See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303685178 "Gender Stratiļ¬cation" Chapter · March 2016 DOI: 10.1002/9781119085621.wbefs261 CITATIONS READS 2 70,462 1 author: Ermira Danaj Independent Scholar 33 PUBLICATIONS 53 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Gender and communism in Albania View project Analysis of 2001 Population and Housing Census in Albania View project All content following this page was uploaded by Ermira Danaj on 18 March 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Gender Stratification ERMIRA DANAJ University of Neuchatel, Switzerland A common general definition of gender stratification refers to the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and privilege between the two sexes. Gender (in)equality can be analyzed on the bases of prestige, style of life, privileges, opportunities, association with social groups, income, education, occupation, and power (Acker 1973). The unequal distribution is illustrated by unequal figures regarding employment, participation in politics, education, land ownership, household works, and so on. “Most wealth is in the hands of men, most big institutions are run by men, most science and technology is controlled by men” (Connell 2002, 5). Some of the definitions of gender rely specifically on the structuring power of gender as a hierarchical division between women and men embedded in both social institutions and social practices. Gender is produced, negotiated, and sustained at every level of everyday interaction, and cannot be abstracted from the wider social relations with which it is enmeshed. Further, gender intersects other social divisions and inequalities such as class, race, and sexuality (Jackson and Scott 2002). In short, gender is a socially constructed stratification system, embedded at the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of society (Risman 2004). Gender stratification was not among the preferred themes of analyses in social sciences until the 1970s. As Huber (1986, 476) says, “interest in gender stratification before 1970 was little above zero.” Until the 1970s, the differences between men and women were considered as “natural” and mainly based on biological origin. Gender was not yet a dimension of analysis in American, British, or French sociology with few exceptions (the most famous being Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex of 1949), and not yet a principle of stratification. For the majority of sociologists until that period, sex/gender, or even women, were completely invisible to the analysis of class stratification. Social class was considered to be based on the unit of the family, and thus was defined for all the members by the occupation of the male head of the household. Goldthorpe (see Goldthorpe, Llewellyn, and Payne 1980) was one of the strongest defenders of the argument that women should not be included separately in a class analysis as they take the class of their father first and of their husband later (Walby 1990; Jackson and Scott 2002). Thus was class attributed to families, and research on class included the analysis of only male breadwinners or heads of households, with households considered as homogeneous units. With the emergence of the feminist perspective in sociology and the introduction of the concept of gender, the household was no longer seen as the “locus of harmonious integration but as forms of social organization structured around hierarchies of gender and generation” (Jackson and Scott 2002, 13). As Huber (1986, 490) says, the emergence of the analysis of the division of household labor is the “most significant phenomenon in gender stratification after 1950.” This change of perspective in sociology made possible the analysis of inequalities inside the family, including the sources of this inequality, as well as analyses of the labor market from a gender perspective highlighting the sex The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies, First Edition. Edited by Constance L. Shehan. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781119085621.wbefs261 2 G E N DE R STR AT I F IC AT ION segregation of the labor market, the gender pay gap, inequalities regarding access to top positions, and so on. Gender inequalities – such as domestic labor and domestic and sexual violence – made visible through such analyses were previously considered as personal, “natural,” or unworthy of being analyzed. For example, domestic violence was only considered an issue of male pathology, with no analysis of the structural and relational conditions or outcomes for victims. Marital rape was not even discussed. Emerging research in the 1970s showed that domestic violence could occur in all types of family and reflected hierarchical power relations inside the family rather than anomalous pathology. Once researchers started to analyze gender as a principle of structuring the unequal power relations both within and outside the household, it became clear that the domestic and public spheres were closely related to each other. Housework started to be seen not as a “natural duty” of women but as unpaid work “carried on within a hierarchical relationship within which women serviced men’s needs and at the same time contributed to the economy through preparing their husbands and themselves for work in the labor market” (Jackson and Scott 2002, 13). Thus, inequalities within the household made very problematic the analysis of class based on the family as the unit of analysis. Such analyses could not reflect the social division of labor and the attendant inequalities within households (e.g., women spend more hours on housework than men, have less access to household goods, have less money for leisure, have less decision-making power, etc.). Thus, a series of studies on social class analysis that included women or gender followed this period of changes in sociology. Early theorists struggled to make sense of the intersections between gender and social class. For example, an early author dealing with the intersection of class and sex was Shulamith Firestone (1974), who argued that all women are in one class and all men are in another. In her analysis, sex is class. Inequalities between women and men are produced by their position regarding reproduction – pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, child care, and so on. One of the strongest critiques of Firestone’s theory concerns her biological determinism (Walby 1990). In contrast, Christine Delphy (1984) argued that housewives and breadwinning husbands constitute two separate classes. They have a relation of economic difference and of social inequality, where the housewives are the producing class, engaged in domestic