Soc 225 notes unit 2 PDF

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Professor Ashley Bledsoe; Section 1; Spring Semester 2019...

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TA lecture – Acker: Gendered Organizations ● ●

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Reactions to Acker ○ Very gendered differences in experiences (pushback against Kanter) Gendered Organizations ○ Organizations are seen as gender neutral so the literature addressing them ignores gender, sexuality, & “bodies” ○ Organization literature (hierarchical chart) ■ CEO → VPs → managers → administrative assistants ■ Organizational flow charts with positions but don’t acknowledge gender aspects ■ Why is this problematic? ● Ignores different experiences in the workplace caused by gender ● Issues such as sexual harassment are seen as experiential deviances → not seen as part of the workplace experience ○ Masculine perspective becomes the default Kanter ○ Says organizations are viewed as gender neutral but there are masculine principles dominating the organizational structures ○ Focuses on organizational structure instead of gender → implying that gender is outside of the structure ○ Tokens ■ Issues ● Threatened the status quo ● Additional stress ● Expected to stand in for the “typical” representation for something ● Status leveling ● Kantor JUST looked at the numbers → says a woman who is a token in a male dominated field should have the same experience as a man in a female dominated field ○ This isn’t true ○ Acker disagrees with this Acker on tokens ○ Men in female dominated positions will be seen as favorable ○ Not true in the reverse Organizations = gendered processes (5 main ways this is done) ○ Construction of divisions along lines of gender ■ Divisions of labor ● Women → secretaries ● Men → higher level positions ● Out of top 1000 fortune companies CEOs → 54 are women ● *these positions come with the ability to make decisions* ■ Management discretion & choices reinforces gender categories

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CEO and top ranking positions come with the power to make decisions ● The people in power reinforce gender roles → create a cycle of inequality ■ Construction of symbols & images that express and reinforce divisions ● Reinforced through ideology, popular culture ● University of North Georgia professional development photo → white men winning the race, woman and black man losing ■ Interactions enact dominance and submission ● Men → more often initiate interruptions in conversations, interrupted earlier ● Importance ○ Having the floor in a conversation is a position of power ○ The person in classrooms who talks a lot is often seen as more competent ■ Conflate who talks the most w/ who knows the most ■ Gender is implicated in the processes of creating and conceptualizing social structures ● Disembodiment → separation of work from actual people ○ Assumes that the people in the job are 100% committed to this job (somebody else dealing with things in private sphere) ○ The male worker is the closest application of the disembodied worker ● Devaluation → organizational logic assumes match between responsibility, job complexity, & hierarchical position ○ Assumes higher up positions are more valued than lower positions ○ Bc of strong patterns in the genders of those who fill higher up positions → devaluation has strong gender applications ○ Assumes competency ● Organizational control → women’s bodies create disorder ○ Women’s bodies are seen as tempting and distracting ○ Employers being aware of maternity leave → birth disrupts work flow ● *Perpetuated by public and private sphere* ○ Public sphere → work, school, etc ○ Private sphere → home Acker summary ○ Pushes back against Kanter ○ We need to have a theory of gender and  organizations ■ Examines how they interact ○ Gender and social structure makes up organizations

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We can’t understand experiences within the workplace without looking at gendery

Feb 21 – Hedgepath ● Ridgeway connections ○ Quote on p. 132 ■ Ridgeway on the impact of hegemonic cultural schemas on gender even in homosexual couples ■ Power is what matters ● Gendered household division of labor leads to… ○ Increased earning differences for men and women ○ Inequalities in long-term career outcomes for mothers and fathers ○ Which further exacerbates gender inequality both within the family and in the larger society ● Motherhood wage penalty ○ Roles conflicts between paid work and unpaid family labor for women ■ Assumption that mothers are not good employees (not “ideal workers”) ○ Employed mothers earn less than non-mothers ■ Estimate wage penalty of about 7% per child ○ Employers discriminate against mothers ● Marriage and fatherhood benefit ○ Never-married men have lowest salaries, followed by men with employed wives, highest salaries and achievement levels were men with unemployed wives ○ Other research has demonstrated that men earn more with each child they have ● Hochschild Second Shift ○ Women spent 15 hours a week more than men on housework, meant working an extra month a year ○ Men do tasks that involve greater personal discretion and more likely to have fixed beginning and end ■ Women do tasks of everyday necessity ○ Hochschild found differences between individual and family gender ideologies and actual practices – developed “family myths” to account for discrepancies ■ Gender ideologies ● Egalitarian → equality ● Transitional → blend between equality and separation ● Traditional → man is breadwinner, woman is in the home ○ Quote from p 12 ■ Change in women but lack of change in the workplace and much else ○ Finishing the revolution ■ Humanely adapt to the fact that most women work outside of the home ■ The workplace would allow parents to work part time, to share jobs, to work flexible hours, to take parental leaves to give birth, to care for children ■ Include affordable house closer to places of work

