The Declining Significance of Gender?

"This book is full of interesting information on the long-run trends in women's work and family life, exploring the evidence behind key theories about why women's jobs have improved and why there are still large gender gaps in many areas. A major appeal is its multi-disciplinary approach, including economic, political, and organizational perspectives on gender and work. The Declining Significance of Gender? is a book that anyone interested in research on women in the labor market will want to read."
-REBECCA M. BLANK, University of Michigan

"An impressive list of sociologists and economists confront the evidence of women's progress and setbacks in work and beyond. Their authoritative treatments show how American women's common destiny of disadvantage gave way to a world in which some women have come a long way while others are being left behind."
-MICHAEL HOUT, University of California, Berkeley

"The Declining Significance of Gender? is an up-to-date collection of some of the best analyses of the causes and outcomes of gender differentiation in the paid labor force that one can find. WIth outstanding contributions by the top sociologically informed economists and economically informed sociologists working today on issues such as pay equity, glass ceilings, and culturally imposed social structures, the volume should be on the desk of scholars and policy makers, journalists, and activists alike. The work of the scholars brought together in Francine D. Blau, Mary C. Brinton, and David B. Grusky's carefully selected collection of essays brings a lucid and dispassionate perspective to a topic usually informed more by sentiment than by data."
-CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN, Graduate Center, City University of New York

The last half-century has witnessed substantial change in the opportunities and rewards available to men and women in the workplace. While the gender pay gap narrowed and female labor force participation rose dramatically in recent decades, some dimensions of gender inequality—most notably the division of labor in the family—have been more resistant to change, or have changed more slowly in recent years than in the past. These trends suggest that one of two possible futures could lie ahead: an optimistic scenario in which gender inequalities continue to erode, or a pessimistic scenario where contemporary institutional arrangements persevere and the gender revolution stalls.

In The Declining Significance of Gender?, editors Francine Blau, Mary Brinton, and David Grusky bring together top gender scholars in sociology and economics to make sense of the recent changes in gender inequality, and to judge whether the optimistic or pessimistic view better depicts the prospects and bottlenecks that lie ahead. It examines the economic, organizational, political, and cultural forces that have changed the status of women and men in the labor market. The contributors examine the economic assumption that discrimination in hiring is economically inefficient and will be weeded out eventually by market competition. They explore the effect that family-family organizational policies have had in drawing women into the workplace and giving them even footing in the organizational hierarchy. Several chapters ask whether political interventions might reduce or increase gender inequality, and others discuss whether a social ethos favoring egalitarianism is working to overcome generations of discriminatory treatment against women.

Although there is much rhetoric about the future of gender inequality, The Declining Significance of Gender? provides a sustained attempt to consider analytically the forces that are shaping the gender revolution. Its wide-ranging analysis of contemporary gender disparities will stimulate readers to think more deeply and in new ways about the extent to which gender remains a major fault line of inequality.

FRANCINE D. BLAU is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics at Cornell University.

MARY C. BRINTON is Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.

DAVID B. GRUSKY is professor of sociology at Stanford University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Francine D. Blau, Mary C. Brinton, Paula England, Claudia Goldin, David B. Grusky, Heidi Hartmann, Robert Max Jackson, Lawrence M. Kahn, Vicky Lovell, Eva M. Meyersson Milgrom, Trond Petersen, Solomon W. Polachek, Cecilia L. Ridgeway, and Stephen J. Rose.