Women have entered the labor market in unprecedented numbers. Yet these critically needed workers still earn less than men and have fewer opportunities for advancement. This study traces the evolution of the female labor force in America, addressing the issue of gender distinction in the workplace and refuting the notion that women's employment advances were a response to social revolution rather than long-run economic progress. Employing innovative quantitative history methods and new data series on employment, earnings, work experience, discrimination, and hours of work, this study establishes that the present economic status of women evolved gradually over the last two centuries and that past conceptions of women workers persist.
Closing the gender pay gap begins with awareness and understanding of the state of the gap. This hybrid book that serves as a resource for both the academic and corporate communities, builds the reader’s awareness of the gender pay gap, its magnitude and ramifications, and provides action plans to address the challenge. Much of the existing literature on the gender pay gap provides an excellent foundation in stating facts and inferences; yet, the reader is often left wondering "now what?" This book tells the story of the state of the gap by the numbers and then offers specific actions that can be taken to achieve equity. The authors combine backgrounds in statistics and management/HR to provide a unique perspective in painting a broader overview of the issue, examining the history of the gender pay gap, its global impact, and how nations are addressing the issue. The book shines a light on the wide-ranging effects of the gap, including women’s poverty rates, student loans, economic growth, childhood poverty, and corporate profits, and offers insights to help close it with best practices of select organizations. Upper-level undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive education students will appreciate the clarity and conciseness of this guide to understanding and solving an important human resources issue. The inclusion of a brief instructor’s manual and PowerPoint slides for each chapter differentiates this book and adds to the ease of adoption in both the academic and corporate setting.
While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.
This fascinating compilation of the recent data on gender differences in education presents a wealth of data, analysed from a multitude of angles in a clear and lively way.
Why do Japanese women enjoy a high sense of well-being in a context of high inequality? Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan brings together researchers from across the social sciences to investigate this question. The authors analyze women’s values and the lived experiences at home, in the family, at work, in their leisure time, as volunteers, and in politics and policy-making. Their research shows that the state and firms have blurred “the public” and “the private” in postwar Japan, constraining individuals’ lives, and reveals the uneven pace of change in women’s representation in politics. Yet, despite these constraints, the increasing diversification in how people live and how they manage their lives demonstrates that some people are crafting a variety of individual solutions to structural problems. Covering a significant breadth of material, the book presents comprehensive findings that use a variety of research methods—public opinion surveys, in-depth interviews, a life history, and participant observation—and, in doing so, look beyond Japan’s perennially low rankings in gender equality indices to demonstrate the diversity underneath, questioning some of the stereotypical assumptions about women in Japan.
Sex remains one of the most salient demographic dividing points in American politics today. President Obama has women, particularly unmarried women, to thank for his re-election victory. The gender difference in voter support for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates grew from twelve points in 2008 to eighteen points in 2012. This gender gap in candidate preference likely emerges because of gender gaps in policy preferences. Yet despite much scholarly and popular interest in this topic, the cause or causes of gender gaps in policy preference remain unclear. The Political Battle of the Sexes: Exploring the Sources of Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences examines gender gaps in policy preferences in the United States, outlines their form, and explores their causes. This work makes four contributions to the literature on gender gaps. First, it provides the first comprehensive look at gender gaps across time and various issue areas completed since the 1980s. Second, it provides a theoretical framework for explaining the causes of gender gap emergence that incorporates both nature (biology) and nurture (socialization) and provides the basis with which to predict the attitudes on which gender gaps will likely emerge. Third, it explores the causes of gender gaps in foreign and social policy, two of the policy domains where gender gaps continue to increase. Finally, it introduces a new way of conceptualizing biology based on emerging research in the hard sciences. Studying gender gaps remains difficult. Women comprise a very diverse group, and are divided by far more factors than the sex categorization that unites them. However, electoral realities demand that scholars studying political behavior pay attention to sex based differences in political preferences. Women exhibit consistent preference tendencies relative to men, and women remain more likely to show up on Election Day than men. As such, gender gaps have substantial political and practical implications for women in the United States. And while explaining their causes requires drawing from a wide array of fields, ranging from biology to economics, understanding the origins and consequences of gender gaps does much to further empirical research in public opinion and mass behavior.
Praise for The Gender Gap in College "Linda Sax has produced an encyclopedic volume comparing women's and men's development during the undergraduate years. We believe it is destined to become a classic in the higher education literature." —From the Foreword by Alexander W. Astin and Helen S. Astin "Using findings from an important national data set, Linda Sax has skillfully crafted a definitive work about the gender gap in college. It is a major scholarly achievement that will be influential for many years to come." —Ernest Pascarella, Petersen Professor of Higher Education, University of Iowa "Linda Sax has produced a meticulously researched, carefully documented analysis that identifies many ways that college impacts men and women differently. This book will be an invaluable resource to researchers and practitioners seeking to better understand and serve traditional-age students at four-year colleges and universities." —Jacqueline E. King, assistant vice president, Center for Policy Analysis, American Council on Education
In this book, the author builds on decades of complex research to examine the gender pay gap and the unequal distribution of labor between couples in the home. The author argues that although public and private discourse has brought these concerns to light, the actions taken - such as a single company slapped on the wrist or a few progressive leaders going on paternity leave - are the economic equivalent of tossing a band-aid to someone with cancer. These solutions, the author writes, treat the symptoms and not the disease of gender inequality in the workplace and economy. Here, the author points to data that reveals how the pay gap widens further down the line in women's careers, about 10 to 15 years out, as opposed to those beginning careers after college. She examines five distinct groups of women over the course of the twentieth century: cohorts of women who differ in terms of career, job, marriage, and children, in approximated years of graduation - 1900s, 1920s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s - based on various demographic, labor force, and occupational outcomes. The book argues that our entire economy is trapped in an old way of doing business; work structures have not adapted as more women enter the workforce. Gender equality in pay and equity in home and childcare labor are flip sides of the same issue, and the author frames both in the context of a serious empirical exploration that has not yet been put in a long-run historical context. This book offers a deep look into census data, rich information about individual college graduates over their lifetimes, and various records and sources of material to offer a new model to restructure the home and school systems that contribute to the gender pay gap and the quest for both family and career. --
