Reproduce Gender Inequality Research Articles

Women Partners, Feeling Rules, and the Gendered Consequences of Porn Addiction

A significant portion of the research on porn addiction has focused on the construction of this social problem and the heterosexual male addicts, yet relatively little is known about women partners. Analyzing open-ended online surveys and interviews with women partners of male porn addicts, this article demonstrates how the medicalization of porn addiction has social consequences which are profoundly gendered and tangled in emotion work. Respondents’ narratives reveal how family, friends, therapists, and partners center the addict’s “recovery” and “healing” by imposing feeling rules that suppress women’s anger and sadness. These feeling rules repress partners’ discussions of the social challenges of porn addiction and lead women to seek out anonymous support online on a site explicitly designed to affirm partners. The site provides opportunities for respondents to discuss the implications of their relationships in ways not fully possible offline. This article thus expands sociological understandings of porn addiction, gender, and emotion work by (1) highlighting the social implications for women who in these partnerships, especially those which reflect and reproduce gender inequalities, and by (2) documenting how women make meaning of social support which affirms, rather than minimizes, those gendered experiences. By doing so, this article raises questions about how the medicalization of other issues related to sexuality, paired with clinical authority of therapists, results in the constraining of women’s intimate lives under the guise of treatment.

Gender Disparity in Chinese Academia: A Conceptual Analysis Through Organizational Theory Lens

Women academics face unparalleled challenges such as underrepresentation and marginalization in Chinese higher education. A review of the literature revealed a tendency in the scholarly discussions that separates gender from the social and organizational processes, which is a missed opportunity to better understand how gender interacts with the broader social, cultural, and political contexts. Using three major organizational theory perspectives, this conceptual paper addresses the issue of academic gender disparity through analyzing organizational culture, organizational management, and the way higher education institutions interact with the external environments. Higher education institutions are gendered organizations that create, fortify, and reproduce gender inequalities. This essay will provide various methodological, epistemological, and ontological possibilities of interventions for transformative organizational change.

Morocco’s northern border region: gender, labour and mobility

This paper presents the results of two recent studies on gender, labour and mobility on the borders between Morocco and Spain. Industrial relocation and the feminised labour market was the first focus of our attention. Subsequently, we integrated research on cross-border labour markets, such as the small-scale commercial activity carried out by women. The objective of these studies is to understand the impacts of globalisation processes, such as industrial relocation and border dynamics, on the daily lives of women. Therefore, we consider theoretical approaches to female participation in emerging economic circuits in developing countries as a macro-vision that enables contextualisation at a micro-social level. At the micro level, our analysis draws from the notion of lived precariousness as a perspective that allows us to examine the testimonies and the meaning they give to their experience. The results not only indicate that the complexity of border life and its precariousness represent a challenge for women – who develop different ways of dealing with structural and cultural limits as they strive for more substantial autonomy and empowerment – but also provide a glimpse of a broader trend in female economic participation in these circuits that appears to reproduce gender inequalities and pose new obstacles.

Crowd work in STEM‐related fields: A window of opportunity from a gender perspective?

AbstractAfter the Global Financial Crisis (2008) many people found new job opportunities on crowd platforms. The COVID‐19 crisis reinforced this trend and virtual work is expected to increase. Although the working conditions of individuals engaged on these platforms is an emerging topic, of research, the existing literature tends to overlook the gendered dimension of the gig economy. Following a quantitative approach, based on the statistical analysis of 444 profiles (platform Freelancer.com in Spain and Argentina), we examine the extent to which the gig economy reproduces gender inequalities such as the underrepresentation of women in STEM‐related tasks and the gender pay gap. While the findings reveal lower participation of women than men, this gap is not higher in Argentina than in Spain. Moreover, gender variations in hourly wages are not as marked as expected, and such differences disappear once STEM skill levels are controlled for. Asymmetry in individuals' STEM skill level provides a better explanation than gender of the hourly wage differences. This finding opens a window of opportunity to mitigate the classical gender discrimination that women face in technological fields in traditional labor markets. Finally, the paper identifies some issues concerning the methodological bias entailed by the use of an application programming interface in cyber‐research, when analyzing gender inequalities.

