In this article, I examine how Syrian refugee men and women shifted their household divisions of labor in their initial years of resettlement in the United States. I combine and extend relational approaches from gender theory and economic sociology to examine how men’s and women’s behaviors shifted, the resources engendered by behavioral shifts, and how they interpreted and compensated for new behaviors and resources. I show that shifts in Syrian household divisions of labor occurred at the intersection of inequalities in (...) social policies, labor markets, and households. As a result of limited social assistance, the refugee families needed to earn an income within months of their arrival. The Syrian men entered the labor market, in keeping with a breadwinning expectation for their labor, but could only access menial jobs that limited their time and opportunity to learn English. Women, meanwhile, did not enter the labor market full-time and could attend English classes. By observing this divergence in men’s and women’s language learning, I theorize human capital as a gendered outcome of household divisions of labor. (shrink)

Drawing on findings from an original national survey experiment, we unpack Americans’ views on the employment of mothers and fathers with young children. This study provides a fuller account of contemporary attitudes than is available from surveys such as the General Social Survey. After seeing vignettes that vary the circumstances in which married mothers, single mothers, and married fathers make decisions about paid work and caregiving, the respondents’ views swing from strong support to deep skepticism about a parent’s work participation, (...) depending on the parent’s specific job conditions and family circumstances. When a mother, whether married or single, is satisfied with her job and her family depends on her income, respondents overwhelmingly support the option to work. Conversely, when a father is dissatisfied with his job and the family does not depend on his income, respondents generally support the option to stay home. These findings provide insight regarding the “gender stall” thesis by showing that Americans’ views depend heavily on the circumstances they believe parents are facing. This more nuanced view highlights the importance of social context in the allocation of paid work and caregiving for both mothers and fathers. (shrink)

Increasingly, both mothers and fathers are expected to play an equal role in child rearing. Nonetheless, we know little about how child care arrangements affect couples’ sexual intimacy and relationship quality. Research has focused on the effect of the division of paid labor and housework on couples’ relationships, finding that egalitarianism is problematic for sexual intimacy, relationship quality, and relationship stability. These findings, however, come almost universally from studies utilizing decades-old data that fail to examine the division of child care. (...) In this study, we update this work by utilizing data from the 2006 Marital and Relationship Study to examine how the division of child care affects the relationship quality and sexual intimacy of heterosexual couples in the United States. Results indicate that men’s performance of child care is generally associated with more satisfaction with the division of child care, more satisfying sexual relationships, and higher quality relationships. Importantly, we find that egalitarian child care arrangements have positive consequences for both men and women. These findings contribute to a growing body of research that challenges the costs of egalitarianism and indicates instead that egalitarianism is associated with higher quality, more intimate relationships than gender traditional arrangements. (shrink)

Some research indicates that women professionals—when compared to men—may be more ethical in the workplace. Existing literature that discusses gender and ethics is confined to the for-profit business sector and primarily to a US context. In particular, there is little attention paid to gender and ethics in science professions in a global context. This represents a significant gap, as science is a rapidly growing and global professional sector, as well as one with ethically ambiguous areas. Adopting an international comparative perspective, (...) this paper relies on 121 semi-structured interviews with US and UK academic physicists to examine how physicists perceive the impact of gender on science ethics. Findings indicate that some US and UK physicists believe that female scientists handle ethical issues within science in a feminine way whereas their male colleagues approach ethics in a masculine way. Some of these physicists further claim that these different approaches to science ethics lead to male and female scientists’ different levels of competitiveness in academic physics. In both the US and the UK, there are “gender-blind” physicists, who do not think gender is related to professional ethics. Relying on physicists’ nuanced descriptions this paper contributes to the current understanding of gender and science and engineering ethics. (shrink)

Drawing from the gender wage gap literature, we explore four possible causes of sexual minority earnings gaps: variation in human capital and labor force participation, occupational and industrial sorting, differences in the institutional organization of the public and private sector, and different returns to marriage and parenthood. Using the 2006 Census of Canada, we find that heterosexual men earn more than gay men, followed by lesbians and heterosexual women. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions show that industry of employment, rather than occupation, disadvantages gay (...) men, lesbians, and heterosexual women. High levels of educational attainment lead to employment in lucrative occupations, but sexual minorities earn significantly less than heterosexual men within these occupations. Wage gaps are reduced in the public sector for heterosexual women, gay men, and lesbians. Finally, we find that heterosexual women experience a motherhood penalty, heterosexual men experience a fatherhood premium, and both receive a premium for marriage; however, the presence of children and marriage have no effect on the earnings of either gay men or lesbians in conjugal relationships. (shrink)

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women randomly sampled from New York City, I ask: how do women develop expectations about their future workforce participation? Using an intersectional approach, I find that women’s expectations about workforce participation stem from gendered, classed, and raced ideas of who works full-time. Socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexuality influenced early expectations about work and the process through which these expectations developed. Women from white and Latino working-class families were evenly divided in their (...) expectations about their future workforce participation, while the vast majority of white, Asian, African American, and Latina middle-class women expected to work continually as adults. Unlike their working-class white and Hispanic peers, all of the working-class Black respondents developed expectations that they would work continuously as adults. The intersections of race, class, and gender play a central role in shaping women’s expectations about their participation in paid work. (shrink)

