Gender Difference and Gender Disadvantage

This paper explores the theoretical foundations of American sex discrimination law. Traditional legal frameworks have analyzed gender issues in terms of gender difference. Yet, inder this approach, sex-based differences have been both overlooked and overvalued. In some instances, such as occupational restrictions and military service, courts have transformed biological distinctions into cultural imperatives. In other cases, such as those involving pregnancy, sex-based differences have remain unacknowledged and unaddressed. The alternative framework proposed here focuses less on gender difference than on gender disadvantage- on inequalities in the sexes' social status, political power, and economic security. Taking issues surrounding occupational restrictions, protective labor, and maternity policies as representative samples, the paper suggests how a contextual inquiry can usefully shift gender discrimination law from its focus on difference to the consequences that follow from it. For most of this nation's history, the law's approach to gender difference has alternated between exaggeration and neglect. Neglect has been the preferred strategy; the recent cluster of Bicentennial conferences on women and the Constitution is an ironic reminder of the fact.¹ When the nation's founding fauthers spoke of "We the People" they were not using the term generically. Although subject to the Constitution's mandates, women were unacknowledged in its text, uninvited in its formulation, unsolicited in its ratification, and, before the last quarter-century, largely uninvolved in its interpretation. Yet, as these recent conferences also testify, such patterns of silence have been broken. Women have found a voice. How we should use it is a question worthy of greater exploration. The following analysis considers a specific set of questions about voice. How we describe the relation between the sexes involves a politics of paradigms that legal decision makers rarely acknowledge or address. For the most part, traditional legal frameworks have analyzed gender issues in terms of gender difference. Under this approach, sex-based distinctions have been both overvalued and overlooked. In some contexts, such as occupational restrictions, courts have transformed biological differences into cultural imperatives. In other cases, such as those involving pregnancy, those differences have remained unrecognized. Significant progress will require an alternative framework, one focused not on gender difference but on gender disadvantage.     

Gender Role Ideology and the Gender Based Differences in Earnings

Much of the research on gender differences in occupational earnings still focuses on human capital and the structure of the labor market. However, these variables rarely explain even half of the gender gap in earnings. Most research has examined the impact of gender role ideology as it impacts occupational choice, which indirectly can impact earnings. Using data from the National Opinion Research Center General Social Surveys, this research focuses on the relationship between attitudes about gender roles and two variables: (a) earnings, and (b) occupational positions held by women and men. Findings show that traditional gender-role ideology contributes to lower observed earnings for both males and females, independent of the influences of human capital characteristics, occupational context, and ascribed characteristics. Results support socialization as a partial explanation for the gender-based earnings differences and suggest that, to the extent that economic rewards are used to assess the value of gender role expectations, traditional gender role attitudes might continue to change and lead to relatively equal earnings among women and men.     

Spontaneous self disclosures in psychotherapy

The closeness and intensity of feeling that develops between therapist and patient raises complex issues related to the therapist's neutrality, the transference, the countertransference, the therapeutic alliance, and the very essence of the curative aspects of the relationship. The issue of the relationship of self disclosure and the evolving transference, countertransference complex is discussed. It is suggested that on some occasions, the pressure a therapist feels to spontaneously disclose something intimately personal is an indication that the therapeutic role has become reversed and the therapist is using the process to heal a vulnerability in himself or herself. The patient unconsciously participates in the interest of safeguarding the treatment process. In such instances the self disclosure need not interfere with the evolving transference. It may lead to great spontaneity in the process and to opening areas of affect previously unreachable. Self disclosures cannot be viewed as technical innovations to avoid stalemates in clinical practice. Rather, they are facts of our clinical life, facts that must be explained and understood rather than judged and condemned.     

Redirecting blaming in marital psychotherapy

This paper will address the methods utilized in encouraging the redirection of blaming in marital therapy. In this author's view, significant and lasting changes in marital interaction require that each spouse address his or her individual contributions to the conflictual relationship. Case material will be presented which illustrates the couple's shift from nonproductive blaming to greater self-understanding as the therapist orchestrates the shift from externalization to self-exploration.     

