The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled
Abstract
In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that women should have access to upward mobility and to all areas of schooling and jobs. But persistent gender essentialism means that most people follow gender-typical paths except when upward mobility is impossible otherwise. Middle-class women entered managerial and professional jobs more than working-class women integrated blue-collar jobs because the latter were able to move up while choosing a “female” occupation; many mothers of middle-class women were already in the highest-status female occupations. The author also notes a number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled.
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1.
1. In this article, I use the term class to cover both categoric notions of class and gradational notions of socioeconomic position. Often I use education or occupation as imperfect but readily available indicators of class.
2.
2. A complementary hypothesis about why employment rates are lower for less educated women is that, compared to women with more education, they place a higher value on motherhood and find less intrinsic meaning in the jobs they can get. In this vein, Edin and Kefalas (2005) argue that low-income women place a higher value on motherhood because they have so few alternative sources of meaning. However, Ferree (1976) found that working-class women were happier if employed; they worked for the money but also gained a sense of competence, connectedness, and self-determination from their jobs. McQuillan et al. (2008) find that neither education nor careerism is associated with the value placed on motherhood. Overall, there is no clear conclusion on class differences in how women value motherhood and jobs.
3.
3. Women’s employment is higher at higher education levels, but it is not clear if the gender gap in employment is less at higher education levels. This is because men’s employment is also affected by education. For example, in 2007, 94 percent of men with a college education, but only 74 percent of those with less than high school, were employed sometime during the year (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2009). How gender inequality in employment varies by education depends on the metric used to measure inequality. Inequality is smaller at high education levels if the ratio of women’s to men’s proportion employed is used, but not if the difference between men’s and women’s log odds of employment is used (author calculations from Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2009; results not shown).
4.
4. One important additional factor is that blue-collar male jobs have been contracting (Morris and Western 1999), so integrating them would have been more difficult even if women had wanted to do so. Moreover, male coworkers may fight harder to harass and keep women out of blue-collar than professional and managerial jobs; lacking class privilege, blue-collar men may feel a stronger need than more privileged men to defend their gender privilege. Finally, it is possible that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had an institutional bias toward bringing cases challenging discrimination in high-level managerial and professional positions, particularly when they became concerned with the “glass ceiling.” This could explain why Burstein (1989) found more discrimination cases in high-level jobs.
5.
5. England et al. (2007) showed no nontrivial change in segregation of doctoral degrees through 2002. Using the same source (National Center for Education Statistics 2004-2007), I have computed the index of dissimilarity, which shows that the lack of change continued through 2006 (results not shown).
6.
6. Risman (2009) reminds us that our own teaching has probably had an effect on keeping feminism alive, as today’s young feminists often say that the college classroom is where they began to identify as feminists.
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Article first published online: March 19, 2010
Issue published: April 2010
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