labor, and husbands are the nonproducing class, expropriating the labor of their wives. This theory has been criticized for going too far in the application of Marxist concepts of class and mode of production and for not acknowledging the many differences between women (e.g., not all women are housewives). Also, in focusing only on the economic dimension, Delphy neglects cultural, sexual, and ideological aspects of gender inequality. Sylvia Walby (1990), though she argued that housewives and husbands are classes (but men and women are not), disagreed with Delphy and argued that the concept of class should not be extended to cover gender inequality across all the areas and should not be used to cover noneconomic forms of inequality. Early twenty-firstcentury research on gender stratification is far more rich and complex, but early theorizing was important in that it showed that social classes cannot be viewed in the aggregate regarding the means of production, wealth, power, or prestige, because doing so fails to deal with the inequalities that cut across class lines (Acker 1973), such as gender inequality. As of the mid-2010s, gender stratification is defined as the degree to which men and women who are otherwise social equals G E N DE R STR AT I F IC AT ION are nonetheless unequal in their access to the scarce and valued resources and opportunities of their society (Chafetz 2006). Chafetz suggests 11 dimensions that may be unequally distributed and clusters them into four groups. The first group includes the dimensions defining the particular society or social system (such as the different expectations for gender roles). The second is related to the organization of work and control over the means and products of production. The third group includes dimensions related to family structure and division of labor within the household. The fourth group includes independent dimensions such as demography, level of technology, and so on. All the four groups are interrelated with each other and interact to place women and men in unequal positions. Gender stratification is based on four forms of power according to Blumberg (1984; see also Chafetz 2006): political, coercive, economic, and ideological. Economic power, including control of the products and/or income derived from labor, constitutes a central construct in most macrostructural theories. Along a purely economic dimension, the more economic resources women produce and control, the lower is the level of gender stratification (Chafetz 2006). However, as mentioned, economic power cannot be analyzed alone without the other dimensions (political, coercive, and ideological). Gender inequalities regarding economic resources, political participation, education, and household labor differ from country to country. Some of the figures on a more global level show that these inequalities still persist strongly. Only 20.9 percent of national parliamentarians were female as of July 1, 2013. In 2013, eight women served as heads of state and 13 served as heads of government. As of January 2012, only 17 percent of government ministers were women, with the majority overseeing social sectors, 3 such as education and health (UN Women n.d.a). According to UN Women (n.d.b), only 18.3 percent of companies had a top-level female manager. Women comprised 31 percent of permanent full-time workers, but among manufacturing firms the figure was 9.9 percent. The gender pay gap still remains wide. Despite the global reduction of more than 800 million people living in extreme poverty from 1990 to 2008, women continue to be more likely to live in poverty than men. The land ownership of women is extremely low compared to that of men, especially in some regions of the African and Asian continents. Women in sub-Saharan Africa are overrepresented in poor households, mainly because they are less likely to have paid work, and when they do they are, on average, paid less than men. Household poverty figures further underestimate the extent of women’s poverty because they do not show unequal income distribution or stratification within a household. SEE ALSO: Feminist Perspectives on Families; Feminization of Poverty; Gender; Gender and Household Labor; Gender Identity; Gender Roles; Global Gender Gap Report REFERENCES Acker, Joan. 1973. “Women and Social Stratification: A Case for Intellectual Sexism.” American Journal of Sociology, 78(4): 936–45. DOI:10.1086/225411. Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1984. “A General Theory of Gender Stratification.” Sociological Theory, 2: 23–101. DOI:10.2307/223343. Chafetz, Janet Saltzman. 2006. “The Varieties of Gender Theory in Sociology.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, edited by Janet Saltzman Chafetz, pp. 3–24. New York: Springer. Connell, Raewyn W. 2002. Gender. Cambridge: Polity. Delphy, Christine. 1984. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression. London: Hutchinson. 4 G E N DE R STR AT I F IC AT ION Firestone, Shulamith. 1974. The Dialectics of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow. Goldthorpe, John, Catriona Llewellyn, and Clive Payne. 1980. Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Huber, Joan. 1986. “Trends in Gender Stratification 1970–1985.” Sociological Forum, 1(3): 476–95. DOI:10.1007/bf01123941. Jackson, Stevi, and Sue Scott. 2002. “Introduction.” In Gender: A Sociological Reader, edited by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, pp. 1–26. London: Routledge. Risman, Barbara J. 2004. “Gender as a Social Structure: Theory Wrestling with Activism.” Gender & Society, 18: 429–50. DOI:10.1177/ 0891243204265349. UN Women. n.d.a. “Facts and Figures.” Accessed October 28, 2013. http://www.unwomen.org/ en/what-we-do/leadership-and-politicalparticipation/facts-and-figures. UN Women. n.d.b. “Facts and Figures: Economic Empowerment.” Accessed October 28, View publication stats 2013. http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-wedo/economic-empowerment/facts-and-figures. Walby, Sylvia. 1990. Theorizing Patriarchy. Cambridge: Blackwell. FURTHER READING Collins, Randall, Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Rae Lesser Blumberg, Scott Coltrane, and Jonathan H. Turner. 1993. “Toward an Integrated Theory of Gender Stratification.” Sociological Perspectives, 36(3): 185–216. DOI:10.2307/1389242. Huber, Joan. 2006. “Comparative Gender Stratification.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, edited by Janet Saltzman Chafetz, pp. 65–80. New York: Springer. Wharton, Amy S. 2004. “Gender Inequality.” In Handbook of Social Problems: A Comparative International Perspective, edited by George Ritzer, pp. 156–72. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