Economics,psychotherapy and politics

The paper explores the application of ideas derived from psychotherapy to questions of economic and social policy. It is argued that disputes concerning human nature underlie many debates on economic theory. Class is reviewed from internal and emotional perspectives. Psychological obstacles to the achievement of economic inequality are explored and ways of overcoming them critically discussed. Particular attention is paid to the operation of economic sadism in the behaviour of individuals and societies. A range of possible gender differences in relation to money is reviewed. Inherited wealth is explored from the perspective of ‘therapy thinking’. The paper proposes that we reconsider what is deemed to be realistic and what is deemed to be (hopelessly) idealistic in thinking about economics. The paper concludes by proposing a deeper discussion of the problematic of sacrifice in connection with sustainable economics.     

Gender and the Artist Archetype: Understanding Gender Inequality in Artistic Careers

Women artists are systematically disadvantaged across cultural fields. Although some of these disadvantages resemble gender inequalities in non‐artistic work, such as lower pay, underrepresentation, work–family conflict, and symbolic devaluation, others are unique to artistic careers. In this essay, I extend Acker's work on the implicit gendering of the ideal‐typical worker to show how gender implicitly organizes social expectations around artists and artistic work. I highlight themes emerging from past research on gender relations in artistic careers, which suggest that the ideal‐typical artist builds on a masculine model in at least three ways. First, collective understandings of creative genius center a masculine subject. Second, bias in aesthetic evaluations systematically favors men over women. Third, the structure of artistic careers, particularly the need for entrepreneurial labor and self‐promotion, requires artists to engage in behaviors that are more socially acceptable in men than in women.     

Therapeutic alliance and treatment progress in couple psychotherapy

This study examined the ability of the therapeutic alliance to predict treatment progress on individual- and relationship-level variables from the early to middle phase of couple treatment. Although alliance did not predict progress in individual functioning, it accounted for 5-22% of the variance in improvement in marital distress. Women's mid-treatment alliance uniquely predicted improvement in marital distress, over and above early treatment alliance. When men's alliances with the therapist were stronger than their partners' at session 8, couples showed more improvement in marital distress. Treatment response was also positively associated with women's ratings of their partners' alliance. Results confirm that the therapeutic alliance in conjoint treatment is composed of distinct client subsystems that are useful predictors of treatment progress.     

Gender and Democratization

This article does not have an abstract     

Gender and Destiny

The author critiques the idea of 4 distinct waves of feminism, instead defining feminism as one overarching continuous movement with political, sociocultural, personal, and spiritual currents comingling in different proportions in different historical eras. The ways that psychological theory has evolved in tandem with feminist thought is also discussed with emphasis on recent developments in relational theory, which emphasizes mutuality, empathy, and dialogue in the patient-therapist relationship. The potential of relational psychology to contribute to social and individual transformation is explored with examples from the author's own experiences in treatment—first with a traditional Freudian analyst and more recently with a relational therapist. The psychic costs for men and women of current gender-linked norms and social arrangements are discussed along with the subversive potential of putting feminist consciousness together with psychology in order to create a vision that helps women to reclaim their voices and men their hearts.     

Biopolitics and Gender

No abstract available for this article.     

Self-regulation of distance in supportive psychotherapy

The authors present the case of a schizophrenic man treated in the setting of a supportive care clinic. The course of treatment from beginning to termination is illustrated by treatment vignettes and by excerpts from the patient's letters to the therapists. Case discussion centers around the handling of the classic schizophrenic conflict over intimacy versus isolation. The authors stress that the therapists must be acutely sensitive to the patient's need and ability to regulate his or her own emotional and therapeutic distance over the course of treatment. They make a case for utilizing this conceptual framework in the treatment of chronic psychiatric patients in supportive clinic settings.     

Touch: its use in psychotherapy

The use of touch as a therapeutic intervention is a matter of controversy. While the literature reflects the healing potential of touch, it also identifies concern that touch can be harmful to our clients. This article reports the results of an exploratory research project on how social work therapists are touching their clients, as well as their reasons for using touch or not using touch. The results of the study show that the therapists sampled use touch with their clients, but have received little education, training or supervision on the use of touch. The authors encourage further dialogue and research about this potentially powerful but complex intervention.