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Encourages notions of masculinity that include parenting and caring in the home

Friday 2/22 Connections to other readings ● Second Shift ○ When women are breadwinners, they would still come home and feel responsible for home responsibilities and parenting ● Ridgeway ● Discussion on reading ○ Why are men staying home ■ A lot of time they’re sick or lost job but also some that are choosing to stay home ■ Why they chose to stay home → connect more with children ■ Usually not a decision within their control ○ What are some of the consequences of their role as SAHD? ■ Positive → connect more with their kids ■ Negative → losing time pushing their career forward ■ Don’t get positive feedback from people outside of their family ○ Why is it mostly upper-middle class men? ■ Have more economic flexibility ■ Working class men have more pressure to earn money ○ Could it be from education or diff peer groups? ■ If they know other SAHD it could be more normalized ○ What do you think of the fact that almost all men were like “this is great for now, but i can’t wait to get back” ■ Shows a big disparity between women and men ■ Women often see staying home with the kids as more permanent, esp thinking about future kids ■ Men see it as a temporary thing and somebody else will do it once they go back to work ○ Connection to Ridgeway ■ If needed and temporary, perpetuates the gender gap still Feb 26 – Education ● Mickelson reading ○ Background ■ In the 1980’s it was noted that women had begun to outperform men academically ■ People seek education to reap it market-value rewards ■ Most disadvantaged groups underachieve academically ○ Research questions → Why do women perform as well as they do academically and attain so much education in light of the fact that they aren’t reaping the same rewards as men?

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Possible explanations for why women are doing well in school ● Differential reference groups ● Pollyanna hypothesis ○ Women are optimistic of their future ○ Think sexism is a thing of the past ● Social powerlessness ○ women don’t have control in society ○ MRS degree ■ Women go to college to find a husband ● Sex-role socialization ○ Men can challenge authority but women must follow rules ○ Women are taught their whole lives to keep to themselves, stay quiet, follow the rules, please others ● Baker and Jones article – Gender Stratification and Math Performance ○ Background ■ As of 1993, the size and direction of sex differences in the performance of students in math was beginning to change ■ Popular social psychology and biological explanations as to why girls lagged so far behind in math were thrown into question ○ Research question → Do improvements in inequalities faced by women result in changes in math skills? ■ The authors argue that anticipated opportunities can shape future performance ■ Levels of gender stratification in the workplace will influence performance on math results ○ The study ■ 77,000 students in 8th grade across the globe ■ Compared student achievement in the FIMS and SIMS, which allowed them to examine changes over time ■ They looked at educational opportunities, outcomes, and workforce participation ○ Findings ■ Clear pattern of national differences in gender effects in achievement in math ■ Gender stratification of opportunity related to the sex differences found in math performances cross-nationally ■ Girls received more parental support in countries where women more commonly attained higher level education Feb 28 – Dumet ● Pierre Bourdieu ○ Examined social inequality through cultural lens ○ Cultural capital ■ High culture/low culture

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Cultural omnivorousness → upper class consumes all different kinds of culture (go to fancy restaurants and food trucks) ○ Habitus → more of a way of being and seeing yourself in the world (less concrete than cultural capital) ○ Role of formal education ● DiMaggio: Cultural Capital ○ Examined the effects of cultural capital on grades ■ Students w/ high amounts of cultural capital… ● tended to have relatively high grades in all their subjects ● Had frequent discussions about their future ■ Female students from high-status families tend to benefit from cultural capital ■ High-status males tend to rebel against their high status family-life, but low status males can advance using cultural capital ● Dumais ○ Research questions → how does gender intersect with cultural capital and habitus to influence grades ○ Methods ■ Quantitative analysis of US NELS ○ Results ■ In terms of the six activities, girls outnumbered boys ■ high-SES children outnumbered low-SES children in activities ■ Larger percentage of girls than boys aspired to white-collar jobs with gender difference most pronounced among low-SES students ■ SES has a stronger effect than gender on cultural capital and habitus ■ Hapitus has stronger effect on grades than cultural capital does (having a positive effect for both male and female students) March 5 – Edging Women Out (Tuchman and Fortin) ● Examined how women were slowly edged out of the literary world ○ Literary field ■ Novelist came to be a masculine occupation during Victorian times bc of the following ● “Empty field” → a woman dominated field being treated as empty simply because it’s done by women ● Rationalize and centralize publishing → became a business, led to men taking over and it became a profession; associated with higher culture ● Women’s work died with them ● Male domination of nonfiction → men were able to control what and how history was recorded ○ Film ○ Secretaries ● Male dominated fields = higher levels of social value

