The Sociologist May 2015 On the Cover: Photo by Ricky Johnson at CONTENTS the Woodshed Orlando for Morpheous Bondage Extravaganza '14 3 What’s next? Contributors DCSS Banquet Bringing Social Science Research into Ruth Milkman the Policy Process Julie Fennell Johanna Bockman Patricia Lengermann 4 Gillian Niebrugge Class Inequalities among Women Publisher District of Columbia Sociological Society 10 Editor Y. Shaw-Taylor The Slippery Search for Kinky Sex Become a Writer for The Sociologist. 15 Send us your writings about your Inequality in the District sociology. We are looking for provocative pieces and insights. If you are a DCSS member you 17 receive The Sociologist as part of The Founding of DCSS—part two membership. If you are not a DCSS member, and would like to receive electronic copies 21 of The Sociologist, email the editor: Founding Members of DCSS 1934 [email protected]. 2 Annual Banquet & Award Ceremony Bringing Social Science Research into the Policy Process Panelists Patricia White Roberta Spalter-Roth Amy Best Kelly Joyce Thursday, May 28, 2015 Langston Room, 2021 14th St, NW, Washington, DC 20009 ╬╬╬ 3 any standard, the situation has improved Class Inequalities among greatly since the 1970s. This improvement Women has not been evenly distributed across the female population, however. Ruth Milkman City University of New York Graduate Center The United States made substantial progress In precisely the same historical toward reducing gender inequality in the late period during which gender twentieth century, not only thanks to the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s inequalities declined dramatically, but also as an unintended consequence of class inequalities rapidly widened, the shift to a post-industrial economy. The with profound implications for gender gap in pay rates, for example, narrowed not only because unprecedented women as well as men. numbers of women gained entry to the elite professions and upper-level management starting in the 1970s, but also because real wages for male workers, especially those On the contrary, in precisely the without a college education, fell sharply in same historical period during which gender that same period with de-industrialization inequalities declined dramatically — the and union decline. 1970s through the early twenty-first century As manufacturing withered, the — class inequalities rapidly widened, with traditionally female-employing service profound implications for women as well as sector expanded; surging demand for female men. Class inequalities among women are labor, in turn, drew more and more married greater than ever before. women and mothers into the workforce. By Highly educated, upper middle class the twentieth century's end, women typically women — a group that is vastly were employed outside the home throughout overrepresented in both media depictions of their adult lives, apart from brief interludes women at work and in the wider political of full-time caregiving. They were far less discourse about gender inequality — have likely to be economically dependent on men far better opportunities than their than their mothers and grandmothers had counterparts in earlier generations did. Yet been. Their legal and social status had their experience is a world apart from that of dramatically improved as well, and the idea the much larger numbers of women workers that women and men should have equal who struggle to make ends meet in poorly- opportunities in the labor market won wide paid clerical, retail, restaurant, and hotel acceptance. jobs; in hospitals and nursing homes; or as Women workers continued to face housekeepers, nannies, and home care serious problems, including sex workers. discrimination in pay and promotions, Many of those working women are sexual harassment, and the formidable paid at or just above the legal minimum challenges of balancing work and family wage; and some — especially women of commitments in a nation that famously lags color and immigrants — earn even less behind its competitors in public provision because their employers routinely violate for paid family leave and child care. Still, by minimum wage, overtime, and other workplace laws. Although female managers 4 and professionals typically work full time In addition, affluent, highly educated (or more than full-time), many women in women are more likely to be married or in lower-level jobs are offered fewer hours marriage-like relationships than are than they would prefer, a problem working-class women, and such compounded by unpredictable work relationships are typically more stable schedules that play havoc with their family among the privileged. Women in managerial responsibilities. Millions of women are and professional jobs not only can more trapped in female-dominated clerical and easily afford paid domestic help, but also are service jobs that offer few if any more likely to have access to paid sick days opportunities for advancement, and in which and paid parental leave than women in employment itself is increasingly precarious. lower-level jobs. And families routinely