Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World by Cecilia L. Ridgeway (review)

In Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World, Cecilia Ridgeway has given a true gift to the field of gender inequality. The book moves the field forward in a number of ways. First, whereas many studies focus either on the workplace or the household as sites of gender-role reproduction and negotiation, Ridgeway provides a theoretical framework to explain gender inequality in both of these spheres. Second, research on gender inequality has been dominated by a structural framework and what Andrew Abbott (1997) has termed “variable-based analysis.” While Ridgeway’s analysis is arguably a deeply institutional one, cultural understandings of gender take center stage and processes assume pride of place over variables in her book. Third, Ridgeway draws on a breathtaking array of fields to substantiate her theoretical perspective, from social and cognitive psychology to evolutionary psychology, from cultural anthropology to studies of labor market gender stratification to sociological inquiries into the private sphere of the household and intimate relations. The book’s bibliography is a treasure trove of high-quality studies in all of these fields, representing much of the best social scientific work on gender in recent decades. Fourth, and most important, Ridgeway shows us a new path to follow in research and teaching on gender, a point to which I will return below.

Ridgeway’s central premises are two. Most fundamental to her argument is the recognition that because we are all social actors, we view ourselves and others through a gendered lens. Gender is one of the primary frames through which we organize our understanding of self and others. As such, it permeates and shapes all of our interactions. It is these interactions that constitute our daily lives at work and at home, and that reciprocally influence our self-perceptions and our perceptions of others. In this sense, one could argue that gender has an ontological status that is so different from other “variables” such as education and work experience that determine the division of labor and the allocation of rewards that it has no place at all alongside these quantifiable variables. Rather, gender infuses these variables with particular meanings.

To illustrate, imagine a man and a woman with equivalent amounts of education or identical job qualifications. Despite their equivalence in terms of human capital, the two persons may be viewed quite differently by virtue of the social meanings attributed to an Ivy League–educated man versus an Ivy League– educated woman, or a man with a social work background versus a woman with a social work background. To the extent that the amount of education, the prestige of that education, or the particular substantive area of education or work experience carries gendered connotations in a society, the pairing of these supposedly “neutral” human capital characteristics with individual men and women can either accentuate or contradict the established social order. As Christine Williams (1992) has shown in her work, men in a “female” profession who are equally qualified with women are often promoted more quickly than women, or are discouraged from remaining in the occupation at all. Such is not the case in the reverse situation: women in a male profession who are equally qualified with the male incumbents. These dynamics are elegantly and parsimoniously explained by the two well-substantiated social facts that are the cornerstone of Ridgeway’s framework. The first, mentioned above, is that we see the world through a gendered lens. The second is that “male” more often than not denotes higher status. In Ridgeway’s language, gender is a status characteristic. Its consequences for inequality are clear; as she states in Chapter 6, “gender inequality persists partly because everyday reliance on the gender frame in social relations has embedded beliefs about gender status and difference in established institutions of work and family that powerfully control access to resources and power.”(185)

In important ways, Ridgeway’s insights stand in...