Gender Inequality

9 Key excerpts on "Gender Inequality"

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  The Persistence of Gender Inequality

  • Mary Evans(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  1

  What is Gender Inequality?

  Debates about gender have existed in both print and daily life for generations, and heated discussions about the state of relations between men and women show little sign of decreasing. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, issues about gender and sexual identity have become the subjects of increasingly complex debates, whilst the actual lived experience of gender can still be defined by rigid and often non-negotiable assumptions derived from biological difference. For example, debates arising out of the politics of transgender have called into question the very meaning of the terms ‘male’ and ‘female,’ whilst in certain parts of the world these very definitions of identity constitute mandatory forms of social existence. Discussions about gender exist universally; it is the nature of the debate, and certainly the degree to which it is a matter of public debate, that differ. But apart from these debates – about the implications of biological difference – there is a considerable degree of consensus that women, both born and made, have less access to power and privilege than men. Hence, although we speak of ‘Gender Inequality’, the term here has a more specific focus. It refers to those various social inequalities which are more often experienced by women than men. Those inequalities take forms which will be the basis of the discussion here and in later chapters: those of material and political disadvantage and of various forms of abusive representation.

  At that point, and through the use of the apparently inclusive term ‘women’, we encounter a potential minefield: a minefield in which much of the strength of that binary division between women and men is disrupted. Questions of class, of race, of sexual identity, of age, of ethnicity all disrupt any simplistic view that gender ‘inequality’ is solely a question of all men having more power and privilege than all women. There are two reasons for this: one is the point that the American academic Kimberlé Cranshaw made in 1991 when she wrote about the ‘multiple grounds of identity’ – of gender, race and class - which we all occupy. In doing so she articulated the concept of ‘intersectionality’, the recognition that all human beings are located within conditions of class and race as well as that of gender.1

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  Handbook of Social Problems

  A Comparative International Perspective

  • George Ritzer(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  This is contained in the idea of gender as a system of practices that are far-reaching, interlocked, and exist independently of individuals. Gender thus is a multilevel phenome-non (Risman 1998). This insight enables us to explore how social processes, such as interaction, and social institutions, such as work, embody and reproduce gender. Third, this definition of gender refers to its importance in organizing relations of inequality. Whether gender differentiation must nec-essarily lead to Gender Inequality is a subject of debate. As a principle of social organization, how-ever, gender is one critical dimension upon which social resources are distributed. These shifts in the meanings of gender have had considerable impact on how Gender Inequality has been understood. While previous approaches tended to trace Gender Inequality to differences in the 156 characteristics of women and men as individuals, more recent views emphasize the roles played by social interaction patterns and institutions. More important, however, by treating gender as a multi-level phenomenon, gender theory and research on inequality has had to address the ways that these lev-els interrelate. These interrelations play an important role in the reproduction of Gender Inequality and the possibilities for challenging the gender order. One inadvertent consequence of an individualist view of gender is that women and men have often been portrayed as either villains or victirns—oppressing, exploiting, or defending against each other. While inequality does not just happen, how it happens is more complex than this. Just as gender must be viewed as not simply a property of individuals, so too, Gender Inequality must be understood as the product of a more complex set of social forces. These may include the actions of individuals, but they are also to be found in the expectations that guide social interac-tion, the composition of social groups, and the struc-tures and practices of the institutions.

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  Enduring Bonds

  Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible

  • Philip N. Cohen(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  127 Difference is a precondition of inequality between groups. The condition of inequality requires a referent—one group has more or less of something than another. With regard to Gender Inequality, it is not the case that men have more of everything desirable than women, or that all men have more of anything desirable than all women do, or that Gender Inequality results from a single, coherent set of sexist motivations or the actions they inspire. Yet it is reasonable for practical—or political—purposes to refer to Gender Inequality as a systemic property of contemporary US society (and all other societies). To do so responsibly, however, requires grappling with a compli-cated set of facts that change over time according to patterns that are linked but not synchronized. Retreating behind the gauzy haze of terms like nuance and complexity is not a solution to this problem; rather, we need to name and measure the quantities we hope to understand and to explain them in both specific and systemic terms, quantitatively and quali-tatively. We need facts and theory, and intelligible descriptions of both. 1 This chapter deals mostly with economic inequality—jobs and incomes and wealth. That’s partly because economic inequality is very important and partly because it’s easier to measure than a lot of other things, like sexual assault, mansplaining, childhood socialization, and other kinds of 6 Gender Inequality 128 g e n d e r i n e q u a l i t y inequality that I discuss in other essays. Because I often come at Gender Inequality through critiques of media accounts, I start here with what the news people call a “deep dive” into one highly influential publication: the New York Times. 1. gender segregation at the new york times The Women’s Media Center (WMC) reported in 2015 that women wrote 37 percent of print news stories in major newspapers. Levels ranged from a low of 31 percent female at the New York Daily News to a high of 54 percent at the Chicago Sun-Times.