Labour markets, families and public policies shaping gender relations and parenting: Introduction to the Special Issue

Objective: This article introduces the reader to the Special Issue "Labour markets, families and public policies shaping gender relations and parenting" and gives a theoretical and empirical overview of gender roles and gender equality in Europe. Background: This Special Issue analyses the connection between labour markets, families, social policy, and gender relations in several European countries. Method: The six included articles are based on qualitative and quantitative approaches and data that have been gathered in Finland, Norway, Poland, Spain, and across the entire EU. Results: Key findings are: (1) In less egalitarian countries, children of single parents suffer more nutritional, educational and social life deprivation. (2) The institutional design of parental leave can contribute to reproducing gender inequality in the use of leave. (3) The institutional design interacts with cultural norms in shaping fatherhood practices of migrant fathers. (4) Individualised, performance-based wage and career schemes can counteract the effects of gender-equalising family policies. (5) Fathers taking leave independently from the mother and for an extended period are more involved in childcare beyond the leave period, and (6) the use of longer unpaid parental leave by mothers leads to a more unequal distribution of childcare between the parents. Conclusion: This Special Issue highlights that even in the most egalitarian countries, there remain persistent challenges to achieving gender equality regarding labour market, institutions and family life.

Gender and the symbolic power of academic conferences in fictional texts

ABSTRACT Across the contemporary global higher education sector, there is an increased focus on gender and the academic profession, particularly inequalities. Previous studies construct a clear picture of the academy as an unfriendly profession for women, particularly highlighting the challenge to ‘belong’. A growing body of literature demonstrates how conferences contribute to the development of academic careers but are also shown to be exclusionary spaces for many different groups, including women academics. This study focuses on how gender manifests in cultural representations of conferences – and the academics involved. Based on a qualitative gender analysis of symbolic references to academic conferences from a sample of written fictional texts, the article reveals how fictional representations of conferences portray gender and especially how they contribute to depictions that reproduce gender inequalities. Focusing on who is attending fictional conferences and what these characters are doing at or in relation to conferences, our analysis highlights how women’s viability as academics is challenged across a range of texts. We argue that cultural representations of academics cannot be ignored in gender analyses of academia, due to the role they play in constructing a dominant imaginary of academics.

Same habitus in new field? How mobile phone communication reproduces masculinities and gender inequality in intimate relationships in Mwanza, Tanzania

The use of mobile phones and other communication technologies is booming in low-income contexts. Yet there is lack of detailed analyses of their impact to social interactions, including intimate relationships between men and women and gender-based violence. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field, we argue that mobile phones reproduce gender inequality and negative masculinities in these relationships. This happens through the diverse use of phones, and the interactive interface of the physical, electronic and social spaces within the broader social and economic context. We analyzed 48 in-depth interviews with men and women in Mwanza, Tanzania to explore how mobile phone use reproduces entrenched masculinities, gender norms, and power struggles in their daily lives and social interactions. Intimate partners navigate these complexities in several ways, including by creating ‘private spaces’ through their phones and concealing their communications. Men draw on negative masculinities to dominate their partner’s phone use, while women engage social recognition and family custodianship to influence their partner’s behaviour. These endeavours redefine concepts such as love and care, trust and faithfulness in the relationships. It is crucial to assess how technological advances are transforming intimate relationships and impacting gender-based violence in low-income countries.

Gendering Identity Talk: Gamers’ Gendered Constructions of Gamer Identity

ABSTRACT Despite comprising roughly half of the gaming population and engaging in similar activities, women remain marginalized in gaming spaces. Previous scholarship has shown how cultural and subcultural gender conventions can serve to reproduce gender inequality in a range of social contexts. This article examines how video gamers used identity talk to gender themselves through the telling of self-narratives. Players represented themselves as gendered through narratives of play, framing similar gaming behaviors as either masculine or feminine. This retelling of gaming practices was rooted in larger, cultural meanings of gender, and in repackaging their gaming in gender-congruent manners, gamers reproduced gender within gaming spaces. Ultimately, this research presents how gamers maintained gaming as a social space dominated by men through their reproduction of a gender order that valued men’s play and minimized women’s play.

Precarious Professionals: Layoffs and Gender Inequality in the Oil and Gas Industry.

As mass layoffs, downsizing, and corporate restructuring have become standard organizational practices, professional work is becoming less stable. We examine the effects of this turbulence on gender inequality through a case study of layoffs in the oil and gas industry. Using a longitudinal survey that followed a cohort of recently hired scientists and engineers at a multinational oil and gas company from 2012-2016, we find that a major reduction-in-force during our study resulted in significant gender disparities in firm departures. Results indicate that about seventy percent of the gender gap in departures can be explained by underlying gender differences in the formal layoff criteria and workers' experiences in the firm prior to layoffs, pointing to formal organizational processes as insidious mechanisms driving inequality. The firm stated that layoffs were determined by performance and skill set, but the actual attributes for surviving layoffs turned out to be more malleable and open to bias. Results suggest that the firm's performance rating system may provide a pathway through which women's relational disadvantages became formalized in seemingly bureaucratically neutral ways. Our findings illustrate how increasing insecurity in professional careers may disadvantage women and shed light on the organizational mechanisms that reproduce gender inequality in professional work today.

