Chapter 6 Gender And The Global Economy Full Test Bank

Chapter 6 Gender and the Global Economy

Chapter Introduction

Walmart exemplifies the system of gender inequality in jobs, pay, and promotion.

Paid Work

Who Is in the Paid Workforce?

The entry of women into the paid labor force is one of the key events of the 20th century. By the end of the century in the U.S., almost all women worked for pay at some point during their lifetimes. Globally, the lowest proportion of employed women is in North Africa and the Middle East, but in other regions at least one-third of women work for wages, and these numbers are rising (see Table 6-1).

Emotional Labor

Women’s and men’s work differs in the emotional labor involved in their jobs. In this largely invisible aspect of many jobs (flight attendant, wait-staff, secretary, teacher, sales clerk, and health care worker), employees must show such feelings as attentiveness and caring and suppress feelings such as boredom or irritation. Approximately one-third of U.S. workers, most of them women, work in jobs that require them to smile, nod, greet, pay attention to, and thank customers. Men’s emotion work demands different types of emotions. Police officers are supposed to exhibit strength and toughness. Men and women in the same job may have different expectations about the emotional work they should do. Customers, employers, and coworkers may expect women to be nicer and friendlier and to smile more. Women college professors are often evaluated more highly if they are friendly, while men professors are not judged in this way. Emotional labor makes work harder. It can cause psychological problems for workers who must perform in ways inconsistent with their inner feelings. Constantly having to suppress one’s own emotions can cause burnout.

Equal Pay?

Despite the large and growing numbers of employed women around the world, a substantial pay gap between men and women remains (see Table 6-3). In the U.S., white men are significantly better paid than minority men and all women. Within racial ethnic categories, men earn more than women in each category (Table 6-4). In the U.S. in the l970s women earned 59 cents on the dollar compared to men. Today they earn about 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. Part of this improvement is due to men’s falling wages rather than women’s gains. The 20% gap between women and men underestimates the real gap. Women tend to work part-time and intermittently over their lives. If we calculate lifetime employment women make only about 38% of men’s earnings. Worldwide, women are paid less than men (Table 6-3).

Race ethnicity and age also contribute to the wage gap between women and men (Table 6-4).

Unequal Opportunity: The Glass Ceiling, the Glass Escalator, and the Sticky Floor

Besides having different pay, women and men have different ranks in corporate and government jobs. The higher you go, the fewer women and minorities you will see. This “glass ceiling” (the invisible force holding women back from the highest corporate levels) confronting women and racial ethnic workers is a global phenomenon. On the other hand, men in women-dominated professions often “ride the glass escalator” (get preferential treatment) as tokens (see Box 6-1). While men are welcomed and promoted in some professions and occupations, gay men and men of color may experience hostility and ostracism. Glass ceilings and glass elevators describe jobs at the top. The “sticky floor” is a metaphor for the lowest-paid and lowest-skilled jobs in manufacturing and service. Workers in these jobs (often women) are “stuck” working long hours for low wages.

Why Is There a Wage Gap between Women and Men?

Scholars offer several explanations for the wage gap.

1. Discrimination. Laws now make it illegal to hire or to pay workers differently solely on the basis of gender. But overt discrimination is not entirely a thing of the past. Discrimination also occurs in a number of subtle ways.

2. Human Capital. Human capital theorists maintain that 1) women do not have as much commitment to paid work; 2) men invest more in themselves than women do; and 3) men obtain more education or job training. But research has shown that women are similar to men in career commitment. They may have less education and experience due to gender barriers in schools and workplaces. Human capital theory resonates with American beliefs in individualism. According to this ideology, success is the result of hard work and luck.

3. The Organization of Jobs. This is the most powerful of the three explanations for the wage gap. It holds that the organization of workplaces and labor markets promotes gender inequality. Social structural explanations include homosociality, gender segregation, the different structures of men’s and women’s jobs, and politics.

Gender Segregation of the Labor Market

A second social structural factor explaining the wage gap is the way jobs are segregated into men’s work and women’s work. Nine out of ten top jobs for women are more than 75% female, including secretarial work and elementary and middle school teaching. Only one of the top ten jobs, retail sales manager, is evenly divided between men and women (Table 6-5). Men also work in gender-segregated jobs (Table 6-6).

