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Every society is diverse, and to assume there’s one way to “properly” be a member of that society is not fair to either longtime residents or to new arrivals.
Sex and Gender
Just as “race” and “ethnicity” are often used interchangeably but mean different things from a sociological standpoint, such is the case with the terms “sex” and “gender.” As used by sociologists, the word sex refers to a person’s biological sex; with a few exceptions, this is unambiguously male or female. Gender is a more complicated term that refers, like “ethnicity,” to a role that a person identifies with; it may or may not correspond to a person’s biological sex.
In this section, I describe the history of sex and gender from a sociological standpoint and explain how sociologists are trying to keep up with the rapid recent social changes in how sex, gender, and sexual orientation are viewed.
“You’ve come a long way, baby”?: The women’s movement and its discontents
Women can have babies. Men can’t. After the babies are born, women can nurse them. Men can’t. The basic biological differences between men and women have always led to them having different roles in societies. As societies grew and institutionalized — that is, created social institutions such as businesses and governments, with elaborate codes of law — these differences became formalized in specific rules about what men and women could do.
This played out differently in each society, but in most societies around the world, it was made difficult or impossible for women to take formal leadership roles. In many societies women were for a long time unable to own property or vote.
As with racial discrimination, sex discrimination came under increasing challenge as the principle of equality that fueled the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries (see Chapter 3) spread, and as science made increasingly clear that there were no significant differences between men and women in intellect or ability. An international suffrage movement around the turn of the 20th century earned women the right to vote in most countries around the world, and other legal barriers to women’s equality began quickly to drop away.
But even as formal distinctions between men and women fell away, many informal distinctions remained. In the postwar “Baby Boom,” women were still typically expected to stay at home and care for the children and the
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home while their husbands went off to bring home the bacon. This theoretical ideal was never actually as widespread as it seemed (see Chapter 15), but many women felt suffocated by the expectation that they would inevitably find a life of domesticity more rewarding than any alternative.
A wave of influential thinkers — Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others — called for a complete rethinking of the roles of women in society, and millions of women around the world actively resisted being pigeonholed in the role of passive nurturer. In part because of this cultural shift and in part because of an economic recession, women entered the workforce in record numbers, and today it’s normal for women in many, if not most, societies around the world to have independent careers in addition to, or instead of, raising children.
Today, many young women prefer not to identify themselves as “feminists.” The term is often associated with a strident political stance, and some women believe that the success of the women’s movement created challenges for women who freely choose, for example, to leave their jobs to raise children. Some feel that the new challenge for feminists is to advocate for woman-friendly and family-friendly laws and corporate policies that make it easier to take time off work for childbearing or family responsibilities.
Still, for all the success of the women’s movement, the fact of the matter is that women continue to face negative discrimination in almost every society. Women’s earnings are still not as high as those of men with comparable experience, and women are still underrepresented in executive suites.
There are several reasons for the continuing disparity in career achievement between men and women. A few of the most important include:
Direct discrimination. In many cases, women face direct discrimination by men (or even other women) who decline to hire them for high-paying positions or to pay them as much as a man might earn in the same position.
This discrimination continues to happen for many of the same reasons that racial discrimination continues to happen (see previous section).
Different career timing. Though parental leave is today widely available for fathers as well as mothers, women remain more likely than men to take time off for childbearing — and to take more time off when they do. This time off can put them at a disadvantage when competing for raises and promotions with colleagues who have been working continuously, even if their total experience is comparable.
A segmented labor market. Among careers, some are especially dominated by women (nursing, teaching, library work) and others are especially dominated by men (construction jobs, computing, engineering). On average, male-dominated fields are higher-paying. This means that women are — whether by choice or for other reasons — concentrated in relatively low-paying careers, and when they try to enter higher-paying careers, they are especially vulnerable to discrimination.
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Should gender matter on the job market?
I did a lot of babysitting when I was in high school, so when I arrived at college in another city, one of the first things I did was to go to the college employment office and submit my résumé for possible employment in child care. The woman at the desk was thrilled to get my application — they almost never, she said, received child care applications from men. “But I have to tell you,” she warned me, “you won’t be hired.” Why? “Because when a parent calls me, I’ll give them three names: yours, and the names of two women. They’ll call the women first.” She was right; I never did get a call from any parent who was given my name through that service.
