in the importance of gendered characteristics influences the search for candidates who are “masculine” or “feminine.” In westernized cultures, “masculine” traits would be rationality, objectivity, and aggressiveness; “feminine” traits would be emotional sensitivity, psychological perceptivity, and ability to mediate and compromise. In a non-gendered workplace, the search would be for workers who exhibited “neutral” characteristics, such as intelligence, honesty, experience, and mental agility. The gender designations of attributes as masculine, feminine, or neutral are culturally contingent, and the skills needed for a job are frequently re-gendered as the gender composition of the workforce changes (Jacobs 1989; Reskin and Roos 1990). The same jobs can be stereotyped as masculine “dangerous work” in one country and feminine work needing “nimble fingers” in another (Poster 2001).
The end result of the attribution of desired characteristics is the valuation of men workers over women workers, men’s jobs over women’s jobs, and “masculine” over “feminine” work capabilities. However the workplace is gendered, the economic outcome seems to be stubbornly uniform in advantaging men. Salaries are highest in jobs where men are the predominant workers, whether the worker is a woman or a man, and lowest in jobs where women are the predominant workers, again whether the worker is a man or a woman. Looked at from the perspective of the worker, men have the advantage no matter what the gender composition of the job or workplace since they earn more than women in jobs where men are the majority, in jobs where women are the majority, and in gender-balanced jobs.
The pervasive cultural beliefs about women and men workers that perpetuate gender inequality support the devaluation of women’s competence by men. Women themselves help to sustain the devaluation because they frequently compare themselves with other women, not men, at the same level. The unequal salary scales and opportunities for career advancement thus seem fair because there are no challenges to the beliefs that sustain them. In sum, the process producing gender inequality in the workplace is both interactive and structural. As Cecilia Ridgeway (1997) says, “The result is a system of interdependent effects that are everywhere and nowhere because they develop through multiple workplace interactions, often in taken-for-granted ways. Their aggregate result is structural: the preservation of wage inequality and the sex segregation of jobs” (1997: 230).
Gender regimes
Gender structures nation-states into gender regimes. Just as organizations are not aggregates of gendered practices but have a logic of their own, gender regimes are not aggregations of gendered organizations. Gender regimes stratify women and men across organizations, so that they are valued more or less over a matrix of statuses that determine their access to power, prestige, and economic resources (Collins 2000; Yuval-Davis 1997). Commonly, gender intertwines with racial, ethnic, and class stratification, so that gender is only one aspect of an intersectional complex of inequality (Acker 2006; Collins 2019; Crenshaw 1989; McCall 2001).
Many gender regimes privilege one group of men. In Masculinities, Connell (1995) contrasted hegemonic men and subordinated men. Hegemonic men have economic and educational advantages and institutionalized patriarchal privileges, and their characteristics are the most valued attributes of masculinity. Subordinated men are not necessarily devalued, but they have fewer opportunities for advancement and little of the power, prestige, and wealth of hegemonic men. Connell describes how the values of western hegemonic masculinity are produced through college education, where young men are trained to be rational and technically expert, and reproduced in professional and managerial careers in hierarchically organized workplaces, where hegemonic men expect eventually to have positions of authority over other men. Which men are hegemonic and which subordinated shifts with changing historical conditions but, according to Connell, the hegemony of white European masculinity over the past 500 years has spread globally through colonization, economic control, and state violence (Connell 1993, 1998, 2005).
Gender as a social institution
According to Giddens, society-wide structural principles that extend over time and space can be considered institutions (1984). In Paradoxes of Gender (1994), I claimed that gender was a social institution based on three structural principles: the division of people into two social groups, “men” and “women,” the social construction of perceptible differences between them, and their differential treatment legitimated by the socially produced differences. In complex societies, the binary division by gender overrides individual differences and intertwines with other major social statuses – racial categorization, ethnic grouping, economic class, age, religion, and sexual orientation – to create a hierarchical system of dominance and subordination, oppression, and exploitation. The members of the dominant gender status, usually hegemonic men, legitimate and rationalize the gender order through politics, the media, the education system, religion, and the production of knowledge and culture. Gendered kinship statuses reflect and reinforce the prestige and power differences of the different genders and institutionalize heterosexuality as an intrinsic part of gender as a social institution (Butler 2002; Ingraham 2006).
The concept of gender as a social institution makes change seem impossible, but institutions do evolve or are drastically altered through political movements. Through feminist political activism and other political and social forces, the institution of gender has certainly evolved in western societies: Women and men now have formal equality in all the major social spheres (Jackson 1998). No laws prevent women from achieving what they can, and many laws help them do it by preventing discrimination and sexual harassment. More and more countries are ratifying laws to protect women’s procreative and sexual rights, and to designate rape, battering, and genital mutilation as human rights crimes. However, despite formal and legal equality, discriminatory treatment of women still regularly occurs in the economy and in politics. Gender equality has not significantly penetrated the family division of labor, and conflicts over who takes care of the children spill over and are exacerbated by gender inequities in the paid job market. Women have not gained the power or economic resources in most western societies to ensure the structural bases of gender equality, and so their successes are constantly being undermined by the vicissitudes of the economy, a war, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, or a pandemic.
Conclusion
To review: The processes of doing gender and gender performance construct individual identity. Gendered individuals in interaction with others equally gendered construct gendered organizations. These are cemented by a gender-segregated and stratified job market, gendered political structures, family and kinship systems, cultural productions, religions, and educational systems into gendered regimes within which individual constructions of gender play out. It is this edifice of gender that is fragmenting in many ways and being sustained in other ways. The next two chapters will describe these two warring trends.
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