Soc 611, Spring 2011
Hogan
Where Have We Been? What Are We Doing Here?
I. Where Have We Been (last week)?
A. Race and Ethnicity
1. What is a race, as opposed to an ethnicity?
2. How does race or ethnicity operate as a basis for inequality?
3. consider Bonacich's geographical base
5. consider Hogan's endogamy versus patronage distinctions
6. what about racism?
7. human capital and segmented assimilation?
8. networks and social psychology
B. Gender Inequality
1. theories of gender inequality
Theories
Focus
Problem
Radical Feminism
Culture and Politics
Marxist Feminism
Economics and Politics
Liberal Feminism
Economics and Politics
Sexual or Reproductive
Exploitation
Economic Exploitation and
Patriarchal Exploitation
Discrimination and Unfair
Competition
2. base of gender inequality: biological and sociological (not much here in third
edition)
3. labor markets and inequality/fair competition
a. equality of opportunity versus condition
b. how much inequality is too much?
c. what is fair?
4. social psychology and micro-economic theory
a. statistical discrimination: its about money
- makes sense for rational employers
- makes sense for rational men
b. forms of gendered labor markets
- glass ceilings (see Baxter and Wright vs. world in G&S)
- cumulative disadvantage (ask Ken Feraro)
- revolving doors
- queues
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Hogan
Before we turn back to Grusky and the statistics, consider these questions:
- How and why are men and women different?
- Do gender differences necessarily imply inequality?
- Are differences rooted in biology (sex) or gender socialization, patriarchy,
discrimination, exploitation?
- Does it matter whether gender inequality is rooted in nature or nurture?
- Does it matter if gender is different from sex?
- Does it matter if discrimination is conscious or unconscious?
- Are racial, ethnic, and gender inequality fundamentally different? How and Why?
Okay, so Grusky wants to distinguish two different sets of moral philosophies: first there
is a "vertical" (male's superior status) philosophy (what feminists might call patriarchy). Then
there is the "gender difference" philosophy that Durkheim would associate with organic
solidarity. What is particularly interesting here is the idea that that "gender difference" is
associated with female advantage in white collar/blue collar gender advantage. Also, as Grusky
argues, there is no reason to believe that liberal enlightenment (a third moral philosophy, which
Grusky and Durkheim regard with cautious optimism as the inevitable moral base of modern
industrial society (and its organic solidarity) should displace "gender difference" along with
patriarchy. In fact, doing so might even aggravate gender inequality.
Do you find this argument interesting? Compelling? Useful?
Might we suggest that this is the sort of thinking that divides race and gender along lines of
(white) women's advantage in white collar employment versus (black) men's advantage in
manual labor?
Okay, the other piece of the Grusky puzzle (as you might recall) is the centrality of
occupations and firms as the units of labor markets. The problem of inequality (for Grusky) is
the distribution of goodies over positions (occupations within firms) and the distribution of
persons over positions. The extent to which there is gender inequality within positions would be
considered problematic—that would be discrimination (a bad thing). Fortunately, Petersen and
Morgan find that virtually all of the gender inequality is distributional: "occupationestablishment segregation accounted for more of the gender wage gap than any other variable or
set of variables currently used in studying the gender wage gap." (p. 831).
Doesn't this simply mean that if we can isolate individuals in jobs in firms there are no more
degrees of freedom?
Somehow, they have enough cases to claculate "reliable" estimates of average earnings for men
and women in the same job/firm, despite the fact that men and women rarely work side by side
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in the same occupation at the same firm. So are these results valid? If so, what do they represent
(other than a victory for Durkheimians everywhere)?
Okay, so Paula England make the case for comparable worth, which Tam torpedoes by
showing that women's jobs lack the on-the-job training that men's work entails. Firm-specific or
occupation-specific human capital explains away gender inequality and the case for comparable
worth.
Once again we have large enough datasets to produce estimates of occupation and industry
specific human capital requirements and men and women's human capital. So, assuming that
these are reliable estimates of the benefits of manly jobs, what does this tell us? What does it
mean to say that women's work (notably housework and childcare and the types of jobs that draw
on similar experience—nurses and daycare workers, secretaries, personal assistants, legal aids) is
devalued because it does not rely on "specific vocational training for an occupation"?
Finally, Blau and Kahn summarize findings that should be familiar to all who read my
paper (on the website). Women are now educationally advantaged but the gender gap seems to
be stuck at somewhere between 77% and 81% of men's earnings (depending on whom we survey
and how we calculate measures of central tendency). We know that female labor force
participation has increased dramatically since WWII—particular, in recent years, for women
with children. It appears that stay at home moms of the Seventies went back to work in the
Eighties. Since the Nineties there has been less of an increase in female labor force participation
and less progress in reducing the gender gap.
Why is that?
Who constitute the population of "workers" (male and female)?
Are wealthy (privileged) women opting out of the labor force?
Are welfare moms going back to work (Clinton's workfare)?
Are only the wealthiest women able to "opt out"? That would reduced the positive outliers
among women on mean earnings for the fulltime year-round workers—although the men tend to
be the wealthiest of the wealthy?
Isn't this entire conversation predicated on the fact that we are ignoring race and focusing on
middle class white feminists and their mid-career crises? As Angela Davis reminds us, black
women (and working class women) have always worked. They worked on the plantations and in
the fields. This whole second-wave feminist drama about the right to work is just a bourgeois
racist anti-labor, anti-union rant—see Mitch Daniels and his friends at the Journal and Courier.
My mother went back to school and back to work in the Seventies. She started out selling
women's clothes and then working in a daycare center and studing something like the business
side of home economics. Then the OWL and senior feminist ideology corrupted her and
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undermined her already tenous grasp on proper feminine behavior (as learned in the 1930s). So
my mother and I were at Grossmont Community College together in 1969, although she was still
there when I graduated from Santa Cruz and then went to Michigan in 1975. She accumulated
over 100 hours at a two year college but never transferred to San Diego State—too big and scary
for a feisty senior woman (even for an OWL).
So, why did I get more for my education than my mother? Was it age discrimination? Was is
gender discrimination? Was it her traditional (as opposed to my progressive) gender ideology?
[If you think my gender ideology was progressive in 1974 you should bear in mind that when my
mother joined the OWLs I was regretting that I had not joined the Teamsters but was, instead,
delivering furniture (with a BA) and earning less than I had five years earlier (as a high school
graduate in 1969). At the time, when my wife worked as a French maid and I worked as a
furniture delivery man we were returning to my redneck hippy roots in a brief (one year)
interlude between undergraduate and graduate study. If you still need guidance on the gender
ideology question you should ask my wife.]
All these disclaimers notwithstanding, what about the role of good old fashioned sexism as an
element in the burden of marriage for women, as opposed to men? Did Bielby and Bielby get it
right when Denise decided to follow Bill? (see Bielby and Bielby 1991—p. 796)