­la­tions clear, and, where pos­si­ble, sum­ma­rize the im­por­tant an­a­lyt­i­cal strengths and weak­nesses of each ar­gu­ment (or facet to an ar­gu­ment).

    (We should start with the un­der­stand­ing that this kind of an­a­lyt­i­cal overview is rather easy to do poorly and very de­mand­ing to do well and thor­oughly.  At this stage we are not as­pir­ing to a pro­fes­sional job but hop­ing to achieve a rea­son­able, if basic, analy­sis.)

• Com­mon Read­ings
  • An­drew J. Cher­lin,  Amer­i­can Mar­riage in the Early Twenty-First Cen­tury The Fu­ture of Chil­dren Vol­ume 15, Num­ber 2, Fall 2005
  • Down So Long:  In­ti­mate Com­bat: The Re­spon­si­bil­ity for Child Rear­ing
  • Brines, Julie. 1994. "Eco­nomic De­pen­dency, Gen­der, and the Di­vi­sion of Labor at Home."  Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy 100(3): 652-689. 
  • William J. Goode. "The The­o­ret­i­cal Im­por­tance of Love"  Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Feb., 1959), pp. 38-47  [jstor: 2089581]
  • Kath­leen Ger­son. "Chang­ing Lives, Re­sis­tant In­sti­tu­tions: A New Gen­er­a­tion Ne­go­ti­ates Gen­der, Work, and Fam­ily Change"  So­ci­o­log­i­cal Forum, Vol. 24, No. 4, De­cem­ber 2009
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Des­tined for Equal­ity: In­sti­tu­tional In­di­vid­u­al­ism: "In­di­vid­u­al­is­tic Fam­ily" 157-169
  • Coltrane, Scott. 1989. "House­hold Labor and the Rou­tine Pro­duc­tion of Gen­der." So­cial Prob­lems 3
  • Stephanie Coontz. "The His­tor­i­cal Trans­for­ma­tion of Mar­riage," Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily,  Vol­ume 66, Issue 4 (p 974-979) No­vem­ber 2004.
  • Beth Anne Shel­ton, Daphne John.  "The Di­vi­sion of House­hold Labor." An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 22, (1996), pp. 299-322
  • An­drew J. Cher­lin, "The De­in­sti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of Amer­i­can Mar­riage"  Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily, Vol­ume 66, Issue 4 (p 848-861)   No­vem­ber 2004. 
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  • Kath­leen Ger­son.  "Moral Dilem­mas, Moral Strate­gies, and the Trans­for­ma­tion of Gen­der: Lessons from Two Gen­er­a­tions of Work and Fam­ily Change" Gen­der & So­ci­ety. Vol. 16 No. 1, Feb­ru­ary 2002 8-28
  • Sara B. Raley, Mary­beth J. Mat­tingly, Suzanne M. Bianchi. "How Dual Are Dual-In­come Cou­ples? Doc­u­ment­ing Change From 1970 to 2001. Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily 68:1 (2006), 11-28
  • Davis, S. N., T. Green­stein and J. G. Marks, "Ef­fects of Union Type and Di­vi­sion of House­hold Labor," Jour­nal of Fam­ily Is­sues 28 (2007):1247-72. [doi: 10.1177/0192513X07300968]
  • Scott Coltrane. Fa­ther-Child Re­la­tion­ships and the Sta­tus of Women: A Cross-Cul­tural Study. Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy, 93 (1988): 1060-1095.
  • Joann Vanek. "Time Spent in House­work." Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can 231 (Nov 1974):116-120. 
  • Va­lerie Kin­cade Op­pen­heimer. "The So­ci­ol­ogy of Women's Eco­nomic Role in the Fam­ily." Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jun., 1977), pp. 387-406 
  • Kath­leen Ger­son.  (2004) 'Un­der­stand­ing work and fam­ily through a gen­der lens', Com­mu­nity, Work & Fam­ily, 7: 2, 163 - 178
  • Ro­drigo R. Soares, Bruno L. S. Falcão. "The De­mo­graphic Tran­si­tion and the Sex­ual Di­vi­sion of Labor." The Jour­nal of Po­lit­i­cal Econ­omy, Vol. 116, No. 6 (Dec., 2008), pp. 1058-1104 
  • Pen­ning­ton, Suzanne(2009) 'Bi­sex­u­als "Doing Gen­der" in Ro­man­tic Re­la­tion­ships', Jour­nal of Bi­sex­u­al­ity, 9:1, 33-69
  • Tichenor, Veron­ica. "Main­tain­ing Men's Dom­i­nance: Ne­go­ti­at­ing Iden­tity and Power When She Earns More." Sex Roles 53, no. 3-4 (2005): 191-205. [doi:10.1007/s11199-005-5678-2]
  • Becker, G. S., "Human Cap­i­tal, Ef­fort, and the Sex­ual Di­vi­sion of Labor," Jour­nal of Labor Eco­nom­ics 3(1) (1985):33-58.  [

VI. What is the role of sex dif­fer­ences in the func­tion­ing and per­pet­u­a­tion of gen­der in­equal­ity?

At­tempts to ex­plain gen­der in­equal­ity at all lev­els are haunted by es­sen­tial­ism.  Es­sen­tial­ist ar­gu­ments im­pute dis­tinc­tive at­trib­utes to women and men and at­tribute the so­cial dif­fer­ences be­tween women's and men's ac­tiv­i­ties, op­por­tu­ni­ties, sta­tuses, and roles to these dis­tinct at­trib­utes.  Even the­o­ret­i­cal analy­ses of gen­der in­equal­ity that ex­pressly re­ject the pos­si­bil­ity of con­se­quen­tial, in­her­ent sex dif­fer­ences,  com­monly build their ex­pla­na­tions of in­equal­ity on gen­der dif­fer­ences.  To com­pli­cate mat­ters, es­sen­tial­ist ar­gu­ments pro­claim­ing su­pe­rior at­trib­utes for women exist along­side of the ar­gu­ments pro­claim­ing women in­fe­rior.  More­over, while for some, es­sen­tial­ism al­ways means a dif­fer­ence based in bi­ol­ogy or ge­net­ics, for oth­ers it in­cludes cul­tural dif­fer­ences that are em­bod­ied in women and men.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem.   To in­ves­ti­gate how es­sen­tial­ist ar­gu­ments work, we will ex­am­ine how dif­fer­ent kinds of es­sen­tial­ist ar­gu­ments might be ap­plied to ex­plain some as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity, in con­trast to a non-es­sen­tial­ist ar­gu­ment.  We aim to see both the at­trac­tion of es­sen­tial­ist ar­gu­ments and the pos­si­bil­i­ties for al­ter­na­tives.
    • Se­lect one form or facet of gen­der in­equal­ity that you will try to ex­plain for this task.  This in­stance or as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity should be suf­fi­ciently im­por­tant, wide­spread, and en­dur­ing or re­cur­ring to merit thought­ful the­ory and ex­pla­na­tion.  It should also be nar­row or spe­cific enough that the goal of ex­plain­ing it is plau­si­ble.  For ex­am­ple, the facet might be that wives com­monly defer to hus­bands. 
    • For the se­lected type or as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity, you will sug­gest five al­ter­na­tive ex­pla­na­tions, each one rep­re­sent­ing a dif­fer­ent ap­proach to ex­plain­ing such so­cial phe­nom­ena.  The ex­pla­na­tions should be suc­cinct but clear.  They should also be plau­si­ble to the ex­tent that a rea­son­able per­son might make such an ar­gu­ment. Plau­si­ble does not mean true, of course.  Rather, we are try­ing to imag­ine an ar­gu­ment that would seem plau­si­ble to peo­ple who are ad­vo­cates for each of the per­spec­tives.
  • The five types of ex­pla­na­tion.   At­tempt to de­vise the best ex­pla­na­tions you can for the rel­e­vant facet of in­equal­ity from each of the fol­low­ing per­spec­tives.  Ex­pla­na­tions may be cat­e­go­rized in many ways.  The five per­spec­tives de­fined here are meant to en­gage dif­fer­ent re­sponses to the prob­lem of es­sen­tial­ism.
    
    1. Di­rect bi­o­log­i­cal - De­vise an ex­pla­na­tion claim­ing that some bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence be­tween the sexes pro­duces the rel­e­vant as­pect of in­equal­ity by mak­ing women and men act dif­fer­ently.  For ex­am­ple, an ar­gu­ment might be that men are stronger than women so men dom­i­nate women as a sim­ple re­sult of su­pe­rior strength.  (More com­plex bi­o­log­i­cal ex­pla­na­tions might be de­rived from evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy.)  This type of ex­pla­na­tion is usu­ally purely es­sen­tial­ist.  Note that this type of ex­pla­na­tion can be di­vided fur­ther into those re­ly­ing on real bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences and those im­put­ing fic­tional bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences.  Let us stress bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences that are at least po­ten­tially real here, leav­ing the fic­ti­tious ones for below.
    2. In­di­rect bi­o­log­i­cal - For­mu­late an ex­pla­na­tion claim­ing some bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence does not di­rectly pro­duce the in­equal­ity, but the bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence has im­por­tant ef­fects or im­pli­ca­tions of some sort, and those ef­fects that make likely or un­avoid­able the emer­gence or per­sis­tence of the se­lected as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity.  For ex­am­ple, some­one might argue that women's child bear­ing makes them anx­ious about the wel­fare of their chil­dren, and that anx­i­ety makes them feel weak and in want of a pro­tec­tor, lead­ing them to defer to hus­bands.  Or, oth­ers might sug­gest that women's bi­o­log­i­cally in­duced child rear­ing ori­en­ta­tion en­cour­ages both women and men to make men re­spon­si­ble for war­fare, and that men's re­sult­ing skill at com­bat, their pos­ses­sion of weapons, and men's or­ga­ni­za­tion around mu­tual de­fense leaves wives typ­i­cally in their hus­bands' con­trol.  The key for this type of ex­pla­na­tion is that the rel­e­vant bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences do not di­rectly cause the gen­der in­equal­ity being ex­plained, but have ef­fects on so­cial be­hav­ior and so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion that lead to gen­der in­equal­ity.  These types of ex­pla­na­tions have es­sen­tial­ist ori­gins in a bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, but the ex­pla­na­tion as a whole may in­voke me­di­at­ing causal in­flu­ences that re­duce the es­sen­tial­ist qual­ity, some­times greatly.
    3.  Non-bi­o­log­i­cal sex dif­fer­ence - Sug­gest how some so­cially con­structed dif­fer­ence be­tween women and men – one that is nei­ther bi­o­log­i­cal nor a di­rect re­sult of bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences – ini­ti­ates or pre­serves the as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity being ex­plained.  This will usu­ally be an en­dur­ing in­di­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tic (a dif­fer­ence that peo­ple carry with them, not a dif­fer­ence in their cir­cum­stances).  For ex­am­ple, one might claim that women are fear­ful and de­pen­dent be­cause of so­cial­iza­tion processes (that have no bi­o­log­i­cal basis), and this psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tion in­duces wives to defer to their hus­bands.  Or, one might argue that child­hood sports avail­able only to boys re­sult in a higher com­pet­i­tive drive that ac­counts for adult men's greater suc­cess in busi­ness.  This type of ex­pla­na­tion claims a real dif­fer­ence ex­ists be­tween women and men (in the so­ci­ety or so­cial con­text where the in­equal­ity being ex­plained oc­curs; the rel­e­vant sex dif­fer­ence need not exist in all or any other so­ci­ety or so­cial con­text), but this dif­fer­ence is a so­cial con­struc­tion.  This type of ex­pla­na­tion often be­comes re­dun­dantly cir­cu­lar: each as­pect of in­equal­ity ex­ists as a re­sult of in­equal­ity, and that over­all in­equal­ity is con­sti­tuted by the var­i­ous as­pects.
    4. Fic­ti­tious sex dif­fer­ence - An im­puted sex dif­fer­ence that does not re­ally exist is claimed to play a sig­nif­i­cant role in pro­duc­ing the se­lected facet of gen­der in­equal­ity.  For ex­am­ple, some­one might sug­gest that al­though women have no bet­ter ca­pac­ity for child rear­ing, peo­ple com­monly as­sume they do be­cause women bear chil­dren, and that this false ex­pec­ta­tion pro­duces a di­vi­sion of labor and power fa­vor­ing men.  This type of ex­pla­na­tion fo­cuses on the con­se­quences of be­liefs, re­ly­ing on the ob­ser­va­tion that be­liefs can or­ga­nize be­hav­ior even if they are false be­liefs.  While such fic­ti­tious dif­fer­ences are com­monly as­sumed to be bi­o­log­i­cal, they need not be.
    5. Causes in­de­pen­dent of sex dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion - A causal process that does not in­volve any dif­fer­ence be­tween the sexes is ar­gued to pro­duce the in­equal­ity being con­sid­ered.  For ex­am­ple, some might argue that for fam­i­lies to ful­fill their so­cial func­tions ef­fec­tively, they need one spouse/par­ent to per­form the crit­i­cal emo­tional ac­tions needed and the other spouse/par­ent to per­form the prac­ti­cal and lead­er­ship ac­tions (this is es­sen­tially a well-know idea of Tal­cott Par­sons).  This role dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion can then re­sult in spouse in­equal­ity, as an in­di­rect and un­in­tended con­se­quence.  This cat­e­gory in­cludes highly di­verse ex­pla­na­tions, the one crit­i­cal sim­i­lar­ity among them being that they do not rely on a sex dif­fer­ence in their cen­tral causal ar­gu­ment.  It may be worth not­ing that one rea­son ex­pla­na­tions based on sex dif­fer­ences (in­clud­ing all the pre­ced­ing per­spec­tives) are more com­mon is that for­mu­lat­ing a plau­si­ble analy­sis that for­goes the mech­a­nism of sex dif­fer­ences is often a hard task.
  • (Note, in this task we are aim­ing to pro­duce ex­pla­na­tions that those ad­vo­cat­ing each of the above types of ex­pla­na­tion would think are rea­son­able.  It is often hard­est to con­ceive good ex­pla­na­tions from the points of view we find un­con­vinc­ing or un­ap­peal­ing, but the ca­pac­ity to do this is a valu­able skill.)
  • Bring­ing it to­gether.  The point of this ex­er­cise is to ex­am­ine how it is pos­si­ble to de­vise a range of al­ter­na­tive causal ex­pla­na­tions of gen­der in­equal­ity stress­ing some mech­a­nism of sex dif­fer­ences, while de­vel­op­ing al­ter­na­tive the­o­ries that do not rely on sex dif­fer­ences is rather hard.  The dif­fer­ence ar­gu­ments run the full range from being di­rectly and fully bi­o­log­i­cal to re­ly­ing on non-bi­o­log­i­cal or fic­ti­tious dif­fer­ences in in­di­rect ways.  The ar­gu­ments that ex­clude not only bi­ol­ogy but all de­pen­dence on sex dif­fer­ences com­monly de­rive from an­other the­o­ret­i­cal ap­proach, such as func­tion­al­ism or con­flict the­o­ries.  The chal­lenge with these ap­proaches is not only to make the im­me­di­ate causal process es­chew dif­fer­ences, but to avoid re­ly­ing on sex dif­fer­ences one or two steps ear­lier in the causal chain.
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Carol Gilli­gan. "Hear­ing the Dif­fer­ence: The­o­riz­ing Con­nec­tion."  Hy­pa­tia, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), pp. 120-127
  • Carol Gilli­gan. "Reply by Carol Gilli­gan." Signs, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1986), pp. 324-333
  • Jaf­fee, Sara; Hyde, Janet Shi­b­ley. "Gen­der Dif­fer­ences In Moral Ori­en­ta­tion: A Meta-Analy­sis." Psy­cho­log­i­cal Bul­letin. Vol 126(5), Sep 2000, 703-726. [doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.703]
  • Valian, Vir­ginia. 1998. "Sex, Schemas, and Suc­cess: What's Keep­ing Women Back?" Acad­eme 84(5): 50-55. (Com­pare Ridge­way in Sec­tion III above.)  (See Valian in Op­tional Read­ings for fuller ac­count.)
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Uri Gneezy, Ken­neth L. Leonard, And John A. List. "Gen­der Dif­fer­ences in Com­pe­ti­tion: Ev­i­dence From a Ma­tri­lin­eal and a Pa­tri­ar­chal So­ci­ety." Econo­met­rica, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Sep­tem­ber, 2009), 1637-1664
  • Re­view: Sec­tion II Com­mon Read­ings above and the De­La­mater and Hyde piece from Sec­tion VI.

