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Sociology 3004, Summer 2023 Dr. Wimberley Unit 5: Inequalities of Gender and Sexuality Lecture 2: Gender, Sexuality, Class, and Institutional Discrimination Sernau, Chapter 6 (Exhibit 6.3, p. 165) shows a graph comparing women’s and men’s earnings trends in the U.S. Below is an updated version of that graph that should be easier to follow with distinguishably color-coded lines you don’t get in the Sernau PDF posted on Canvas. It comes from the September 2022 U.S. Census publication Income in the United States: 2021, in the same “P60” series of publications that is the source of the income inequality and poverty data presented in detail earlier this term.

These results are limited to year-round, full-time workers, so they’re affected little if any by differences in earnings that depend on how many days or hours women and men work. Among these workers, median earnings for women are about $10K lower than the median for men, as shown in the lower section of the figure (which is in inflation-adjusted dollars so that we’re looking at comparable dollar amounts over the decades covered in the graph). This gap has tended to close over several decades, as indicated by the ratio (expressed as a percentage) of women’s to men’s

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median earnings in the upper part of the graph, but that ratio was still only about 84 percent in 2021 ($51,226 / $61,180 = 0.837, or 83.7%). That ratio measures overall (average) gender inequality in earnings; if its value were 100, there would be overall gender equality in earnings. This ratio of women’s-to-men’s median earnings is what the upper section of the figure traces over time. Notice that at some points in time – though men’s earnings are always much higher than women’s – the women-to-men ratio increased (i.e. moved toward equality) at least partly because men’s median earnings dropped, reflecting the different kinds of industries and jobs in which men were more likely to work than women. A more general statistical observation to notice in these graphs that cover 62 years of trends: though the lines do go up or down over time, they are remarkably stable and change very gradually, and the distances between the women’s and men’s graph lines are very slow to change as well. The stability of these statistical indicators over time comes from the inertia created by social structure’s enduring patterns of social activity and relationships. Okay now, did you follow all that, and see exactly where I got all the numbers and what they mean from those graphs above? If not, go back and check just how I did it. You could get a question about this figure in an exam section and may need to refer to this to check the answer – either one of the key statistics, or some other detail about the graphs and how to interpret them. Other analyses find gender differences in earnings – income from work – after controlling for (holding constant) race/ethnicity education as well (e.g., Fred L. Pincus, Understanding Diversity, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011). More elaborate studies that control for other possible causes of income differences by gender (such as specific occupations) still found substantial earnings differences by gender. These income differences constitute inequality, by definition. But are they discrimination? People pretend to answer questions like this all the time – indeed, they convince themselves that they’ve answered them – without consistent and clear definitions of terms, without any solid logic of what evidence is needed, and without any well-thought-out way to recognize discrimination when they see it and to rule it out when it isn’t there. To answer the question of whether these patterns constitute discrimination, you would have to start with a clear, consistently-used definition of discrimination. Unit 4, Lecture 2 examined racial and ethnic discrimination, gave a definition for discrimination, and showed how it takes different forms. Statistical models measure discrimination as a quantitative difference in income or another quality-of-life outcome between different groups (e.g., females and males) that remains even after controlling for all other factors that might cause such a difference, such as the Pincus analysis (not shown) and other studies briefly referenced above.

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As this lecture has already implied, discrimination isn’t just a racial/ethnic phenomenon, which was the focus of Unit 4, Lecture 2; the phenomenon of discrimination applies equally in the domains of gender and sexuality. Let’s first review and then expand the key concepts introduced in Unit 4. Discrimination: Review and further development of general principles To reiterate Unit 4, Lecture 2, discrimination is behavior having the result that a person or group of people are harmed by others’ actions just because they belong to that particular group. Institutional discrimination is discrimination that results from the routine operation of existing social arrangements – arrangements that include social structure, norms and other cultural elements, laws, and organizational policies. This kind of discrimination is “institutionalized” in the sense that it is built into – embedded in – the social order, i.e., into social structure and culture. It exists in two forms: • intentional or direct institutional discrimination: conscious acts that are intended as harmful

treatment of racial and ethnic minority groups or other subordinated groups in a society • unintentional or indirect institutional discrimination: unconscious acts that are unintended as

harmful treatment of racial and ethnic minority groups or other subordinated groups in a society. This can be identified in individual acts linked to “implicit bias,” for example, but it can also exist at a structural level – the way that society is organized – that don’t arise from any individual action that might be associated with implicit bias.