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Cultural status as a cultural construction Cultural consecration → certain works of art should be seen as higher than others and are what other works should aim to achieve ● Examined historical changes and the Dictionary of National Biography Inequality in Screenwriting ● Background info ○ Causes for inequality in the TV industry ○ Similarities and differences between the film and TV industry ○ Women’s role in screenwriting ● Research question: What effect does gender have on the labor market for feature film screenwriters? ● Women can’t write men, but men are allowed to write men and women ● Women now account for ⅕ screenwriters ● Possible scenarios for gender effects in film screenwriting ○ Declining disadvantage (comedy) ■ Things are getting better for women ○ Continuous disadvantage (drama) ■ Bias effects women equally throughout their careers ■ Start behind and end equally far behind ■ No interaction effects with experience, previous employment and earnings ○ Cumulative disadvantage (horror) ■ At every stage in the career, gender has a negative effect ■ Snowball effect ■ *this is often how it works out* March 7 – From Armory to Academia (Braden) ● Research question: How does nationality and gender influence cultural consecration? ● Builds off Tuchman and Fortin ● Uses the Armory SHow in 1913 as a natural lab setting ● Findings ○ Women made up 17% of artists at the Armory exhibit ○ Women faced the greatest barriers when getting into exhibitions at MoMA ○ Males from the Armory show were 4.6x more likely to get their work into MoMA ○ Once in MoMA, women didn’t face additional barriers getting into textbooks ○ MoMA playing major gatekeeping role Gender and Cultural Consecration of Popular Music – Schmutz and Faupel ● Research question 1: which factors affect the likelihood that female performers achieve consecrated status? ○ Connections they have ○ Who your parents are / familial connections ○ How well received their work is by the public ○ 3 main types of legitimacy ■ Specific, popular, & bourgeois

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Research question 2: how are those decisions discursively legitimated? Methods: mixed Main points ○ Gender inequality in music happens directly & indirectly ■ In the flow chart from the article ○ Different forms of legitimacy have different levels of impact on consecration ○ Discourse around males’ albums more likely to focus on history, high art, autonomy ■ The reviews about men’s albums said the work of men was genius and seen as a masterpiece ○ Discourse around females’ albums more likely to focus on authenticity Country Music and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame at a Glance ● Country music is overwhelmingly white to start with ○ Only two african american performers out of 100+ artists March 8 – The Moral Underpinnings of Beauty (Baumann 2008) ● Background ○ The purpose of advertising in society ■ Buy into an idea, value, or product ■ Selling a dream or aspiration ○ Gender’s place in advertising ○ Appearance ideals ○ The ideal complexion? ● Research questions ○ how do the ideal complexions for men and women compare? ○ Why would we have those ideals? ○ How do such ideals reflect dominant moral and aesthetic standards? ● Methods ○ Coded advertisements in 9 magazines ○ Unit of analysis was the person depicted ● Findings ○ For both races, men are portrayed as being darker ○ Lightness’ social and moral implications ■ In addition to coding the advertisements for skin color, she looked at a subset of advertisements to look at the different portrayals and how that connected to skin color ■ The darker the african women were, the more sexual their images were ■ The darker white women were seen as authoritative and strong ○ Sexualization differences between black and white women Size Zero High-End Ethic (Mears 2009) ● Background ○ Looks at Cultural production and model’s “look” ● Research question: How do fashion producers choose models? Why do we see particular aesthetic conventions?

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Methods: participant observation of two modeling agencies Findings ○ Uncertainty rules ■ These markets are incredibly uncertain, so they want to minimize risk however they can ○ Coded language ○ Editorial vs. commercial: race and class intersections March 19 – Gender and Advertising Gender Advertisements – Goffman ● Goffman argues that there are codes which can be used to identify gender ○ Relative size ■ Women are shown as smaller than the man ○ Function ranking ○ Feminine touch ■ Women are often shown caressing things ○ Ritualized subordination ■ Women are often laying on the ground while men are standing ○ Licensed withdrawal ■ ,women tend to be looking off into space/into the distance ■ The man is often making eye-contact with the camera (shows confidence, control, power) ● Men’s superiority vs. women’s inferiority of body language ● Fulfilling traditional gender roles Images of Women in Gender Interest Magazines – Lindner ● Background ○ Advertising as socializing agent ○ Greater “equality” and greater sexualization ○ Previously research showed shifts in types of stereotyping & magazine stereotyping ● Research question → what changes have occurred in mags over time, and how do mags compare? ● Methods → content analysis of Vogue and Time magazines since 1955 ● Findings ○ 78% of the ads had stereotypical images of women in them ○ Major areas of stereotyping included: licensed withdrawal, ritualized subordination, & objectification ○ Objectification was also coupled with other types of stereotyping ○ Vogue was more likely to use gender stereotyping than Time Miss Representation Tokens - Symbolic - Rachel Maddow → expectation that women will do the same for future generations

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Greater sexualization of women → disempowering - Media images and ads Gender inequality and cultural consecration Male improv troop - Screaming, loud - Pause in the middle and critique each other Female improv - More reserved - Less loud - More supportive...