HND Social Science

 

 

GENDER   

 

 

 

 

 

 

·       WOMEN AT WORK

 

·       THE DOMESTIC LABOUR DEBATE

 

·       GENDER, SEX AND SEXUALITY

 

GETTING STARTED

 

Sociological interest in gender is relatively recent.  Gender issues were for a long time either ignored altogether or submerged in the sociology of the family.  The emphasis was formerly on difference rather than on inequality, with the rather optimistic suggestion often being advanced of a progressive convergence in roles.  The rise of women’s movement since 1970 has had a major influence on sociology, and the sociology of gender can be largely seen as the sociology of women.

 

The main themes of questions set on this topic are:

 

1.                  Women in the labour market.

2.                  The domestic labour debate.

3.                  Sex, gender and sexuality.

 

Answering a question based on any one of these themes usually requires reference to the other two areas.  Although most textbooks and examination syllabuses have separate sections dealing with gender, the issue of gender inequality now runs through all of sociology.  Other topics where gender must be considered include education, media, health, crime and of course, the family.

 

 

Definitions

 

§                     Sex refers to the biological differences between male and female.

 

§                     Gender refers to the socially defined differences between men and women.

 

§                     Sexuality refers to desires, needs and behaviour which are seen as specifically sexual in nature.

 

§                     Patriarchy is the power relationship by which men dominate women.

 

§                     Patriarchal ideology is the set of beliefs which support male domination.

 

ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES

 

WOMEN AT WORK

 

The main concerns are:

 

§                     women’s earnings;

§                     patterns of employment;

§                     relationships between home and work.

 

In general, women are concentrated in low-paid, low-status work.  They may be segregated into particular kinds of work which is seen as feminine or located in the lower ranks of those occupations shared with men.  Women are frequently found in part-time work.  The main explanations of gender inequality in the labour market include the following:

 

1.                  Functionalist

 

Gender roles are assumed to ‘fit’ the needs of individuals, the family and the social system.  These roles are influenced by biology, are learned through socialisation and emphasise that the woman’s primary responsibility is the home.

 

Critics see such approaches as avoiding a proper consideration of inequalities in the distribution of labour and power, with the consequent exploitation of women in work and at home.

 

2.                  Feminist

 

Emphasis is placed here on the importance of the housewife-mother role in maintaining male advantage in the labour market.  Housework is unpaid and housewives are seen as economically inactive. Feminists, in contrast, see it as real productive work.  Women’s occupations are often extensions of their domestic roles (cooking, caring, cleaning, etc) and are low-paid and low-status occupations.  The primacy given to the housewife-mother role often interferes with women’s careers;  for instance, women may end up as low-paid home workers, in an attempt to combine economic activity with the housewife-mother role. 

 

Critics argue that women are not exploited at home, or that the cause of any exploitation which might exist is capitalism and not men.

 

3.                  Marxist

 

Marxism was the inspiration for many feminists (but today it is the modern Marxists who are often influenced by feminism).  Women’s confinement to the home is to ensure the reproduction of labour power for capitalism.  Women are a reserve army of labour, available for low-paid insecure work when required but not seen as having a right to work.  This view is reinforced by higher rates of female unemployment and by their concentration in part-time work

Critics see this view as underestimating the particular disadvantages of women, and failing to explain gender inequality in socialist societies.

 

4.                  A Gendered Labour Market

 

Women do different jobs from men.  They are concentrated in clerical, caring, cooking and cleaning occupations.  Some jobs are seen as being more suitable for women.  Schools may still encourage this view, and despite the law, discrimination continues.  If women do different jobs from men, and if women’s employment has risen while men’ unemployment has risen, then it is difficult to see women as a reserve army if labour.

 

5.                  Dual Labour Market Theory

 

The labour market is divided into two sectors.  The primary sector comprises secure, better-paid jobs with career prospects.  The secondary sector comprises insecure, low-paid jobs with few opportunities.  Access to the primary sector depends on having and displaying those characteristics preferred by employers who may see women as worse trained, less experienced and less reliable. Like the Marxist approach, this explanation can be applied to ethnic minorities and to immigrant labour.

 

Critics see this theory as avoiding the issue of class exploitation and denying the special position of women.

