The Paradox of Gender Equality

The Paradox of Gender Equality
Author: Kristin A Goss
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-07-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0472037838

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Kristin A. Goss examines how women’s civic place has changed over the span of more than 120 years, how public policy has driven these changes, and why these changes matter for women and American democracy. As measured by women’s groups’ appearances before the U.S. Congress, women’s collective political engagement continued to grow between 1920 and 1960—when many conventional accounts claim it declined—and declined after 1980, when it might have been expected to grow. Goss asks what women have gained, and perhaps lost, through expanded incorporation, as well as whether single-sex organizations continue to matter in 21st-century America.

Women, Power, and Property

Women, Power, and Property
Author: Rachel E. Brulé
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2020-10-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108870600

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Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government – gatekeepers – catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.

Paradoxes of Gender

Paradoxes of Gender
Author: Judith Lorber
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300064971

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In this pathbreaking book, a well-known feminist and sociologist--who is also the Founding Editor of Gender & Society--challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber views gender as wholly a product of socialization subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation. In her new paradigm, gender is an institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Drawing on many schools of feminist scholarship and on research from anthropology, history, sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, Lorber explores different paradoxes of gender: --why we speak of only two "opposite sexes" when there is such a variety of sexual behaviors and relationships; --why transvestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites do not affect the conceptualization of two genders and two sexes in Western societies; --why most of our cultural images of women are the way men see them and not the way women see themselves; --why all women in modern society are expected to have children and be the primary caretaker; --why domestic work is almost always the sole responsibility of wives, even when they earn more than half the family income; --why there are so few women in positions of authority, when women can be found in substantial numbers in many occupations and professions; --why women have not benefited from major social revolutions. Lorber argues that the whole point of the gender system today is to maintain structured gender inequality--to produce a subordinate class (women) that can be exploited as workers, sexual partners, childbearers, and emotional nurturers. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize economic, educational, and cultural resources or the positions of power.

The Paradox of Gender Equality

The Paradox of Gender Equality
Author: Kristin A. Goss
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0472028731

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Drawing on original research, Kristin A. Goss examines how women's civic place has changed over the span of more than 120 years, how public policy has driven these changes, and why these changes matter for women and American democracy. Suffrage, which granted women the right to vote and invited their democratic participation, provided a dual platform for the expansion of women's policy agendas. As measured by women's groups' appearances before the U.S. Congress, women's collective political engagement continued to grow between 1920 and 1960—when many conventional accounts claim it declined—and declined after 1980, when it might have been expected to grow. This waxing and waning was accompanied by major shifts in issue agendas, from broad public interests to narrow feminist interests. Goss suggests that ascriptive differences are not necessarily barriers to disadvantaged groups' capacity to be heard; that enhanced political inclusion does not necessarily lead to greater collective engagement; and that rights movements do not necessarily constitute the best way to understand the political participation of marginalized groups. She asks what women have gained — and perhaps lost — through expanded incorporation as well as whether single-sex organizations continue to matter in 21st-century America.

The Nordic Gender Equality Paradox

The Nordic Gender Equality Paradox
Author: Nima Sanandaji
Publisher:
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2016
Genre: Equality
ISBN: 9789177030126

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Upside Down

Upside Down
Author: Robert L. Waring
Publisher: Robert Waring
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1475292945