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  Social Inequality as a Global Challenge

  • Medani P. Bhandari, Shvindina Hanna(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • River Publishers

    (Publisher)

  1 Chapter 1 Social Inequality as a Global Challenge: Scenario, Impacts, and Consequences Medani P. Bhandari, PhD 1 1. Introduction “ Inequality—the state of not being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities—is a concept very much at the heart of social justice theories. However, it is prone to confusion in public debate as it tends to mean different things to different people. Some distinctions are com-mon though. Many authors distinguish “economic inequality”, mostly meaning “income inequality”, “monetary inequality” or, more broadly, inequality in “living conditions”. Others further distinguish a rights-based, legalistic approach to inequality—inequality of rights and asso-ciated obligations (e.g. when people are not equal before the law, or when people have unequal political power )” (United Nation 2018:1). Inequality is one of the major human to human divisive factor since the evolutionary history of human development and civilizations. Inequalities present in every sphere of social, political, and economical structure of com-munity, national and international level throughout social, economic, reli-gious, and political histories. The strata created by inequalities are grounded 1 Professor of Sustainability, Akamai University, Hilo, Hawaii, USA; Prof. of Innovation and Finance, Sumy State University, Ukraine. [email protected] 2 Social Inequality as a Global Challenge on innumerable factors—such as social, cultural, political, geographical, or due to environmental (anthropogenic or natural) catastrophe. Inequality can be seen as a communicable global disease. Inequalities can be understood in many forms, however, mostly known, and discussed forms are economic, social, political, cultural, and religious inequalities. As Stewart (2010) notes: “Economic inequalities include access to and ownership of financial, human, natural resource-based and social assets. They also include inequalities in income levels and employment opportunities.

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  Frontiers of Gender Equality

  Transnational Legal Perspectives

  • Rebecca J. Cook(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Part I

  Understanding Gender Inequality and Equality

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  Chapter 1

  Faces of Gender Inequality

  Sophia Moreau

  1. A Pluralist Approach to Gender-Based Discrimination

  Inequalities based on gender are morally troubling for a number of different reasons. Consider violence against women. It is morally concerning at least partly because it places many women’s lives and health in danger. We can acknowledge this as a harm without making any comparison between women and men. But violence against women is concerning also because of the ways in which it results from, and also perpetuates, the disempowerment and silencing of women, a disempowerment and silencing that many men do not experience. So violence against women is also a problem of discrimination. And it is made possible by the persistence of gender stereotypes that work, either tacitly or explicitly, to rationalize the power relations that render women vulnerable while leaving men in a position where they can often dominate with impunity.

  Interestingly, even the discriminatory aspect of violence against women seems to have multiple component parts, which cannot easily be reduced to a single harm. Such violence subordinates women to men—that is, it is caused by, and in turn perpetuates, a social order in which women systematically have less power and authority than men and attract less deference than men, and in which women’s needs are often marginalized or rendered invisible. Violence against women also denies many women the freedom to shape their lives in a manner of their own choosing. And when it occurs within the family, it leaves women without access to a good that is a necessary condition for functioning as an equal in their society: namely, a home that is a place of respite, a place where one can gather one’s strength, a place where one is secure and respected. It is not obvious that these different harms—social subordination, a lack of certain important freedoms, and a denial of access to a basic good—are reducible to some single type of harm or single type of disvalue. I have argued elsewhere that they form different parts of a pluralist theory of what makes discrimination wrong.1

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  Gender and Macroeconomic Policy

  • Raj Nallari, Breda Griffith(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • World Bank

    (Publisher)

  In 2008, 97 girls for every 100 boys were enrolled in tertiary education, up from a ratio of 67 in 1991. Issues of gender equality and inequality have important implications for development, at both the individual and the macroeconomic level. As the World Bank (2001) notes, the foremost cost of Gender Inequality is its toll on the quality of human lives. Some of the findings from this report are summarized here: • Societies with large, persistent gender inequalities pay the price of more poverty, malnutrition, illness, and other deprivations. 10 Gender and Macroeconomic Policy Figure 1.2 Selected Measures of Gender Equality, by Country Income Level, 1970–95 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 1970 a 1970 a 1970 a 1980 b 1980 b 1980 b 1990 1990 1990 1995 c 1995 c 1995 c female to male ratio a. Low-income countries b. Middle-income countries c. High-income countries life expectancy secondary enrollment primary enrollment parliamentary representation Source: World Bank 2001, 7, citing WISTAT 1998 for parliamentary data and World Bank 1999 for income data. Note: The gross enrollment rate is enrollment in a school level, regardless of student age, expressed as a percent- age of the official school-age population corresponding to that level in a given school year. The female to male enrollment ratio is the female gross enrollment ratio divided by the male gross enrollment ratio. For parliamen- tary representation, the ratio is seats held by women to seats held by men. All values are population-weighted averages. a. Parliamentary data are from 1975. b. Parliamentary data are from 1985. c. Life expectancy data are from 1997. • Mothers’ illiteracy and lack of schooling are detrimental to young children. Children of illiterate or undereducated mothers experience poorer care and higher rates of malnutrition and mortality. Child immunization rates rise with a mother’s education level.

