Gender Inequality: Is the progress to gender equality stalled? Shavonne Abella May 5, 2015

In short: Yes  Progress has been made towards gender equality  BUT  That progress has slowed due to the belief that equality has been reached  Wage Gap  “Time Bind”  Gender roles and expectations  “Enlightened sexism”

Gender: What is it?  Merriam-Webster: “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex”  WHO: “socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.”  GenderSpectrum: “Biological Gender (sex) includes physical attributes such as external genitalia, sex chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, and internal reproductive structures. At birth, it is used to assign sex, that is, to identify individuals as male or female. Gender on the other hand is far more complicated. It is the complex interrelationship between an individual’s sex (gender biology), one’s internal sense of self as male, female, both or neither (Gender identity) as well as one’s outward presentations and behaviors (gender expression) related to that perception, including their gender role. Together, the intersection of these three dimensions produces one’s authentic sense of gender, both in how people experience their own gender as well as how others perceive it.”

Some Stats  “The Opt-Out Revolution” Lisa Belkin, 2003  50% undergrad class of Yale, 63% graduate class Berkley Law, 46% Harvard, 51% Columbia. 47% Med students, 50% undergrad business majors  BUT  Only 16% partners in law firms, 16% corporate officers women, and only 8% Fortune 500 CEOs are female. 62/435 House of Reps, 14/100 Senators  2/3rds of mothers aged work part time; only 5% work 50+ weekly hours  Men with MBAs: 95% full-time, Women with MBAs: 67% full-time  Catalyst survey: 26% of women up for senior promotion turn it down; want to stay home with kids  “As news reports could be transmitted father and farther from the ‘mothership,’ she found herself an hour or two away from home when the nightly news was done. ‘Will was growing up, and I was driving home from a fire [….] there would always be wrecks and fires, but there wouldn’t always be Will’s childhood.’”

 “Getting to Equal: Progress, Pitfalls, and Policy Solutions on the Road to Gender Parity in the Workplace” Pamela Stone, 2009  Women’s participation in labor force lower than men’s: 60% vs 75%, but rising over a period where men’s participation started to decline  “The bad news is that despite women’s best and sustained efforts, progress toward gender equality is uneven and appears to be stalling.”  Index of dissimilarity: ,  Most of these gains come from desegregation of work-force, little to no changes in recent decades  Wage gap narrowing, from 59¢/$1 (1970’s) to 78¢/$1, but wage-gap movement slowing down  “The combination of rising hours, travel, and 24/7 accountability demanded in today’s workplaces, coupled with insufficient and inadequate part-time and flexible options, put these working moms in a classic time-bind.”

Some Graphs

 “Do Young Women Expect Gender Equality in Their Future Lives? An Answer From a Possible Selves Experiment” Janell C. Fetterolf & Alice H. Eagly, 2011  “Although women in the United States have increased their presence and status in the workforce, as well as their presence in higher education, women still experience lower wages and greater household duties than men.”  “despite very large increases in women’s labor force participation, they are more likely than men to work part-time (27% vs. 11% for men) and have a lower overall participation rate (59% vs. 72% for men; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010)”  Social pressure on women to be “good mothers” by staying home  “Hewlett found that 93% of the women who were not employed at the time they were interviewed expressed a desire to return to the work force.”  70% housework done by women; married women spend 5x more hours on housework and 2.5 on cooking than married men  “As married mothers of a preschool child, 48.20% expected part-time employment, 34.80% expected full-time employment, and 17.00% expected no employment. Overall, 83.90% planned on attaining an advanced degree.”

 “Fantasies of Power” Susan Douglas, 2010  Women in media portrayed as powerful, great jobs, independent  Gender equality has been reached! Women can be lawyers, doctor, presidents!  Over-representation: most women are not high-ranking CEO hero president doctors  Alternatively, overtly sexist images in media  Bimbos, house-wives, Girls Gone Wild; image-obsessed, shopping, decorative and shallow  Enlightened Sexism: “Enlightened sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceive threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism-- indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved-- so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.”

References Belkin, Lisa. "The Opt-Out Revolution." The Inequality Reader. Ed. David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelényi 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, Print. Douglas, Susan J. "Introduction: Fantasies of Power." Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done. New York, NY: Henry Holt and, LLC, Print. Fetterolf, Janell C., and Alice H. Eagly. "Do Young Women Expect Gender Equality in Their Future Lives? An Answer From a Possible Selves Experiment." Sex Roles (2011): Web. Stone, Pamela. "Getting to Equal: Progress, Pitfalls, and Policy Solutions on the Road to Gender Parity in the Workplace." The Inequality Reader. Ed. David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelényi. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, Print. Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 04 May "Understanding Gender." Gender Spectrum. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May "What Do We Mean by "sex" and "gender"?" WHO. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May 2015.