Climbing the Ladder of Success

A third social structural factor explaining the wage gap is that women’s jobs are structured differently from men’s jobs in that they have short or no ladders. Women are often segregated into jobs within businesses that are less visible to those who are choosing people to promote within the company.

Bringing Politics into the Picture.

A fourth explanation for the wage gap focuses on issues of power. The politics of gender includes men’s desire to preserve their advantaged position, their power to write the rules, and their ability to benefit from them. The historical record supports this explanation. Moreover, women’s work is devalued in comparison with men’s work. But is truck driving more valuable than customer service? Is engineering more important than nursing? What political struggles will help members of society recognize the real value of women’s work?

How Can the Gender Gap in Promotion Be Closed?

Some actions to address this problem are building bridges from dead-end jobs to divisions where promotion is more likely; creating formal processes for advancement to eliminate biases; and promoting employee organization into unions.

Comparable Worth Policies

Comparable worth is one way to equalize women’s and men’s unequal pay scales. Under comparable worth, jobs are evaluated according to levels of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Often these factors are not sufficient to eliminate the subjective prejudices devaluing jobs women typically perform.

Success Stories

Studies show that white working-class women receive the least support from their families for their occupational aspirations, while nearly all working-class and middle-class black families stress the importance of getting a good job. White women were more likely to report that their parents emphasized the importance of marriage over employment. Black women felt obligated to their families for their support. White women believed their accomplishments were because of their own efforts.

Success Stories in Engineering

Engineering is almost exclusive male, although women have made some inroads into the profession since the turn of the 21st century. Some universities have successfully instituted programs for women. The text lists the traits common to these universities.

Retirement

Retirement is also gendered. Women and minorities fare less well as recipients of Social Security, because benefits are tied to income and benefits for women are tied to marital status. This disadvantage is particularly serious for black women, who are more likely to marry late or not at all (Table 6-7). However, private pension coverage, which has favored white, well-educated men in large companies, has stagnated over the past 30 years. Recently, public pensions have come under severe attack from the right wing. Private pensions are more likely to go disproportionately to white, full-time, male workers.

When Work Disappears: Masculinity and Homeless Men

Homeless men lose their connection to the symbols of masculinity: a job, a car, a house. Some research has shown how men survive on the streets by reconstructing their ideas about what it is to be a man.

Feminization of Poverty

Women, especially racial ethnic women, are more likely than men to be poor. But the concept of the “feminization of poverty” applies mainly to whites because poverty falls more equally on women and men in other racial ethnic groups. Unemployment is an important cause of poverty, but there is a large group of “working poor” in the U.S. Poverty is an international problem. Worldwide, about 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Because of poverty millions lack access to water, food, sanitation, and literacy. Wealth creates poverty and poverty creates wealth. The assets of the 200 richest people in the world were greater than the combined income of the poorest 40% of the world. That gap continues to grow as the wealthiest 5% of people in the world receive 82% of the income. Within each nation, the poorest of the poor are women and children.

Unpaid Work Through the Life Cycle

Although a lot of work has moved from families into factories and offices, much work remains as unpaid housework, and housework remains an important site of gender inequality. Women do more housework than men even when comparing employed women to non-employed men. In the household, men and women do different kinds of tasks. Women are more likely to do cooking, washing dishes, indoor cleanup, laundry, shopping, and childcare. Men are more likely to do repairs and maintenance, gardening and pet care. The unpaid work of women is estimated be worth about $138,095 a year for stay-at-home mothers and $85,876 annually for employed women. Despite the obvious importance of this unpaid work it is often invisible.

Why is Women’s Work Invisible?

Many things that women do are invisible, including housework, volunteering, and what one scholar calls “sociability work.” This work is long, hard, and essential to the community, though it is trivialized. It is invisible because it is seen as a “natural part” of women’s nurturing and caretaking.

Children and Housework. There are gender differences in the distribution of housework between boys and girls in families. Girls are much more likely to do the dishes and the laundry and boys are much more likely to do yard work and take out the trash. Teenage daughters, especially in low-income families, are responsible for significant amounts of chores and childcare, and they also do a lot of emotion work by helping their parents.

What’s behind the Way People Divide up Housework?

