The Declining Significance of Gender?

1. The Declining Significance of gender?

Chapter 1 The Declining Significance of Gender? Francine D. Blau, Mary C. Brinton, and David B. Grusky I n the typical life history of a social revolution, the initial revolutionary ardor proves to be sustainable for only so long, and gradually sentiment grows that the revolution has stalled or run its course. We appear to be entering just such a period of pessimism about the future of the ongoing “gender revolution.” After a half-century of dramatic reductions in the gender pay gap and other forms of gender inequality, we now find ourselves poised at a crossroads in which two very plausible futures appear before us, an “optimistic scenario” which assumes that the remaining (and very substantial) gender inequalities will continue to erode, and a “pessimistic scenario” which treats the gender revolution as stalling and regards contemporary institutional arrangements as an equilibrium. The optimistic vision rests on the straightforward premise that the forces making for change over the last half-century remain in play and will bring about further substantial reductions in gender inequality. The scholars who advance this vision emphasize that egalitarian values continue to spread unabated and to produce a growing commitment among parents to provide their daughters with the same opportunities as their sons. These egalitarian values also undergird a shared political commitment to such powerful legal interventions as antidiscrimination legislation and may lead ultimately to more ambitious and far-reaching forms of legal intervention (for example, paid parental leave legislation, expanded provision of government-provided child care). At the same time, gender equality is further advanced by the continuing diffusion of women-friendly organizational reforms, most notably on-site child care, guaranteed family leaves, and rigorously enforced bureaucratic rules that provide formal guarantees of equal treatment. Finally , because women are disproportionately located in economic sectors that are growing (especially the white-collar and service sectors) and men are disproportionately located in economic sectors that are shrinking (especially blue-collar and manufacturing sectors), there is continuing downward pressure on the gender pay gap. The foregoing forces for change are all ongoing and, one might argue, can be anticipated to carry the gender revolution forward. / 3 The pessimistic vision rests on an equally diverse array of counter-arguments that have appeared with increasing frequency in popular magazines (Louise Story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” New York Times, September 20, 2005; Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” New York Times, October 26, 2003), popular books (Barash 2004; Faludi 1991), and scholarly outlets (chapters 8 and 9, this volume). This work often emphasizes that the gender revolution has been a profoundly asymmetric one, a revolution in which females have increasingly assumed male-typed jobs, but males have not to the same extent moved into female-typed jobs. If, as proponents of this view argue, most of the gains that asymmetric change can generate have now been reaped, any further gains will have to rest on the unlikely prospect that the revolution develops a more symmetric cast to it (see chapter 8, this volume). For other commentators, it is equally troubling that there has been no great rush among men to take on child care and other domestic duties, an outcome that is entirely in keeping with the asymmetric dynamic observed elsewhere. It is argued that the persistence of this deeply gender-based division of labor in the family reduces the incentives for women to further invest in their human capital or to acquire work experience, thus dampening the rate of change in gender inequality. The final set of pessimistic arguments , again closely related to the foregoing ones, emphasizes that a rather constricted form of egalitarianism has been diffusing, one that rests on a formal commitment to “equal opportunity” without any corresponding commitment to ensuring that women and men will be similarly oriented toward taking up such opportunities. By this line of argument, a narrow commitment to purely formal guarantees of equal opportunity leaves much room for “essentialist” ideologies to flourish, ideologies that regard women and men as fundamentally different, having very distinctive skills and abilities, and therefore unlikely to avail themselves of the formally equal opportunities in the same ways (see Charles and Grusky 2004). It is possible, then, to put forward two quite contradictory predictions about the future of gender inequality, both of which have at least a surface plausibility. How well do these scenarios stand up under closer scrutiny? How does the pattern of change over the last half-century accord with...