Gender and Women. Women have always had lower status than men, but the extent of the gap between the sexes varies across cultures and time (some arguing that it is inversely related to social evolution).

Unlike sex, which is a biological concept, gender is a social construct specifying the socially and culturally prescribed roles that men and women are to follow in a society that is dominated by men.

Gender is the "costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance" - Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy

"of all the ways that one group has systematically mistreated another, none is more deeply rooted than the way men have subordinated women. All other discriminations pale by contrast." - Alan Wolfe in "The Gender Question"

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.
- Mary Wollstonecraft

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat - Rebecca West

The United Nations summed up the burden of this inequality: Women, who comprise half the world's population, do two thirds of the world's work, earn one tenth of the world's income and own one hundredth of the world's property.

World Bank seeks to reduce gender disparities and enhance women's participation in economic development through its programs and projects.

World Bank summarizes knowledge and experience, provides gender statistics, and facilities discussion on gender and development. - worldbank.org/gender/

CGS is Advanced Research Program in Comparative Gender Studies, inaugurated at Stockholm University, in 1995 It was among the first of eight research programs to be funded by the Riksbankens Kulturvetenskapliga Forsknings Programmet. Within the general rubric Comparative Gender Studies: Transformations in Gender, Citizenship, and Welfare States, the CGS has supported five book projects and nine dissertations. - sociology.su.se/cgs/index.html

Women Working Worldwide. UK organization supports the rights of women workers in the global economy. - poptel.org.uk/women-ww/

Research at Surrey. Older women's working lives. The research aims, first, to understand the factors influencing the labour force participation and hours of work of mid-life women.- soc.surrey.ac.uk/research/14.html

Women's prisons places of contradiction, Canadians expect too much from their prisons for women, says Kelly Hannah-Moffat, a sociology professor at U of T at Mississauga who studies womens imprisonment and the countrys criminal justice system. - newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bin2/010423b.asp

Study of women incarcerated at the Eddie Warrior Correctional Facility, from 1991 through 1995. By Prof. Phillip D. Holley and Dennis Brewster, Department of Sociology, Southwestern Oklahoma State Univ. - doc.state.ok.us/DOCS/OCJRC/Ocjrc96/Ocjrc107.htm

Feminist Activist Resources on the Net - This guide is particularly oriented toward connecting Feminists who are Activists to resources on the Internet which could be of use. Sarah Stapleton-Gray tries to connect people to other indexes about a particular topic of feminism, rather than to the resources themselves. - igc.apc.org/women/feminist.html

How do we “gender” heterosexuality?

"Heterosexuality is a category divided by gender" So we need to understand what Weitzer (2000) refers to as the “gender disparity” in heterosexual deviance, that is, that male sexual behavior “is less subject to social strictures” than female sexual activity.

A sexually active teenage girl, for example, is condemned more strongly than a teenage boy. Hence, the very foundation of deviance, that is, the stigma or condemnation is dependent on who is being stigmatized or condemned which, in turn, is based on the sex or gender of the enactor.

The problem of teenage sex, pregnancy, and subsequent out-of-wedlock births is widely regarded as a problem almost exclusively of the behavior of girls

The vast majority of “sex work” jobs are enacted by women for men. “Female sex workers are quintessential deviant women, whereas their customers are seen as essentially normal men"

Sexual behavior generally and sexual deviance more specifically are expressions or manifestations of the roles of men and women. It is naive to assume that a given sexual encounter between a man and a woman means the same thing to the two participants, has the same consequences, or is interpreted by members of the society in the same fashion.

Glass Ceiling Hypothesis

“While, as a metaphor, the glass ceiling conveys a strong connotation . . . when the glass ceiling is actually measured by the mobility of individuals between different hierarchical levels, one recognizes that it has different levels of severity, or closedness, and thus the analyst can investigate the phenomenon as a matter of degree rather than as a dichotomy.” Yamagata.

The salience of the 'glass ceiling' metaphor in public discussions of gender inequality, has given rise to a substantial body of quantitative research systematically exploring the extent and variations in the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling hypothesis is not a special hypothesis for any particular country, but a general hypothesis about the patterns of gender discrimination in organizational hierarchies.

