Egalitarianism and Gender Inequality

egalitarian institutional reforms is a distinctive feature of modernity and postmodernity. This development, which dates at least to the Enlightenment, intensified throughout the twentieth century as formal legal rights were extended to previously excluded groups(e.g., women); wide-reaching institutional reforms were implemented to equalize life chances (e.g., bureaucratic personnel policies) and anti-egalitarian doctrines (e.g., racism) were challenged. These processes of equalization, dramatic though they are, obviously do not exhaust the story of modernity and postmodernity. As is well known, this story is replete with counterpoints at which the forces for egalitarianism have been resisted, sometimes violently (as with recurrences of eugenics and fascism) and sometimes in quieter but still profound ways (as in the persistence of residential segregation). This chapter is about one of those quieter anti-egalitarian forces currently playing out in the domain of gender stratification. At first blush, the forces for equalization may appear to be straightforwardly triumphing in this domain, as evidenced by (a) the rapid diffusion of egalitarian views on gender roles, (b) the withering away of the long-standing gender gap in college attendance and graduation, and (c) the steady increase in rates of female labor force participation (see Figure 38.1). These developments, although spectacular and unprecedented, have nonetheless been coupled with equally spectacular forms of resistance to equalization, especially within the workplace. Most notably, women and men continue to work in very different occupations, with women crowding into a relatively small number of historically female occupations (e.g., teacher, secretary, nurse). If one sought, for example, to undo all sex segregation by reallocating women to less segregated occupations, a full 52 percent of the employed women in the United States would have to be shifted out of their current occupational categories (Jacobs 2003). This extreme sex segregation is typical of what prevails throughout the advanced industrial world. Because sex segregation is so 38