In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that women should have access to upward mobility and to all areas of schooling and jobs. But persistent gender essentialism means that most people follow gender-typical paths except when upward mobility is impossible otherwise. Middle-class women entered managerial and professional jobs more than working-class women integrated blue-collar jobs because the latter were able to move up while choosing a “female” occupation; many mothers of middle-class women were already in the highest-status female occupations. The author also notes a number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled.

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The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled

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Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It

/pdf/educational-attainment-in-the-united-states-march-1977-and-1j0zlytaod.pdf

Educational Attainment in the United States: March 1977 and 1976. Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics, Series P-20, No. 314.

This paper reports trends in educational assortative marriage from 1940 to 2003 in the U.S. Analyses of Census and Current Population Survey data show that educational homogamy increased over most of this period, although there is some evidence of stabilization in the 1990s. From 1940 to the early-1970s, these increases were generated by decreasing intermarriage among groups of relatively well educated persons. Beginning in the early-1970s, the odds of intermarriage among the highly educated stabilized while the odds that high school dropouts marry up dropped substantially. These trends are similar for a broad cross-section of married couples and for newlyweds.

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Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003 - eScholarship

POLITICS ACROSS GENERATIONS: FAMILY TRANSMISSION REEXAMINED M. Kent Jennings University of California, Santa Barbara Laura Stoker University of California, Berkeley Jake Bowers University of California, Berkeley Working Paper 2001-15 Working Papers published by the Institute of Governmental Studies provide quick dissemination of draft reports and papers, preliminary analysis, and papers with a limited audience. The objective is to assist authors in refining their ideas by circulating results and to stimulate discussion about public policy. Working Papers are reproduced unedited directly from the author’s page.

Politics Across Generations: Family Transmission Reexamined

The "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s marked a sea change in public attitudes toward sex­ uality. Prior to this, premarital sex had been taboo. The norm was often broken, but most women who had sex before marriage did so only with the man they were going to marry. Women who had non­ marital sex were so stigmatized that the discovery of a premarital pregnancy was seen as a crisis that often led to a "shotgun'' marriage. The sexual revo­ lution rendered premarital sex acceptable, at least in a relationship. Not all groups accepted the new norm, but its mainstream acceptance can be seen by how common cohabitation before marriage became; by the early 1990s, well over half of mar­ riages were preceded by cohabitation (Bumpass and Lu 2000). The pre-197os sexual norms went together with a particular gender system. Women's virginity was seen as more important than men's, men were seen as the leaders in politics and the economy, and men were supposed to be the initiators in dating, pro­ posals of marriage, and sexuality. Women's primary adult role was that of wife and mother, and men's primary role in the family was accomplished pre­ cisely by his role outside the family as a breadwin­ ner. Men were seen as the heads of their family. The "gender revolution'' shook some of this up, with the most important change being the increase in women's employment and career orientation. In 1960, 41% of American women between 25 and 54 years of age were in the labor force, but this figure had climbed to 74% by 2000. Today, more women than men are graduating from college, ·and while college majors are still substantially seg­ regated by sex, more women than previously are entering traditionally male fields in management and the professions (England and Li 2006). In the aftermath of these two "revolutions:' what do dating, sexuality, and relationships look like on today's college campuses? We report here on a study we undertook to answer this question. As undergraduate readers of this article know, casual dating is no longer as common as "hooking up" among college students. So our first goal is simply to clarify the definition and characteristics of the new social form, the "hook up:' Our second goal is to probe how meanings and behavior in hook ups or relationships are structured by gender.

Hooking Up and Forming Romantic Relationships on Today’s College Campuses

We examine whether sex of child affects parents' beliefs about traditional gender roles. Using an improved methodological approach that explicitly analyzes the natural experiment via differences in differences, we find that having a daughter (vs. having a son) causes men to reduce their support for traditional gender roles, but a female child has no such effect among women, representing less than 4 percent of the size of the standard deviation of the attitude scale.

The Effect of a Child's Sex on Support for Traditional Gender Roles

Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,254) and discrete-time event-history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are their own or their husbands' absolute wages. In addition, I show that women married to men who work more than 45 hours per week are more likely to exit the labor force than are wives whose husbands' work approximately 40 hours per week. My findings highlight the need to examine how women's partners affect women's labor-force participation.

Wives' Relative Wages, Husbands' Paid Work Hours, and Wives' Labor-Force Exit.

One commonsense view of women’s employment is that working-class women have always been more likely to work for pay than other women because of their families’ need for their paycheck. But in fact, recent evidence shows higher levels of employment for highly educated women than for the less educated, despite the fact that well-educated women typically have higher earning husbands. This article uses data from a number of highand middle-income countries to investigate how women’s employment and hours worked, and the gender gap in annual and hourly earnings, vary by educational level. Focusing on commonalities across countries, the analyses presented are limited to adults 25 to 54 years of age who have a marital or cohabiting partner of the other gender and, for some considerations, to the subset of these adults who have children in the household. The countries examined are Austria, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom (U.K.), the United States (U.S.), and Uruguay.1

Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer

Papers

Hooking Up and Forming Romantic Relationships on Today’s College Campuses

The Effect of a Child's Sex on Support for Traditional Gender Roles

Wives' Relative Wages, Husbands' Paid Work Hours, and Wives' Labor-Force Exit.

Women's employment, education, and the gender gap in 17 countries

Forming fragile families: Was the baby planned, unplanned, or in between?