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CHAPTER EIGHT
SEXISM
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Chapter Seven Breakdown
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The Meaning of Sexism
The Economic Effects of Sexism
The Political Effects of Sexism
The Feminist Movement
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Even though women constitute around
50% of the U.S. population, they are still
considered a ‘minority group’.
– What was the definition of minority group?
– There are certain costs associated with being
born female just as there are costs associated
with being born ‘black’ or being of a nonEuropean nationality, in the U.S.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Sexism: a systematic subordination of people on the
basis of their sex
– Sexism limits females to narrow roles
– They are judged based on motherhood and sexuality
only
– This narrows their identity development based on
these two roles, while making everything else about
them invisible. In other words, women in the U.S. are
socially ‘veiled’ except for narrowly defined roles of
mother or sex object.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Sexism where it concerns disadvantaging women is based on
the ‘biology is destiny’ construct. Women biologically are the
ones that reproduce/carry the offspring therefore that
biological function is generalized to their entire character
structure: it is then taken to ensure that women themselves
believe in it through socialization through the family and later
reproduction in male dominated institutions.
– Women in sexist societies like the U.S. are considered
defective in intelligence, having no leadership skills,
emotionally charged etc. In other words the message they
get is that their only use in U.S society is as mothers and
as sexual objects, and that those roles are best fulfilled
when not mixed with any other social interaction. Women
are therefore silenced and taught to be submissive.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Institutional Racism and Male Chauvinism
– Male Chauvinism is a form of personal racism, it is sexism
of the interpersonal nature
• Women depicted as animals in everyday slang: chick,
fox, bitch
• Males refuse to perform routing household tasks they
consider derogatory and ‘women’s work’.
• The mother (wife) and sex-object role of women carries
over to the office/outside work that women do as well.
The coffee brewer in an office of equal ranking staff is
often a woman.
• Being conscious to such chauvinistic tactics has been
part of the consciousness raising of the feminist
movement.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• The greater harms and implications for women is not in
stereotypes that describe male chauvinism but in the effects
of Institutional Sexism: where disadvantage for women is built
into the workings of social institutions
– Gender discrimination becomes a personal trouble for
women that is also a public issue because it is linked to
social institutions.
– Male chauvinism becomes a character defect of
individuals that is linked to the workings of social
institutions that reinforce such characterization of women.
It is a public issue not a personal trouble alone.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Where discrimination against women and minorities is overt,
i.e. explicit it is easier to locate the source of it and attack it.
However when it is implicit, as in the workings of social
institutions, it is much harder to track where it is coming from
– Women therefore do not know who their enemy is, a false
sense of liberation prevails which is what type of
consciousness?
• False or class?
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Biology as destiny implies that each sex is
biologically (naturally) suited to perform
certain roles in society:
– Men are the providers while women and
children are ‘dependents’ on them.
• Remember the dependency relationship when we
talked of ‘third world’ underdevelopment.
• Dependency implies one is considered inferior and
as a result exchange is unequal.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Difference between sex and gender
– Sex: genetic or physical characteristics of
people that identify them as either male or
female
– Gender: is a social construct that summarizes
the culturally accepted behaviors and
expectations required of the sexes,
associated with ways of conducting yourself in
society. Gender refers to the social meaning
behind biological sex.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Gender as social construction is revealed by:
– Women have historically been the providers on equal par with
men when societies were Hunting Gathering and Horticultural
Pastoral
– Women do all kinds of back-breaking manual labor work in the
‘Third World’, including construction, agriculture etc
– The role of women in a social structure like the US have also
varied over time, before and after WW2.
– Using gender resources are distributed in a way that
disadvantages women, which also reveals the functions behind
its social construction.
– Gender gets defined through a ‘political process’ where
restructuring can either harm or benefit women and alter
meanings of gender- ‘Gender formation’
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
•
Identity development: based on experiences in the family and social meanings
attached to group membership: racial, national, sex group etc.
– Ascribed status of women in the US based on: motherhood and sexuality,
regardless of differences in upbringing of individual women.
– Achieved status is always secondary to ascribed status
– Ascribed status becomes the master status
– When master status is devalued, it leads to seperation based on
inferior/superior
– When identity other than based on your master status cannot be verified it
leads to anxiety and loss of self esteem since you judge yourself based on a
devalued master status
– The defense mechanism enacted to guard against that is that you bring
your perceived identity in tune with the actual identity
– Displacing your own identity in favor of the inferior social identity, which
reproduces a social structure of inequality.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Indicators of a devalued ‘master status’ of women and
girls:
– The various indicators of male chauvinism that
have the hidden assumption that women are
inferior to men and are valued only for their
nurturing (motherhood) and sexuality (reproduction)
functions.
– Insulting boys as if they were girls.
– Relocating emotionality and crying, both devalued
in the social structure to the domain of women.
Heard the expression “don’t cry like a girl’?
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• In the school after parental socialization, the notion of female
inferiority is reinforced:
– Most accomplishments taught are ‘achievements’ of men.
Women’s educational achievements are ignored.