Three theories try to explain the division of labor in housework:

• Socialization theorists say boys and girls learn lessons about what they should feel and do when faced with a dirty kitchen. From this point of view the solution is to teach boys and girls the skills they will need to take care of households and the people in them.
• Rational choice theorists argue that women and men rationally divide the housework based on which partner knows how to do the work and which partner brings home a larger paycheck.
• Feminist theory. Feminist argue that the way housework is divided cannot represent two people of equal status negotiating rationally because women do not have as much power as men. Housework is both a cause and an effect of gender inequality. Women do more housework because they don’t have as much power as men. Housework is a “gender factory.” When women do more housework and when women and men do different kinds of housework, they are reproducing gender. We also need to pay attention to the connection between paid work and unpaid work. As long as women are paid less than men, their ability to negotiate changes in the division of unpaid work will be hampered.

Globalization and Gender

Paid and unpaid work is embedded in a global system. Women in the global South, like women in the global North, are often lower in status and power than are men. They do more work but own less land, a basis of the inequities of international policies. If women do not own land or other property like cattle, they cannot participate in development programs or receive loans and credit. The difference between men’s and women’s poverty status is growing, exacerbated by international economic pressures. Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) force debtor nations to cut programs in education, health care, transportation, and other government-funded projects in order to pay back their loans. Women are hardest hit because they are already the poorest members of those debtor countries and because they rely on government programs for food, schools, and medical aid for their children. Globalization also affects work in wealthy nations like the United States. When work is globalized, jobs are transferred to countries where labor is cheapest. Since American workers are then competing with very-low-wage workers around the globe for jobs, they affect the pay scales for the jobs that remain in the United States. In the United States, the economy is increasingly productive and profitable for investors while workers’ real wages have declined and problems like homelessness are growing. Ironically, these trends may create more gender equity in pay because men’s wages are pushed down to the levels of women’s wages. Men are “catching up” with women and workers in wealthy nations are “catching up” with those in the poorer ones.

WID, WAD, and GAD

Feminist scholars have offered three models for understanding the global economy and creating policies to alleviate the economic difficulties of the world and eliminate the gender gap. The WID (Women in Development) approach argues that women in the global South should become more like men by moving into the paid labor force and that poor countries should allow multinationals to build factories and invest in agribusiness to provide more jobs.

The WAD (Women and Development) approach asserts that women already are active workers although they may not be receiving wages. International economic policies should recognize women’s invisible work and design ways to support and compensate it. Also, economic development should avoid the pitfalls of Western capitalism: environmental degradation, gaps between the rich and poor, and inequities between women and men.

The third approach is GAD (Gender and Development), which criticizes WAD for treating women as a homogenous group rather than attending to differences in women’s experience by race ethnicity, social class, and nation. GAD also argues that we cannot talk about women in isolation but rather must think of the relationships between women and men. For example, we cannot address the problem of violence against women without considering how violence is part of the social construction of masculinity. GAD activists support policies that look at gender rather than women in isolation. They also see gender equity as part of a larger exercise of human rights and a mission of transforming the global economy to one that is based on human needs and cooperation rather than profitability and competition.

A fourth stage, Women, Culture, and Development (WCD) has recently emerged in the advance of ideas about women and development. This work criticizes WID, WAD, and GAD scholars for not taking culture into account. WCD scholars also criticize the failures to study resistance as well as oppression.

Gender Matters

If we are to create gender equity, we must attend to changing the individual, interactional, institutional, and global systems that create the context and structure of our work lives.

Short-Answer Essay Questions

1. What is emotional labor?
2. What is the pay gap in the U.S.?
3. Explain the differences between the glass ceiling, the glass escalator, and the sticky floor.
4. Name three explanations scholars offer for the wage gap.
5. How might the gender gap in promotion be closed?
6. How would comparable worth equalize women’s and men’s unequal pay?
7. What traits have made it possible for certain universities to successfully institute engineering programs in which women succeed?
8. How is retirement gendered?
9. Why is the feminization of poverty white, according to this chapter?
10. Why is women’s work invisible, according to this chapter?

Long-Answer Essay Questions

1. Describe the global system of paid and unpaid work. In your answer explain the factors that account for the pay gap between men and women worldwide. Explain the ways that wealthy and debtor nations can be seen as part of the same system.
2. Ask students to interview a low-wage worker about her or his work. Their questions should include the following:

• Tell me how you got into the work you do now.
• What skills do you use in your work?
• Tell me about your relationships with others on the job.
• What problems do you encounter at work?
• What gratifications do you get from work?
• Are your coworkers more likely to be women or men? If both, can you estimate what proportion are women, are men? Are the tasks divided by gender in any way?