  • Dou­glas Schrock, Michael Schwalbe. "Men, Mas­culin­ity, and Man­hood Acts."  An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 35: 277-295 (Au­gust 2009). [doi: 10.1146/an­nurev-soc-070308-115933]
  • Janis S. Bohan. "Re­gard­ing gen­der: Es­sen­tial­ism, Con­struc­tion­ism, and Fem­i­nist Psy­chol­ogy." Psy­chol­ogy of Women Quar­terly, Mar 93, Vol. 17 Issue 1, p5-22 
  • Matthew H. McIn­tyre, Car­olyn Pope Ed­wards. "The Early De­vel­op­ment of Gen­der Dif­fer­ences."  An­nual Re­view of An­thro­pol­ogy, Vol. 38: 83-97 (Oc­to­ber 2009)
  • Wood, W., & Eagly, A. H. (2002). A Cross-Cul­tural Analy­sis Of The Be­hav­ior Of Women And Men: Im­pli­ca­tions For The Ori­gins Of Sex Dif­fer­ences. Psy­cho­log­i­cal Bul­letin, 128, 699-727. [doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.128.5.699]
  • Nancy Chodorow. "Oedi­pal Asym­me­tries and Het­ero­sex­ual Knots." So­cial Prob­lems, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fem­i­nist Per­spec­tives: The So­ci­o­log­i­cal Chal­lenge (Apr., 1976), pp. 454-468
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  • Eagly, A. H., & Wood, W. (1999). The Ori­gins Of Sex Dif­fer­ences In Human Be­hav­ior: Evolved Dis­po­si­tions Ver­sus So­cial Roles. Amer­i­can Psy­chol­o­gist, 54, 408-423. 
  • Valian, V. (1999). The Cog­ni­tive Bases Of Gen­der Bias. Brook­lyn Law Re­view, 65, 1037-1061.
  • Clop­ton, Nancy A.; Sorell, Gwen­dolyn T.  "Gen­der dif­fer­ences in moral rea­son­ing." . Psy­chol­ogy of Women Quar­terly, Mar93, Vol. 17 Issue 1, p85 [doi: 10.1111/j.​1471-​6402.​1993.​tb00678.x]
  • Pamela L. Geller. "Iden­tity and Dif­fer­ence: Com­pli­cat­ing Gen­der in Ar­chae­ol­ogy."   An­nual Re­view of An­thro­pol­ogy, Vol. 38: 65-81 (Oc­to­ber 2009) [doi: 10.1146/an­nurev-an­thro-091908-164414]
  • Bar­bara J. Ris­man, "In­ti­mate Re­la­tion­ships from a Mi­crostruc­tural Per­spec­tive: Moth­er­ing Men." Gen­der and So­ci­ety 1:1 (March 1987). 
  • Nancy Chodorow. "Moth­er­ing, Ob­ject-Re­la­tions, and the Fe­male Oedi­pal Con­fig­u­ra­tion." Fem­i­nist Stud­ies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1978), pp. 137-158 [jstor: 3177630]
  • Tim­o­thy J. Biblarz & Ju­dith Stacey. "How Does the Gen­der of Par­ents Mat­ter?" Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily 72:1 (2010):3-22  [doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2009.00678.x]
  • Adri­enne Rich. 1980. "Com­pul­sory Het­ero­sex­u­al­ity and Les­bian Ex­is­tence." Signs: Jour­nal of Women in Cul­ture and So­ci­ety 5 (4): 631-660
  • Ju­dith But­ler. "Per­for­ma­tive Acts and Gen­der Con­sti­tu­tion: An Essay in Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy and Fem­i­nist The­ory." The­atre Jour­nal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 519-531. 
  • Nuss­baum, M. C. The Pro­fes­sor Of Par­ody [J. But­ler]. The New Re­pub­lic v. 220 no. 8 (Feb­ru­ary 22 1999) p. 37-45.  {Also, Nuss­baum, M. C. Martha C. Nuss­baum And Her Crit­ics: An Ex­change [dis­cus­sion of Feb­ru­ary 22, 1999 ar­ti­cle, The Pro­fes­sor Of Par­ody]. The New Re­pub­lic v. 220 no. 16 (April 19 1999) p. 43-5}
  • Tim­o­thy V. Kauf­man-Os­born. "Fash­ion­able Sub­jects: On Ju­dith But­ler and the Causal Id­ioms of Post­mod­ern Fem­i­nist The­ory."  Po­lit­i­cal Re­search Quar­terly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 649-674
  • Veron­ica Vaster­ling. "But­ler's So­phis­ti­cated Con­struc­tivism: A Crit­i­cal As­sess­ment."  Hy­pa­tia, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sum­mer, 1999), pp. 17-38
  • Bar­bara F. Re­skin. "In­clud­ing Mech­a­nisms in Our Mod­els of As­crip­tive In­equal­ity." Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 1-21

VII.  What is the role of sex­u­al­ity?

Sex­u­al­ity has been evoked in mul­ti­ple ways in the study of gen­der in­equal­ity.  Some have con­sid­ered it as a pos­si­ble mo­ti­vat­ing cause for in­equal­ity, oth­ers have ex­plored how gen­der in­equal­ity can mold the ex­pe­ri­ence and prac­tice of sex­u­al­ity, and oth­ers have tried to the­o­ret­i­cally in­cor­po­rate sex­u­al­ity as a pe­cu­liar ten­sion be­tween women and men that me­di­ates both the causes and ef­fects of gen­der in­equal­ity.  Es­sen­tially, every­one rec­og­nizes sex­u­al­ity is crit­i­cally im­por­tant to gen­der in­equal­ity, but we lack agree­ment or clar­ity on how it mat­ters.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem.  Fo­cus­ing on het­ero­sex­ual be­hav­ior, it ap­pears that men seek to have sex with women much more than women seek to have it with men, rel­a­tive both to how often they have sex and with how many part­ners.  Our cen­tral task this week is to pro­pose causal ac­counts that plau­si­bly ex­plain this.
  • Give a brief ac­count of pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tions from the fol­low­ing per­spec­tives.  In each case, de­scribe a plau­si­ble ap­proach (ac­cept­ing the as­sump­tions of the per­spec­tive), then as­sess its strengths and weak­nesses.
    • Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­ogy - Try­ing to ex­plain this phe­nom­e­non (well, part of it) has been a high­light of the work that evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gists have done on gen­der dif­fer­ences.  Pro­vide an ap­pro­pri­ate brief ex­pla­na­tion of this sort, iden­tify the fun­da­men­tal as­sump­tions it re­quires.  Also, con­sider the ev­i­dence and what might be im­por­tant short­com­ings.
    • In­di­rect bi­o­log­i­cal - For­mu­late an ex­pla­na­tion claim­ing some bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence does not di­rectly pro­duce the in­equal­ity, but the bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence has im­por­tant ef­fects or im­pli­ca­tions of some sort, and those ef­fects that make likely or un­avoid­able the emer­gence and per­sis­tence of this sex­u­al­ity dif­fer­ence.   Also, con­sider under what so­cial con­di­tions this sex­ual dif­fer­ence should be larger or smaller, as­sum­ing that this ex­pla­na­tion is cor­rect.
    • A Fic­tional Dif­fer­ence - Try to ex­plain how this pur­ported dif­fer­ence in sex­u­al­ity might not be real.  This in­cludes ex­plain­ing why the fic­tional be­lief in this dif­fer­ence would arise and be­come preva­lent.
    • Sec­ondary ef­fect of gen­der in­equal­ity - Con­sider how this dif­fer­ence can arise as a re­sult of gen­der in­equal­ity.   Ex­am­ine what so­cial con­di­tions must be true for this causal se­quence to occur.
    • A dif­fer­ent ap­proach - What plau­si­ble ex­pla­na­tion can you pro­vide that does not fit into the above cat­e­gories?
  • Can you pro­vide rea­son­ing or ev­i­dence to show that one of the ex­pla­na­tions is bet­ter than the oth­ers?
  • Bring­ing it to­gether.  In short, our aim is to con­struct and as­sess al­ter­na­tive basic causal ar­gu­ments seek­ing to un­der­stand a widely ac­cepted dif­fer­ence in the sex­u­al­ity of women and men. In each case, try to be clear about the logic of the causal ar­gu­ment.  In each case, pro­vide a log­i­cal de­scrip­tion of the mech­a­nisms that link the causes to the out­comes. 
  • Al­ter­na­tive An­a­lyt­i­cal Task [ig­nore]
    • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem. Our cen­tral task this week is to pro­pose a causal ac­count that plau­si­bly ex­plains the re­la­tion­ship be­tween one as­pect of sex­u­al­ity and gen­der in­equal­ity.  
      • Every­one who an­a­lyzes gen­der in­equal­ity con­sid­ers sex­u­al­ity im­por­tant, but they have highly var­ied ideas about what mat­ters and why.  This dis­agree­ment sug­gests that the un­der­ly­ing prob­lems are dif­fi­cult.  We can­not hope to solve them in this brief ef­fort.  So, our aim is to "pro­pose" a sim­ple and rea­son­able ac­count of some part of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween in­equal­ity and sex­u­al­ity. We are not try­ing to de­velop a full, pro­fes­sional analy­sis.
      • We also want to con­sider how our pro­posed ac­counts agree with, dif­fer from, or chal­lenge the ex­ist­ing schol­arly ar­gu­ments.  Again, our goal here is lim­ited.  The aim is to give a rea­son­able first sense of how the pro­posed ac­count fits (or does not fit).
    • Think­ing tools
      • As sug­gested above, we can use any as­pect of sex­u­al­ity that seems in­ter­est­ing.  How­ever, it may help if the se­lected facet of sex­u­al­ity:
        • has a re­la­tion­ship to gen­der in­equal­ity that at least some writ­ers think is im­por­tant.  Which way it is im­por­tant is wide open.  The role of the cho­sen sex­u­al­ity char­ac­ter­is­tic rel­a­tive to gen­der in­equal­ity may be cause, ef­fect, cat­a­lyst, or what­ever else seems causally rel­e­vant.
        • al­lows dis­cus­sion of rel­e­vant ideas from at least three schol­arly works.  These may be part of the com­mon read­ings, any of the other read­ings rec­om­mended here, or an­other le­git­i­mate source.  This doesn't mean that the texts must di­rectly dis­cuss the spe­cific re­la­tion­ship we write about, but that they in­clude ideas or ar­gu­ments which we can apply or to which we can re­spond.
      • A basic ap­proach to the task pre­sen­ta­tion might have the fol­low­ing three parts:
        • First, we lay out the causal, ex­plana­tory prob­lem.  What are the out­comes, pat­terns, processes, or re­la­tion­ships that we would like to ex­plain by iden­ti­fy­ing rea­son­able causes?  And why is this im­por­tant enough to merit at­ten­tion? (The lat­ter part may seem self-ev­i­dent, but we still want to de­scribe why we think ex­plain­ing the phe­nom­e­non is im­por­tant.)
        • Sec­ond, we pro­vide the causal analy­sis.  We want to be as com­plete as pos­si­ble within rea­son­able space lim­its.  And, we want to be clear, sim­ple, and di­rect. 
        • Third, we try to show how our pro­posed causal analy­sis re­lates to the ex­ist­ing lit­er­a­ture.  For our pur­poses, we can limit our­selves to con­sid­er­ing a cou­ple the­o­ries or per­spec­tives that would sup­port or com­pli­ment our ap­proach and a cou­ple that would be likely to ques­tion our pro­posed causal analy­sis.  (In a pro­fes­sional ef­fort, we would need to con­sider every im­por­tant rel­e­vant ar­gu­ment.)  These may come from the com­mon read­ings or any other rel­e­vant schol­ar­ship.  When dis­cussing those who might dis­agree, we want to be as spe­cific as pos­si­ble about what crit­i­cism we would ex­pect from each of these "op­po­nents" and how we might re­spond. 
    • Bring­ing it to­gether.  In short, our aim is to con­struct a basic causal ar­gu­ment seek­ing to un­der­stand how some as­pect of sex­u­al­ity is re­lated to gen­der in­equal­ity, and to as­sess how that causal ar­gu­ment re­lates to the ex­ist­ing lit­er­a­ture (as rep­re­sented in our read­ings).
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • David L. Weis. "The Use of The­ory in Sex­u­al­ity Re­search". The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, Vol. 35, No. 1, The Use of The­ory in Re­search and Schol­ar­ship on Sex­u­al­ity (1998), pp. 1-9
  • Leti­tia Anne Pe­plau. "Human Sex­u­al­ity: How Do Men and Women Dif­fer?"  Cur­rent Di­rec­tions in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 37-40
  • Joan Acker. "Hi­er­ar­chies, Jobs, Bod­ies: A The­ory of Gen­dered Or­ga­ni­za­tions"  Gen­der & So­ci­ety 1990 4 (2): 139-158 (stress pp. 151-4).
  • Down So Long:  In­ti­mate Com­bat: Sex­u­al­ity and Gen­der In­equal­ity
  • Carl N. De­gler. "What Ought To Be and What Was: Women's Sex­u­al­ity in the Nine­teenth Cen­tury." The Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Re­view, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Dec., 1974), pp. 1467-1490 
  • Catharine A. MacK­in­non.  "Fem­i­nism, Marx­ism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for The­ory." Signs, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fem­i­nist The­ory (Spring, 1982), pp. 515-544
  • John D. De­La­mater and Janet Shi­b­ley Hyde. "Es­sen­tial­ism vs. So­cial Con­struc­tion­ism in the Study of Human Sex­u­al­ity." The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, Vol. 35, No. 1, The Use of The­ory in Re­search and Schol­ar­ship on Sex­u­al­ity (1998), pp. 10-18.
  • Bem, D. J. (2000). Ex­otic Be­comes Erotic: In­ter­pret­ing the bi­o­log­i­cal cor­re­lates of sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. Archives of Sex­ual Be­hav­ior, 29, 531-548. 

• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Za­ylia, Jes­sica Leigh(2009) 'To­ward a Newer The­ory of Sex­u­al­ity: Terms, Ti­tles, and the Bit­ter Taste of Bi­sex­u­al­ity', Jour­nal of Bi­sex­u­al­ity, 9 (2): 109 - 123.
  • Craw­ford, M., et. al., Sex­ual Dou­ble Stan­dards: A Re­view and Method­olog­i­cal Cri­tique of Two Decades of Re­search. The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search v. 40 no. 1 (Feb­ru­ary 2003) p. 13-26
  • Den­nis D. Waskul, Phillip Van­nini, De­siree Wiesen.  "Women and Their Cli­toris: Per­sonal Dis­cov­ery, Sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, and Use."   Sym­bolic In­ter­ac­tion May 2007, Vol. 30, No. 2: 151-174
  • Bre­anne Fahs.  "Com­pul­sory Bi­sex­u­al­ity?: The Chal­lenges of Mod­ern Sex­ual Flu­id­ity."     Jour­nal of Bi­sex­u­al­ity, Vol­ume 9, Issue 3 & 4 July 2009 , pages 431-449
  • John A. Miller, Joan Acker, Kate Barry, Miriam M. John­son and Lois A. West. "Com­ments on MacK­in­non's 'Fem­i­nism, Marx­ism, Method, and the State'." Signs, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Au­tumn, 1984), pp. 168-184; [jstor: 3174252; and Catharine A. MacK­in­non, "Reply to Miller, Acker and Barry, John­son, West, and Gar­diner." Signs, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Au­tumn, 1984), pp. 184-188 [jstor: 3174253]
  •   Steven Ep­stein. "An In­cite­ment to Dis­course: So­ci­ol­ogy and the His­tory of Sex­u­al­ity."  So­ci­o­log­i­cal Forum, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 485-502
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  • Nicole Con­sta­ble. "The Com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of In­ti­macy: Mar­riage, Sex, and Re­pro­duc­tive Labor."  An­nual Re­view of An­thro­pol­ogy, Vol. 38: 49-64 (2009)
  • Im­pett, E. A., & Pe­plau, L. A. (2003). Sex­ual Com­pli­ance: Gen­der, Mo­ti­va­tional, And Re­la­tion­ship Per­spec­tives. Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, 40(1), 87-100 [doi: 10.1080/00224490309552169]
  • Ronald Weitzer. "So­ci­ol­ogy of Sex Work."  An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 35: 213-234 (2009)
  • Pen­ning­ton, Suzanne(2009) 'Bi­sex­u­als "Doing Gen­der" in Ro­man­tic Re­la­tion­ships', Jour­nal of Bi­sex­u­al­ity, 9: 1, 33-69
  • Lisa Dug­gan "From In­stincts to Pol­i­tics: Writ­ing the His­tory of Sex­u­al­ity in the U.S."  The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, Vol. 27, No. 1, Fem­i­nist Per­spec­tives on Sex­u­al­ity. Part 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 95-109 
  • Michael W. Wie­der­man. "The Truth Must Be in Here Some­where: Ex­am­in­ing the Gen­der Dis­crep­ancy in Self-Re­ported Life­time Num­ber of Sex Part­ners." The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, Vol. 34, No. 4 (1997), pp. 375-386
  • Nor­man R. Brown, Robert C. Sin­clair. "Es­ti­mat­ing Num­ber of Life­time Sex­ual Part­ners: Men and Women Do It Dif­fer­ently." The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Aug., 1999), pp. 292-297
  • John Levi Mar­tin, Matt George. "The­o­ries of Sex­ual Strat­i­fi­ca­tion: To­ward an An­a­lyt­ics of the Sex­ual Field and a The­ory of Sex­ual Cap­i­tal." So­ci­o­log­i­cal The­ory, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 107-132
  • Ju­dith Treas, Deirdre Giesen. "Sex­ual In­fi­delity among Mar­ried and Co­hab­it­ing Amer­i­cans." Jour­nal of Mar­riage and the Fam­ily, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 48-60
  • Blow, Adrian J.; Hart­nett, Kel­ley. "In­fi­delity In Com­mit­ted Re­la­tion­ships II: A Sub­stan­tive Re­view ." Jour­nal of Mar­i­tal and Fam­ily Ther­apy, Vol­ume 31, Issue 2, (2005): 217-33.
  • Lever, J., Fred­er­ick, D., & Pe­plau, L. A. (2006). Does Size Mat­ter? Men's And Women's Views On Penis Size Across The Life Span. Psy­chol­ogy of Men and Mas­culin­ity, 7(3), 129-143

VIII. What is the role of vi­o­lence and in­tim­i­da­tion in the re­la­tion­ships be­tween men and women? 

Most the­o­ret­i­cal ap­proaches to gen­der in­equal­ity sug­gest that vi­o­lence be­tween women and men plays a role in sus­tain­ing in­equal­ity; some also point to­ward vi­o­lence as an ini­tial cause.  A re­cur­ring issue con­cerns the de­gree to which vi­o­lence is an ex­pres­sion or re­sult of gen­der in­equal­ity or, al­ter­na­tively, is a cause of in­equal­ity.  The sep­a­rate roles of rape, ha­rass­ment, and do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, and their re­la­tion­ships to each other are an­other crit­i­cal ques­tion.  Much re­search and ar­gu­ment has also been fo­cused on the ques­tion of women's ag­gres­sive im­pulses and ac­tions. 

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • An­a­lyt­i­cal Task: Try to de­velop a rea­son­able ex­pla­na­tion for why women do not en­gage in sex­ual ha­rass­ment or sex­ual vi­o­lence at rates sim­i­lar to those of men.  Here, our strat­egy is to re­verse the usual way peo­ple ap­proach the prob­lem of gen­der vi­o­lence, aim­ing to ex­plain the (sup­pressed) rates for women rather than the (el­e­vated) rates for men.
  • In ad­di­tion to the read­ing ma­te­ri­als, con­sider care­fully the point­ers below in the sec­tions on Think­ing Tools and Well Formed Causal Ar­gu­ments
  • In short, tak­ing into ac­count the point­ers below and the ideas in the ma­te­ri­als we have read up to this point, you want to de­velop a rea­son­able ex­pla­na­tion why women do not en­gage in ha­rass­ment or vi­o­lence to­ward men at the rates that men do to­ward women.
  • Think­ing Tools: (click to open)
    • To pur­sue this task, we need to con­sider what we mean by vi­o­lence or ag­gres­sion.  When peo­ple refer to the pat­terns of vi­o­lence be­tween women and men (in mod­ern so­ci­eties), they are usu­ally re­fer­ring to sev­eral kinds of ag­gres­sive be­hav­ior, par­tic­u­larly: (1) sex­ual vi­o­lence (es­pe­cially rape), (2) sex­ual ha­rass­ment, and (3) in­ti­mate part­ner vi­o­lence (which in­cludes wife bat­ter­ing).  
    • These three cat­e­gories im­plic­itly dis­tin­guish pat­terns of ag­gres­sion based on sev­eral cri­te­ria: (1) the de­gree to which the ag­gres­sive acts in­volve sex­u­al­ity, (2) the sever­ity of the ag­gres­sive acts, and (3) the ex­ist­ing re­la­tion­ship be­tween the rel­e­vant men and women. 
    • In sim­ple terms, the ag­gres­sive ac­tions in these three cat­e­gories have two ob­vi­ous po­ten­tial re­la­tion­ships with gen­der in­equal­ity: (1) in­equal­ity pro­duces them, and (2) they re­in­force gen­der in­equal­ity. 
      • These ac­tions are es­pe­cially linked to in­equal­ity by the ways they con­tribute to women’s fears and sense of phys­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­ity.  That fear is cru­cial.  For it is the prospect of pos­si­ble vi­o­lence that in­duces women to re­strict their be­hav­ior, to seek male pro­tec­tors, and to heed men’s wishes.  The fear of vi­o­lence is com­monly a more preva­lent and ef­fec­tive mech­a­nism of con­trol than the ex­pe­ri­ence of vi­o­lence.
      • Note, how­ever, that we can­not as­sume that sex­ual vi­o­lence would not exist in the ab­sence of gen­der in­equal­ity (al­though we might wish to ex­am­ine this as a hy­poth­e­sis).  We know, for ex­am­ple, that part­ner vi­o­lence oc­curs in gay male and les­bian cou­ples at rates com­pa­ra­ble to those of het­ero­sex­ual cou­ples.  To put it dif­fer­ently, we have good ev­i­dence for in­fer­ring that gen­der in­equal­ity is a con­trib­u­tory cause for sex­ual vi­o­lence, but not for the claim that it is a nec­es­sary cause.  Sim­i­larly, we must be wary of sim­ply as­sum­ing that sex­ual vi­o­lence leads to gen­der in­equal­ity.
    • To sim­plify our task, we will set aside the ques­tion of in­ti­mate part­ner vi­o­lence and focus on the other two kinds men­tioned above, sex­ual vi­o­lence and sex­ual ha­rass­ment.  So, our goal is to ex­plain why women, seem­ingly, in­dulge less often in sex­ual vi­o­lence and ha­rass­ment to­ward men than the re­verse.
    • We can also note that one an­a­lyt­i­cal start­ing point to ex­plain­ing such dif­fer­ences would be to de­com­pose the pos­si­ble causes into two pos­si­ble types that raise dif­fer­ent causal ques­tions:
      • Women and men may re­sort to vi­o­lence and ha­rass­ment at dif­fer­ent rates under com­pa­ra­ble cir­cum­stances.  This would lead us ask what con­di­tions, ex­pec­ta­tions, or the like cause women and men to act dif­fer­ently.
      • Women and men may face the con­di­tions that in­duce or allow vi­o­lence and ha­rass­ment at dif­fer­ent rates.  This would lead us to ask how and why women and men find them­selves at dif­fer­ent rates in cir­cum­stances that pro­mote ag­gres­sion to­ward the other sex.
    • [Both men and women vary greatly, so we must de­cide if we will ab­stract away all that vari­a­tion (and thus talk of "men" or "women" in the most generic or ab­stract pos­si­ble man­ner) or if we feel that some vari­a­tions (e.g. wealth or age) re­quire con­sid­er­a­tion for the analy­sis.  Re­mem­ber that you can re­strict the scope of your analy­sis.]
    • Try to ap­proach the prob­lem of defin­ing po­ten­tial causes as sys­tem­at­i­cally as you can.  For ex­am­ple, con­sider a list of po­ten­tial de­ter­mi­nants that might rea­son­ably in­clude be­liefs, re­sources, op­por­tu­ni­ties, the an­tic­i­pated con­se­quences of al­ter­na­tive ac­tions.  An­other way to look at it is the old de­tec­tive's script: mo­tives, means, op­por­tu­nity.  The key here is to avoid ran­domly at­tach­ing your­self to one or two pos­si­ble causes, just be­cause they hap­pen to be what you first think about.  You want to think se­ri­ously about what you might have ne­glected.
      