– They are tracked into certain fields, away from the hard
sciences towards relatively lower status specialization.
– Women’s place is supposed to be different to a man’s
place, the lesson being that both are not supposed to
compete with each other but women are encouraged to
compete within their group for men’s sexual favors thereby
dividing a class against itself.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Job Opportunities:
– In 2001 women on average earned $511 a week
compared to men’s $672 a week
– Female managers earned $732 a week compared to
men’s $1038 a week
– A dual labor market exists in the U.S. with women being
segregated/overrepresented in certain occupational
categories that are mostly low paying and
underrepresented in other categories that are relatively
high paying.
• Even within categories women get paid less than
men, have lesser experience and less time in
positions held
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Estimates suggest that over half of male-female differences in
earnings is due to discrimination
– Women’s upward mobility is blocked through a glass
ceiling
– White men only 29% of the labor force hold 95% of senior
management positions
– As a group women have the same number of schooling years
as men, therefore this discrimination cannot be explained in
terms of education, rather it is better explained by being a
public issue involving social instituions- institutional sexism.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Economic forces favoring subordination
– Men face less competition when women are segregated
into low paying service jobs
– However men are harmed as well as discrimination
against married women and children in the workplace
reduces family income potential
– Payment of child support
– Lower wages depress average wages of men as well
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• However, some men, those that are of the
ownership class, also known as the
_______, benefit from this arrangement.
– Women as a reserve labor pool that can be
called when the labor market requires it as
during WW2
– Lower average wages
– Deflecting blame from class to gender for
economic troubles that men might face.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Comparable worth:
– Women doing comparable work compared to
men being paid less was widespread till the
equal pay act of 1963 was established.
• How ever dejure amendment does not take care of
defacto practice if the government is not serious in
implementation.
• Main obstacle of equal pay for women is job
segment segregation. One third of women workers
are clustered in 20 of 503 categories of jobs. The
rest are all male dominated.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• The index of segregation:
– What would it take to achieve an equal
configuration of male/female workers
throughout the occupation classifications
– 53% of women would have to move to
achieve equal male female configurations in
the work force
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Home labor:
– 39% of married women remain in the home
being a ‘housewife’
• Being “just” a housewife sends contradictory
messages and devalues household work. It gives
the impression that corporate work or work outside
the home is to be valued more, since such work
carried status- status is defined by the dominant
culture, the dominant culture in the U.S. is:
___________?
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Demeaning and lowering the worth of household
work means that tens of billions of dollars worth
of work (if it were given a dollar value) goes
unpaid. This means that employers benefit by
the unpaid work of ‘housewives’ or women
working a ‘double shift’. If such unpaid work was
paid for, employers would have to pay men
much more just to maintain their household.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Once women’s identity and self worth are damaged through an
inferior ascribed status, and a new identity based on that
ascribed status is internalized by them: it results in i) alienation
(estrangement from the self) and ii)potential for manipulation in
order to achieve self worth.
– Manipulation involves selling products that show women how
unworthy they are of their newly formed ‘sexuality or
motherhood based’ identity. As a result 75% of consumer
expenditures annually are accounted for by women.
– Emotionality is displaced from its actual markers signifying a
change in the outside environment to respond to products by
being linked specifically with certain products. A diamond is
supposed to signify love that can be ‘bought’ and so on…
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• ERA: equal rights amendment: equality of
rights will not be denied on the basis of
sex- failed to pass in 1982, yet the cultural
view is that women have achieved
‘liberation’ in the U.S.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
• Read the definitions and difference
between
• 1. liberal feminists
• 2. Radical feminists
• 3. Socialist feminists
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
The Meaning of Sexism
• Male Chauvinism versus Institutional
Sexism
• Is Biology Destiny?
• Sex versus Gender
• Socialization and Self-Concept
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Institutional Sexism
• Subordination of women at the institutional
level
• Examples
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Male Chauvinism
• Attitudes an actions through which
individual males display their sense of
superiority over women
• Examples
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Is Biology Destiny?
• Ideology based on assumption that basis
biological and psychological differences
exist between males and females
• The “domestic code”
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Sex versus Gender
• Sex: genetic and physical characteristics
of persons that identify as male or female
• Gender: socially constructed concept
referring to the culturally accepted
behaviors and ways of relating to others
expected of two sexes
– Gender as political claims process
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
The Economic Effects of
Sexism
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Earnings and Job Opportunities
Forces Favoring Economic Subordination
The Issue of Comparable Worth
Laboring in the Home
The Consumer Role
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Earnings and Job Opportunities
• Gender wage gap
• Dual labor market
• The “glass ceiling”
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
The Political Effects of Sexism
• Women’s Rights and the Law
• Political Participation
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
The Feminist Movement
• The Development of the Feminist
Movement
• Issues and Goals
• The Gains of the Movement
• The Question of Men’s Liberation
• Hopes for the Future
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.
Key Branches of Feminism
Causes? Issues?
Goals?
Branches
Liberal
Feminism
Radical
Feminism
Socialist
Feminism
Neubeck, Social Problems: A Critical Approach. © 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.