Was I the victim of sex discrimination? Absolutely, and it would be illegal for the owners of a public child care facility to selectively interview only females for employment. Why would the parents — likely, professors who considered themselves open-minded people — act that way?
When it comes to their children, any parent is likely to be very risk-averse: There’s nothing in the world that’s more important than the
happiness and safety of one’s children. On average, women will be more experienced at child care than men; children who have never had a male babysitter will likely be more startled and upset at a new male babysitter than at a new female babysitter; and it’s an undisputed fact that the large majority of sex offenders are male. From the standpoint of an individual parent, it makes all the sense in the world not to take a chance on a man when you have qualified women who might babysit your children.
When large numbers of parents act this way, though, you can see the pattern that will inevitably emerge: Qualified men will be unable to find employment in child care, and in many cases will probably seek employment in another field, perpetuating the gender division in child care. This is an illustration of Thomas’s maxim that a situation defined as real (men are unsuitable for child care) becomes real in its consequences (few men seek or find employment in child care). You can see how this effect might work the other way around when it comes to construction work or other male-dominated occupations.
This being true, women are quickly catching up with men; in education, they have already surpassed men in most of the developed world. Increasingly, attention is turning to the challenges boys face in school, which may be related to challenges some men face in the workplace. Just as surely as women, men find themselves with a stereotypical role to play, and may be punished in the form of scorn or discrimination if they fail to play the role as they’re “supposed” to. For both men and women, gender roles still very much matter — in all societies.
If someone chooses a role or lifestyle that’s considered “traditional” for their gender doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been brainwashed. It’s typical for mothers to work outside the home in many societies today, but choosing not to work outside the home is a choice that many mothers are proud to make.
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GBLTQ rights and the deconstruction of gender
“GBLTQ” is an alphabet soup of a term; it stands for gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and queer. Some members of the GBLTQ community identify with one of these terms, some identify with multiple of them. Some people who identify with the term “gay” find the term “queer” to be derogatory and inappropriate, while others who identify with a “queer” identity consider terms like “gay” and “lesbian” to be restrictive and outmoded. So the term “GBLTQ” (or, sometimes, simply “GBLT”) is used to include everyone whose sexual orientation is other than — or at least broader than — heterosexual.
The term is a little awkward — it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and it unites people who don’t necessarily always want to be united. But it’s
become necessary as societies around the world have increasingly come to see sexual orientation as something that individuals are free to determine for themselves. Whether that means “straight,” whether it means “queer,” whether it means “lesbian,” or whether it means something else is for each individual to say.
The widespread recognition of sexual orientations other than heterosexual as valid and healthy is relatively new — it wasn’t that long ago that most psychologists considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder — and it’s still unclear where laws and customs regarding sexual orientation will go in the future. Many consider the debate over sexual orientation to be a moral debate, and you may be among them; but remember that sociology is about looking at the big picture and setting aside your personal views so that you can understand society objectively. From a sociological standpoint, the debate over GBLTQ rights can be seen as the next step in the overall debate over sex and gender.
If you’re allowed to decide whether you work, where you work, and whom and when you marry despite your biological sex, it follows logically that many people will want to decide for themselves who they have sex with and when — and whether that other person is a man or a woman. However you feel personally about the matter, the fact that sexual orientation is increasingly regarded as a matter of personal choice is consistent with what sociologists would expect given many of the other sociological ideas in this book. (By “personal choice,” I don’t mean to say that people aren’t born with one sexual orientation or another. I mean to say that from a social and legal standpoint, people are increasingly allowed to say for themselves what their sexual orientation is rather than being told by someone else what it is.)
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Sociologists of culture (see Chapter 5) are seeing a transition to “microcultures,” where groups of people who identify with one another are able to come together from across a range of social backgrounds. This means that people who consider themselves, say, queer can share a common culture that may be different than mainstream cultures.
Sociologists of race and ethnicity (see earlier sections in this chapter) have seen that “race” is losing legitimacy as a category people are born into and that determines what they can or should do with their lives. Sex is changing in the same way — it’s increasingly seen as something individuals can and should express for themselves.