It’s true that some discrimination isn’t institutional: • Personal discrimination: one individual’s deliberate harmful treatment of another person

because of the second person’s race or ethnicity that results NOT from social structure, norms and other cultural elements, laws, and organizational policies, but rather from the first individual’s prejudice.

• Small group discrimination, also not based in the social structure, culture, laws, or policies in the larger society, but unlike personal discrimination it is shared among a small group.

But even in these “noninstitutional” forms the discrimination rarely if ever comes from nowhere at all – these forms of discrimination are at the low end of a continuum of institutionalization, but in truth they aren’t at “zero.” At the very least, the very notion of what constitutes a racial or ethnic group is a sociocultural construction, a part of language (a cultural phenomenon) that the personal or small group discriminator uses as a target. But when I use the term “institutional discrimination” in this course, I’m not referring to these phenomena. One useful application of personal and small group discrimination concepts is to describe how members of groups that are routinely discriminated against society-wide (e.g., women or members

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of minority racial groups) might mistreat members of a dominant group (e.g., men or members of a dominant racial group) within a limited geographic or social space – that is, “shoe on the other foot” circumstances. It isn’t that such events never happen; no racial, ethnic, gender, or other group is immune from lashing out at other groups. But a fundamental point I’m making here is that not only are these exceptions, but also that these exceptional circumstances can be evaded by those in the more privileged positions. One of the implications of the institutional discrimination concept is that when personal and small group discrimination occurs, it occurs as exceptional islands in the large sea of institutional discrimination that maintains dominant groups’ privileges. Or as Margaret Frye described in her essay “Oppression,” that you read for Unit 1, such exceptions would be the isolated wires that a hypothetical bird could fly around if it were so privileged to find its flight blocked merely by half of a birdcage, or one-tenth of a bird cage, or one wire of a birdcage. It might even take some effort, but this privileged bird can find alternatives outside the limited space in which the obstacle occurs. But when the wires form a pervasive system, an entire birdcage, perhaps with enough space between a pair of wires that a bird could squeeze through at the cost of losing some feathers, or perhaps with no possible exit at all – i.e., institutional discrimination (oppression, in Frye’s words) – they aren’t so easily escaped. This is a key reason why I forbid using “reverse discrimination” arguments in your essays; such arguments – based on culturally-based “common sense” shared by part of our society’s population, but as you’ll remember from earlier courses, sociology often demonstrates that common sense is misleading or plain wrong – such “reverse discrimination” arguments evade the much larger issue of institutional discrimination which is fundamental to this course. The idea of reverse discrimination is based on selective observation of the context where racial or gender discrimination occurs. The points in this lecture so far belong to the “thread” examining oppression and privilege which has run throughout this course. And now we are a good point at which to make those semester- long connections explicit to you – hopefully you already have been experiencing some glimmerings of how ideas like Frye’s oppression are connected to social structure and culture and how institutional discrimination is a manifestation of the same phenomena. (Continued on next page)

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One of this thread’s earliest appearances was in Lemert’s (Unit 1) “mysterious and persisting power” of social structures that, “when they work in our favor, we seldom notice. When they work against us, we notice the pain of punishment or exclusion.... They tend to be invisible to those who enjoy their benefits until such time as they fail to deliver” (p. 25). Here Lemert is describing an example of how the selective observation to which our social positions incline us can make it difficult for us to see social forces at work – especially if, like me, you are in a combination of advantaged positions (e.g., a native-born white, expert-class heterosexual cisgender male) (see Unit 1, Lecture 3 for the significance of selective observation and how systematic scientific research can be designed to avoid it). The Unit 1 reading from Peggy McIntosh was a long list of such privileges experienced but rarely noticed by white people (male or female) and other privileged social categories. Andersen and Collins (p. 4, as described in Unit 5, Lecture 1) examine how the social structure described by Lemert plays out in a matrix of domination. Such forces work simultaneously through culture, which is intertwined with and inseparable from social structure. In particular, such forces work through sociologist Antonio Gramsci’s principle of cultural hegemony, “the political* creation and maintenance of dominance by one group over another” in such a way that the power relationship is taken for granted as natural (Keister and Southgate, Inequality: A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender, p. 261). Thus, in our society the “gendered roles ... clearly visible [at least to those who know to look] in advertising [in which] men are in control, showing independence and strength, whereas women are beautiful companions – emotional, weak, and in need of protection” (Keister and Southgate p. 261) are generally taken for granted; the video “The Codes of Gender” powerfully illustrates this point. And – potentially visible but most commonly unseen – cultural hegemony is present in the taken-for-granted domination of “one social class rul[ing] over other classes within society through a monopoly of mass media and cultural production.... By controlling the production of culture, the dominant class subordinates others by presenting inequality as natural,” as Gramsci originally wrote from prison, where Italy’s fascist government held him and where he died in 1937 at age 46 (Keister and Southgate p. 315). Gramsci’s ideas of how cultural hegemony served to empower dominant classes over other classes were later applied by other scholars to cultural dominance in the domains of gender (as in the example above), race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and elsewhere.