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  A Portrait of America

  The Demographic Perspective

  • John Iceland(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  What follows is a review of the evidence on Gender Inequality in education, labor force attachment and occupations, and earnings. I explore patterns and trends in Gender Inequality in other countries as well. I evaluate arguments about the rise of women and the decline of men and discuss emerging patterns of Gender Inequality in American society today. traditional division of labor in the household Conventional wisdom used to hold that differences between men and women, including the division of labor between the two, were rooted in biological differences. For example, researchers writing in the 1960s docu-mented how among some primates the male is dominant and aggressive, extrapolating that humans are much the same. However, others have shown that significant variation occurs in primate social systems, in which females of many species are “fiercely competitive, resourceful and inde-pendent, sexually assertive and promiscuous and, in some cases, more prone than males to wanderlust at puberty.” 5 While it would be wrong to say that there are no meaningful biological differences between men and women that can affect their behavior, 64 g e n d e r i n e q u a l i t y biological predispositions are strongly affected by social influences and the culture in which individuals are embedded. The goal here is not to definitively determine to what extent biology affects the behavior of boys and girls and men and women, but rather to discuss the role of social con-structions of gender in shaping normative behavior and in particular how such norms have changed over time. Societies today vary considerably in their level of patriarchy, or the sys-tematic dominance of males over females. In several countries in the Middle East and South Asia, women who have committed adultery or have had premarital sex are in some cases killed by their father, brothers, or husbands as a way to protect the family’s honor.

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  Just Who Loses?

  Discrimination in the United States, Volume 2

  • Samuel Lucas(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Temple University Press

    (Publisher)

  The meaning of the results is overstated, reflecting an a priori commitment to the primacy of the biological that actually contradicts basic evolutionary theory as well as cutting-edge epigenetic research. Despite these serious deficiencies, the response biosocial research on Gender Inequality receives contrasts sharply with the reception of research on discrimination. When analysts propose discrimination as an explanation for observed outcomes, even though the analysis may be based in rigorous methods and state-of-the-art theorizing, the research is often rejected as failing to nail down the case for an effect of discrimination because every single conceivable alternative possibility and methodological challenge has not been assessed and addressed. In contrast, in biosocial research, basic ac-cepted principles of research—that attitudes are not the same as behaviors, that measures must be defended on coherent grounds, that causal primacy must be established rather than assumed—are violated routinely, yet the work is published anyway; indeed, it can be published in the leading jour-nals in social science. This state of affairs is lamentable, for it produces a warped literature and a systematically incoherent social science, with the systematic incoherencies aligned along lines of power. And what this means for our purposes here is that whatever we find concerning the role of sex 46 / Chapter 2 discrimination in the determination of outcomes for men and women, the biosocial explanation for Gender Inequality has so little rigorous empirical support, and so little coherent theorizing behind it, that it cannot be plau-sibly asserted to be the missing piece in the analysis. Racial Inequality and Biology The challenge of linking biological sex to social outcomes is extremely large. Yet the effort to make the link has one solid fact in its favor—people do fall into physiologically identifiable categories of male and female.

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  A Bark But No Bite

  Inequality and the 2014 New Zealand General Election

  • Jack Vowles, Hilde Coffé, Jennifer Curtin(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • ANU Press

    (Publisher)

  189 9 The gender dimension of inequality During Labour’s period in opposition since 2008, discussions of economic inequality and Gender Inequality have often been portrayed as at odds with each other. The former is framed as material, meaningful and representative of a class politics that, if addressed, would remedy inequality. By contrast, the latter is framed as a variation of ‘identity politics’, whereby material wellbeing is eschewed in favour of a politics of presence (Edwards 2009, 2011, 2013a). This is not a new standoff: the old left in New Zealand has a long history of resisting feminist politics, while Labourist feminism has an equally long history of championing women’s economic equality. Women parliamentarians have been the conduit for some of the more significant reforms (Coney 1993; Curtin 2008; Curtin and Sawer 1996; Curtin and Teghtsoonian 2010; Davies 1984, 1997; Grey 2002; Nolan 2000; Wilson 2013). Gender equality in political power and economic resources in post-industrial democracies has grown tremendously in the past 50 years. Over recent decades, women have sought, and in many countries gained, greater access to the labour market, equality before the law and social reforms that impact their everyday lives. Alongside this, more women are running for and being elected to national parliaments than ever before, and a record number of women hold executive positions within their nations’ governments (Curtin and Sawer 2011; Lovenduski 2005; Paxton, Kunovich and Hughes 2007). A BARk BuT No BITE 190 However, gender inequalities remain. In 2006, the World Economic Forum began an annual assessment of the global gender gap in women’s empowerment and employed measures that sought to capture the economic, political and social dimensions of women’s lives.

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