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In the early 1970''s, feminism promised to remake the world for women and create a new cultural landscape where women have equality with men. But forty years later, this attempted reboot has not occurred. Only a small minority of women have ever self-identified as feminists, and women overall are less happy today. In many ways progress is now stalled. Has feminism failed, or have we been thinking wrongly about gender issues all along? Both are true. Feminism sought too little systemic change and didn''t build a national consensus that it should succeed. While the book The End of Men helped encourage the false illusion that we''ve largely remedied gender inequality in America, in fact, we''ve barely begun. We need to rethink the effort, and on many levels start over. Upside Down draws on insights from biology, psychology, economics and political science. This book itself is paradoxical. It embraces the notion of gender differences, but does not imagine the world necessarily being better if women were in charge. Rather, Upside Down proposes a dozen public policy changes that could make the world a better place, with the side effect of aiding women''s advancement. The book delves into the difficult divide of partisan politics and explains how various public policies affect women, thus empowering individuals to effect change with their energies, their money and their votes. To set the stage for a new direction, the book relies on peer reviewed, scientific studies to describe eleven gender paradoxes - circumstances that based on feminism''s goals shouldn''t have happened, but did. Each of these paradoxes helps explain the causes of women''s continuing inequality in society, illuminates the harms, and suggests solutions. Did you know that as societies are becoming more egalitarian and behavior and opportunity are less constrained by gender, personality differences between men and women are becoming greater and increasing advantages men have in attaining power and wealth? This runs completely counter to the feminist view that such differences are purely cultural. It has huge implications for women''s competitiveness. Did you know that women in the U.S. are less happy today than they were forty years ago? And that by many measures, women''s progress in business and government - which should be steadily improving - has completely stalled in the 21st Century? Even more disturbing is research showing that in many workplace settings, women discriminate against women more than men do. Based on eleven years of meticulous research, Upside Down is filled with other surprising facts to support its conclusions. For example, did you know that mothers-to-be who skip breakfast are more likely to have daughters than those who don''t? Even more curious is the way this mechanism explains why women are less prone to violence than men. And on the topic of violence, many people are aware of the role played by testosterone, but did you know that a single dose often makes women more egocentric, less trusting and less collaborative? The book''s proposals would increase women''s access to opportunity, influence and power. For example, part time careers should be available to all, in every field - family responsibilities are too big a counterweight to a full time career for many. Changing hearts and minds about gender issues will require advertising and public relations campaigns. Adopting the policies of countries where women have greater influence could help women gain influence in government here. The book''s unique formula for gender quotas in state legislatures also could accelerate change. Upside Down charts a course for feminism to regain relevance and create real gender equality. This Deluxe Edition gives readers access to original research papers on a wide range of gender issues. The endnotes contain hundreds of web links to academic journal articles and newspaper stories.

The Gender Paradox: Discrimination and Disparities in the Postmodern Era

The Gender Paradox: Discrimination and Disparities in the Postmodern Era
Author: Zachary Elliott
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2020-01-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1794868704

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Explore the origins of sex and gender through a scientific lens and understand social constructionism, its reliance on regressive gender stereotypes, and its pathological doctrines. Social constructionist theory tells us that boys and girls are not born different but are rather made different through socialization. Yet something strange has happened: Across the world's most gender-equal liberal democracies, the differences between men and women have not gone away. Paradoxically, gender differences in personality, interests, and occupational preferences have grown larger. This should not be happening. If men and women are made different through socialization, shouldn't the most gender-equal societies be, after all, gender-equal? Gender, like the Penrose Triangle, is an optical illusion. Many people think they know its properties, but it's wildly deceptive. If we can just find the correct angle, then maybe we can observe gender's actual properties, and with it, perhaps we can solve The Gender Paradox.

Gendered Paradoxes

Gendered Paradoxes
Author: Amy Lind
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2015-11-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0271076364

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Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

The New Gender Paradox

The New Gender Paradox
Author: Judith Lorber
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 69
Release: 2021-10-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509544372

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Today, in Western countries, we are seeing both the fragmentation of the gender binary (the division of the social world into two and only two genders) and its persistence. Multiple genders, gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms, X designations, and other manifestations of degendering are becoming common, and yet the two-gender structure of our social world persists. Underneath the persistence of the binary and its discriminatory norms and expectations lurks the continuance of men’s power and privilege. So there is the continued need to valorize the accomplishments of women, especially those of denigrated groups. This succinct and thoughtful book by one of the world’s foremost sociologists of gender shines a light on both sides of this paradox – processes in the fragmentation of gender that are undermining the binary and processes in the performance of gender that reinforce the binary, and the pros and cons of each. The conclusion of the book discusses why we haven’t had a gender revolution and how degendering would go a long way in creating gender equality.

Only Paradoxes to Offer

Only Paradoxes to Offer
Author: Joan Wallach Scott
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674043383

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Joan Wallach Scott's interpretation of the dilemma of feminism underlines the paradox that arises as theorists introduced the very idea of difference they had sought to eliminate by arguing from the standpoint that difference was irrelevant.