*“Political” here is used, potentially in a confusing way, in the broad sense of the word, carried out within structures of power of economic, political, patriarchal or other forms, rather than in the narrower conventional sense of state-related.

Antonio Gramsci (source: Wikipedia article)

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Institutional discrimination as it applies to inequalities of gender Help wanted ads in U.S. newspapers were routinely divided into “male and female jobs” until 20 years after the 1945 example at right. In 1965 the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (chaired, interestingly, by FDR Jr., son of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt) ended them, enforcing Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. These ads were intended (direct) institutional discrimination in action. They were intended to treat men and women differently, in a way that led to different outcomes. Though the employers placing such ads, the newspapers printing them, and most readers at the time took these ads for granted and would surely argue that they simply reflected the appropriate places of women and men respectively – much as Southern white politicians at the time would typically have argued that black and white children should have different schools because they fit different places in our society – these ads helped put women in subordinate positions. There are plenty of other examples of intended institutional discrimination against women in the U.S. But because they are hidden in plain sight, it’s usually harder to think of examples of unintended (indirect) institutional discrimination by gender in U.S. society. Here are several: 1. It is common for females to be called on in class less often than male students, giving males

more voice and visibility and encouragement to be assertive; the teachers who do so tend to be unconscious of committing this bias. (Again, see Sue’s “Microaggressions” on this. I consciously work to avoid doing this.)

2. In many work settings, people who are more assertive and aggressive in various ways tend to get better positions and higher pay. However, in our culture women who act more assertively and aggressively tend to be viewed as bitches or dragon ladies, whereas men acting the same way tend to be admired. More assertive women are breaking a “code of gender” (remember the documentary by that title that you are watching for this unit?). Thus, women are culturally discouraged from being more assertive – they are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. One way this plays out is that women are less likely to negotiate for (and get) better pay

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compared to men, as documented in a 2003 Harvard Business Review study which concludes that “Women tend to assume that they will be recognized and rewarded for working hard and doing a good job. Unlike men, they haven’t been taught that they can ask for more. [Furthermore], many companies’ cultures penalize women when they do ask – further discouraging them from doing so. Women who assertively pursue their own ambitions and promote their own interests may be labeled as bitchy or pushy” (Babcock, Laschever, Gelfand, and Small, “Nice Girls Don’t Ask,” https://hbr.org/2003/10/nice-girls-dont-ask/). Derald Wing Sue in “Microaggressions” (Unit 4) examines similar phenomena.

3. A given man and given woman have both ended up in the expert class (remember E.O. Wright’s class locations, Unit 3), but their gender differences (e.g., different socialization rooted in the socializers’ taken-for-granted cultural beliefs about gender differences) helped lead them into different kinds of industries/enterprises with different prospects for advancement. For example, a man might tend to go into engineering while a woman might tend to become a schoolteacher; and engineering firms generally have greater possibilities for salary increases than schools do, a built-in advantage for the male.

4. Another way of looking at the two previous examples is that some jobs are culturally defined as “men’s” jobs while others are seen as “women’s” jobs, and for various reasons the first type tend to pay more. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s research on one corporation, described in Sernau’s Chapter 6 (pp. 167-169), gave examples of this phenomenon. One of those reasons is that jobs involving “nurturing” in some way (e.g., teaching positions, or even human resource managers as Kanter reported), while culturally valued in some ways, are economically devalued; and these are jobs women are more likely to want than men. This devaluation thesis (Keister and Southgate, p. 268) – i.e., the conclusion that disproportionately female occupations are paid less because of their gender balance – has received substantial empirical support.