    • It is often use­ful to start this kind of an­a­lytic rea­son­ing con­cretely, con­cen­trat­ing on cir­cum­stances we know best.  We think about the kinds of peo­ple we know best, ei­ther through per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence or from study­ing them.  We ask our­selves why the women in these cir­cum­stances or groups do not en­gage in sex­ual ha­rass­ment or sex­ual vi­o­lence to­ward men as much as do men to­ward women.  If we can gain an ex­plana­tory foothold in these fa­mil­iar cir­cum­stances, we have a start­ing point for de­vel­op­ing a more gen­eral ex­pla­na­tion.
    • Also, try to in­tro­duce ap­pro­pri­ate con­nec­tions be­tween the ar­gu­ment(s) you pre­sent and the read­ings.  Con­sider not only the com­mon read­ings from this week, but also past read­ings and op­tional ones from this week that seem par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant.
  • Well Formed Causal Ar­gu­ments: (click to open)
    • The causal ar­gu­ments should try to con­form to the stan­dards for a good causal ar­gu­ment that we have read about and dis­cussed.  Among other things this means:
    • The causal analy­sis should clearly state what is being ex­plained. 
    • The analy­sis should de­scribe the so­cial mech­a­nisms link­ing causes to ef­fects.  It should show what hap­pens in the world that pro­duces the out­comes, what kinds of peo­ple or or­ga­ni­za­tions be­have in man­ner, what cir­cum­stances arise that in­duce the rel­e­vant be­hav­ior, and so forth.  This may be ab­stract at the level of the causal model.
    • The analy­sis should con­sider why the de­ci­sive causes exist and take the form that they do.  That is, the causal analy­sis should push back at least one step past the causes being in­voked to ask what causes them.
    • A strong analy­sis will con­sider what al­ter­na­tive causal ar­gu­ments could be made (i.e., how the causal processes could be dif­fer­ent from what you de­scribe) and show what ev­i­dence or logic fa­vors the ar­gu­ment you have pre­sented.  A thor­ough causal analy­sis will rec­og­nize that other causal mod­els might be con­sid­ered plau­si­ble, and try to com­pare the causal model being pro­moted to the al­ter­na­tives.
    • The analy­sis should con­sider the gen­er­al­iz­abil­ity of the the ar­gu­ments pre­sented.  It should con­sider to what pe­ri­ods, places, types of so­ci­eties, parts of so­ci­ety, kinds of so­cial re­la­tion­ships or in­ter­ac­tions do the ar­gu­ments apply? 
    • Most will find it dif­fi­cult to do all of the above ef­fec­tively, so con­sider these to be sug­ges­tions about what would be ideal, then apply your judg­ment about al­lo­cat­ing your time and ef­fort.
  • An­a­lyt­i­cal Task Alt 2 [Ig­nore un­less in­structed oth­er­wise]
    • Try to de­velop a clear causal analy­sis of the role played in gen­der in­equal­ity by a fear of vi­o­lence.
    • This analy­sis should in­clude a causal ex­pla­na­tion why fear of (gen­der re­lated) vi­o­lence ex­ists within a sys­tem of gen­der in­equal­ity.  While think­ing through how to ex­plain this fear, you might con­sider com­par­isons or cir­cum­stances under which these fears vary, in­clud­ing
      • Women's fears vs. men's fears
      • The cir­cum­stances under which women ex­pe­ri­ence greater fear and those where they feel safe
      • Dif­fer­ences in the amount of fear typ­i­cal amongst groups or cat­e­gories of women ac­cord­ing to their age, af­flu­ence, lo­ca­tion, com­pan­ions, or any other rel­e­vant so­cial con­di­tion
      • Dif­fer­ences in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of fear across so­ci­eties dis­tin­guished by such con­di­tions as forms of eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal or­ga­ni­za­tion, de­gree of de­vel­op­ment, pre­vail­ing re­li­gious or cul­tural in­sti­tu­tions and the like
    • This analy­sis should also in­clude a causal ex­pla­na­tion of the con­se­quences for gen­der in­equal­ity of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of fears of vi­o­lence.  In what ways do fears of vi­o­lence in­flu­ence the be­hav­ior of women or the re­la­tion­ships be­tween women and men?  Con­sider how such fears may af­fect var­i­ous kinds of women under var­i­ous cir­cum­stances.  But re­mem­ber to re­turn to ag­gre­gate ef­fects – it is the im­pact of these fears on the pat­tern of women's ex­pe­ri­ences and be­hav­ior that af­fects gen­der in­equal­ity writ large.
    • Avoid the an­a­lytic temp­ta­tion to argue as if equal­ity might imply an ab­sence of dis­cord and ag­gres­sion.  Re­al­is­ti­cally, equal­ity be­tween two groups by it­self only leads us to ex­pect that acts of ag­gres­sion will occur with equal fre­quency and ef­fect be­tween mem­bers of the two groups.  Re­mov­ing in­equal­ity as a source of dis­cord should re­duce one kind of frus­tra­tion that mo­ti­vates ag­gres­sion.  Other sources of dis­cord still exist, how­ever, and some forms of ag­gres­sion that could be sup­pressed by in­equal­ity might even rise.
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Clau­dia Gar­cia-Moreno, Lori Heise, Hen­rica A. F. M. Jansen, Mary Ells­berg and Char­lotte Watts. "Vi­o­lence against Women."  Sci­ence, New Se­ries, Vol. 310, No. 5752 (Nov. 25, 2005), pp. 1282-1283  [data brief] [doi: 10.1126/sci­ence.1121400]
  • David M. Fer­gus­son, L. John Hor­wood, Eliz­a­beth M. Rid­der. "Part­ner Vi­o­lence and Men­tal Health Out­comes in a New Zealand Birth Co­hort." Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily, 2005, Vol­ume 67, Issue 5 (p 1103-1119)  [This ar­ti­cle was pub­lished with the fol­low­ing two com­men­taries and re­join­der by the au­thors – these clar­ify the points of dis­agree­ment.]
    • Michael P. John­son. "Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence: It's Not about Gen­der: Or Is It?." Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily, Vol. 67, No. 5 (Dec., 2005), pp. 1126-1130
    • Amy Holtz­worth-Munroe. "Male Ver­sus Fe­male In­ti­mate Part­ner Vi­o­lence: Putting Con­tro­ver­sial Find­ings Into Con­text." Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily, Vol­ume 67, Issue 5 (p 1120-1125) [doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2005.00203.x]
    • David M. Fer­gus­son, L. John Hor­wood, Eliz­a­beth M. Rid­der. "Re­join­der." Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily, Vol­ume 67, Issue 5 (p 1131-1136)
  • Down So Long:  In­ti­mate Com­bat: Vi­o­lence and In­tim­i­da­tion
  • Down­load Ar­ti­cle:  Thomae, Manuela, and Afroditi Pina. " Sex­ist Humor and So­cial Iden­tity: The Role of Sex­ist Humor in Men’s In-Group Co­he­sion, Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment, Rape Pro­cliv­ity, and Vic­tim Blame." HUMOR 28, no. 2 (2015): 187. [read: 190-196 on In-Group Co­he­sion & Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment]
  • Down­load Ar­ti­cle:  McLaugh­lin, Heather, Christo­pher Uggen, and Amy Black­stone. " Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment, Work­place Au­thor­ity, and the Para­dox of Power." Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view 77, no. 4 (2012): 625-47. [read: 626-27, 635-39]
  • Re­view Robert Sapol­sky,  "Testos­terone Rules" from sec­tion III above.
  • Thomp­son, Car­leen M., Susan M. Den­ni­son, and Anna Stew­art. " Are Fe­male Stalk­ers More Vi­o­lent Than Male Stalk­ers? Un­der­stand­ing Gen­der Dif­fer­ences in Stalk­ing Vi­o­lence Using Con­tem­po­rary So­cio­cul­tural Be­liefs." Sex Roles 66, no. 5 (2012): 351-65. [read: 351-354]
  • Lit­tle, Betsi, and Cheryl Ter­rance. " Per­cep­tions of Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence in Les­bian Re­la­tion­ships: Stereo­types and Gen­der Role Ex­pec­ta­tions." Jour­nal of Ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity 57, no. 3 (2010): 429-40. [read: 429-432]
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Archer, J. (2002). Sex Dif­fer­ences In Phys­i­cally Ag­gres­sive Acts Be­tween Het­ero­sex­ual Part­ners: A Meta­an­a­lytic Re­view. Ag­gres­sion & Vi­o­lent Be­hav­ior, 7(4), 313-351. [doi: 10.1016/S1359-1789(01)00061-1]
  • Saguy, Abi­gail C. "Em­ploy­ment Dis­crim­i­na­tion or Sex­ual Vi­o­lence?: Defin­ing Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment in Amer­i­can and French Law." Law & So­ci­ety Re­view. 34:4 (2000):1091-1128. also see Saguy, Abi­gail C. "What is Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment? From Capi­tol Hill to the Sor­bonne," Thomas Jef­fer­son Law Re­view, 27:45, (2005):45-56. 
  • Manuel Eis­ner.  "Long-Term His­tor­i­cal Trends in Vi­o­lent Crime. " Crime and Jus­tice, Vol. 30, (2003), pp. 83-142
  • Mal­colm M. Fee­ley, Deb­o­rah L. Lit­tle.  "The Van­ish­ing Fe­male: The De­cline of Women in the Crim­i­nal Process, 1687-1912."  Law & So­ci­ety Re­view, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1991), pp. 719-758 
  • Quinn, Beth A. "Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment and Mas­culin­ity: The Power and Mean­ing of 'Girl Watch­ing.'"  Gen­der & So­ci­ety, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 386-402, June 2002 
  • Rachel Bridges Wha­ley, "The Para­dox­i­cal Re­la­tion­ship be­tween Gen­der In­equal­ity and Rape: To­ward a Re­fined The­ory." Gen­der & So­ci­ety, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 531-555, Aug 2001  [doi: 10.1177/089124301015004003]
  • Mur­ray A. Straus.  2008. "Dom­i­nance and sym­me­try in part­ner vi­o­lence by male and fe­male uni­ver­sity stu­dents in 32 na­tions." Chil­dren and Youth Ser­vices Re­view 30(3):252-275.
  •   Wood, W., & Eagly, A. H. (2002). A cross-cul­tural analy­sis of the be­hav­ior of women and men: Im­pli­ca­tions for the ori­gins of sex dif­fer­ences. Psy­cho­log­i­cal Bul­letin, 128, 699-727. [note: also rec­om­mended for pre­vi­ous sec­tion] 
  • Sarah K. Mur­nen, Car­rie Wright, and Gretchen Kaluzny.  "If 'Boys Will Be Boys,' Then Girls Will Be Vic­tims? A Meta-An­a­lytic Re­view of the Re­search That Re­lates Mas­cu­line Ide­ol­ogy to Sex­ual Ag­gres­sion."  Sex Roles Vol­ume 46, Num­bers 11-12 / June, 2002
  • Peggy Reeves San­day. "Rape-Prone Ver­sus Rape-Free Cam­pus Cul­tures." Vi­o­lence Against Women, Vol. 2, No. 2, 191-208 (1996)    [doi: 10.1177/1077801296002002006]
  • Quinn, Beth A. "Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment and Mas­culin­ity: The Power and Mean­ing of "Girl Watch­ing"." Gen­der & So­ci­ety 16, no. 3 (2002): 386-402. [doi:10.1177/0891243202016003007]
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  • Linda Gor­don. "Fam­ily Vi­o­lence, Fem­i­nism, and So­cial Con­trol." Fem­i­nist Stud­ies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Au­tumn, 1986), pp. 453-478
  • Christo­pher Uggen & Amy Black­stone. "Sex­ual Har­ras­ment as a Gen­dered Ex­pres­sion of Power."  Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view, Vol­ume 69, Num­ber 1, (Feb­ru­ary 2004): 64-92
  • Sandy Welsh. "Gen­der And Sex­ual Ha­rass­ment." An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy  25 (1999): 169-190
  • Lee Ellis and Charles Beat­tie. "The Fem­i­nist Ex­pla­na­tion for Rape: An Em­pir­i­cal Test." The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 74-93 
  • Kim­berly Mar­tin, Lynne M. Vieraitis and Sarah Britto. "Gen­der Equal­ity and Women's Ab­solute Sta­tus: A Test of the Fem­i­nist Mod­els of Rape."  Vi­o­lence Against Women. 12 (4) 2006: 321-339
  • Gwen Hun­ni­cutt. "Va­ri­eties of Pa­tri­archy and Vi­o­lence Against Women Res­ur­rect­ing "Pa­tri­archy" as a The­o­ret­i­cal Tool."  Vi­o­lence Against Women. 15 (5) 2009: 553 - 573    [doi: 10.1177/1077801208331246]
  • Tom W. Smith. "The Polls: Gen­der and At­ti­tudes To­ward Vi­o­lence." The Pub­lic Opin­ion Quar­terly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 384-396 [jstor: 2748632]
  • Richard C. Eichen­berg. "Gen­der Dif­fer­ences In Pub­lic At­ti­tudes To­ward The Use Of Force By The United States, 1990-2003." In­ter­na­tional Se­cu­rity 28.1 (2003) 110-141
  • Jon Hur­witz and Shan­non Smithey, "Gen­der Dif­fer­ences on Crime and Pun­ish­ment." Po­lit­i­cal Re­search Quar­terly, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), pp. 89-115
  • Joan B. Kelly & Michael P. John­son. "Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion Among Types Of In­ti­mate Part­ner Vi­o­lence: Re­search Up­date And Im­pli­ca­tions For In­ter­ven­tions." Fam­ily Court Re­view, Vol­ume 46, Issue 3, 2008 (p 476-499)   [doi: 10.1111/j.1744-1617.2008.00215.x]
  • Richard B. Fel­son, Al­i­son C. Cares. "Gen­der and the Se­ri­ous­ness of As­saults on In­ti­mate Part­ners and Other Vic­tims." Jour­nal of Mar­riage and Fam­ily, Vol­ume 67, Issue 5 (2005):1182-1195
  • Mur­ray A. Straus and Igna­cio Luis Ramirez. 2007. "Gen­der Sym­me­try In Preva­lence, Sever­ity, And Chronic­ity Of Phys­i­cal Ag­gres­sion Against Dat­ing Part­ners By Uni­ver­sity Stu­dents In Mex­ico And USA." Ag­gres­sive Be­hav­ior 33:281-290.  [doi: 10.1002/ab.20199]
  • Rus­sell P. Dobash and R. Emer­son Dobash. "Women's Vi­o­lence to Men in In­ti­mate Re­la­tion­ships." The British Jour­nal of Crim­i­nol­ogy 44 (2004): 324-349    [doi: 10.1093/bjc/azh026]

IX.  How has the econ­omy in­flu­enced men's and women's po­si­tions in so­ci­ety?

Analy­ses of gen­der in­equal­ity at­tribute great im­por­tance to the econ­omy.  Gen­der in­equal­ity ap­pears every­where em­bed­ded in eco­nomic in­equal­ity, in the sense that a crit­i­cal as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity in­volves un­equal ac­cess to eco­nomic re­sources and po­si­tions.  This re­la­tion­ship be­comes clearer in more "ad­vanced" so­ci­eties where eco­nomic or­ga­ni­za­tion has be­come in­sti­tu­tion­ally dif­fer­en­ti­ated from kin­ship and po­lit­i­cal or­ga­ni­za­tion.  Some­times this un­equal eco­nomic ac­cess is un­der­stood as an ex­pres­sion of gen­der in­equal­ity, some­times a cause of gen­der in­equal­ity, some­times a re­sult. Many analy­ses con­sider it all three.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • An­a­lyt­i­cal Task 1: De­velop a causal analy­sis of eco­nomic in­equal­ity be­tween women and men that ac­counts for two em­pir­i­cal ob­ser­va­tions, one being the earn­ings in­equal­ity be­tween the sexes by the gen­der com­po­si­tion of major oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gories, the other being the chang­ing like­li­hood that wives will earn more than their hus­bands.
    
