Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She recently edited and contributed to “For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States.“
Gender roles have been bending for some time, both in the United States and around the world. Yet our concepts of femininity and masculinity have not changed direction so much as they have widened.
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Perspectives from expert contributors.
We now see greater diversity in socially acceptable behavior for women and men. Especially when intensity of attitudes is taken into account, the average seems to have changed less than the variance.
Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” now atop The New York Times hardcover nonfiction list, promises women greater economic success if they will act more like men. Social conservatives like Christina Hoff Sommers protest that most women don’t want to act that way, while in a recent magazine article, the journalist Lisa Miller exalts the “retro wife.”
Masculinity seems less negotiable than femininity in our culture but is increasingly up for grabs.
A host of daddy bloggers deplore traditional stereotypes of detached fatherhood, even as some members of the religious community worry that stay-at-home dads are too feminine. The sociologists Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel assert that a culture of hegemonic masculinity contributes to school shootings. Try that one out on the National Rifle Association.
The gender role debate is often framed in terms of nurture versus nature, as though social pressures for change meet inertial resistance from inherent, biologically determined differences between women and men. But the ideological standoff may instead reflect the contradictory and uneven process of social change in which old forms of inequality are displaced by new ones. Would you rather take orders from a husband or a boss? Sometimes that’s a toss-up.
Many women hold tight to traditionally feminine values of care for others because they fear that a growing ethos of competitive individualism threatens the sustainability of our natural and social environment.
Declining family income and the increased pressures to find and keep jobs create nostalgia for the slower pace of an earlier era. As one review of Ms. Sandberg’s book observed, professional women might be better able to lean in at work if they had housewives of their own.
A stay-at-home wife and mother — the ultimate luxury good — has become a marker of social status, adding upper-class gloss to old-fashioned domesticity.
Women tend to be rewarded for traditionally masculine behavior more in employment than in personal life, facing far sharper conflicts between these domains than men. Institutional arrangements seem more resistant to change than hormones, which men and women now routinely get prescriptions to buy at the drugstore along with the antidepressants that help them cope with stress.
Our educational system sends young students home earlier in the day than most employees can exit work and features long summer holidays that reflect the outdated requirements of a farm-based economy. The timing seems designed to torture employed parents of small children.
The standard full-time work week, shaped by the traditional male breadwinner model, allows little time for family care. Part-time work is penalized. Many parents are forced to adapt by reducing the employment hours of one parent, typically the mother.
Single mothers inhabit the cutting, bleeding edge of social change. As family commitments have come to be defined more as choice than necessity, many fathers have opted out, leaving mothers responsible for financial provision as well as daily care.
Yet single mothers often take the blame for failing to extract a marriage contract, as though this reflects some shortfall of femininity that a more generous social safety net would only encourage.
Paradoxically, economic development and affluence often enable women to buy into culturally comfortable expressions of femininity that they might not otherwise be able to afford. The sociologist Maria Charles emphasizes that gender differences in college majors and occupational choices remain significant worldwide despite meaningful transformations in other aspects of gender roles.
Part of the explanation lies in the great diversity of pathways for women, combined with “postmaterialist” values of individualism and self-expression. It’s easier to praise free choice among limited options than to widen the set of choices available to everyone.
Ms. Charles contends that the interplay of culture and institutions is particularly evident in cross-national comparisons of the gender gap in young people’s attitudes toward math and science, which is greater in advanced industrial countries than in developing and transitional countries. In some countries that we think of as socially conservative, like Iran, Oman and Saudi Arabia, women earn more than half of all science degrees.
Some more specific comparisons are startling: in the United States, computer science is considered male territory; in Malaysia, it is considered an ideal field for educated women. Relatively few women in the United States enter engineering. In Indonesia, almost half of the engineers are women.
These cross-national comparisons lend weight to efforts to degender math and science. Consider, for instance, Danica McKellar’s feminine version of math-nerdism, or Elise Andrew’s science blog — whose millions of readers, only recently realizing she was a woman, responded with enthusiastic amazement.
Here’s another harbinger of change: in 1989, the Barbie Liberation Organization conducted small acts of guerrilla warfare, switching the voice recordings in two popular dolls, then returning them to stores, so that at least some G.I. Joes could say “I hate math” and “Let’s plan our dream wedding,” while some Barbies could say “Vengeance is mine.”
Now, we can point to an official Computer Engineer Barbie, released in 2010, with pink smartphone, matching laptop and a T-shirt decorated with binary code. Unfortunately, Barbie’s unrealistic physical dimensions remain unchanged.
Some aspects of gender are easier to bend than others.
Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/the-future-of-the-gender-bend/?partner=rss&emc=rss