The glass ceiling hypothesis could change with time because the labor force participation rates of women have been increasing rapidly in recent years and the proportion of all jobs that are located within managerial hierarchies has also been increasing. By far the biggest bias in estimates of gender-specific promotion rates from cross-sectional data is likely to be generated by the very rapid rate of increase in women’s labor force participation and historic legacies of past discrimination.

Gender-based discrimination in promotions is not generally present across all levels of hierarchy but is more intense at higher levels. Empirically, it has been established that the relative rates of women being promoted to higher levels compared to men declines with the level of the hierarchy.

Occupational and organizational sex segregation, even self-segregation, may reflect various forms of gender discrimination in the society at large, but the mechanisms involved are different from those identified with the glass ceiling.

Women are more likely to work part-time than are men, and part-time workers are less likely to be promoted than are full-time workers, not because of gender-specific reasons but because of the organizational costs of promoting part-time managers.

Similarly, women are more likely to work for the state than are men, and there are proportionately fewer upper-level managers in state organizations than in private corporations.

Some of the apparent gender gap in authority would be the result of the distribution of women into work settings with fewer managerial opportunities rather than any gender-specific obstacles to their acquiring managerial positions within their workplaces.

The glass ceiling effect at the middle level of managerial hierarchies could be higher than at higher levels. Removing gender-related obstacles to getting into middle hierarchy would appear to be a more pressing task than removing obstacles to promotions in the upper reaches of authority structures.

There is a critical difference between women’s struggles against gender inequality in the liberal democratic and social democratic political traditions. In liberal democratic politics, the pivotal focus of struggle is equal rights, and this leads to policies designed to eliminate various forms of discrimination that affect individual opportunities in the market. In social democratic politics, the core issue is satisfaction of needs, which in a capitalist market economy leads to policies directed at the decommodified provision of services and political regulation of labor market transactions. The result is that much less political energy has been devoted to ending gendered discrimination in employment practices, which may help explain both a larger overall gender gap in authority and the presence of glass ceiling effects within hierarchies.

Recruitment into levels is not simply by promotion from the next lower level within an organization or even by recruitment of people from outside the organization who were in the equivalent next lower level in some other organization. There are many lateral moves within and across organizations as well as recruitment of people into middle and even upper-level positions who did not previously occupy any hierarchical position. The advancement process within managerial hierarchies is thus much less ordered than the movement through levels of an educational system.

Movement can be downward as well as upward. Especially in the context of movement across organizations—for example, movement from the upper levels of a small firm to the middle levels of a large corporation—this is probably not a rare event.

Third, people may voluntarily exit organizations and leave the hierarchy before reaching the highest level they could have attained if they had stayed in their jobs. If women voluntarily leave in this way at higher rates then men, then the distribution of men and women across levels may simulate a glass ceiling where none exists.

Historical Legacies
At any point in time, the actual distribution of men and women across hierarchical levels either within a specific organization or in the society at large will depend not simply on the currently existing allocation rules, whatever those might be, but on the legacies of past allocation rules and past gender-specific labor force participation rates.

There is every reason to believe that gender-related promotion practices have undergone at least some recent historical change, and of course, there have been massive increases in women’s labor force participation. Distributional patterns that may look like a glass ceiling could thus simply be by-products of past discrimination and past lower levels of women’s labor force participation rather than current practices. Discrimination could in principle have been completely eliminated in organizations, or at least differential discrimination across levels could have been eliminated, and yet therewould still be high concentrations of women in lower levels of the hierarchy. There simply has not been enough historical time to allow these new cohorts of women to be promoted up to the highest levels they will eventually achieve.

Unmeasured differences in employee quality
Even if it were the case that we could solve all of the structural complexities of promotions, the fact that men and women at a given level of an authority hierarchy may have different unmeasured qualities may confound any inferences drawn directly from
differential promotion rates. These quality differences could work either to make it seem that a glass ceiling is present when one does not really exist or to mask the presence of a glass ceiling. If, for example, it were the case that men on average have certain qualities that are important for managerial promotions but that are not captured by easily observable measures of individual attributes (e.g., willingness to sacrifice intimate personal relations for careers), and if these attributes become increasingly important as one moves up a hierarchy, then increasing promotion advantages for men relative to women might
simply reflect the increasing salience of this personal attribute rather than intensified gender discrimination per se. Women with these attributes might have the same promotion probabilities as men; it is simply less likely that women will actually have these
attributes.