    • The data to be ex­plained can be found in three ta­bles (click to see).  Use the tabs at the bot­tom to switch be­tween ta­bles.
      • The first table shows the 2012 earn­ings gap in the 20 oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gories that have the largest num­ber of fe­males.  These have been sorted by the pro­por­tion fe­male.  The num­bers in dark red show the earn­ings gap where women also ac­count for two-thirds or more of the those in the oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gory.
      • The sec­ond table shows the same kind of data as the first, but is for the 20 oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gories that have the largest num­ber of males.  It is oth­er­wise the same as the first table, ex­cept the dark red num­bers are for oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gories where two-thirds or more of the work­ers are male.
      • The third table shows the chang­ing pro­por­tion of mar­ried cou­ples where the wife earns more than the hus­band over the 25 years up to 2011.
    • Pre­lim­i­nary to de­vel­op­ing an analy­sis, the first task is, of course, to in­ter­pret what the data in the ta­bles tell us about eco­nomic in­equal­ity be­tween women and men.  It is rec­om­mended that you focus on the dark red num­bers of all the ta­bles.  The first two ta­bles are meant to be in­ter­preted as one. 
    • The main task is to de­velop a back­ground analy­sis of gen­der in­equal­ity in the econ­omy, as it ex­ists today and how it has changed over the past sev­eral decades.  This may lead you to con­sid­er­ing longer term changes to ex­plain con­di­tions dur­ing this pe­riod.
    • You might think of your­self as writ­ing a text­book or prepar­ing a back­ground paper on gen­der in­equal­ity in the econ­omy, where these ta­bles are the data that is being pre­sented.  Your goal is to offer an un­der­stand­ing of these ta­bles. 
    • One way to think about this is in terms of what we don't see in the ta­bles.
      • Why aren't women and men dis­trib­uted equally across these oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gories?
      • Why are women's earn­ings lower?
      • Why do the dif­fer­ence be­tween women's and men's earn­ing vary across the oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gories?
      • Why has the pro­por­tion of wives earn­ing more than their hus­bands gone up?  
      • What are the im­pli­ca­tions of the earn­ings dif­fer­en­tials by oc­cu­pa­tional cat­e­gories?
      • What are the im­pli­ca­tions of the data on wives' earn­ings?
      • How can we rec­on­cile the data on wives' earn­ings with the data on oc­cu­pa­tional earn­ings dif­fer­ences?
    • In short, we are aim­ing at a brief ex­pla­na­tion of women's vs. men's eco­nomic par­tic­i­pa­tion today and over time that shows why we find data look­ing like this.
  • An­a­lyt­i­cal Task 2 [ig­nore Fall 13]
    • Iden­tify three of the most im­por­tant, pri­mary, ex­plana­tory prob­lems that need so­lu­tion to un­der­stand the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the econ­omy and gen­der in­equal­ity. 
      • Each way that some as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity in­flu­ences eco­nomic or­ga­ni­za­tion im­plies a causal prob­lem.  Sim­i­larly, in the re­verse, each way that eco­nomic or­ga­ni­za­tion in­flu­ences some as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity im­plies a causal prob­lem.  For ex­am­ple, women used to have no ac­cess to most high-sta­tus po­si­tions in the Amer­i­can econ­omy and are now still under rep­re­sented in them.  In ei­ther di­rec­tion we might con­sider the in­ten­sity or de­gree of gen­der in­equal­ity, rather than some as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity, as that which in­flu­ences or is in­flu­enced by eco­nomic or­ga­ni­za­tion.  For each ob­ser­va­tion or claim about eco­nomic in­equal­ity be­tween women and men, we can ask "why?" or "how?"  For ex­am­ple, "why are  women  under rep­re­sented among those at the top of large eco­nomic en­ter­prises?" or "how does women's rel­a­tive ab­sence from po­si­tions great eco­nomic power in­flu­ence the per­sis­tence of gen­der in­equal­ity?"
      • Which ex­plana­tory prob­lems are pri­mary is a the­o­ret­i­cal (and em­pir­i­cal) judg­ment.  A pri­mary causal process is one with­out which the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the econ­omy and gen­der in­equal­ity would look and work dif­fer­ently.  Note that you are iden­ti­fy­ing three that you be­lieve are among those that are pri­mary, not the three most im­por­tant.
    • For each of the three se­lected, pri­mary, ex­plana­tory prob­lems, do the fol­low­ing: State clearly what is the ex­plana­tory prob­lem and why it is a pri­mary or im­por­tant one.  Think care­fully about what makes some causal processes more im­por­tant than oth­ers when we are try­ing to un­der­stand a so­cial phe­nom­e­non (her the re­la­tion­ship be­tween gen­der in­equal­ity and eco­nomic or­ga­ni­za­tion). 
    • Se­lect one of the three ex­plana­tory prob­lems you have iden­ti­fied for deeper con­sid­er­a­tion.  For that prob­lem:
      • Briefly de­scribe what stand out as the pos­si­ble causal processes that could ac­count for the re­la­tion­ship or con­di­tion that is the focus of the ex­plana­tory prob­lem.  For ex­am­ple, what might be  the causal processes that ac­count for few women being in po­si­tions of high eco­nomic power?  These are the com­pet­ing or al­ter­na­tive ex­pla­na­tions for the prob­lem.  These may in­clude the causes or ex­pla­na­tions ex­plic­itly sug­gested in the lit­er­a­ture con­cern­ing the prob­lem, or ex­pla­na­tions de­rived from ap­ply­ing a more gen­eral the­o­ret­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion (e.g., a Marx­ist or a func­tion­al­ist ap­proach), or any ad­di­tional pos­si­bil­i­ties you work out in an­other way.
      • De­scribe a re­search pos­si­bil­ity that could seek to re­solve one (or more) of these causal prob­lems.  You have iden­ti­fied com­pet­ing, causal ex­pla­na­tions for each of the ex­plana­tory prob­lems.  For one of these, con­sider how we might hope to learn which causal ex­pla­na­tion is more valid by doing rel­e­vant re­search.  To do this, we usu­ally want to think about the cir­cum­stances under which the com­pet­ing the­o­ries sug­gest that some­thing in the world should look or work dif­fer­ently. 
    • To sum­ma­rize, the an­a­lyt­i­cal task in­volves (1) iden­ti­fy­ing three pri­mary, ex­plana­tory prob­lems re­lat­ing gen­der in­equal­ity and eco­nomic or­ga­ni­za­tion, pro­vid­ing a care­ful de­scrip­tion for each of those ex­plana­tory prob­lems, stat­ing why it is im­por­tant, (2) for one ex­plana­tory prob­lem, ex­plor­ing com­pet­ing ex­pla­na­tions that could solve the prob­lem, and de­scrib­ing a re­search de­sign that could, hy­po­thet­i­cally, dis­cover which ex­pla­na­tion is bet­ter.
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Bar­bara F. Re­skin. "Bring­ing the Men Back in: Sex Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and the De­val­u­a­tion of Women's Work." Gen­der and So­ci­ety, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 58-81
  • Des­tined for Equal­ity: Em­ploy­ment: Gain­ing Equal­ity from the Econ­omy
  • Chris­tine L. Williams. "The Glass Es­ca­la­tor: Hid­den Ad­van­tages for Men in the "Fe­male" Pro­fes­sions," So­cial Prob­lems, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Aug., 1992), pp. 253-267
  • Eagly, Alice H., and Linda L. Carli. "Women and the Labyrinth of Lead­er­ship." Har­vard Busi­ness Re­view 85, no. 9 (Sep­tem­ber 2007): 63-71.
  • Eng­land, Paula. "Gen­der In­equal­ity in Labor Mar­kets: The Role of Moth­er­hood and Seg­re­ga­tion." So­cial Pol­i­tics 12 (2005):264-288.
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  • Francine D. Blau. "Trends in the Well-Be­ing of Amer­i­can Women, 1970-1995." Jour­nal of Eco­nomic Lit­er­a­ture, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), pp. 112-165 
  • Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn. "The Gen­der Pay Gap: Have Women Gone as Far as They Can?" Acad­emy of Man­age­ment Per­spec­tives 21 (Feb­ru­ary 2007): 7-23.  [Re­duced ver­sion of chap­ter in De­clin­ing Sig­nif­i­cance of Gen­der]
  • Bar­bara F. Re­skin, "In­clud­ing Mech­a­nisms in Our Mod­els of As­crip­tive In­equal­ity: 2002 Pres­i­den­tial Ad­dress", Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 1-21
  • Michelle J Budig. "Male Ad­van­tage And The Gen­der Com­po­si­tion Of Jobs: Who Rides The Glass Es­ca­la­tor?" So­cial Prob­lems. May 2002. Vol. 49, Iss. 2; p. 258 
  • Eliz­a­beth H. Gor­man and Julie A. Kmec. "Hi­er­ar­chi­cal Rank and Women's Or­ga­ni­za­tional Mo­bil­ity: Glass Ceil­ings in Cor­po­rate Law Firms." Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy Vol­ume 114 Num­ber 5 (March 2009): 1428-74 [doi: pdf/10.1086/595950]
  • Chris­tine E. Bose, Philip L. Bere­ano and Mary Mal­loy. "House­hold Tech­nol­ogy and the So­cial Con­struc­tion of House­work." Tech­nol­ogy and Cul­ture, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Jan., 1984), pp. 53-82 
  • Maria Charles. "De­ci­pher­ing Sex Seg­re­ga­tion: Ver­ti­cal and Hor­i­zon­tal In­equal­i­ties in Ten Na­tional Labor Mar­kets." Acta So­ci­o­log­ica, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 267-287 
  • Shel­ley J. Cor­rell, Stephen Be­nard, In Paik. "Get­ting a Job: Is There a Moth­er­hood Penalty?" Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 112, No. 5 (Mar., 2007), pp. 1297-1338 
  • Louise Marie Roth. Women on Wall Street: De­spite Di­ver­sity Mea­sures, Wall Street Re­mains Vul­ner­a­ble to Sex Dis­crim­i­na­tion Charges. Acad­emy of Man­age­ment Per­spec­tives, Feb 2007, Vol. 21  [doi: 10.5465/AMP.2007.24286162]
  • Judge, Tim­o­thy A.; Liv­ingston, Beth A. "Is The Gap More Than Gen­der? A Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Analy­sis Of Gen­der, Gen­der Role Ori­en­ta­tion, And Earn­ings."  Jour­nal of Ap­plied Psy­chol­ogy. Vol 93(5), Sep 2008, 994-1012. 
  • Clau­dia Goldin. "The Chang­ing Eco­nomic Role of Women: A Quan­ti­ta­tive Ap­proach." Jour­nal of In­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary His­tory, Vol. 13, No. 4, The Mea­sure of Amer­i­can His­tory (Spring, 1983), pp. 707-733  [jstor: 203887]
  • Clau­dia Goldin. "The Quiet Rev­o­lu­tion That Trans­formed Women's Em­ploy­ment, Ed­u­ca­tion, and Fam­ily." The Amer­i­can Eco­nomic Re­view, Vol. 96, No. 2 (May, 2006), pp. 1-21
  • Va­lerie Kin­cade Op­pen­heimer. "De­mo­graphic In­flu­ence on Fe­male Em­ploy­ment and the Sta­tus of Women."  Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 78, No. 4, Chang­ing Women in a Chang­ing So­ci­ety (Jan., 1973), pp. 946-961; see also Va­lerie K. Op­pen­heimer. "The In­ter­ac­tion of De­mand and Sup­ply and its Ef­fect on the Fe­male Labour Force in the United States." Pop­u­la­tion Stud­ies, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Nov., 1967), pp. 239-259 
  • Eng­land, Paula, Paul Al­li­son, and Yux­iao Wu. "Does Fem­i­niza­tion Lower Wages, Do De­clines in Wages Cause Fem­i­niza­tion, and How Can We Tell From Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Data?" So­cial Sci­ence Re­search 36(3) (2007): 1237-56. [doi: 10.1016/j.​ssresearch.2006.08.003]
  • Trond Pe­tersen, Ve­mund Snart­land, Eva M. Mey­ers­son Mil­grom.  "Are fe­male work­ers less pro­duc­tive than male work­ers?"  Re­search in So­cial Strat­i­fi­ca­tion and Mo­bil­ity 25(1) (2007): 13-37. 
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  • Clau­dia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, Ilyana Kuziemko. "The Home­com­ing of Amer­i­can Col­lege Women: The Re­ver­sal of the Col­lege Gen­der Gap." The Jour­nal of Eco­nomic Per­spec­tives, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall, 2006), pp. 133-156
  • Jerry A. Ja­cobs. "Gen­der In­equal­ity and Higher Ed­u­ca­tion."  An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 22 (1996): 153-185 [doi: 10.1146/an­nurev.soc.22.1.153]
  • Clau­dia Buch­mann, Thomas A. DiPrete, Anne Mc­Daniel.  "Gen­der In­equal­i­ties in Ed­u­ca­tion."  An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 34 (2008): 319-337 [doi: 10.1146/an­nurev.soc.34.040507.134719]
  • Eng­land, Paula and Su Li. "De­seg­re­ga­tion Stalled: The Chang­ing Gen­der Com­po­si­tion of Col­lege Ma­jors, 1971-2002." Gen­der & So­ci­ety 20(5) (2006):657-677.
  • M. Everts­son, P. Eng­land, I. Mooi-Reci, J. Hermsen, J. de Bruijn, D. Cot­ter. "Is Gen­der In­equal­ity Greater at Lower or Higher Ed­u­ca­tional Lev­els? Com­mon Pat­terns in the Nether­lands, Swe­den, and the United States." So­cial Pol­i­tics: In­ter­na­tional Stud­ies in Gen­der, State & So­ci­ety 16(2):210-241 (2009) [doi: 10.1093/sp/jx­p008]
  • Eagly, A. H., Jo­han­nesen-Schmidt, M. C., & van Engen, M. L. (2003). Trans­for­ma­tional, trans­ac­tional, and lais­sez-faire lead­er­ship styles: A meta-analy­sis com­par­ing women and men. Psy­cho­log­i­cal Bul­letin, 129(4), 569-591.
  • Eckel, Cather­ine; de Oliveira, An­gela C. M.; Gross­man, Philip J.  "Gen­der and Ne­go­ti­a­tion in the Small: Are Women (Per­ceived to Be) More Co­op­er­a­tive than Men?" Ne­go­ti­a­tion Jour­nal, Vol­ume 24, Issue 4, 2008: 429 [doi: 10.1111/j.1571-9979.2008.00196.x]; Kolb, Deb­o­rah M.  "Too Bad for the Women or Does It Have to Be? Gen­der and Ne­go­ti­a­tion Re­search over the Past Twenty-Five Years." Ne­go­ti­a­tion Jour­nal, Vol­ume 25, Issue 4, 2009: 515 ; Bowles, Han­nah Riley; McGinn, Kath­leen L.  "Gen­der in Job Ne­go­ti­a­tions: A Two-Level Game."  Ne­go­ti­a­tion Jour­nal, Vol­ume 24, Issue 4, 2008: 393 [doi: 10.1111/j.1571-9979.2008.00194.x]
  • Sue Bow­den, Avner Offer. "House­hold Ap­pli­ances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain Since the 1920s." The Eco­nomic His­tory Re­view, New Se­ries, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Nov., 1994), pp. 725-748 
  • Gra­ciela Chichilnisky.  "The Gen­der Gap." Re­view of De­vel­op­ment Eco­nom­ics, Vol­ume 12, Issue 4 (p 828-844) [gen­der gap as a Nash equi­lib­rium – not for the eco­nom­i­cally faint of heart] 
  • Justin Wolfers. "Di­ag­nos­ing Dis­crim­i­na­tion: Stock Re­turns and Ceo Gen­der"  Jour­nal of the Eu­ro­pean Eco­nomic As­so­ci­a­tion, Vol. 4, No. 2/3, Pa­pers and Pro­ceed­ings of the Twen­ti­eth An­nual Con­gress of the Eu­ro­pean Eco­nomic As­so­ci­a­tion (Apr. - May, 2006), pp. 531-541 
  • Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn. "The Gen­der Pay Gap," The Econ­o­mists' Voice (June 2007). [doi: 10.2202/1553-3832.1190]
  • Clau­dia Goldin. "The Long Road to the Fast Track: Ca­reer and Fam­ily." The An­nals Of The Amer­i­can Acad­emy Of Po­lit­i­cal And So­cial Sci­ence. 2004 596 (2004): 20-35.  [doi: 10.1177/0002716204267959]
  • Clau­dia D. Goldin. "The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women's Em­ploy­ment." The Amer­i­can Eco­nomic Re­view, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Sep., 1991), pp. 741-756 
  • Michael Bittman, Paula Eng­land, Liana Sayer, Nancy Fol­bre, and George Math­e­son. "When Does Gen­der Trump Money?: Bar­gain­ing and Time in House­hold Work." Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy 109 (2003):186-214. 