In the interview, listen carefully and follow up with probes to clarify what your informant tells you. If s/he says, for example, “The boss is always asking me to do more work,” ask for specific examples. You might say, “Can you tell me more about the last time that happened?” You might want to hear more about the issue. Ask, “Can you give me another example?” You could also continue probing by asking, “How did you respond to the boss?” “What did you think and how did you feel when s/he asked you to do that?” In other words, ask for examples to help your informants be as specific as possible. Take only brief notes during the interview, and then write up as complete a record of the interview as you can immediately afterward. What did you learn from this interview? For example, you might have been surprised to discover that what you considered unskilled work involved learning and deploying many skills. What did you learn about gender in workplaces?

Discuss students’ findings in class.

1. How does the globalization of the economy affect your students? In class, ask students to identify the national origin of whatever they have on and about their bodies, such as clothing, cell phones, pens/pencils, eyeglasses, laptop computers, books, notebooks, briefcases, purses (and what’s inside—combs, wallets, and so forth) by reading the labels on these items. Poll the class and tally the results by country of origin. Lead a discussion about the meaning of this list, using the following questions:

• What if anything surprised you about the list?
• How does your embeddedness in the global economy affect you?
• How do you think the global economy affects people who produce these goods?

Critical Thinking Exercises

1. Consider the kinds of emotional labor you expect of people in different paid positions: Does the gender of the worker alter your expectations? Does the gender the job is associated with guide your expectations? If you have a job, what kind of emotional labor is expected of you?
2. Look at the chapter’s explanations for the wage gap between men and women. If your job was to develop a set of policies to address these problems, what would the policies be?
3. Sociologists, rational choice theorists, and feminist theorists explain the division of labor in housework differently. What are their different explanations? Which one or ones do you think are right? Does one of the theories offer more hope for change than the others? What do you think is the best way to divide household work?