Digital reading and gender inequality in higher education

ABSTRACT Digital text has become the dominant medium for participation in higher education. Yet little is known about the consequences from the shift to digital text usage on the academic reading practices of specific groups of students. Using a unique data set of higher education students, we analyse differences in digital reading skills, practices, perception, and experience for female students and male students. Then we explain these differences by social inequality related to gendered reading practices and artifacts and reveal that the digitisation of academic reading is reproducing gender inequality in higher education.

Property in whose name? Intrahousehold bargaining over homeownership in China

Previous research typically examined homeownership inequality across individuals or households, overlooking the intrahousehold allocation of homeownership. Using couple-level data of the 2016 China Family Panel Studies, our study addresses the gap by examining the bargaining over homeownership between husbands and wives in China. Descriptive results reveal a large gender gap in homeownership: only about one-quarter of couples listed the wife as an owner on the Housing Ownership Certificate, whereas about 92% listed the husband. The gender gap in ownership, however, has narrowed among couples married after 2000. Multivariate analyses show that economic autonomy, relative resources, housing purchase conditions, and modernization significantly increase wives’ homeownership, but with varying degrees among rural and urban wives. Women’s own socioeconomic status is more important for acquiring homeownership for urban wives, yet rural wives’ homeownership depends more on the resource exchange with their husbands. Given the stratifying effects of homeownership, our findings of the unequal distribution of homeownership between husbands and wives underscore how family dynamics reproduce gender inequality.

The (im)mobility of masculinities: discourses on hiring men in long-term care services in Catalonia

The presence of male job seekers in the long-term care sector poses new challenges for organizations operating in this environment. We take a qualitative approach to analyze the discourses and practices applied by managers of long-term care services in relation to hiring men in their organizations. In this analysis we explore how masculinities are mobilized and whether the growing male presence has brought about changes in hiring requirements in terms of gender. The growing number of professionally trained male carers who are willing to work in direct care settings does not, at the moment, seem to be a factor that alters or challenges organizational hiring requirements. We introduce the concept of (im)mobilization of masculinities to illustrate how, although care service organizations’ recruitment practices do mobilize idealized and alternative conceptions of masculinity, hiring men is not their priority. These practices help to reproduce gender inequalities in the long-term care sector.

Analyzing ‘Working from Home’ as ‘the New Normal’ for Working Women from Feminist’ Lens

Working from home, when workers accomplish their duties and works at home, have become an important phenomenon during the Covid-19 pandemic, that have been practiced for more than a year since the Covid-19 outbreak. For working women, working from home have combined two women’s duties in one place at the same time, those are their responsibilities as workers, and their responsibilities at homes – including care work, as the common gender role of women. This article aims to explore whether working from home could become a conducive mode of work for women and family’s welfare. What factors do the policy makers need to consider, so that working from home would not reproduce gender inequality against women. This article was developed from literature studies on the analysis and policy framework at the global level, and also several existing researches about the challenges that have been faced by working women during the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia.

Pedagogies of perfection in the postfeminist digital age: young women’s negotiations of health and fitness on social media

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore how pedagogies of perfection in fitness content on social media work as a postfeminist technology of the self, exhorting young women to act upon themselves to become ‘perfect’ but hiding the extent to which exercise as aesthetic labour is normatively demanded. We draw on focus group and individual interviews with 37 young women who follow fitness content on Instagram and a discourse analysis of the social media presence of Patry Jordán, a famous Spanish fitness influencer. Through the concept of pedagogies of perfection, we explain how fitspiration is a gendered public pedagogy of digital health through which neoliberalism and postfeminism are disseminated, providing techniques to develop individualized projects of the self. The perfect is the horizon of expectation for continued self-optimization, where young women engage in a never-ending project of the body that also demands the improvement of psychological attitudes. Through the careful articulation of 'positive' pedagogies, the idea of imperfection or failure becomes embedded within the perfect. This production of the self both as a problem and with possibilities represents the horizon of expectation, a powerful force that leads to the belief that all women can achieve ‘successful’ feminine subjectivities while reproducing gender inequality.

