Gender and Stratification

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Gender and Stratification

-A.W.

Although social stratification lies at the heart of macro-sociology, the study of gender and stratification is comparatively recent, and developed from feminist scholarship. The traditional sociological view is that the oppression of women is adequately covered by class analysis. Feminist theory insists that the class structure, and the oppression of women within patriarchal systems, are separate but interacting social processes.

Conventional class analysis treats all members of a household as having the same social class as the main breadwinner, who is usually a man. Feminists debated whether wives should be allocated to classes on the basis of their husband’s occupation or the wife’s current (or last) occupation. It is now agreed that women’s position in society, and in the labor force, should be studied separately from class analysis. Empirical research has shown that the sex segregation of occupations, and the pay gap between men and women, cut across social classes in ways that vary from one society to another, and vary across time. Occupational segregation and the pay gap develop and change independently within labor markets due to variations in female employment, anti-discrimination policies and other social policies – including family-friendly policies that have been counter-productive in their effects. Similarly, women’s position in the family is studied independently of their position in the class structure, and depends on their education (relative to that of their spouse) as much as their earning power and occupational status.

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The feminist assumption that dual-earner and dual-career families would become universal after equal opportunities policies took effect has been proven wrong, even for ex-socialist countries. Instead, couples choose between three family models, corresponding to women’s three lifestyle preferences: a minority of work-centered women who adopt the male profile of continuous full-time employment and are financially self-supporting; a minority of home-centered women who are dependent on their spouses after marriage; and a majority of adaptive women who are secondary earners within their households rather than careerists, and have varied employment patterns. This heterogeneity of women’s lifestyle preferences, and thus employment profiles, ...

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