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How do differences in emotional labor fall along gender lines?
   1. Men are almost never required to do emotion work, and when they try to, they are passed over for promotions and raises.
   2. Women are more than 40 times more likely to do emotional labor, which is by definition unpaid.
   3. Women are more likely than men to be required to do emotion work, and they are expected to show different emotions.
   4. Men are more likely than women to be required to do emotion work, and women are expected to suppress emotion.
2. What percent of men’s wages do women earn in the United States?
   1. 16%
   2. 61%
   3. 81%
   4. 94%
3. What happens when men enter women-dominated professions?
   1. They experience a similar glass ceiling effect as women in male-dominated professions.
   2. They find themselves welcome and even given preferential treatment, but they are encouraged to move up in their professions.
   3. They are often assumed to be gay, and they experience workplace homophobia, whether they are gay or straight.
   4. They face awkward, unfriendly, and sometimes interactions with colleagues, management, and patients.
4. How is the labor market gender segregated?
   1. Men and women have similar salary scales, but they are in different jobs.
   2. Men do all the hiring and firing, while women have to overperform to find work.
   3. Men and women are in the same jobs, but men’s jobs tend to pay better than women’s jobs.
   4. Men and women are in different jobs, and men’s jobs tend to pay better than women’s jobs.
5. How is retirement gendered?
   1. Men receive more Social Security than women.
   2. Women live longer than men, so women’s savings have further to stretch.
   3. Men are able to retire earlier than women.
   4. Men are taught to save for retirement earlier than women, so men have larger “nest eggs” for retirement.
6. In a society in which work is a primary sign of masculinity, how do unemployed and homeless men cope?
   1. They self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, and their sense of masculinity resides primarily in their drinking and drug use.
   2. They develop other styles of masculinity that value such features as taking responsibility, being “cool,” and being hypermasculine or hyperfeminine.
   3. They reject gendered stereotypes and come to a “postgender” understanding of gender.
   4. They consider their own means of survival as a form of work, in which their masculinity is only somewhat threatened.
7. Which of the following is the poorest group in the world?
   1. Female children
   2. Women in the global South
   3. Children in the global South
   4. Women and children
8. In what areas of the world does the gender gap in unpaid housework exist?
   1. All areas of the world
   2. Most areas of the world except Nordic countries
   3. Most areas of the world except the Antipodes
   4. Developing nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia
9. What does “globalization” refer to?
   1. Capitalist economic policies and their global effects
   2. The spread of socialism that Karl Marx envisioned would precede worldwide communism
   3. The integration of the world’s economies, political systems, informational networks, and ecology into one large global system
   4. The mistake of reducing complex differences between nations to an idea of global sameness
10. What is the GAD model for understanding the global economy?
    1. The global alliance directive, which understands the economy as a matter of alliances and negotiation
    2. The gender affirmation determination, a model that focuses on ways that affirmation of gender presentation can prevent gender-based economic disparities
    3. The gender and development model, which focuses on systems of inequality including gender, race ethnicity, class, and nation
    4. The global axis dissolution model, whose platform is to dismantle the abuses of globalism
11. In the U.S. economy, women hold a greater proportion of what are known as frontline jobs. What are frontline jobs?
    1. Jobs in the service sector, like care and customer service jobs, that require face-to-face interaction
    2. Unpaid housework and care for children and other family members
    3. Federal, state, and city jobs whose salaries are mainly provided by tax dollars
    4. Community service jobs, both paid and unpaid
12. What are comparable worth policies?
    1. Policies that require that individuals with the same job titles within an employment setting are paid the same wage, regardless of gender or race
    2. Policies that require that workers in a given economy with similar credentials who perform jobs with similar difficulty and level of importance and which require similar skill sets be paid similarly.
    3. Policies that employers use to establish initial pay for new employees based on the salaries they earned at their previous jobs
    4. Policies that employers use to determine pay based on whether an employee is the primary breadwinner in their household and how many dependents they have
13. The human capital perspective regarding the gender wage gap says that __________.
    1. Women choose to invest more in unpaid household labor and childcare and less in their paid professions amounting to an unproblematic difference in average wages across genders.
    2. Women face bias and discrimination in hiring, promotion, and pay.
    3. A number of factors, including gender socialization, bias and discrimination, and gendered decision-making regarding family responsibilities amongst heterosexual couples lead to differences in lifetime earnings for women and men.
    4. All of the above. The human capital perspective takes all of the above factors into account.
14. Which of the following is true regarding the gender pay gap in the United States?
    1. Black, Asian, Hispanic, and white men earn more than their female counterparts in each racial category.
    2. White women earn more than black and Hispanic men.
    3. White women earn more than black and Hispanic women.
    4. All of the above.
15. According to conflict theorists, because emotional labor requires one to feel and perform emotions for wages, it can lead to a sense of alienation from one’s species being. What does this mean?
    1. They feel disconnected from what it means to be human
    2. They can turn their emotions on and off at work and save their true feelings for their loved ones
    3. They develop an authentic relationship with their customers and come to care about them deeply
    4. They come to care about their customers more than they care about themselves or their personal relationships
16. What is a family wage?
    1. Where all members of a family, including children, work for wages that go towards supporting the family
    2. Where all adult members of a family work for wages that go towards supporting the family
    3. An arrangement where a husband/father earns the main wages for a family as the “breadwinner” and a wife/mother earns extra or non-essential wages known as “pin money”
    4. A wage paid to one worker, typically a male breadwinner, which is adequate to support all other members of his family
17. Today, about 10% of senior citizens in the United States live in poverty. Without income from _______, about 45% would live in poverty.
    1. work
    2. private pensions
    3. Social Security
    4. family members
18. In which of the following nations do women earn average wages that are most equal to those men?
    1. Norway and Sweden
    2. Romania and Costa Rica
    3. China and Cuba
    4. Iceland and the United States
19. Which of the following is the best definition of the feminization of poverty?
    1. The greater likelihood of women and their children to be impoverished
    2. The tendency of female-dominated jobs to be low-paying
    3. The tendency of wages to stagnate or drop within a given field when women enter that field in great numbers
    4. Both b. and c.
20. Christine Williams observes that when men enter female-dominated fields, such as teaching and nursing, they often encounter __________.
    1. an accelerated route to promotion and higher wages known as the “glass escalator”
    2. a “sticky floor,” or difficulty finding jobs in adjacent fields after they quit
    3. barriers to promotion known as the “glass ceiling”
    4. higher rates of quitting or being fired due to assumptions that they are not as good at these jobs
21. Data show that when promotion is based on formal criteria (as is more likely when jobs are unionized) rather than subjective impressions of workers, women’s wages tend to be _________ compared to men’s.
22. much higher
23. much lower
24. more equal
25. None of the above. There is no relationship between formal promotion criteria and wage trends.