Gendered Work and Inequality

Flight Attendants

• First airlines hired men (military uniforms)

• 60’s-70’s: airlines sexualized flight attendants to attract male customers

  • strict standards of appearance

  • 1964 civil rights act means airlines have to shift

  • white, thin, educated (medically)

• WWII→ hired women

• Seriousness of job was downplayed (men leaving job)

Gendered job segregation

the practice of filing occupations with mostly men or mostly women worker

• in India most construction workers are female: because women control home for them

• Causes:

  • Socialization hypothesis

  • Employer selection hypothesis

  • Selective exit hypothesis

Socialization hypothesis

a theory that suggests that people respond to gender stereotypes when planning, training, and job applications

Employer selection hypothesis

proposes that employers tend to prefer men for masculine jobs and women for feminine jobs, slotting applicants into gender-consistent roles during hiring and promotion

Selective exit hypothesis

an explanation for job segregation that emphasizes worker’ abandonment of counterstereotypical occupations (don’t feel welcome, not a lot of opportunity for advancement)

Androcentric pay scale

a strong correlation between wages and the gender composition of the job

• gender composition is single largest contributor to gender pay gap

Masculinization of wealth

the concentration of men in high-earning occupations

• “mans” jobs get paid more than “women’s” jobs

• Starts when men are boys

  • sons paid more for chores, even when daughters are working for longer

Emotional labor

the act of controlling one’s own emotions and managing the emotions of others

• skills of a flight attendant with passangers

“Women’s work”

comes naturally

• skills seems natural equals less pay

• Requires:

  • knowledge, concentration, effort, creativity, problem-solving

“Men’s work”

requires skill

Care work

work that involves face-to-face caretaking of the physical, emotional, and educational needs of others

• results in the loss of prestige and income (androcentrism)

• face to face care-taking gets less prestige (care work has been devalued in society)

Glass Ceiling

the idea that there is an invisible barrier between women and top positions in masculine occupations

Glass Closet

An invisible place in which sexual minorities hide their identities in order to avoid stigma, suspicion or censure at work

• to family and friends, gay, but in the office acting straight

Glass Cliff

a heightened risk of failing by women who break through the glass ceiling

• women hired into positions of power for already failing companies

Sticky Floor

a metaphorical barrier to advancement describing jobs with no or low opportunity for promotion

Glass Escalator

An invisible ride to the top offered to certain men in women-dominated professions

Gender

the social understanding of men and women

Gender identity

a subjective sense of one’s own gender

• the gender binary presumes we are all cisgender

Cisgender

A term that describes people who are assigned male at birth who identify as men and people who are assigned female at birth who identify as women

• a cisgender person’s gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth

Trans

People whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth

Nonbinary

a gender category that encompasses people who are either both man and woman or neither man nor woman

Gender fluid

Without a fixed gender identity

Cisgender Men and Women: Differences

there are average differences, not binary ones

• our physical traits overlap far more than they diverge and vary widely over the course of our lifes

  • more difference within genders than between genders

Ideology

a set of ideas widely shared by members of a society that guides identities, behaviors, and institutions

• shared idea and belief is helpful for society to function (murder is wrong)

• wanting to make a place where all function well

Gender Ideologies

widely shared beliefs about how men and women are and should be

Social construct

an arbitrary but influential shared interpretation of reality

• IU sucks: protect ourself against “truth”

Social Construction

a process by which we make reality meaningful through shared interpretation

• college sports teams help to create this

The Social Construction of Gender

• we gender something when we layer objects, characteristics, behaviors, activities, and ideas with notions of masculinity and femininity

• much of what we gender is actually contradictory

• the gender binary also causes us to disconnect masculine ideas from feminine ones, making it harder to form connections between these ideas

Gender binary subdivision

the practice by which we divide and redivide by gender again and again, adding finer and finer degrees of masculinity and femininity to the world

Associative Memory

a phenomenon in which cells in our brain that process and transmit information make literal connections between concepts

• latches onto gender so our brains form clusters of ideas (encode the binary) revolving around the concepts of masculinity and femininity

Associative Memory Neurons

aided by dopamine

• reward base

• our brain wants us to keep making these easy connections to gain rewards

The Masculine Origins of Cheers

at its inception, cheerleading at White colleges was dominated by men and had the same prestige as football platers

• women were first allowed to join when men were deployed to fight WWI

• entrance of women was unnatural and inappropriate because cheerleading was masculine

The Feminization and Demotion of Cheer

• as more women joined prestige declined, and men stopped joining

• helps to understand relationship between gender and power

• good example of male flight

• instead of changing how we thought about women, the presence of women changed how we thought about cheer

Cheer Today

• cheer lost prestige

• 1990s re-masculinized by women

  • involved intense athleticism

  • stunts became dangerous

• men have slowly returned

  • recruitment strategies

    • emphasizing physical strength

    • access to women

• unregulated, retains feminine dimensions

• somehow both masculine and feminine (what a women feels like today)

Gender for Men

• perform masculinity

• avoid femininity

• fail to live up be at the bottom

• obey gender rules to preserve social standing

Doing Masculinity, Avoiding Femininity

• parents of boy children expressed distress over boys’ interests in “icons of femininity”

• girls can play with toys of opposite gender

• boys grow up learning to avoid femininity

• men and boys use words like sissy and gay to police each other into masculinity

Male Flight

a phenomenon in which men abandon feminizing arenas of life

“Fragile” Masculinity

being a masculine man is a social advantage, but men who can’t or won’t do masculinity, or whose masculinity is stigmatized, find themselves near the bottom of the hierarchy

Hypermasculinity

extreme conformity to the more aggressive rules of masculinity

• Hypermasculinity is glorified in many aspects of American culture, especially in sports 

• The glorification of hypermasculinity erases its violent consequences 

• Potential outcome of this: were okay with him doing this 

Toxic masculinity

enactments of masculinities that are harmful bot to the men who enact them and to the people around them

Gender for Women

in some ways, the daily lives of women are less constrained than those of men

• options for women to engage with gender rules are more open than options for men

Feminine apologetic

a requirement that women balance their appropriation of masculine interests, traits, and activities with feminine performance (usually thought of as ideal white woman) 

• Women who are ascribed masculinity by American culture-like queer and Black women- have fewer options for mixing in masculinity 

Sexism

• The perception of femaleness is always a possible source of prejudice 

• Women can be just as good as men but are largely evaluated as less than 

• Whatever women do, they have to do it better than men if they want to be evaluated as equally good 

Misogyny

fear and hatred of women with power

Victim blaming

identifying something done by a victim as a cause of their victimization 

Emphasized femininity

an exaggerated form of femininity "oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men" 

• trad wife and stay at home mom

Emphatic sameness

a strategy by which women try to be "just one of the guys" 

• try to be in power by stepping on other women

• doctors or mechanics

Gender equivocation

the use of both emphasized femininity and emphatic sameness when they're useful and culturally expected 

• Describes as pretty for pictures and aggressive for the streets 

• One of the guys but sometimes also express their femininity 

Stalled Revolution

a sweeping change in gender relations that is stuck halfway through

• men suffer more as individuals

• women are harmed more categorically