Sociologists studying social change (see Chapter 16), from Durkheim to Weber, have all observed that individuals are increasingly seen as having the right to say for themselves what they’ll do and with whom
they’ll associate. There’s no reason that association in bed should prove to be an exception to that rule.
It’s often said that governments are getting “out of the bedroom,” but sociologist David John Frank, who has studied international changes in sex laws, says that that’s not exactly true. On the one hand, it is true that some sexual activities that were once forbidden by law — for example, gay sex — have increasingly been permitted by law in countries around the world. On the other hand, some sexual activities that were once permitted — for example, a husband forcing his wife to have sex with him — have been increasingly made illegal. The common theme is that laws around the world have been changing, for decades, in favor of allowing individuals to decide for themselves what intimate activities they are going to participate in, and when, and with whom.
Race, Ethnicity, Sex, and Gender:
Why They Still Matter
If it’s true — and it is — that in societies around the world, all individuals increasingly have the right to choose for themselves what they will do, with whom they will do it, and what identities they will choose, are ideas like race, ethnicity, sex, and gender outdated? Does it even matter what race or ethnicity or sex or gender you are? Why even bother having an ethnicity or a gender, or a particular sexual orientation? Some people feel this way; in fact, there are people who identify their sexual orientation as “omnisexual,” claiming complete freedom to be intimate with anyone they happen to be attracted to. As people from different races and ethnicities mix more and more, maybe “omniracial” and “omniethnic” identities will also increasingly be adopted.
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That probably will happen, but sociologists believe that race, ethnicity, sex, and gender aren’t “going away” any time soon. Those concepts are grounded deep in the fabric of every society, and saying that they don’t matter any more is simply false. No matter where you live, your physical features and biological sex are going to influence how the people around you see you, and they’re going to influence how you see yourself.
Ethnicity may be an “option” for some people, but although ethnicity (unlike race) is not determined by how others see you, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to renounce the ethnicity you were raised in — even if you want to. Novels like The House on Mango Street (by Sandra Cisneros) and Portnoy’s Complaint
(by Philip Roth), films like Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Tyler Perry’s
The Family That Preys, and plays like Fences (by August Wilson) and Angels in America (by Tony Kushner) movingly depict people’s struggles to reconcile their personal hopes and dreams with the strengths and limitations of the ethnic communities to which they belong.
Similarly, sex and gender are increasingly complicated categories that remain just as meaningful to individuals as they were when they were simpler. Your sex, your gender, and your sexual orientation are part of who you are, and though societies increasingly allow you to decide how and when you will express your gender and your sexual orientation — and, also increasingly, forbid others to judge you by them — that doesn’t mean that your sex and your gender don’t matter profoundly to you, and to others.
If you’re confused or frustrated trying to understand your own race, ethnicity, sex, or gender, you’re not alone! Many groups exist to help people find support and advice about their identity, no matter what it is. A visit to a counselor, a trip to the library, a quick Web search, or even a conversation with a caring listener can help connect you with other people who are wrestling with the same concerns you are.
Chapter 10
Getting Religion:
Faith in the Modern World
In This Chapter
Understanding religion in history
Separating religious theory from religious practice
Shopping for God
After 13 years in Catholic school, when I arrived at my first comparative religion course in college, I wondered how the professor was
going to handle the fact that not all religions could be right. I wasn’t sure that Catholicism was entirely “right,” but I figured they couldn’t all be right. Members of different religions have very different beliefs about the spiritual world; I wasn’t sure how you could study religion without taking a position on which set of beliefs were “correct.”
I soon realized that my professor was not going to tell us which religion was right; whatever her personal religious beliefs, they weren’t the point. When social scientists — sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists — study religion, they are not studying God (or gods), they are studying people. It’s the job of theologians and philosophers to study the hereafter; social scientists study the here and now.
And religion is indeed very much here and now. Every day, billions of people around the world pray and gather to share their faith, whatever that might be. Religious practices and organizations have always been at the heart of the social world, and for a sociologist to ignore religion would be like a physician ignoring the nose on your face. So sociologists have studied religion, just as they’ve studied every other major feature of society.
In this chapter, I first outline the important early sociologists’ ideas about religion. Then, I explain the difference between religious beliefs or values and the organizations that support people’s religious practices. Finally, I encourage you to think about the relationship between religious belief and social action in the world today.