“Doing Gender,” Candance West and Don Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, has become a folk concept—a trope or commonsense resource within the sociology of gender. Yet at the same time, most gender scholars overlook its ethnomethodological premise, visible in both poststructuralist misunderstandings of its argument outside the discipline of sociology and what I term a realist misunderstanding of it in the study of structures and identities within the discipline. Reading West and Zimmerman queerly while clarifying ethnomethodology’s ontology, I refocus attention for (...) critical scholarship on ethnomethodology’s analytic sensibilities for research on gender, race, and sexuality, among other embodiments. Specifically, ethnomethodology reframes a vision of actors as relational, practical actors; repositions gender as accountable, jointly produced social relations, not individual identity; and foregrounds resistance in addition to conformity. Hence, my gender is not mine; it is ours. Ethnomethodology’s ontological shift in temporality to reality-in-production enables interpretive-materialism: a queer, anti-racist, intersectional sociology that is future-facing and in motion. (shrink)

The accumulation and advancement of gender scholarship over past decades has led us to the point where gender scholars today can leverage our deep understanding of the reproduction of gender inequality to develop and test models of change. In this lecture, I present one such model designed to reduce the negative effects of stereotypic biases on women’s workplace outcomes. After synthesizing the literature on stereotyping and bias and showing the limits of past change efforts, I develop a “small wins” model (...) of change. Key to this model is that researchers work with teams of managers to produce concrete, implementable actions that produce visible results. I argue that small wins motivate further action and are the building blocks to larger organizational transformation. Preliminary results from several case studies show that this approach can produce important changes in the short run, such as reducing gender biases in workplace evaluations, and that these small wins can inspire longer run change, such as increases in the rate of hiring women. (shrink)

The recent deluge of sexual harassment allegations in the media serves as a reminder that sexual harassment remains a pervasive, destructive occurrence in the workplace. Organizations in the United States have taken a legal‐centric approach to managing workplace sexual harassment, resulting in impotent anti‐harassment policies, ineffective sexual harassment training, and underused reporting mechanisms. In this conceptual paper, I argue that men's differential perceptions of sociosexual behaviors have propagated this legal‐centric approach, which fails to meet organizations’ ethical obligation to provide a (...) safe and healthy work environment. Specifically, men have a different psychological experience of sexual harassment, which may inhibit their ability to take the perspective of targets. This lack of perspective‐taking has influenced the jurisprudence on workplace sexual harassment, which has in turn informed organizations’ approach to managing the phenomenon. I contribute to research on both business ethics and workplace sexual harassment by integrating two bodies of scholarship that have developed largely independent of one another: organizational psychology and legal. In so doing, I offer an explanation for the continued pervasiveness of workplace sexual harassment despite decades of legal sanction, organizational interventions, and research. (shrink)

Social scientists have provided rich descriptions of the ascendant cultural ideologies surrounding motherhood and paid work. In this article, I use in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 40 employed mothers to explore how they navigate the “intensive mother” and “ideal worker” ideologies and construct their own accounts of good mothering. Married mothers in this sample construct scripts of “extensive mothering,” in which they delegate substantial amounts of the day-to-day child care to others, and reframe good mothering as being “in (...) charge” of and ultimately responsible for their children’s well-being. Single mothers describe extensive mothering in different ways, and their narratives suggest less accountability to the “intensive mothering” model. Mothers in this sample also justify employment in novel ways: They emphasize the benefits of employment for themselves—not only their children—and they reject the long work hours imposed by an ideal worker model. The article ends with the implications of extensive mothering for the motherhood and employment literatures and for gender equality. (shrink)

