Читать книгу The New Gender Paradox - Judith Lorber - Страница 11

Structuration is the congealing of the situationally based rules of interactive processes and practices and their enforced application across time and space (Giddens 1984). Concepts of gendered organizations, gender regimes, and gender as an institution convey stability and solidity, in contrast to the fluidity and mutability of doing gender and gender performativity. Gendered structures are not just the accumulation of gender processes; they constitute and organize a major part of the social order. With structuring, gendered practices (process) are imposed on by institutionalized patterns of social interaction embedded in legal and bureaucratic rules and regulations. Most significantly, these institutionalized patterns are imbued with domination and power.

A prime arena for research on gender structuration is the organization of workplaces (Acker 1990; Britton 2000; Ferguson 1984). A workplace is more or less structurally gendered on several levels. One is the extent of the division into women’s and men’s jobs; another is the steepness or flatness of the hierarchy of authority and prestige and the gender clustering at each level; still another is the range of wage and benefits scales and where women and men workers fall on it. The extent of gendering depends on the decisions, policies, and history of the particular workplace, which reflect and reproduce its structure through the interactions of workers as colleagues, bosses, and subordinates.

When workers are recruited to a heavily gendered workplace, a belief in the importance of gendered characteristics influences the search for candidates who are “masculine” or “feminine.” In westernized cultures, “masculine” traits would be rationality, objectivity, and aggressiveness; “feminine” traits would be emotional sensitivity, psychological perceptivity, and ability to mediate and compromise. In a non-gendered workplace, the search would be for workers who exhibited “neutral” characteristics, such as intelligence, honesty, experience, and mental agility. The gender designations of attributes as masculine, feminine, or neutral are culturally contingent, and the skills needed for a job are frequently re-gendered as the gender composition of the workforce changes (Jacobs 1989; Reskin and Roos 1990). The same jobs can be stereotyped as masculine “dangerous work” in one country and feminine work needing “nimble fingers” in another (Poster 2001).

The end result of the attribution of desired characteristics is the valuation of men workers over women workers, men’s jobs over women’s jobs, and “masculine” over “feminine” work capabilities. However the workplace is gendered, the economic outcome seems to be stubbornly uniform in advantaging men. Salaries are highest in jobs where men are the predominant workers, whether the worker is a woman or a man, and lowest in jobs where women are the predominant workers, again whether the worker is a man or a woman. Looked at from the perspective of the worker, men have the advantage no matter what the gender composition of the job or workplace since they earn more than women in jobs where men are the majority, in jobs where women are the majority, and in gender-balanced jobs.

The pervasive cultural beliefs about women and men workers that perpetuate gender inequality support the devaluation of women’s competence by men. Women themselves help to sustain the devaluation because they frequently compare themselves with other women, not men, at the same level. The unequal salary scales and opportunities for career advancement thus seem fair because there are no challenges to the beliefs that sustain them. In sum, the process producing gender inequality in the workplace is both interactive and structural. As Cecilia Ridgeway (1997) says, “The result is a system of interdependent effects that are everywhere and nowhere because they develop through multiple workplace interactions, often in taken-for-granted ways. Their aggregate result is structural: the preservation of wage inequality and the sex segregation of jobs” (1997: 230).