X. What role does ide­ol­ogy play in de­ter­min­ing the re­la­tions be­tween men and women?

Ide­ol­ogy is near the cen­ter of al­most all ef­forts to ex­plain gen­der in­equal­i­ties.  Peo­ple's con­cep­tions of mas­culin­ity and fem­i­nin­ity, ideas con­cern­ing the fair­ness of dif­fer­en­tial treat­ment  or ex­pec­ta­tions of women and men, in­ter­nal­ized schema that evoke dif­fer­ent judg­ments of women's and men's ac­tions, rules about proper male and fe­male be­hav­ior ap­plied to chil­dren – all these and more con­cern the in­flu­ence of ide­ol­ogy on gen­der iden­ti­ties, dif­fer­en­tial treat­ment of women and men, and the or­ga­ni­za­tion and per­sis­tence of gen­der in­equal­ity.  Con­versely, each ide­o­log­i­cal be­lief that sym­bol­izes, le­git­i­mates, in­vokes, guides, in­duces, or helps sus­tain gen­der in­equal­ity is it­self a prod­uct of gen­der in­equal­ity.  To un­tan­gle these com­plex causal in­ter­de­pen­den­cies, we must al­ways at­tend care­fully to two kinds of dis­tinc­tions.  First, we must con­sis­tently rec­og­nize dif­fer­ences in lev­els of so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion, in­clud­ing, among oth­ers, so­ci­etal struc­tures and cul­ture, or­ga­ni­za­tions, so­cial net­works, so­cial processes, and in­di­vid­ual ac­tors.  While it is tempt­ing to treat ide­o­log­i­cal be­liefs as dif­fuse en­ti­ties un­con­nected to iden­ti­fi­able peo­ple, or­ga­ni­za­tions, or struc­tures, the an­a­lyt­i­cal re­sults are poor.  Sec­ond, we must con­sis­tently dis­tin­guish be­tween con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous causes (e.g., the ways that in­ter­nal­ized schema can in­flu­ence in­ter­ac­tions) and asyn­chro­nous or his­tor­i­cal causes (e.g., the ways that changes in do­mes­tic pro­duc­tion  in­duce dif­fer­ent ideas about women's place).  Causal ar­gu­ments about ide­ol­ogy con­sider it as both an ef­fect of gen­der in­equal­ity and a cause of gen­der in­equal­ity, al­though it is ide­ol­ogy's po­ten­tial role as a con­tribut­ing cause that stands out as more the­o­ret­i­cally im­por­tant.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem. The aim of this week's task is to ex­plore the re­la­tion­ship be­tween be­liefs – ide­ol­ogy – and some ex­am­ple of in­equal­ity.  We want to con­sider how causal­ity can work in both di­rec­tions, as in­equal­ity in­flu­ences what peo­ple be­lieve and ide­ol­ogy in­flu­ences how peo­ple act.
  • To begin, choose one as­pect or com­po­nent of gen­der in­equal­ity.  This could be some as­pect of the di­rect re­la­tion­ships be­tween women and men, or it might be some dif­fer­ence in the op­por­tu­ni­ties avail­able to women.  Ex­am­ples in­clude the way that women over­all se­lect less pres­ti­gious fields of study than men in col­lege, that higher ed­u­ca­tion used to be re­stricted for women, that women are ob­jects of sex traf­fick­ing, that male pro­fes­sional sports have much higher sta­tus, or the dif­fer­ent kinds of restau­rants that use male vs. fe­male wait­ers.  You might try to be a bit cre­ative. It can be help­ful to focus your dis­cus­sion using a con­crete in­stance of that type of in­equal­ity with which you are fa­mil­iar. 
  • Con­tents of the analy­sis.  The goal is to work through the var­i­ous ways that ideas and ex­pec­ta­tions are in­volved in the causal processes sur­round­ing gen­der in­equal­ity using the cho­sen ex­am­ple to do this at a more con­crete level.  The pur­pose of the task spec­i­fi­ca­tion that fol­lows is to help you to be sys­tem­atic about this.  Use this schematic out­line as a start­ing point.
    1. 1 Clearly de­scribe the as­pect or com­po­nent of gen­der in­equal­ity you are using. (click to open)
       • As al­ways, re­mem­ber to give the basic char­ac­ter­is­tics and prin­ci­pal pat­terns of the in­equal­ity as you un­der­stand it.  Among other pos­si­bil­i­ties, this will nor­mally in­clude: (1) de­scribe what is un­equal; (2) de­scribe what this in­equal­ity looks like, how it is ex­pe­ri­enced, or how it has its im­pact in so­cial life; (3) as­sess how the dis­tri­b­u­tion ap­pears or is man­i­fest in the world, how we would rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ences be­tween more or less of it, and how it is cur­rently dis­trib­uted).
       • The goal is to en­sure the reader (and you) clearly un­der­stand what makes up or de­fines the in­equal­ity you are fo­cused on, and what spe­cific ex­am­ples of that in­equal­ity you will use in your analy­sis. 
    2. 2 De­scribe the prin­ci­pal ide­o­log­i­cal be­liefs or ideas that seem rel­e­vant to the in­equal­ity being ex­am­ined. (click to open)
       • While iden­ti­fy­ing the rel­e­vant be­liefs is ob­vi­ously cru­cial, it can also be dif­fi­cult.  The range of po­ten­tially rel­e­vant be­liefs may be very large, so we have to ex­er­cise judg­ment about which are most im­por­tant
       • It may help to dis­tin­guish be­liefs that mo­ti­vate the prac­tice of this as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity from those that le­git­i­mate it. Usu­ally both are pre­sent, and they may be dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish, but think­ing through the dif­fer­ence can be very help­ful as the im­pli­ca­tions of the two kinds are quite dif­fer­ent.
       • It is cru­cial to con­sider the ac­tions and ideas of both men and women.  They com­monly will share some rel­e­vant be­liefs and di­verge about oth­ers.  Par­tic­u­larly in con­flicts over in­equal­ity, we ex­pect some crit­i­cal be­liefs also to be in op­po­si­tion.
       • Con­sider also whether dif­fer­ent be­liefs mo­ti­vate or le­git­i­mate this type of in­equal­ity in dif­fer­ent times, places, or cir­cum­stances.   That is, you want to de­cide what char­ac­ter­is­tics of the be­liefs con­nected to this in­equal­ity are fairly con­sis­tent across var­i­ous con­crete in­stances of this type of in­equal­ity and what sort of be­liefs dif­fer across in­stances.  For ex­am­ple, the be­liefs that mo­ti­vated male re­sis­tance to women en­ter­ing "male" oc­cu­pa­tions may have var­ied by the sta­tus of the oc­cu­pa­tion and by the time pe­riod women began to enter.
       • Con­sider how much peo­ple agree about the im­por­tant be­liefs.  When is the con­sen­sus high or low, what causes it to be high or low, and what dif­fer­ence does the de­gree of agree­ment make?  In par­tic­u­lar, do peo­ple dis­pute some as­pects of the be­liefs rel­e­vant to this type of in­equal­ity, such that the dis­pute af­fects the in­equal­ity or in­forms us about it?  Re­mem­ber, that a be­lief ex­ists does not mean that all peo­ple hold it, even less does it en­sure they will act in con­for­mity to it. The greater the dis­agree­ment about a be­lief within a group or cat­e­gory of ac­tors, the less that it can pro­duce con­sis­tent pat­terns of ac­tions (al­though this may not di­min­ish its ap­peal as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion). 
       • Be­liefs have a va­ri­ety of other vari­able char­ac­ter­is­tics that can be im­por­tant to an­a­lyz­ing their sig­nif­i­cance. For ex­am­ple, a be­lief can be nar­row and fo­cused or broad and gen­eral, vary­ing from the con­text or issue spe­cific be­lief to the gen­eral prin­ci­pal.  A be­lief can be so salient and closely held that peo­ple refer to it all the time or so in­signif­i­cant and loosely held that it plays a role only when forced to the fore­front.
    3. 3 As­sess the ef­fects of these be­liefs. (click to open)
       • Con­sider the so­cial sig­nif­i­cance or func­tion of the gen­der in­equal­ity re­lated be­liefs. We can try to judge the ef­fects of be­liefs by com­par­ing how peo­ple would be­have if be­liefs were dif­fer­ent, using ei­ther real or hy­po­thet­i­cal al­ter­na­tives. 
       • Al­though be­liefs exist only by being held by in­di­vid­u­als, we gen­er­ally want to think of be­liefs as cul­tural phe­nom­ena. The be­liefs that con­cern us are those pre­served and im­posed by cul­tures or ac­quired as the com­mon ef­fect of shared or par­al­lel ex­pe­ri­ences. Peo­ple are prone to all kinds of idio­syn­cratic be­liefs, but only shared be­liefs have so­cial ef­fect.
       • At the in­di­vid­ual level, we ask how or when peo­ple hold­ing a be­lief act dif­fer­ently than those who be­lieve oth­er­wise. At the so­cial level, we ask how the pres­ence of those be­liefs in a group or cir­cum­stance has so­cial con­se­quences -- such as in­flu­enc­ing the struc­ture of or­ga­ni­za­tions, the pre­vail­ing legal sys­tem, or di­rec­tion of his­tor­i­cal changes.
       • What kind of ef­fect and how much ef­fect we at­tribute to a be­lief will de­pend in part on what we choose as the al­ter­nate be­liefs for com­par­i­son.   Rea­son­able al­ter­na­tives might in­clude: be­liefs ob­served to exist in more egal­i­tar­ian (or more un­equal) cir­cum­stances, re­ver­sal of be­liefs about women and men (such as be­liev­ing women are bet­ter at math - often im­plau­si­ble in re­al­ity, but po­ten­tially clar­i­fy­ing as an imag­i­nary ex­per­i­ment), the ab­sence of any such be­liefs (that is, peo­ple have no ex­pec­ta­tions about some­thing, such as whether men or women will be more nur­tur­ing), or the pres­ence of some rea­son­able hy­po­thet­i­cal al­ter­na­tive be­liefs.
       • As usual, we want to give some thought to both women and men - con­sid­er­ing how each sex is af­fected, con­sid­er­ing be­liefs about both sexes, and con­sid­er­ing what each sex be­lieves.  Typ­i­cally, we ex­pect to find women and men share many be­liefs, but are sharply di­vided on oth­ers.    We also want to con­sider how the ef­fects of the be­liefs might vary de­pend­ing on the con­text or other me­di­at­ing in­flu­ences.
       • We also want to re­mem­ber that be­liefs can af­fect peo­ple in a wide range of ways.  Be­liefs can af­fect judg­ments, mo­tives, as­pi­ra­tions, qual­ity of ex­pe­ri­ence, and so forth.  Again, the point is not to in­clude every­thing.  In­stead, we want to rec­og­nize that de­cid­ing what is im­por­tant is an an­a­lyt­i­cal judg­ment; it should not sim­ply be to talk about what­ever we hap­pened to think about first. We are try­ing to fig­ure out what be­liefs re­ally make a dif­fer­ence to the strength, dura­bil­ity, or form of gen­der in­equal­ity.
    4. 4 Try to ex­plain how the rel­e­vant be­liefs come to exist and why they per­sist. (click to open)
       • Thus, for the ex­am­ple of in­equal­ity being ex­am­ined, we are in part try­ing to ex­plain how be­liefs or ideas might arise as a re­sult of the pres­ence of the in­equal­ity that they le­git­i­mate and mo­ti­vate.  This is our cen­tral goal, and it is dif­fi­cult.  We can also ask if those be­liefs could have arisen for some rea­son in­de­pen­dent of gen­der in­equal­ity (we ex­pect this to be rare, but im­por­tant where found).
       • It can help to do a hy­po­thet­i­cal ex­per­i­ment.  Con­sider an imag­i­nary cir­cum­stance (which might have a real his­tor­i­cal coun­ter­part) where the rel­e­vant as­pect of gen­der in­equal­ity did not exist, nor did the re­lated be­liefs – then at some point in time this type of gen­der in­equal­ity came into ex­is­tence.  Then try to think through how ideas would change as a re­sult of the emer­gence of this facet of gen­der in­equal­ity.  Con­sider what is­sues might arise if this type of in­equal­ity came to exist, but the be­liefs still did not, and how might the re­sponse to such is­sues lead to new be­liefs. Think about both women and men try­ing to make sense of the un­equal cir­cum­stances, and try­ing to mold the per­cep­tion of re­al­ity and jus­tice to fit their cir­cum­stances.
       • To make the analy­sis more con­crete, see if you can pro­vide ev­i­dence or ob­ser­va­tions about real cir­cum­stances where this type of in­equal­ity is min­i­mal (dif­fer­ent cul­tures, dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal pe­ri­ods, dif­fer­ent parts of so­ci­ety).  As­sess how the be­liefs under min­i­mal in­equal­ity com­pare to those where it is high.
       • It is a good idea to con­sider under what con­di­tions, if any, would the be­liefs as­so­ci­ated with a facet of gen­der in­equal­ity exist with­out the pres­ence of this facet of gen­der in­equal­ity. That is, could sim­i­lar or anal­o­gous be­liefs ap­pear with dif­fer­ent kinds of in­equal­ity or under con­di­tions of lit­tle in­equal­ity.  The first pos­si­bil­ity is crit­i­cal, be­cause it sug­gests be­liefs due to the pres­ence of in­equal­ity per se, not de­pen­dent on the type of in­equal­ity.  The sec­ond pos­si­bil­ity sug­gests the prospect of be­liefs hi­jacked from con­di­tions dis­tinct from in­equal­ity, then con­verted to some ser­vice to re­in­force or chal­lenge in­equal­ity.  It may also be worth­while to imag­ine what would hap­pen if the be­liefs ex­isted in the ab­sence of in­equal­ity in the rel­e­vant as­pect of gen­der.  Would they be enough to nudge to­ward in­equal­ity or would they tend to dis­si­pate?
       • It is also a good idea to con­sider how peo­ple ac­quire the rel­e­vant be­liefs.  Are they part of gen­eral cul­tural ex­pec­ta­tions, are the trans­ferred in spe­cific con­texts, or do peo­ple gen­er­ate them from ex­pe­ri­ence rather than learn­ing them from oth­ers?  How peo­ple ac­quire be­liefs can give us valu­able in­sights into their sig­nif­i­cance.
       • Fi­nally, ask what hap­pens if some peo­ple ques­tion or re­ject the be­liefs? This ques­tion ap­plies to both women and men.  The mech­a­nisms to en­sure ac­cep­tance and con­for­mity are cru­cial to the preser­va­tion and ef­fec­tive­ness of be­liefs.
    5. 5 Fi­nally, after com­plet­ing the steps in the analy­sis above, try to give an over­all as­sess­ment about the sig­nif­i­cance of ide­ol­ogy to the facet of gen­der in­equal­ity you are con­sid­er­ing. 
  • Ad­di­tional Notes 
    • Through­out, be care­ful to dis­tin­guish be­tween em­pir­i­cal claims and moral claims.  Both kinds of be­liefs are im­por­tant.  And they may be con­fused or over­lap­ping rather than neatly dis­tin­guished in real life.  Still, they are cru­cially dif­fer­ent.  Sim­i­larly, dis­tin­guish be­tween the ex­pla­na­tion of be­liefs and the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of be­liefs.
    • Do try to in­tro­duce ap­pro­pri­ate con­nec­tions be­tween the ar­gu­ment(s) you pre­sent and the read­ings.  Con­sider not only the com­mon read­ings from this week, but also past read­ings and op­tional ones from this week that seem par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant. 
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Ridge­way, Ce­cilia L., and Shel­ley J. Cor­rell. " Un­pack­ing the Gen­der Sys­tem: A The­o­ret­i­cal Per­spec­tive on Gen­der Be­liefs and So­cial Re­la­tions." Gen­der & So­ci­ety 18, no. 4 (2004): 510-31.
  • Down So Long:  Dis­puted Ideals: Ide­olo­gies of Do­mes­tic­ity and Fem­i­nist Re­bel­lion
  • Paula Eng­land. "The Gen­der Rev­o­lu­tion: Un­even and Stalled." Gen­der & So­ci­ety 2010 24 (2): 149-166
  • Francesca M. Can­cian. "The Fem­i­niza­tion of Love." Signs, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Sum­mer, 1986), pp. 692-709
  • Robert Max Jack­son. Des­tined for Equal­ity: Ch. 4 - "In­sti­tu­tional In­di­vid­u­al­ism"
  • Döring, Nicola, Anne Reif, and San­dra Poeschl. "How Gen­der-Stereo­typ­i­cal Are Self­ies? A Con­tent Analy­sis and Com­par­i­son with Mag­a­zine Ad­verts." Com­put­ers in Human Be­hav­ior 55, Part B (2016): 955-62. [doi:10.1016/j.​chb.2015.10.001] [read: 955-57, 61; look at pho­tos through­out]
  • Young, Isaac F., and Daniel Sul­li­van. "Com­pet­i­tive Vic­tim­hood: A Re­view of the The­o­ret­i­cal and Em­pir­i­cal Lit­er­a­ture." Cur­rent Opin­ion in Psy­chol­ogy 11 (2016): 30-34. [doi:10.1016/j.​copsyc.2016.04.004]
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  
  • Naka­mura, Mayumi, and Mito Akiyoshi. "What De­ter­mines the Per­cep­tion of Fair­ness Re­gard­ing House­hold Di­vi­sion of Labor be­tween Spouses?." Plos One 10, no. 7 (Jul 2015). [doi:10.1371/jour­nal.pone.0132608]
  • Davis, Shan­non N., and Theodore N. Green­stein. "Gen­der Ide­ol­ogy: Com­po­nents, Pre­dic­tors, and Con­se­quences." An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy 35, no. 1 (2009): 87-105. [doi:10.1146/an­nurev-soc-070308-115920]
  • Ju­dith Lor­ber. "Be­liev­ing is See­ing: Bi­ol­ogy as Ide­ol­ogy." Gen­der and So­ci­ety, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 568-581
  • Faye Gins­burg. "Pro­cre­ation Sto­ries: Re­pro­duc­tion, Nur­tu­rance, and Pro­cre­ation in Life Nar­ra­tives of Abor­tion Ac­tivists." Amer­i­can Eth­nol­o­gist, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1987), pp. 623-636
  • Kristin Luker. "Con­tra­cep­tive Risk Tak­ing and Abor­tion: Re­sults and Im­pli­ca­tions of a San Fran­cisco Bay Area Study." Stud­ies in Fam­ily Plan­ning, Vol. 8, No. 8 (Aug., 1977), pp. 190-196; and "The War Be­tween the Women." Fam­ily Plan­ning Per­spec­tives, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Mar. - Apr., 1984), pp. 105-110
  • Clem Brooks and Cather­ine Bolzen­dahl. "The Trans­for­ma­tion of US Gen­der Role At­ti­tudes: Co­hort Re­place­ment, So­cial-Struc­tural Change, and Ide­o­log­i­cal Learn­ing."  So­cial Sci­ence Re­search Vol­ume:  33  Issue:  1  (2004 Mar):  106 - 133
• Re­lated Read­ings
  
