Doing Gender
• Doing sex/gender takes place in everyday social
interactions and contexts.
• Social interactions are dependent on use of language—
referred to as “discourse” studied by “socio-linguists” like
Deborah Tannen, most popular gender linguist.
• “Asymmetries” & cross-purposes: women “rapport
talk”and men “report talk” differences in concern with
status (contest, competition as bonding) and relationships
(community)
• Study of speech: interruptions, overlaps, intonation,
content.
• Fishman: women had to ask more questions, fill more
silences, use attention-getting beginnings to be heard.
Creating Sex Differences
• West/Zimmerman say “doing gender” means
creating gender differences that are not natural or
essential, but reinforce “essentialness” of sex
difference. Situations create depictions in
everyday interactions.
• Labels in language create “essential” differences:
Goffman—different bathrooms for “ladies” and
“gentleman” while nothing biologically different
requiring toilet segregation. (used as reason for
conservatives against Equal Rights Amendment in
1970s/80s)
Group Composition
• We enact sex/gender not just as individuals
in dyads but in group contexts
• Status characteristics theory tells us that
interactional styles are more a matter of a
group’s sex composition and task
orientation than of individual personality
• Group’s sex composition helps to determine
how gender will shape group interaction
“Skewed” groups and behavior
• Kanter studied “tokens” and “dominants” in
“skewed” groups (one social type is
numerically dominant and other is 15% or
less)
• 3 Relational patterns: visibility, contrast,
assimilation
Visibility
• Tokens are performing under different conditions
than dominants:
• Tokens are more easily noticed
• Are subject of gossip and scrutiny
• Behavior said to be because of social category
membership than individual personality
• A response to “performance pressures” is to
overachieve but try to avoid resentment of
dominants
• Either emphasize uniqueness or keep a low profile
and try to be invisible
Contrast
• Token presence threatening to dominants because
creates uncertainty for dominants
• Dominants take-for-granted behaviors and
interactions with each other but cannot with
tokens
• Dominants perform “boundary heightening”
behaviors—exaggerating and affirming difference
from tokens (ex. For women, dominants’ focus on
colleague mother/therapist role than their
worker/performer role)
• Extreme reaction—isolate, exclude from social
interaction (females not invited to male activities)
Assimilation
• Dominants see individuals as representatives of
their social category group.
• Attribute social category stereotype to token
• Social “role encapsulation” force tokens into
stereotypical roles (female secretaries get coffee
for male bosses)
• Social “role trap” constrains tokens to
stereotypical roles
Expectation States
• Dominants not always male or tokens female
• U.S. society expectation is that males are more competent
(attributed higher status with more positive expectations)
females less so (attributed with lesser expectations more
negative evaluations)
• What happens when men are tokens and women are
dominants? Ex. Floge/Merrill on male nurses; research on
male elementary school teachers. Expectation states still
operate-- Chris Williams says ”glass elevator” for token
males
• Tokens create alternative occupational identities—reassert
masculinity in other ways (male temp workers rename
secretary as bookkeeper, refuse deference performance),
reassert femininity (military women wear make-up)
Composition Numbers
• What difference does the kind of group make on
group gender/sex behaviors?
• Orchestra study: women less satisfied when they
were in orchestras with 90% or more men than
when in orchestras with 40-60% women but esp.
dissatisfied where 10-40% women. Men less
satisfied when women were greater than 10% but
less than 40%.
• Conclusion: once women become greater than
10% they gain power and cannot be overlooked—
tightened identity group boundaries, increased
cross-group stereotyping and conflict, less social
support across gender boundaries, heightened
Organizations/Institutions
Defined
• Groups exist as an organization: a social unit
established to pursue a particular goal.
Organizations have boundaries, rules,
procedures,means of communication, social
practices.
• Organizations exist as institutions: more abstract,
all-encompassing organizations that are
established as the society’s standards or rules of
the game, central logic, structures
• Example: FIU is a university organization by itself
but represents the institution of public higher
education in the state and nation.
Institutional Frameworks
• Social organizations and institutions provide the
frameworks for masculinities and femininities to
be performed.
• Institutional content reveals culture’s concepts and
ideas about what it means to be male/female in
particular society at particular time
• Goffman: organized sports framework for
performance of masculinity as endurance,
strength, competition
Gendered Institutions
• “Gender is present in the processes, practices,
images and ideologies, and distributions of power
in the various sectors of social life.” (Acker in
Wharton p. 65)
• U.S. institutions created, dominated, symbolically
interpreted by certain kinds of elite men
• Kind/type of organization, structure/function of
organization, everyday social
practices/interactions get sex/gender
• Practices are powerful and taken-for-granted
• Gender distinctions are daily produced/reproduced
Org/Institution Examples: Sports
• Who is more likely to play sports? Males or
females? Everybody plays a sport but
organized sport favors men over women
• How are sports structured in U.S. social
life?
Media coverage of sports
• How does the media cover women’s sports? Men’s
sports?
• Television, pay-per-view. “Monday Night Sports”
for men? Where are women’s sports on t.v.? Who
watches what?
• Newspapers devote 80% of sports coverage to
men’s sports
• Boundary challenging 1995 Nike ad: “If You Let
Me Play.” 1) Content of ad—what did it say? 2)
Reception to the ad—how did people interpret it?
Wealthier/more educated women more
cynical/skeptical about it? Why?
Sports Funding
• Where is the money in sports? Who gets it
and how do they get it? College football
teams versus college cheerleading or dance
teams
• Title IX? What is it and what difference did
it make to women’s sports in schools?
Men’s Sports?
Sport Values
• What cultural value of being male or female
get attached to which sport?
• How is a particular sport
masculinized/feminized? Think of Olympic
sports.
• How is an American conception of
masculinity/femininity enacted and
reproduced in sports?
Another Example: Education
• Sex composition of teaching: preschool/elementary school female; higher
education male (white male college professors
about ½, white women 27.9%, women and men
of color 14%.) More likely to be taught by
women in community college, more likely to be
taught by men in university.
• In higher education fields where women
predominate, more likely to be taught by women.
Examples? Women half of faculty in education,
less than 5% in engineering. More AfricanAmerican women in education than elsewhere.
¾ of all education degrees go to women.
Changing Higher Education
• Women getting more B.A. degrees, men getting
less—over half of B.A.’s today female (56%),
M.A. majority, PhD 40%.
• Major changes over time: 1970—women were ¼
of biology degrees, less than 10% of business
degrees, 1% engineering; 1997—women over half
biology degrees and just under half business
degrees, men 80% engineering degrees.
Institutional Patterns
• Gendered institutions’ perspective focus on
organizations/institutions in creating gender
• Sources of cultural beliefs about sex/gender
• Sources of gender scripts that become guides to
action
• Organizations/institutions have gender logics and
schemas
• Patterns are self-perpetuating, take on a life of
their own, and are taken-for-granted
• Practices and patterns are both conscious and
implicit
• Group dynamics form consensus around gender
References
• Wharton Chapter 3
• Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand (1990);
Talking 9 to 5 (1994)
• Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West, Doing Gender,
Doing Difference (2002) includes West/Zimmerman ref.
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the
Corporation (1977)
• Erving Goffman, “The Arrangement Between the Sexes”
(1977); Gender Advertisements (1979)