 

Alternative explanations explain female inequality using concepts like caste and underclass to emphasise their lack of mobility.

 

 

 

THE DOMESTIC LABOUR DEBATE

 

Currently the debate over the significance of housework has become rather one-sided.  Feminists have successfully challenged the traditional views that housework is naturally a woman’s responsibility and that thee is a tendency towards more equal conjugal roles.  (Both these views are argued from the functionalist perspective in the notes on The family).  Feminists see women as being exploited by men in the home.  Marxists explain the development of housework by linking it to the development of the factory system in the early days of capitalism

GENDER, SEX AND SEXUALITY

Most sociologists reject natural or biological explanations of gender roles and of women’s position in society.  Functionalists see gender roles, which are learned through socialisation, as fitting the needs of the social system.  Feminists see gender roles as unequal, as well as different, and as being imposed on women by men.  Marxists also see gender in terms of socially structured inequality, but only as a part of the more important class division of society.

Apparent differences in masculine and feminine sexuality are seen by feminists and Marxists as ideological rather than natural.  Interactionists, while agreeing that sexuality is largely a social construction, would emphasise the way in which behaviour follows negotiation, rather than being determined by structural influences.  The wider significance of differences in sexuality is the way they are used to control and oppress women.  Rape, fear of rape, and the use of hostile language can all be seen as limiting the freedom of women and encouraging them to seek the protection of marriage.  The role of the media is seen as increasingly important, reinforcing the images of femininity and masculinity which develop in the home and school.

You will be rewarded for considering masculinity and homosexuality as part of the debate on sex and gender.

“The sociology of gender is not exclusively about women.”

 

THEORITICAL AND EMPIRICAL STUDIES

HOUSEWORK

Bernard

‘In truth being a housewife makes you sick’.  Bernard distinguished ‘his’ marriage from ‘her’ marriage.  Married men are more successful in their careers, better paid, healthier and live longer.  This is an effect rather than a cause of getting married.  The ‘duties of a wife’ enhance a husband’s life.  Married women are less healthy and less content with marriage than men.  They initiate divorce more often.  Single women are the cream of the crop.  Single men are the bottom of the barrel. 

Delphy

Housework is productive domestic labour, eg. food is processed and clothes are cleaned.  Delphy presents a Marxist analysis where men own the means of production (the house, washing machine and oven) and exploit women.  There is no symmetrical family.  Men own and control the family resources and consume more than their fair share.  Men control the personal spending of women, who are expected to make sacrifices.  Women support their husband’s without pay, eg. as farm labourers, secretaries and hostesses.  They provide unpaid health care for children, men, the old and the disabled.  Women are pushed into marriage by economic and ideological pressures.  Divorce is no escape, since the responsibility for home and children remains.

Oakley

Housework is seen by many as an exclusively feminine activity, regardless of time or class.  It is a woman’s main responsibility, and women are mainly involved in undertaking it.  This includes housewives, daughters, grandparents and servants.  Oakley’s 40 subjects described their housework in the language of the alienated assembly-line worker.  They saw it as monotonous and fragmented and lacking in pay, pension, sick pay or holidays.  It is not contractual nor is it observed by adults.  Labour-saving devices fail in practice to free women from domestic labour, as standards and expectations rise.  Average hours rose from 70 in 1950, to 77 in 1971.  the fact that housework is not seen as real work is both the cause ad effect of women’s low status.  The beneficiaries of domestic labour are men, and those employers who have a fit and suitably motivated workforce.

In 1987 Oakley looked again at family life and concluded that the family itself was not the cause of women’s problems, but rather a symptom of those problems and a location in which those problems were expressed.  The male-female relationship was based on family life and on the class relations of domestic production located in the home.  The dual causes of the problems were gender oppression by men and class oppression in a capitalist society.  ‘The main function of marriage is to keep men and women apart’.  This is achieved through women’s responsibility for housework and childcare, and paid employment for both men and women outside the home.  The family is the location for differential gender role socialisation.

Boulton

Boulton noted that men thought that the division of domestic labour had become more equal and should become even more equal.  However, empirical research contradicted these views.  Only 9 out of 50 subjects helped ‘extensively’ in the home.  Men enjoyed and participated in childcare but not that which involved the routine messy stuff.  It also seemed as if men were advocating an equal division of labour only after office hours.