  • Cather­ine I Bolzen­dahl, Daniel J Myers.. "Fem­i­nist At­ti­tudes and Sup­port for Gen­der Equal­ity: Opin­ion Change in Women and Men, 1974-1998." So­cial Forces, vol. 83, no. 2 (Dec 2004): 759-789
  • Thorn­ton, Ar­land; Young-De­Marco, Linda, "Four Decades of Trends in At­ti­tudes to­ward Fam­ily Is­sues in the United States: The 1960s through the 1990s." Jour­nal of Mar­riage and the Fam­ily, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 1009-1037, Nov 2001 
  • Emily W. Kane, Mimi Schip­pers. "Men's and Women's Be­liefs about Gen­der and Sex­u­al­ity." Gen­der and So­ci­ety, Vol. 10, No. 5 (Oct., 1996), pp. 650-665
  • Eric D. Wid­mer, Ju­dith Treas, Robert New­comb. "At­ti­tudes to­ward Non­mar­i­tal Sex in 24 Coun­tries." The Jour­nal of Sex Re­search, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Nov., 1998), pp. 349-358... [jstor: 3813111]
  • Bem, S, L, (1994) De­fend­ing The Lenses of Gen­der. Psy­cho­log­i­cal In­quiry, 5, 97-101.
  • Frable, D. E., & Bem, S. L. (1985). If You Are Gen­der Schematic, All Mem­bers Of The Op­po­site Sex Look Alike. Jour­nal of Per­son­al­ity and So­cial Psy­chol­ogy, 49, 459-468. [doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.49.2.459]

XI.   How can we make sense of fem­i­nism's fate and role in con­tem­po­rary U.S.?

Today, fem­i­nism is both ex­tolled and con­demned, often by peo­ple whose ori­en­ta­tions to­ward fem­i­nism seem to defy their in­ter­ests.  Both the pop­u­lar press and schol­ar­ship have de­voted a lot of ef­fort seek­ing to make sense of peo­ple's be­liefs about fem­i­nism and equal­ity, but these ef­forts have done lit­tle to re­duce the dis­agree­ments.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  
  • The goal of this task is to ex­plore what young peo­ple think about fem­i­nism today and to at­tempt to ex­plain these be­liefs.
  • As a pre­lude, you should in­ter­view some fe­male and some male ac­quain­tances about fem­i­nism.
    • Use your own judg­ment about who to in­ter­view and how many.  You are try­ing to get enough "data" to serve as the basis for your analy­sis.
    • Also use your own judg­ment about how to con­duct your in­ter­views and what to ask.  How­ever, at a min­i­mum try to in­clude: 1) how they would de­fine fem­i­nism, 2) what kinds of the peo­ple they know do they con­sider fem­i­nist, 3) what they think is true about gen­der in­equal­ity/equal­ity today, 4) whether or not they con­sider them­selves fem­i­nist and why, 5) whether or not they con­sider them­selves com­mit­ted to gen­der equal­ity.
  • Based on these in­ter­views and your pre-ex­ist­ing ob­ser­va­tions, write a de­scrip­tive as­sess­ment of young, ed­u­cated Amer­i­can's ori­en­ta­tion to­ward fem­i­nism.
  • Pre­pare a pro­vi­sional causal analy­sis of these cur­rent at­ti­tudes to­ward fem­i­nism and gen­der equal­ity in your ref­er­ence pop­u­la­tion. Try to do a rea­soned analy­sis, tak­ing into ac­count the read­ings for this topic.
  • Causal analy­ses al­ways hinge on the choice of com­par­i­son.  Among oth­ers, you might con­sider: 1) the dif­fer­ences be­tween now and the past, 2) the dif­fer­ences be­tween women and men, 3) the dif­fer­ences be­tween those who iden­tify as fem­i­nist and those who do not, 3) the dif­fer­ence be­tween peo­ple like you and peo­ple un­like you
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Des­tined for Equal­ity: Women's Re­jec­tion of Sub­or­di­na­tion
  • Nancy Burns and Kather­ine Gal­lagher.  "Pub­lic Opin­ion on Gen­der Is­sues: The Pol­i­tics of Eq­uity and Roles." An­nual Re­view of Po­lit­i­cal Sci­ence, 2010, Vol. 13: 425-443 [doi: 10.1146/an­nurev.polisci.12.040507.142213]
  • Jo Free­man. "Po­lit­i­cal Or­ga­ni­za­tion in the Fem­i­nist Move­ment." Acta So­ci­o­log­ica, Vol. 18, No. 2/3 (1975), pp. 222-244 
  • Mar­shall, Susan E. "Ladies against Women: Mo­bi­liza­tion Dilem­mas of An­tifem­i­nist Move­ments." So­cial Prob­lems 32, no. 4 (1985): 348-62. [doi:10.1525/sp.1985.​32.​4.​03a00040]
  • A se­lec­tion of pop­u­lar/mass media dis­cus­sions of fem­i­nism's cur­rent dilem­mas:
    •  Susan J. Dou­glas. "Girls Gone Anti-Fem­i­nist"
    • Rhi­an­non Lucy Cosslett and Holly Bax­ter. "The Five Main Is­sues Fac­ing Mod­ern Fem­i­nism"
    • Hanna Rosin. "The Pa­tri­archy Is Dead. Fem­i­nists, ac­cept it."
    • Liza Mundy. "Why Do Some Fem­i­nists Get Un­easy When Women Make Progress?"
    • Alexan­dra Petri.  "Fem­i­nism is dead! Long live fem­i­nism!"
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  • Carl N. De­gler. "Char­lotte Perkins Gilman on the The­ory and Prac­tice of Fem­i­nism." Amer­i­can Quar­terly, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring, 1956), pp. 21-39   
  • Emily Stoper, Roberta Ann John­son. "The Weaker Sex & the Bet­ter Half: The Idea of Women's Moral Su­pe­ri­or­ity in the Amer­i­can Fem­i­nist Move­ment." Polity, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1977), pp. 192-217  [jstor: 3234258]
  • ...
• Re­lated Read­ings
  • Holly J. Mc­Cam­mon, Court­ney Sanders Muse, Har­mony D. New­man, and Teresa M. Ter­rell. "Move­ment Fram­ing and Dis­cur­sive Op­por­tu­nity Struc­tures: The Po­lit­i­cal Suc­cesses of the U.S. Women's Jury Move­ments." Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view 2007 72(5): 725-749.   
  • Elsie Clews Par­sons. "Fem­i­nism and Con­ven­tion­al­ity." An­nals of the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Po­lit­i­cal and So­cial Sci­ence, Vol. 56, Women in Pub­lic Life (Nov., 1914), pp. 47-53 
  • Cather­ine Hakim. "Five Fem­i­nist Myths about Women's Em­ploy­ment." The British Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 429-455
  • 
    

XII.   How have po­lit­i­cal processes and struc­tures sus­tained men's and women's rel­a­tive sta­tus?

As struc­ture and as actor, the state has been un­avoid­ably cen­tral to on­go­ing prac­tice of gen­der in­equal­ity, to its per­sis­tence, and to changes in the form and amount of gen­der in­equal­ity.

States or gov­ern­ments have power. Through the mil­i­tary and po­lice, a state can en­force con­for­mity to its rules, repel and pun­ish chal­lenges from the scale of in­di­vid­ual acts to col­lec­tive re­bel­lions, and by threat, im­plicit or ex­plicit, deter re­bel­lions from ap­pear­ing. Through the law, reg­u­la­tions, and bu­reau­cratic poli­cies, a state can de­fine what con­sti­tutes ac­cept­able or le­git­i­mate be­hav­ior at all lev­els of so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion. Through eco­nomic poli­cies of tax­a­tion, ex­pen­di­tures, and re­dis­tri­b­u­tions (such as wel­fare poli­cies or agri­cul­tural sup­ports), a state in­flu­ences the rel­a­tive eco­nomic sta­tus of dif­fer­ent groups.

By act­ing dif­fer­ently to­ward groups with re­gard to any of these as­pects of gov­ern­ment power, a state can cre­ate, re­in­force, or ex­ac­er­bate so­cial in­equal­i­ties. Anal­o­gously, a state can, in the­ory, ob­struct, desta­bi­lize, or di­min­ish so­cial in­equal­ity by using its power in ways that are in­con­sis­tent with so­cial in­equal­i­ties. States de­ter­mine, in­flu­ence, le­git­imize, and sanc­tion rights and op­por­tu­ni­ties; they may do so in more or less egal­i­tar­ian ways.

When sig­nif­i­cant, en­dur­ing, so­cial in­equal­ity ex­ists, those priv­i­leged by that form of in­equal­ity will nor­mally have more in­flu­ence over the state than do those dis­ad­van­taged by the in­equal­ity, and the over­all ef­fect of state poli­cies will re­in­force the ex­er­cise and per­sis­tence of the in­equal­ity. A fun­da­men­tal prob­lem for all state the­o­ries is who or what de­cides state poli­cies and ac­tions. To some de­gree, those "in" the state (elected, ap­pointed, hired, or ap­pro­pri­ated) make de­ci­sions based on their in­ter­ests and out­looks as mem­bers of the state ap­pa­ra­tus. To some de­gree, state ac­tors re­spond to the in­flu­ence of power bro­kers out­side the state, such as the eco­nom­i­cally pow­er­ful. In ei­ther case, when mak­ing pol­icy or strate­gic plan­ning de­ci­sions, those in­flu­enc­ing state ac­tions are in part re­spond­ing to what they per­ceive will be the re­sponses of all ac­tors in the na­tion af­fected by those de­ci­sions.  States, or the po­lit­i­cal ac­tors who com­prise the gov­ern­ment, also have their own in­ter­ests, most no­tably pre­serv­ing their power, and these in­ter­ests are not au­to­mat­i­cally con­sis­tent with the in­ter­ests of dom­i­nant so­cial groups.

These po­lit­i­cal processes may sup­port and en­force gen­der in­equal­ity, pas­sively per­mit it, or op­pose gen­der in­equal­ity (as is true with any form of so­cial in­equal­ity). They may do any com­bi­na­tion of these with re­spect to dif­fer­ent as­pects of gen­der in­equal­ity.  Sus­tain­ing in­flu­ence over po­lit­i­cal processes is a fun­da­men­tal fea­ture and goal of so­cially dom­i­nant groups and the long mo­nop­oly of men over po­lit­i­cal power has both demon­strated and sus­tained gen­der in­equal­ity.  Yet, gov­ern­ment ac­tions have also con­tributed to the de­cline of gen­der in­qual­ity over the past two cen­turies.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  
  • You have been hired by the newly elected Pres­i­dent of the United States (or the anal­o­gous top po­lit­i­cal po­si­tion in an­other coun­try that you pre­fer to ex­am­ine).  One of the new Pres­i­dent’s main goals for her years in of­fice is to use gov­ern­ment power to im­prove gen­der in­equal­ity and the sta­tus of women.  Your job is to rec­om­mend to­ward what spe­cific goals she should focus her ef­forts.
  • You may rec­om­mend new leg­is­la­tion (or the re­moval of old), new ad­min­is­tra­tive strate­gies such as who gets ap­pointed, new ex­ec­u­tive poli­cies (for ex­am­ple, rules for the mil­i­tary) that are within the Pres­i­dent’s power with­out leg­is­la­tion, con­certed ef­forts to in­flu­ence pub­lic opin­ion or state level gov­er­nance.  In short, you can con­sider the en­tire range of ac­tions avail­able to a Pres­i­dent.
  • You should pro­pose at least three dis­tinct ini­tia­tives that you be­lieve could serve this pur­pose.
  • Choose the strat­egy you be­lieve holds the most promise.  For this strat­egy, you must pro­vide an an­a­lyt­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. Your jus­ti­fi­ca­tion should con­sider the fol­low­ing:
    • At what as­pects of gen­der in­equal­ity is the pol­icy aimed? 
    • In­clude a brief analy­sis of this in­equal­ity that ex­plains what is un­equal, how great is the in­equal­ity, who does it ef­fect, how widely is it rec­og­nized, how it has (or has not) changed over time, and what seem to be the prin­ci­pal causes.
    • De­scribe how have gov­ern­ment ac­tions (or in­ac­tion) in­flu­enced this in­equal­ity in the past.
    • Show why we should ex­pect that it will be easy or hard to carry out the strat­egy and how the pos­si­ble dif­fi­cul­ties re­flect the in­flu­ence or ef­fects of gen­der in­equal­ity.
    • Ex­plain how the pro­posed strat­egy can be ex­pected to al­le­vi­ate gen­der in­equal­ity.  This ex­pla­na­tion should con­nect di­rectly to the causal ex­pla­na­tion of the in­equal­ity being di­min­ished.
  • In short, you should pro­pose sev­eral strate­gies by which a gov­ern­ment could pro­mote greater gen­der equal­ity, then pro­vide an an­a­lytic ap­praisal of the strat­egy you deem best.  This ap­praisal should stress the causes of rel­e­vant facets of gen­der in­equal­ity, how the pro­posed strat­egy will af­fect that causal process, and how gen­der in­equal­ity has a causal in­flu­ence on gov­ern­ment pol­icy that must be coun­tered to im­ple­ment the pol­icy.  Do not for­get to pro­vide a his­tor­i­cal con­text.
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Des­tined for Equal­ity: Cit­i­zen­ship: Gain­ing Equal­ity from the State
  • Joyce Gelb, Mar­ian Lief Pal­ley. "Women and In­ter­est Group Pol­i­tics: A Com­par­a­tive Analy­sis of Fed­eral De­ci­sion-Mak­ing." The Jour­nal of Pol­i­tics, Vol. 41, No. 2 (May, 1979), pp. 362-392. [doi: 10.2307/2129770]
  • Pamela Pax­ton, Sheri Kunovich, Melanie M. Hughes. "Gen­der in Pol­i­tics." An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy 2007 33, 263-284
  • Down So Long:  The Re­pro­duc­tion of Eco­nomic and Po­lit­i­cal Power
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  • Lynne Haney. "Home­boys, Ba­bies, Men in Suits: The State and the Re­pro­duc­tion of Male Dom­i­nance." Amer­i­can So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view, Vol. 61, No. 5 (Oct., 1996), pp. 759-778
  • Deniz Kandiy­oti, " Bar­gain­ing with Pa­tri­archy." Gen­der and So­ci­ety," Vol. 2, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 274-290
  • Tor­ben Iversen, Frances Rosen­bluth. "The Po­lit­i­cal Econ­omy of Gen­der: Ex­plain­ing Cross-Na­tional Vari­a­tion in the Gen­der Di­vi­sion of Labor and the Gen­der Vot­ing Gap."  Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Po­lit­i­cal Sci­ence, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 1-19 [doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00166.x]
  • Vicky Ran­dall. "Leg­isla­tive Gen­der Quo­tas and In­dian Ex­cep­tion­al­ism: The Tra­vails of the Women's Reser­va­tion Bill." Com­par­a­tive Pol­i­tics, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Oct., 2006), pp. 63-82 [jstor: 20434021]
• Re­lated Read­ings
  • Guil­laume R. Fréchette, Fran­cois Mani­quet, Mas­simo Morelli. "In­cum­bents' In­ter­ests and Gen­der Quo­tas."Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Po­lit­i­cal Sci­ence, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 891-909 [jstor: 25193856]
  • Lynne A. Haney. "Fem­i­nist State The­ory: Ap­pli­ca­tions to Ju­rispru­dence, Crim­i­nol­ogy, and the Wel­fare State." An­nual Re­view of So­ci­ol­ogy 26:641-666 (2000) [doi: 10.1146/an­nurev.soc.26.1.641]
  • Richard L. Fox, Jen­nifer L. Law­less. "En­ter­ing the Arena? Gen­der and the De­ci­sion to Run for Of­fice."Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Po­lit­i­cal Sci­ence, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), pp. 264-280 [jstor: 1519882].

