Why Gender Inequality Persists in our Modern Era

The key to gender inequality’s staying power is that we use gender as a primary cultural frame for social relations, according to Stanford Social Sciences Professor Cecilia Ridgeway, who Thursday tackled the question of how gender inequality persists in contemporary America in the face of leveling economic and political change. 

Shelley Correll, director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, introduced Ridgeway and said that the lecture, based on her new book, Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World, is highly relevant to the institute’s focus this year on “the stalling of the gender revolution.”

Thursday's talk, at Stanford's Tresidder Union, was sponsored by the Clayman Institute.

“In America, sex, race and age are primary cultural categories of personal perception,” Ridgeway said. “We automatically, nearly instantly, 'sex categorize' any person we attempt to relate to.”

He said cultural beliefs about gender change more slowly than material arrangements between men and women. 

Gender stereotypes—“men are from Mars, women are from Venus”—are the default rules for coordinating relations, and people accept them even if they don’t endorse them.

Ridgeway described gender as a “diffuse background identity” that acts to bias how one behaves. She cited recent studies that showed how men are more strongly advantaged in male-typed settings, but women have only slight advantages in female-typed settings. And men are advantaged for authority in all settings.

She said that “implicit gender stereotype biases help to reproduce current structures of gender inequality: wage and authority gap, sex-segregated jobs and unequal household division of labor.”

Even with considerable change in the workplace since the 1970s, men are still from Mars and women are still from Venus, according to Ridgeway. Studies done since 2000 show men are regarded as much stronger in aggressive and leader-like behavior, while women are now nearly equal in analytical and reasoning skills. Women continue to be considered much more communal.

Ridgeway reported on studies of two kinds of high-tech startups: biotech and information technology (IT). Women are earning half of the doctorates in the life sciences, and, consequently, biotech start-ups are hiring them in large numbers. Women in biotech firms do better than those in traditional hierarchal companies, such as those in the aerospace industry.

On the other hand, IT start-ups are often “boys' clubs” as depicted in . These firms are still culturally stereotyped to favor men, and women employees are found to do worse or no better than in traditional hierarchal companies.

Ridgeway moved from the workplace to innovative, intimate heterosexual unions. She cited studies that showed considerable gender inequality in couples, as men usually initiate moves to sexual behavior and the activities are oriented more toward men’s pleasure.

In response to a question from the audience, Ridgeway said, “we can approach equality in politics with more women in Congress and a woman president before too long.”