For them, best-selling books like Sheryl reproduce class inequalities over the Sandberg’s 2013 Lean In, which encourages generations: affluent parents go to great women to be more assertive in the lengths to ensure that their children — now workplace, are of little relevance. Indeed if daughters as well as sons — acquire the women in lower-level jobs are foolhardy educational credentials that will secure them enough to follow such advice, they are more a privileged place in the labor market, likely to be fired than to win a promotion or similar to that of their parents, when they are pay raise.1 grown. The widening inequalities between women in managerial and professional jobs and those employed at lower levels of the Women of color are labor market are further exacerbated by class-differentiated marriage and family disproportionately likely to have arrangements. Most people marry or partner been shut out of the gender with those of a similar class status, a revolution that transformed the longstanding phenomenon that anthropologists call class endogamy. This United States during the late multiplies the effects of rising class twentieth century. inequality: at one end of the spectrum are households with two well-paid professionals or managers, while at the other end But class divisions have widened households depend on one (in the case of over recent decades within communities of one-parent families) or two far lower color as well as among women. Although to incomes. a much lesser extent than among white women, unprecedented numbers of women of color have joined the privileged strata that Affluent, highly educated women benefitted most from the reduction in gender are more likely to be married or inequality over recent decades. There is a in marriage-like relationships literature on "the declining significance of race," starting with William Julius Wilson's than are working-class women. 1980 book of that title.2 More recently, public concern about growing class inequality has surged. Yet the rapid rise in "within-group" class inequalities among women has attracted much less attention. 5 One dimension of this problem involves the recent emergence of class disparities in regard to the longstanding However, that progress has been phenomenon of occupational segregation by limited and sharply skewed by gender, a longstanding linchpin of gender the rapid growth in class inequality and also the most important driver of gender disparities in earnings. (That is so inequality over the late twentieth because unequal pay for equal work, century. although still all too often present, is a smaller component of the overall gender gap in earnings than the fact that female- Figure 1. Occupational Segregation by dominated jobs typically pay less than male- Gender, United States, 1950-2000 dominated jobs with comparable skill requirements.) 70 Whereas between 1900 and 1960, the 60.8 62 56.8 extent of occupational segregation by sex 60 53.1 3 48.4 was notoriously impervious to change, it 50 46.6 began to decline substantially in the United 40 States since 1960. The standard measure of segregation, "the index of dissimilarity," 30 which specifies the proportion of men or Percentage 20 women who would have to change jobs to 10 have both genders evenly distributed 0 through the occupational structure, declined 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 sharply between 1960 and 1990, and in later Year years continued to fall at a less rapid pace, 4 as Figure 1 shows. This also led to a steady Note: Index of dissimilarity computed from U.S. decline in the gender gap in earnings. decennial census data (IPUMS) Source: Among full-time workers, women's annual http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/vanneman/endofgr/ip earnings were, on average, 59.94 percent of umsoccseg.html. men's in 1970; by 2010 the ratio had grown to 77.4 percent.5 More specifically, occupational segregation by sex has declined sharply in professional and managerial jobs, but has The narrowing of the gender gap hardly declined at all in lower-level in earnings and the associated occupations, as Figure 2 shows. reduction in the extent of High-wage "male" jobs in industries like construction and durable goods occupational segregation reflect manufacturing remain extremely sex- real progress toward gender segregated, as do low-wage "female" jobs equality. like child care, domestic service, and clerical work. 6 Figure 2. Class Differences in Occupational Segregation by Gender, 1950-2000 Source: David A. Cotter, Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman, "Gender Inequality at Work," The American People: U.S. Census 2000 (New York: Russell Sate Foundation and Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2004) College-educated women have services to replace their own unpaid labor disproportionately benefited from inside the home. occupational integration, while less educated But the class pattern of gender women are much more likely to be in disparities in earnings in the late twentieth traditionally sex-stereotyped jobs with low century is complicated.