Graham

H Graham (1991) argued that women’s experience of housework was influenced by class and ethnicity.  She also distinguished the attitudes of women to paid domestic labour from housework in their own homes.  (See the notes on , The family).

Morris

Morris (1995) had found that wives of men who became unemployed did not necessarily seek paid employment.  If wives did get jobs, the men did not take over housework in any significant way.  The man was still seen by both partners as the breadwinner, even though he was unemployed.  Wives becoming unemployed had no effect on the domestic division of labour.

Wheelock

J Wheelock (1990) presented evidence which rejected the commonly held view that male unemployment does not alter the domestic division of labour.  She argued that the domestic division of labour was influenced by the joint effects of male unemployment and women’s working hours.  Wives in full-time paid work spent less time on housework and their husbands did more.  Often the attitudes in these families lagged behind their actual behaviour in moving towards a more egalitarian division of labour.

 

WOMEN AT WORK

Structuralist Views

Structuralist arguments see women’s disadvantaged position in the labour market not as resulting from individual cases of discrimination, but as being embedded in socially structured inequality.

Barron and Norris applied the dual labour market theory to women in the UK.  They explained how women, like other disadvantaged groups, can be largely excluded from the primary sector of the labour market.

Braverman in the USA and Bland in Britain applied the Marxist concept of a reserve army of labour to women.  Carchedi, an Italian Marxist, argued that the feminisation of office work was a significant factor in the proletarianisation of white-collar work.  Feminisation can be seen as both cause and effect of the low pay and status of a job.

Home and Family Life

This is seen as a major handicap for women in the labour market by many feminist writers.  These arguments are not necessarily alternatives to those above, but could be contributory to women’s exclusion from good (or, indeed, any) work.

Oakley has described how the primacy of the housewife-mother role impinges on all other aspects of women’s lives.  Paid work may be the extension of this housewife-mother role.  Apart from caring and cleaning,  Bennet has added secretarial work, which is described as the business equivalent of housework.

Land has shown how the inadequacy of proper childcare facilities limits women’s choices of work. The projected labour shortage of the 1990s is likely to encourage the expansion of day care for children.  In earlier work, she has shown the crucial role women played in maintaining poor families and in keeping families above the poverty line, thus exposing the myth that women worked for ‘pin money’.

Klein has produced a study on the causes and effects of more married women working in Britain.  Huws has developed previous studies on home-workers to include those using new technology.  The same experience of alienation was noted.

Education and the Labour Market

The links between education and the labour market are discussed by  Sharpe, and more recently Griffin, have shown how schooling lowers girls’ ambitions.

Other Occupations

Finally, it may be worth considering those women’s occupations which are not usually considered to be real work.  These include housework, care for the disabled and dependants at home, prostitution and other forms of crime.

 

GENDER, SEX AND SEXUALITY

Morgan suggested the following possible relationships between sex and gender.

1.                  Sex determines gender. Biological differences explain behaviour and the social meaning we give to it.

2.                  Sex gets rigid limits within which minor cultural variations might exist.

3.                  Sex has a minimal influence, but culture produces a wide variety of gender behaviour and meanings attached to it.

We could, for example, assess the relative importance of gender, race, age and class in different cultures.

Biological Determinism

Biological determinism is rejected by sociologists but is supported by other disciplines.

Tiger and Fox argue that natural selection has encouraged hormonal differences which can explain gender differences in instincts, emotions and behaviour.  They claim ‘nature intended mother and child to be together’.

Wilson advocated the development of socio-biology, where contemporary behaviour is explained by reference to primitive animal instincts.  He cites aggression, maternal instincts and male dominance as examples.  This approach is echoed by the zoologist Desmond Morris, who has popularised the reduction of social behaviour to simple animal behaviour.

Bowlby wrote a psychological account of the ill effects of maternal deprivation on children.  This has subsequently been misused as an ideological argument to keep women at home.

 

 

 

Functionalist Views and Critics

Functionalist sociologists argue that the alleged universality of gender roles is explained in terms of their usefulness, rather than biology.  The sexual division of labour is seen as functional for both individuals and society.

