The Puzzle of Women’s “Highbrow” Culture Consumption: Integrating Gender and Work into Bourdieu’s Class Theory of Taste

The fact that women are more likely than men to participate in traditional high status leisure activities constitutes one of the most consistent findings in the empirical study of cultural choice. Most explanations of this phenomenon point to the role of early socialization and society-wide cultural norms, but surprisingly, the more proximate influence of labor force participation and embeddedness in gendered occupational cultures has not been empirically explored. In this paper I fill this gap in the cultural participation and gender literature by asking whether extent of involvement in the labor force mediates the gender gap in highbrow consumption. I follow Erickson (1996) in considering the relative usefulness of arts-related culture at work as an important determinant of individual taste patterns. Further, I show how Bourdieu’s own theory of class fractions is compatible with Erickson’s emphasis on highbrow devaluation as a byproduct of the pragmatism of workplace “business culture”. In tandem with an eye toward gender dynamics, this modified Erickson-Bourdieu perspective can then be used to solve the puzzle of the gender difference in highbrow consumption.