Análisis con perspectiva de género de la Encuesta de Fecundidad 2018 en España

ObjectiveTo analyze the language and content of the questionnaire used in the Fertility Survey 2018, from a gender perspective. MethodQualitative design based on a content analysis of the questionnaire used in the Fertility Survey 2018. Methodological recommendations and guides for gender-sensitive statistics were used, together with the comparison established with the Generations and Gender Survey. The categories of analysis were: language, sexual division of labor and fertility. The analysis procedure included the checklist and the incorporation of emerging variables specifically related to gender inequalities and biases. ResultsThe questionnaire uses with some inclusive language, but maintains the generic use of masculine gender, reproduces gender stereotypes and uses male–female binomials as a single concept. It offers a limited perspective on sexual division of domestic and care labor, horizontal and vertical segregation in the workplace, gender differences between the access and control of resources. In relation to fertility, it reproduces gender inequalities and biases that build a normalized and idealized vision on having children, do not reflect the differential impact of pregnancy and parenting on women's health and prioritize the biological dimension of motherhood and fatherhood. ConclusionsThe Spanish Fertility Survey needs to improve its gender sensitivity, reflect the heterogeneous biological, socio-economic and structural dimensions of fertility and explore deeper into the differential elements that generate inequalities and gender biases.

Reproducing the Gaming Gender Hierarchy

This article draws on in‐depth interviews with 47 male and female gamers to investigate the interactional processes whereby gamers reproduce gender inequality. Women gamers, because they faced harassment from men, traded place for peace, locating themselves at the margins and minimizing their presence within gaming spaces. Men, who faced no harassment on the basis of gender, normalized the seeming absence of women while justifying their dominant position within gaming culture. These processes maintained the overall marginalization of women within gaming culture by reproducing notions of women as outsiders and men as natural gamers.

Gendering the Boy Scouts: Examining Hegemonic Masculinity at a Co-Ed Backpacking Camp

Masculinity has been studied in various outdoor settings, including the industries of ecotourism, outdoor education, and forestry. However, few studies have examined how physical space contributes to the construction of hegemonic masculinity in organizations associated with nature and the outdoors. This study relies on nine in-depth interviews conducted with outdoor educators and sixteen hours of ethnographic research completed at Mountain View Scout Camp, a backpacking program for youth operated by the Boy Scouts of America. Findings indicate that Mountain View is gendered both through its organizational aesthetics, which valorize a hegemonically masculine ideal, and via sta members’ conception of nature as feminine and forestry work and tools as masculine. Results also suggest that men employed at Mountain View will occasionally embody a hybrid masculine gender performance by utilizing non-hegemonic traits of masculinity such as pro-feminist ideas. However, these episodic masculine performances also serve to subtly reproduce gender inequalities by accepting only a speci c type of woman and rewarding men for super cial allyship.

Feminist Women’s Attitudes towards Feminist Men in the Canadian Atheist Movement

Abstract Scholars of nonreligion and atheism have become increasingly interested in how the atheist movement reproduces gender inequalities. This growing research area is especially concerned with atheist activism’s contradictory embracing of gender egalitarianism on the one hand (especially when embedded in a critique of religion) and the exclusion of women from atheist spaces. Limited information is available on male atheists who identify as feminist or who express agreement with feminist goals. Although some scholars have addressed the rejection of feminist claims within organised nonreligion, this article examines both men’s adoption of the feminist label and women’s attitudes towards feminist men in the atheist movement. Drawing from thirty-five semi-structured interviews with atheist activists in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, I show that some feminist women perceived feminist men as passive or guided by insincere motivations (primarily to earn the attention and approval of women within atheist organisations). These findings shed light on the dilemmas of feminist men in atheist activism and contribute to understanding the gender dynamics of some atheist organisations.

Gender Justice, Education and Equality: Creating Capabilities for Girls’ and Women’s Development

Education is a basic human right; “everyone has the right education” as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognised in 1948 (UNESCO, 2007). However, many girls and women cannot access education due to persistent gender bias and inequalities in societies (UNESCO, 2014). As Cin (2017) highlights in her book, around the world, approximately “65 million girls are not schooled and two-thirds of the world’s 774 million illiterate are female” (p.3). Even though it is well-known that access to a quality of education helps to eliminate gender bias and patriarchal values that exist in societies, most of the current educational systems across the world reflect and reproduce gender inequalities and prejudices.

Gendered inequalities in competitive grant funding: an overlooked dimension of gendered power relations in academia

ABSTRACTResearch grant funding influences the organisation of academic work and academic careers. We problematise general approaches to gender bias in research grant funding and argue that it fails to include the wider structures of inequality and the unequal gendered power relations in academia. Approaching the subject with gender budgeting we challenge assumed gender-neutral practices. The objective is to illuminate how the gendered funding system and (the previous and subsequent) gendered structures of academia are maintained. The whole grants scheme is assessed, drawing on statistical data collected on the whole population of a medium-size, comprehensive research and educational institution in Iceland, and two types of competitive grants. The data is measured against the pool of applicants and comparisons within and between fields and ranks are made. By including the structures of inequality and the gendered power relations, the results show how the funding system is biased not only in favour of men, but towards the male-dominated and culturally masculine positions and fields. This approach illustrates the need to address the whole academic system in order to challenge the norms that maintain and reproduce gender inequalities.