5. A married heterosexual couple has jobs in the same class position, but the woman may be the one to quit her job for childrearing because (a) it’s taken for granted in our culture that a woman would do this (it’s a gender-specific norm), and/or (b) she makes less money in the type of job women are more likely to be funneled into in our social structure (see the previous three examples), so it makes more financial sense for her to stay home. In the case of (b), the couple is motivated by purely economic considerations that would have the same impact regardless of whether gender was the origin of the pay difference – their decision, given the social structural constraints they face, has nothing to do with implicit bias or other unconscious or conscious attitudes about gender. In either case, (a) or (b), taking time out for childrearing may well make her career advancement more difficult later. Or, the wife and husband have very similar jobs, but she comes home and does a lot more housework than he does (again due to gender-specific norms).

6. A company may have a long-standing policy of giving seniority a lot of weight in promotion decisions. But this would disadvantage women admitted to certain company career tracks (e.g., not in human resources) from which women were long blocked until company policy changed. If the seniority policy was left standing without conscious or even unconscious motivation to

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disadvantage women workers – which is entirely possible – those women would be experiencing indirect institutional discrimination with a purely social structural source.

7. The threat of sexual violence tends to restrict women’s freedom of movement and participation, which in turn limits many other freedoms, economic and otherwise. Though sexual violence itself constitutes direct (intended) institutional discrimination that’s deeply rooted in a still-patriarchal culture, its impacts on freedom further down the line – impacts that harm women who haven’t been attacked themselves – are reasonably labeled indirect (unintended) institutional discrimination. We’ll return to this point in Unit 6, time permitting.

Institutional discrimination against LGBTQ people It’s easy to identify examples of intended (direct) institutionalized discrimination against LGBTQ people in the U.S. and elsewhere. They have routinely been ostracized in our society, including by their own families, specifically because they are LGBTQ. They have been denied employment because of their sexual orientation, including being fired from government positions. LGBTQ people have been blocked from serving in the military. LGBTQ people have often been targeted for violence, with similar direct and indirect discriminatory consequences that I noted for women in the example above. Until recently, sex between two people defined to be of the same sex (ignoring that this leaves social construction of gender and sex unproblematized) was illegal in much of the U.S., and laws prohibited marriage of lesbian and gay couples. It’s so easy to think of these intended discrimination examples that I’ve found it hard to identify examples of unintended institutionalized LGBTQ discrimination. In my face-to-face SOC 3004 class in Spring 2017 I asked groups of students to come up with examples of unintended (indirect) institutionalized discrimination against LGBTQ people. Here is the class’ list, with light editing by me. Some of these are also microaggressions as we examined that concept in Unit 4. In some cases I’ve labeled an example as possibly direct as well as indirect, depending on circumstances. As you read these you might have different conclusions about whether an example is direct or indirect, or whether there is enough information to draw any conclusion. (And some of these are no longer so current as they were then.) 1. When people say “that’s so gay!” – people who say this tend not to think of it as any insult to

LGBTQ people. [Has that expression finally gone away? More at https://www.hrc.org/news/what-do-you-say-to-thats-so-gay-and-other-anti-lgbtq-comments.]

2. Sex education and sexual resources from doctors assume you are / will be having heterosexual sex.

3. Media portrayal of the LGBTQ+ community, perhaps especially in comedy, that promotes stereotypes.

4. (Direct/intended as well as indirect/unintended:) Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, but now marriage equality is also legally guaranteed, and sometimes these rights come into conflict or at least are perceived by some as being in conflict.

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5. (Could argue as either direct/intended or indirect/unintended:) “Don’t ask don’t tell” was at the time considered a step forward as a compromise on military service in 1993 [that allowed gay and lesbian people to serve, as long as they kept it secret from superiors and other service members] – but now it appears backward and oppressive. LGBTQ people had to hide their lives from others in the military.

6. When not-LGBTQ people ask members of the LGBTQ community specific questions about their sex lives (specifically “how they have sex”) that they wouldn’t ask heterosexual people.