XIIb.   How do the media in­flu­ence or re­flect gen­der in­equal­ity?

Com­men­ta­tors often point to­ward media in­flu­ence when they try to ex­plain con­tem­po­rary gen­der in­equal­ity. The­o­ries of media alert us that we must al­ways con­sider rec­i­p­ro­cal causal processes. While any in­di­vid­ual may ap­pear only to be the ob­ject of media in­flu­ence, the con­tent and im­pact of media de­pend greatly on the ex­ist­ing cul­ture and so­cial struc­ture. The re­la­tion­ship of the media to the col­lec­tive mar­ket ef­fect of con­sumers may be com­pared to the re­la­tion­ship be­tween elected pub­lic of­fi­cials and vot­ers. Also, con­sumers have con­sid­er­able free­dom to choose which media out­lets to give their at­ten­tion and peo­ple se­lec­tively in­ter­pret and judge the media to which they are ex­posed. All of this makes the re­la­tion­ship be­tween what is por­trayed in the media and what occur in the "real" world rather com­plex.

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task
  
  • Se­lect one kind of pop­u­lar/mass media, such as mag­a­zines or the cin­ema, or, al­ter­na­tively, a form of pop­u­lar cul­ture thought to have an anal­o­gous im­pact, such as pop­u­lar music.
  • Pre­pare a sim­ple com­par­a­tive analy­sis of cur­rent ex­am­ples to ex­am­ples from around 1980, a third of a cen­tury ago.
    • Choose a small, rea­son­able sam­ple from the two pe­ri­ods.  For ex­am­ple, the sam­ples might be ad­ver­tise­ments from three mag­a­zines pre­sent in both pe­ri­ods, or the fe­male and male pro­tag­o­nists of top earn­ing movies, or the lyrics of the high­est rated songs.
    • Using the di­men­sions or char­ac­ter­is­tics iden­ti­fied in the read­ings, (or anal­o­gous ones that bet­ter fit the media you are as­sess­ing), char­ac­ter­ize the dif­fer­ences in the ways women and men are por­trayed in the two pe­ri­ods.
  • Given the re­sults of your com­par­isons, show how the data you ob­serve might be ex­plained by (1) the­o­ries stress­ing the in­flu­ence of the media on gen­der ex­pec­ta­tions, eval­u­a­tions, and be­hav­ior, or (2) the­o­ries stress­ing the media as re­flect­ing gen­der in­equal­ity, or (3) the­o­ries stress­ing mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion (au­di­ences choose among media of­fer­ings and media mak­ers aim at au­di­ence seg­ments.
  • Pre­pare a sim­ple, rea­son­able re­sponse to the ques­tions, "What is the basic causal re­la­tion­ship be­tween mass media and gen­der in­equal­ity?" and "How is the cor­re­spon­dence be­tween media por­tray­als and real-life gen­der in­equal­ity sus­tained over time as gen­der in­equal­ity changes?
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Julia T. Wood.  "Gen­dered Media: The In­flu­ence of Media on Views of Gen­der." From Gen­dered Lives: Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Gen­der, and Cul­ture by Julie Wood.
  • Mee-Eun Kang. "The Por­trayal Of Women’s Im­ages In Mag­a­zine Ad­ver­tise­ments: Goff­man’s Gen­der Analy­sis Re­vis­ited."  Vol 37, no. 11-12  (Dec 1997: , Vol­ume 37, Issue 11-12, pp 979-996)
  • P. Dahlgren.  "Mass Media: In­tro­duc­tion and Schools of Thought." In­ter­na­tional En­cy­clo­pe­dia of the So­cial & Be­hav­ioral Sci­ences
  • How Gen­der-Stereo­typ­i­cal Are Self­ies? A Con­tent Analy­sis and Com­par­i­son with Mag­a­zine Ad­verts." Com­put­ers in Human Be­hav­ior 55, Part B (2// 2016): 955-62. [read: 955-57, 61; look at pho­tos through­out]
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  • ... .
• Re­lated Read­ings
  • ...
  • 
    

XIII.   What does the fu­ture hold?

Where do we go from here? Pre­dict­ing the fu­ture is the ul­ti­mate chal­lenge for causal analy­ses.  To have any po­ten­tial to see into the fu­ture, we need a sound and thor­ough causal the­ory, one that can en­com­pass the range of pos­si­ble in­flu­ences si­mul­ta­ne­ously.  We also need to cope with the un­pre­dictable po­ten­tial ef­fects of processes and events that are out­side the bound­aries of our the­o­ries.  These are ex­tremely dif­fi­cult con­di­tions to meet.  But the need to make some sense of the fu­ture weighs on us.  Will gen­der in­qual­ity con­tinue to de­cline, and greater gen­der equal­ity spread through­out the world?  Are some as­pects of gen­der in­qual­ity par­tic­u­larly re­sis­tant to re­duc­tion, and if so why?  Could change stag­nate?  Be­hind such con­cerns are two prin­ci­pal ques­tions.  What has caused the long-term pat­tern of de­clin­ing gen­der in­equal­ity?  And what has pre­served as­pects of gen­der in­equal­ity in the face of these ac­cu­mu­lat­ing changes?  Com­bin­ing the an­swers to these two ques­tions with an ef­fort to pro­ject the rel­e­vant in­flu­ences into the fu­ture, is the basis for try­ing to un­der­stand the pos­si­bil­i­ties for the fu­ture.  Be­hind this also lies an­other an­a­lyt­i­cal ques­tion with moral over­tones: what does gen­der equal­ity re­ally mean?

• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task 1
  • Se­lect two types of in­equal­ity, both im­por­tant, one that you be­lieve to be mov­ing to­ward greater equal­ity at a rel­a­tively high rate, the other that you be­lieve is mov­ing to­ward equal­ity at a rel­a­tively slow rate (or is stalled or is mov­ing back­wards)
    • for each of these two types, de­scribe what is the in­equal­ity (how are women and men un­equal, which women and men ex­pe­ri­ence it, how do things dif­fer when this in­equal­ity is high from when it is low)
    • de­scribe the ev­i­dence and logic that sug­gests one type is de­clin­ing rel­a­tively quickly and the other rel­a­tively slowly
  • Try to ex­plain why the two dif­fer­ent rates of move­ment to­ward equal­ity
    • For each, con­sider what processes, con­di­tions, in­ter­ests, and the like pro­pel the move­ment to­ward greater equal­ity
    • For each, con­sider what cir­cum­stances, ac­tiv­i­ties, and the like ob­struct the move­ment to­ward greater equal­ity
    • Try to ex­plain how and why the bal­ance be­tween the causes pro­pelling greater equal­ity and the causes sus­tain­ing ex­ist­ing in­equal­ity dif­fer be­tween the two types of gen­der in­equal­ity
• An­a­lyt­i­cal Task 2
  • The gen­eral an­a­lyt­i­cal prob­lem.  Using two plau­si­ble fu­ture sce­nar­ios about gen­der in­equal­ity, as­sess what processes or con­di­tions will de­cide which fu­ture al­ter­na­tive comes to pass.
  • The task has the fol­low­ing main parts
    1. Se­lect two of three al­ter­na­tives to use for the analy­sis: high­est con­ceiv­able level of equal­ity, high­est pos­si­bil­ity of inequal­ity, most likely con­di­tions.  Es­sen­tially this means that we com­pare the two ex­treme pos­si­bil­i­ties, or we com­pare what we think most likely with one of the ex­treme pos­si­bil­i­ties.
    2. For each of the two se­lected al­ter­na­tives, give a clear de­scrip­tion of what the ex­pected level of gen­der in­equal­ity means.  How se­vere will be major com­po­nents of gen­der in­equal­ity, how con­sis­tent will dif­fer­ent as­pects of gen­der in­equal­ity be with each other, how con­sis­tent will these pat­terns be in so­ci­ety, and so on.  (It might help to look back over the range of top­ics cov­ered above.)
    3. The cen­ter of the analy­sis will be to pro­vide a causal ar­gu­ment about what causal con­di­tions and se­quence of de­vel­op­ments could lead to each of the two al­ter­na­tives.  To this end, we must con­sider the full range of causal in­flu­ences that we have ex­am­ined pre­vi­ously.
  • Think­ing tools.
    • To con­sider any fu­ture path, we must make as­sump­tions about: (1) how far into the fu­ture, (2) in what so­ci­ety and with re­spect to what so­cial groups, and (3) what other changes might occur, al­ter­ing the cul­tural, po­lit­i­cal, and eco­nomic en­vi­ron­ment. 
      • For our pur­poses, let us set the fu­ture to be about one and two gen­er­a­tions, that is when your chil­dren are your cur­rent age, and then when their chil­dren reach a sim­i­lar age.  The key trade­off with set­ting the dis­tance into the fu­ture is sim­ple: the fur­ther we go into the fu­ture the more in­ter­est­ing and sig­nif­i­cant are the so­cial changes but equally the more ob­scure be­come the re­al­is­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties.
      • Let us focus on our own so­ci­ety as a whole, ref­er­enc­ing dis­tinc­tive so­cial cat­e­gories as needed. 
      • Sim­i­larly, let us as­sume that the cul­tural, po­lit­i­cal, and eco­nomic en­vi­ron­ments are rea­son­ably sta­ble, with the ex­pec­ta­tion that ex­ist­ing long term trends will con­tinue into the fu­ture.  We will ig­nore the po­ten­tial for sig­nif­i­cant struc­tural changes and his­tor­i­cal "shocks" such as eco­nomic re­ces­sions and wars.  Of course, the fur­ther we look into the fu­ture, the more spec­u­la­tive and fal­li­ble such as­sump­tions be­come, but our pur­pose is not to pre­dict the ac­tual fu­ture.
    • Look­ing for­ward, the fu­ture is al­ways un­cer­tain, how­ever well we may ex­plain it once it be­comes the past.  One way to make the fu­ture more amenable to analy­sis is to sim­plify it into what we be­lieve are the prin­ci­pal al­ter­na­tive fu­tures that mat­ter to us.  Prob­a­bly the sim­plest tech­nique it to focus on one char­ac­ter­is­tic and con­sider the most ex­treme plau­si­ble pos­si­bil­i­ties.
    • With this in mind, let us try to an­a­lyze the fu­ture of gen­der in­equal­ity by con­trast­ing stark al­ter­na­tives.  To begin con­sider three pos­si­bil­i­ties:
      • First, the high­est level of gen­der equal­ity that we can imag­ine.  This might be the cur­rent state of in­equal­ity, or it might be the high­est level of in­equal­ity now seen in any com­pa­ra­ble so­ci­ety, or it might be a much higher level of in­equal­ity.  The prob­lem here is to imag­ine what is the great­est amount of fu­ture in­equal­ity we can
      • Sec­ond, the high­est level of gen­der inequal­ity that we can imag­ine.
      • And, third, the most likely level of gen­der in­equal­ity that we ex­pect.  This could co­in­cide with ei­ther one of the pre­vi­ous, but will com­monly be some­where be­tween them.
    • For de­cid­ing the plau­si­bil­ity of any fu­ture cir­cum­stances, we want to re­mem­ber that there are two kinds of lim­it­ing con­di­tions we must con­sider.  First, func­tional plau­si­bil­ity, ask­ing if that level of in­equal­ity is fea­si­ble in the con­text of what we per­ceive to be the rel­e­vant sur­round­ing cir­cum­stances.  For a sim­ple ex­am­ple, a so­cial cus­tom of leav­ing all prop­erty to sons is largely un­work­able in a so­ci­ety with a low re­pro­duc­tion rate be­cause so many fam­i­lies have no sons.  Sec­ond, tran­si­tion plau­si­bil­ity, ask­ing if a con­ceiv­able his­tor­i­cal path of de­vel­op­ment could lead from pre­sent cir­cum­stances to the fu­ture sce­nario.  For a sim­ple ex­am­ple, it might be pos­si­ble to con­ceive how Amer­i­can so­ci­ety could have func­tioned with full gen­der equal­ity in 1900, but it would ex­tremely dif­fi­cult to sug­gest any plau­si­ble way that con­di­tion could have emerged under any con­ceiv­able his­tor­i­cal se­quence from the so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can so­ci­ety in 1850. 
  • Bring­ing it to­gether.  Our goal here is not to pre­dict the fu­ture of gen­der in­equal­ity, but to ex­am­ine what se­quence of causal con­di­tions seem likely de­ter­mi­nants of that fu­ture.  We are try­ing to dis­cover de­fen­si­ble "if, then" ar­gu­ments.  To do this, we are start­ing by imag­in­ing pos­si­ble fu­tures, then work­ing back­wards from them to find paths from the pre­sent to those fu­tures,  then as­sert­ing what else must occur for those paths to ma­te­ri­al­ize.  We should not for­get, there may be more than one path to an imag­ined fu­ture and more than one set of causal con­di­tions that could lead us there. For each al­ter­na­tive being con­sid­ered, we want to an­a­lyze why and how it might rea­son­ably occur.
    As an op­tional extra, you can offer an analy­sis of which al­ter­na­tive seems more likely and why.
• Com­mon Read­ings
  • Paula Eng­land.  "To­ward Gen­der Equal­ity: Progress and Bot­tle­necks," in De­clin­ing Sig­nif­i­cance of Gen­der?, (ed. Francine Blau, Mary Brin­ton, David Grusky), 2007; also Paula Eng­land. "The Gen­der Rev­o­lu­tion: Un­even and Stalled." Gen­der & So­ci­ety 2010 24: 149-166.  [doi: 10.1177/0891243210361475]
  • Ce­cilia L. Ridge­way.  "Gen­der as an Or­ga­niz­ing Force in So­cial Re­la­tions: Im­pli­ca­tions for the Fu­ture of In­equal­ity," in De­clin­ing Sig­nif­i­cance of Gen­der?, (ed. Francine Blau, Mary Brin­ton, David Grusky), 2007
  • Robert Max Jack­son.  "Op­pos­ing Forces: How, Why, and When Will Gen­der In­equal­ity Dis­ap­pear?," in De­clin­ing Sig­nif­i­cance of Gen­der?, (ed. Francine Blau, Mary Brin­ton, David Grusky), 2007
• Rec­om­mended Read­ings
  • Maria Charles and Karen Bradley.  "In­dulging Our Gen­dered Selves? Sex Seg­re­ga­tion by Field of Study in 44 Coun­tries."  Amer­i­can Jour­nal of So­ci­ol­ogy 114:4 (2009), 924-976  [doi: pdf/10.1086/595942]
  • Richard Breen and Lynn Prince Cooke. "The Per­sis­tence of the Gen­dered Di­vi­sion of Do­mes­tic Labour."  Eu­ro­pean So­ci­o­log­i­cal Re­view 2005 21(1): 43-57 [doi: 10.1093/esr/jci003]
  • Luisa Es­criche, Gon­zalo Ol­cina, and Rosario Sánchez. "Gen­der Dis­crim­i­na­tion And In­ter­gen­er­a­tional Trans­mis­sion Of Pref­er­ences." Ox­ford Eco­nomic Pa­pers (2004) 56(3): 485-511
  • Gerda Neyer and Dorothea Rieck. "Mov­ing To­wards Gen­der Equal­ity." Ch. 7 in How Gen­er­a­tions and Gen­der Shape De­mo­graphic Change United Na­tions Eco­nomic Com­mis­sion for Eu­rope. Con­fer­ence "How Gen­er­a­tions and Gen­der Shape De­mo­graphic Change," 14 to 16 May 2008 at the Palais des Na­tions in Geneva 
  • ...
• Re­lated Read­ings
  • ...
  • ...