Murdock emphasises the importance of motherhood and claims that the mother role and the family are universal.

Parsons emphasises the importance of the functions of the family, particularly as regards the stabilisation of the adult personality and socialisation of children.  The expressive female role is compared with the instrumental male role, and they are seen as complementary.

The view that gender is largely socially defined is supported by evidence of cultural and historical variation.  Therefore comparative and historical studies are important.

Mead was able to identify considerable variation in sex and gender roles in simple societies, including the reversal of traditional roles and the virtual absence of role differentiation.

Oakley, using Murdock’s secondary data, refuted his claim that gender roles were universal.  The kibbutz was cited as an example of successful child rearing outside the family.  She accepted that sexuality, reproduction and maternal care are influenced by biology, but reminded us of their cultural variations.  Norms of sexual behaviour vary (even the incest taboo) ad fertility and pregnancy have been medicalised and are socially controlled.

 

Sexuality

Rowbotham gives a Marxist-feminist history of sexuality.  Sexuality is part of the superstructure which is produced by the economic substructure and helps to maintain it.  In the seventeenth century, women were seen as sexually insatiable and thus threatening.  In the nineteenth century, early capitalism saw a distinction between the brutish sexuality of working-class life and the pure non-sexual bourgeois ideal of women. The sexual liberation of the twentieth century has seen sex used to sell goods and as a commodity itself.  This history is a description of norms rather than of actual behaviour.

De Beauvoir and later McRobbie condemn romantic love as a myth to enslave women.

McIntosh notes the acceptance of the male need to casual sex and compares it with the surprise expressed that women can be prostitutes.

Millett see prostitution as an extreme model of all male-female relations.

Smart notes that women are seen as victims and potential victims of sex crimes and that this controls their movements.  Women, and their male ‘protectors’, ensure that they take precautions against rape.  In other cultures women may be seen as sexual aggressors and men also take precautions to avoid sexual attack.  (Men in prison avoid homosexual rape).

McRobbie sees the development of a feminine youth culture based at home, rather than on the streets, as a result of this confinement, though in later work she sees shopping for clothes as part of a feminine youth culture.

Gillespie writes about women shouting sexual insults at men in West African cities where single women have been freed from their subordinate position in extended families.

Lees has described how sexual insults from boys and girls about girls controls girls’ behaviour.  Girls can deny they are sexually available and reject labels such as slag, slut, slapper, dog, bitch, cow, etc.  They do not, however, reject the right of boys and other girls to judge their reputations.  Escape from this language comes with a regular boyfriend or separation from boys.  The latter course makes girls vulnerable to other insults, such as ‘tight bitch’ and frigid.  The effects of this social control can be seen in a girl’s behaviour, clothes, friendships with boys and girls, and social life.

Masculinity

Early feminist sociology protested that women had been neglected in traditional sociological research.  They tended to be ignored altogether or perhaps treated as a special case.  Masculine behaviour was seen as the norm and feminine behaviour as a variation which needed explanation.  Even talking about feminist sociology, where women research women’s issues from a woman’s point of view, suggests that it is a special approach different from ‘normal’ sociology.  We do not talk about ‘masculinity’ sociology – it is just sociology.

The study of men and masculinity is very underdeveloped.  Masculinity may disadvantage men just as femininity disadvantages women.  Certainly studying masculinity helps us to understand how men may oppress women.  Men’s aggression, sexuality and even violence are used to dominate women (and other men).

Masculinity has been used to explain the development of crime.  Young men learn about being ‘sharp’ and ‘hard’ in sub-cultures (see sub-cultural theories of deviance, earlier notes).  This masculine behaviour limits the activities of girls as well as boys.  Friendship between the sexes is discouraged and feminine behaviour in boys is the subject of ridicule.

Men learn not to show emotion or weakness.  This may make it difficult for them to develop relationships with families and may lead them to deny ill health and thus put off getting treatment.  Women are more generally willing to discuss their bodies and seek medical help.

Calling a woman a ‘slag’ indicates disapproval of female sexuality.  Male sexuality is celebrated and is a way of demonstrating manhood.  Disapproval is reserved for real or imagined homosexuality. The supposed association of homosexuality with femininity is used by some men to insult both women and homosexual men.