Gender differences in unmeasured personal attributes, however, could also mask a glass ceiling. Suppose the promotion rate advantage of men relative towomen is constant across levels of the hierarchy. In such a situation, it might be expected that women are being selected for promotion on more exacting criteria than men. In effect, women face a more intense competitive selection process than men since it is harder for them to be promoted. In such a context, the average quality of women managers compared to men managers might be expected to increase more rapidly as one moves up the hierarchy. If relative promotion probabilities of men are constant in this situation, this might nevertheless still be consistent with the relative obstacles faced by women steadily increasing: It would become progressively harder for a woman with given personal qualities to get promoted relative to a man with those same qualities.

Extracts from: THE GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS - A Comparative Study of the United States, Sweden, and Australia - JANEEN BAXTER University of Tasmania and ERIK OLIN WRIGHT University of Wisconsin–Madison.

REFERENCES

Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration. 1994. The glass ceiling: Illusory or real? Canberra, Australia:

Catalyst. 1990. Women in corporate management: Results of a Catalyst survey. New York: Catalyst.

Fierman, Jaclyn. 1990. Why women still don’t hit the top. Fortune 122 (3): 40.

Garland, Susan. 1991. Throwing stones at the glass ceiling. Business Week, 19 August, 29.

Gradolph, Rebecca, Michael Hout, Janeen Baxter, and Erik Olin Wright. 1994. The gender gap inworkplace authority: USA
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Ishida, Hiroshi. 1995. Gender inequality in authority and autonomy in the workplace in Japan, Britain and the United States.
International Journal of Japanese Sociology 4:75-98.

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Jaffee, David. 1989. Gender inequality in workplace autonomy and authority. Social Science Quarterly 70 (2): 375-90.

Morrison, Ann M., R. P. White, E. Van Velsor, and the Center for Creative Leadership. 1987. Breaking the glass ceiling. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Reskin, Barbara, and Irene Padavic. 1994.Women and men at work. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.

Reskin, Barbara, and Roos. 1992. Jobs, authority and earnings among managers: The continuing significance of sex. Work and
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Scandura, Terri. 1992. Breaking the glass ceiling in the 1990s. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau.

State of Wisconsin. Task Force on the Glass Ceiling Initiative. 1993. Report of the governor’s task force on the glass ceiling
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Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald. 1993. Gender and race inequality at work: The sources and consequences of job segregation.
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U.S. Department of Labor. 1991. A report on the glass ceiling initiative.Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Wright, Erik Olin. 1989. The comparative project on class structure and class consciousness: An overview. Acta Sociologica
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Wright, Erik Olin, and Janeen Baxter with Gunn Bikelund. 1995. The gender gap in workplace authority: A cross-national study. American Sociological Review 60 (3): 407-35.

Yamagata, Hisashi,Kuang S.Yeh, Shelby Stewman, and Hiroko Dodge. 1997. Sex segregation and glass ceilings: A
comparative static model of women’s career opportunities in the federal government over a quarter century. American Journal of Sociology 103 (3): 566-632.

Janeen Baxter is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her research interests are gender
inequality in paid and unpaid work, families, households, and the life course. She is coeditor of Class Analysis and
Contemporary Australia (1991) and author of Work at Home: The Domestic Division of Labour (1993) as well as numerous
research articles.

Erik Olin Wright is the Vilas Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work has mainly concerned
the development of the Marxist tradition in sociology, with particular focus on the analysis of class. His most recent book, Class
Counts (1997), contains extensive analyses of the interactions of class and gender.

An index to resources on selected famous women in sociology and related social sciences. - http://sociology.about.com/cs/womensociologists/index.htm

Women in sociology in the early Twentieth Century.- http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/feminism01.htm

WOMEN AND EMPLOYMENT IN PRINCETON'S LATINO POPULATION Meghan K. Caffrey They are behind the counters of fast-food restaurants, examining test tubes in a lab. http://www.princeton.edu/~sociolog/syllabi/centeno_caffrey.html

By 1891, Women too were graduating from Bishop's and doing so even in Medicine. However, the study of topics of concern to and the contributions by women did not come until - http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/wom/