This article suggests that looking at the ways in which subjects relate to and internalise gender norms is a fruitful way to explore socially constructed differences between masculinity and femininity in the U.S. Throughout this article, I am in dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as I focus on practices of subject formation that I denote as ‘logics’ of subject formation. I propose several key ways to distinguish a feminine logic of subject formation from a masculine logic of (...) subjectivity. I suggest that femininity is a multiplicitous, self-proliferating strategy that forecloses truth as a means for achieving selfhood. Alternatively, I postulate that masculinity tends to masquerade as an (oftentimes failed) achievement that is singular and self-consolidating and that generates truth as a means for realising selfhood. In order to contextualise these distinctions between masculinity and femininity, I look to the recent influx of American women into masculine-marked domains such as the workforce, politics and sports without a corresponding entrance of men into feminine-marked domains. Known as the stalled gender revolution, these shifts, I argue, have created the context for the gendered divergences in subjectivity I suggest here. Focusing on examples of women in sports to illustrate these distinctions, I provide a detailed characterisation of femininity as a logic of subject formation. As such, I argue that this approach to gender may provide relevant insights to understanding gender practice, agency and resistance, particularly with respect to Butler’s formulation of gender performativity and subversion. I conclude by providing some preliminary thoughts on how to re-envision agency and subversion in light of the proposed framework. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing public discourse regarding the influence AI will have on the future of work. Simultaneously, considerable critical attention has been given to the implications of AI on gender equality. Far from making precise predictions about the future, this discourse demonstrates that new technologies are instances for renegotiating the relation of gender and work. This paper examines how gender is addressed in news media discourse on AI and the future of work, focusing on Germany. (...) We approach this question from a perspective of feminist technology studies and discourse analysis, exploring a corpus of 178 articles from 2015 to 2021 from German newspapers and newsmagazines. The findings indicate that critical AI and gender knowledge circulates in public discourse in the form of specific discursive frames, thematizing algorithmic bias, automatization and enhancement, and gender stereotypes. As a result, we show that, first, the discourse takes up feminist and scholarly discourse on gender and discusses AI in a way that is informed by social constructivism and standpoint theories. Second, gender appears as a—to some extent intersectional—diversity category which is critical to AI, while at the same time omitting important perspectives. Third, it can be shown that there is a renegotiating of the ideal worker norm taking place, and finally, we argue that the gendered frame of the powerful men developer responsible for AI’s risk is a concept to be challenged. (shrink)

Research on gender inequality has posited the importance of gender discrimination for women’s experiences at work. Previous studies have suggested that gender stereotyping and organizational factors may contribute to discrimination. Yet it is not well understood how these elements connect to foster gender discrimination in everyday workplaces. This work contributes to our understanding of these relationships by analyzing 219 discrimination narratives constructed from sex discrimination cases brought before the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. By looking across a variety of actual work (...) settings, the analysis sheds light on the cultural underpinnings and structural contexts in which discriminatory actions occur. The analyses reveal how gender stereotyping combines in predictable ways with sex composition of workplaces and organizational policies, often through interactional dynamics of discretionary policy usage, to result in discrimination. The findings suggest the importance of cultural, structural, and interactional influences on gender discrimination. (shrink)

Recent calls for reinstituting mandatory home economics education have emphasized its potential to advance gender egalitarian aims. The thought is that, because women’s disproportionate performance of caregiving and household labor is partially caused by gender socialization that better prepares women than men for such work, we can disrupt gender inegalitarian work distributions by preparing everyone for the sort of work in question. The curricula envisioned in these calls are gender-neutral, in the sense that they recommend identical educational interventions for all (...) genders. By exploiting a parallel between gender-neutral educational policies and gender-neutral family leave policies, we argue first that gender-neutral home economics instruction is unlikely to advance gender egalitarian aims, and may in fact reinforce the very outcomes it is meant to disrupt. However, we further argue that a more radical home economics curriculum could avoid these difficulties. To the extent that we value educational interventions as a possible means for advancing gender egalitarian aims, we have good reason to seriously consider adopting a gender non-neutral program in which all and only boys receive mandatory caregiving instruction. (shrink)

This study adds to a small but growing literature that situates sleep within gendered work— family responsibilities. We conducted interviews with 25 heterosexual dual-earner working-class couples with children, most of whom had one partner who worked at night. A few men suffered disrupted sleep because of their commitment to being a coparent to their children, but for most their provider status gave them rights to longer and more continuous sleep. By contrast, as they were the primary caregiver during sentient hours, (...) women’s sleep was curtailed and interrupted by responding to the needs of family members at night and at the beginning of each day, and this was true for women who worked nights as well as days. Furthermore, in struggling to meet their daily employment and familial obligations while tired and sleepy, women further stressed their bodies in ways that can cause cumulative sleep debt. This article demonstrates that sleep deficits are another manifestation of gender inequality, with important implications for long-term health and well-being. (shrink)

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex stands out as a master class in the accommodation of conceptual and inferential practices to real, objective gender kinds. Or so I will argue. To establish this framing, we will first need in hand the kind of scientific epistemology that correctly reconciles epistemic progress and error, particularly as pertains to the unruly social sciences. An important goal of the paper is to develop that epistemological framework and unlock its ontological implications for the domain of gender. As (...) we will see, the real gender kinds that contemporary social scientists successfully identify and track are very much the same kinds to which Beauvoir was coordinating reference in The Second Sex. The correct identification of those kinds endures as a moral and political priority, regardless of one’s other gender-related normative agenda. (shrink)

In this study, I examine the institutional model of data science as a nascent profession undergoing an occupational founding phase. Drawing on interviews with sixty data scientists, senior managers, and professors from Israel as well as observations at the local professional community’s events, I argue that data scientists endorse an open institutional model, upholding largely internet-based institutions focusing on knowledge sharing, networking, and collaboration. This model grants data scientists expertise, autonomy, and authority vis-à-vis clients, employers, and states; provides them with (...) continued credentialing independent of employing organizations; encourages the wide entry of new members; and helps them deal with the accelerated temporality of their field. This open model enables an omnivorous spreading of data science expertise and is used to challenge professionalization as an occupational-institutional model in other professions. Still, this model faces many challenges. (shrink)