7. Negative reactions to someone who brings a date of the same sex to dances or a prom. 8. Heteronormativity in general; the widespread cultural assumption that “everyone is

heterosexual.” Here are several additional examples the Spring 2017 class generated that apply specifically for trans* people (or transgender people), again lightly edited by me. Again, you might draw different conclusions about whether these are necessarily indirect as opposed to direct. 1. ID cards or licenses with biological sex that’s required to be binary – it seems unintentional

(indirect) in that it’s just a cultural assumption that there are only 2 genders. 2. Social norms for what males and females should wear and how they should act. 3. Signs in clothing stores that advertise clothes as being for men or for women. 4. Until recently bathrooms were assumed to be needed in male and female designations only,

leaving trans* people out. 5. Doctors using gender pronouns for transgender patients that don’t match their patients’

identities. Institutional discrimination by class Unintended institutional discrimination not only harms women, members of sexual minorities, and members of subordinate racial groups; it also harms members of “lower” social classes. There is institutional discrimination by class as well as by race, ethnicity, and gender. Here’s just one example, but it’s close to home: a university that gives preference to admitting children of alumni (“legacies”) will disproportionately exclude all applicants whose working-class parents never had the chance to attend college, even if that isn’t the university board members’ and administrators’ intent. Consider this item from the 2017 VT freshman admission application form (VT now uses the Common App, and the form of this question might have changed since then, but VT still uses legacy as an admission criterion – see https://www.vt.edu/admissions/undergraduate/apply/freshman-requirements.html):

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I’m not arguing that preferential legacy admissions are necessarily a bad thing, but that we should recognize it for what it is – a policy favoring people who already have the advantage of coming from college-educated families – and that it therefore calls for compensating policies. Thus, VT partly offsets the legacy preference with an affirmative action policy (I don’t recall if the university calls it affirmative action, but in fact it is) that gives preference to would-be “first generation” college students regardless of race – indeed, most people who benefit from this affirmative action policy here may well be white – or regardless of gender). To do so, as the webpage cited above also lists, “first-generation” status also currently serves as an admission criterion, and new applications ask for that information. Here’s how it looked in the 2017 PDF application:

The legacy preferential admissions policy is itself a form of affirmative action, even though most people don’t recognize this; it’s one of many taken-for-granted forms of affirmative action which have benefited and continue to benefit people who are privileged rather than disprivileged, in this case a benefit associated with membership in the privileged group of people who come from college-educated families. Affirmative action is as old and older as the United States itself – but historically, it has affirmatively privileged Whites and males. VT legacy admissions that benefit already-privileged people are similar to the advantages the white character gained by climbing over the black character in the cartoon in a Unit 4 lecture, repeated below. Most likely, some of you in this class gained VT admission advantages from the first-generation affirmative action policy, and some of you likely gained advantages from the legacy affirmative action policy.

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A few final remarks: Derald Wing Sue’s essay on microaggressions (Unit 4) provides many examples of culturally-based behaviors that constitute institutional discrimination – sometimes intentional, but much more commonly unintentional. Sue, a psychologist, is one of the foremost scholars of microaggressions: “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or

unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” (p. 5). I hope that in that essay you can envision yourself as the aggressor in Sue’s examples, and come away from that reading to stop yourself from committing similar behaviors in everyday life. No one of us (of any gender, racial or ethnic, or other group), myself included, is immune from committing these behaviors against members of one disprivileged group or another. I’ve certainly had the cringing experience of seeing myself in discussions of microaggression; for example, I still clearly remember from when I was in grad school was when I addressed a woman who lived in my apartment building as a nursing student that I assumed she was, rather than the med student she actually was, and getting appropriately corrected by her. Decades later, many doctors are women, and thus fewer people are apt to commit the microaggression I committed then, but there are still plenty of microaggressions people do commit. (This doesn’t mean that I think I’ve not said anything microaggressive since way back then, or that there are only a handful of examples of my doing so! And surely I’ve done something equivalent to that recently and I didn’t recognize it, myself. I am very much a work in progress.) By the way, institutional discrimination, both intended and unintended, is also structured intersectionally – by combinations of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation, as we have studied throughout much of this term – in ways that this lecture hasn’t begun to address.

Professor Wimberley 6/22/23