Motherhood Penalties and Living Arrangements in China

Past research on the “motherhood wage penalty” has been based on data from nuclear families, leaving open the possibility that the motherhood wage penalty may be lower or even absent in multigenerational families. In this article, the wage gap between mothers and nonmothers is examined in nuclear and multigenerational families in the context of contemporary China, which has a long tradition of patriarchal families. Using 1993 to 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey data, the magnitude and variation of motherhood penalty is explored with fixed effects models among 1,058 women. The results show that each additional child lowers hourly wages by about 12%. In addition, the motherhood penalty is largest for women living with their husbands' parents, smaller for women not living with parents, and nil for women living with their own parents.     

The Good Grandparent: Perspectives of Young Adults

As life expectancy increases, the role of grandparent has increased in duration and is continually adapting as families change in structure, function and form. Across the past several decades, researchers have examined grandparenting styles, finding some consistency as well as the emergence of newer styles, and evidence that grandparenting styles are related to the age and gender of both the grandparents and the grandchildren. In this study, we investigated young adults’ perceptions of grandparenting quality. University Students (N?=?470) from a Midwestern university responded to an online survey that asked them to evaluate the quality of their grandparents grandparenting now and at two retrospective points in time, childhood and adolescence. We hypothesized that the grandparents' performance of multiple styles of their role would be related to grandparenting quality. In addition, we expected that preferred grandparental roles would vary in relation to grandchildren's gender. The results of regression analysis indicated that, although grandparenting quality tended to decline across the respondents' developmental stages, higher ratings at an earlier stage were related to higher ratings at the latter two stages. Further, grandsons preferred grandparents who performed as supporters and advisors, whereas granddaughters preferred grandparents who functioned as supporter and friend. Overall, grandmothers were likely to be the more significant grandparent. Continual research on both grandchildren and grandparents will be needed to chronicle the development of the grandparental role in changing times.     

Exploring the Relationship between Secularity and Marital Behavior

The higher religiosity of women is a longstanding feature of the religious landscape in the Western World. With the recent vibrancy of secular movements, the greater religiosity of women is reflected in a gender imbalance within the secular groups. For instance, more than three quarters of American atheists are male. Given the effects of both religiosity and secularity on worldview and lifestyle, this gender imbalance is likely consequential for marital behavior and outcomes. Using the latest cycle of the Canadian General Social Survey focused on family, this paper examines how marital behavior of individuals without any tie with religion or spirituality compares with others. Secular males are found appreciably more likely to experience marital dissolution, whereas their female counterparts are shown no different from others. This result lends support to the theories that posit religiosity as a complementary marital trait, requiring the mating of the like. The analysis also indicates that union formation behavior of secular females manifests a larger shift away from the traditional conceptions of marriage compared with secular males. Various explanations are explored.     

Doing gender in the ‘new office’

This paper investigates how gender is performed in the context of an office setting designed to promote intensive, fluid networking. We draw on an ethnographically oriented study of the move of staff into a new office building constructed primarily from glass, and incorporating open plan offices, diverse collective areas and walking routes. Although the designers aimed to invoke changes in the behaviour of all staff, they conceptualized these changes in masculine terms. We therefore analyse the gender norms materialized by the workspaces of the ‘new office’ and how women responded to these. We suggest that the new office encourages an image of the ideal worker which brings together ways of acting and interacting that have been characterized as both masculine and feminine — active movement and spontaneous encounters, but also intensive face‐to‐face interaction and deep relationship‐building. Women are driven into this mode of working in an uncompromising, almost aggressive way, but a straightforward gender‐based dynamic does not emerge in their responses, with conventional gender characteristics being reshuffled and recombined.     

Redoing Gender: How Women in the Funeral Industry Use Essentialism for Equality

Although some research considers women's participation in traditionally male‐dominated jobs as an ‘undoing’ of the gender system, other scholars argue that women's participation in non‐traditional roles can actually maintain hegemonic masculinity. Because women have recently entered the funeral industry in unprecedented numbers, the profession offers a unique context to study how women negotiate a sense of belonging in male‐dominated fields. I draw on 22 interviews with women in the funeral industry to reveal how gender is done and undone in an occupational context. In what Hughey ( 2010 . Social Problems, 57, 653–679) refers to as a ‘paradox of participation’, I argue that women in the funeral industry redefine the image of the ideal funeral director by using gender essentialist logic, which originally acted as a barrier to their entry to the field, to justify their participation. By showing how gender essentialism and egalitarianism can constitute reinforcing logics instead of an opposing binary, this research contributes to the literature concerning women in non‐traditional roles.     

‘Are we to become a gender university?’ Facets of resistance to a gender equality project

Gender equality (GE) is something ‘we cannot not want’. Indeed, the pursuit of equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities for all women and men throughout a society freed from gendered oppression is widely visible in recent organizational GE initiatives. In practice, however, GE initiatives often fail in challenging gendered norms and at effecting deep‐seated change. In fact, GE measures tend to encounter resistance, with a gap between saying and doing. Using a GE project at a Swedish university, we examined the changing nature of reactions to GE objectives seeking to understand why gender inequality persists in academia. We used ‘resistance’ to identify multiple, complex reactions to the project, focusing on the discursive practices of GE. Focusing our contextual analysis on change and changes in reactions enabled a process‐oriented analysis that revealed gaps where change is possible. Thus, we argue that studying change makes it possible to identify points in time where gendered discriminatory norms are more likely to occur. However, analysing discursive practices does not itself lead to change nor to action. Rather, demands for change must start with answering, in a collaborative way, what problem we are trying to solve when we start a new GE project, in order to be relevant to the specific context. Otherwise, GE risks being the captive of consensus politics and gender inequality will persist.     

“留守”对西部农村妇女社会性别观念的影响

本文根据较大规模问卷抽样调查的结果,分析比较西部农村留守妇女与非留守妇女的社会性别观念。结果发现,留守妇女自身能力意识和事业价值观要强于非留守妇女,而非留守妇女在忠贞观、生育观方面要比留守妇女更加传统保守。回归分析结果表明,在对农村妇女自身特征如文化程度、年龄、家庭年收入等变量进行控制之后,留守对农村妇女的社会性别观念仍然有独立影响,这种影响主要表现在留守促进了农村妇女事业能力观、婚育贞节观以及总体社会性别观念从传统到现代的转变。     

‘A place for men to come and do their thing’: constructing masculinities in betting shops in London

During fieldwork conducted with workers and customers in betting shops in London research participants consistently conceptualized betting shops as masculine spaces in contrast to the femininity of other places including home and the bingo hall. According to this argument, betting on horses and dogs was ‘men's business’ and betting shops were ‘men's worlds’. Two explanations were offered to account for this situation. The first suggested that betting was traditionally a pastime enjoyed by men rather than women. The second was that betting is intrinsically more appealing to men because it is based on calculation and measurement, and women prefer more intuitive, simpler challenges. I use interviews with older people to describe how the legalisation of betting in cash in 1961 changed the geography of betting. I then draw upon interviews with regular customers in order to show how knowledge about betting is shared within rather than between genders. Finally, I use my experience of training and working as a cashier to describe how the particular hegemonic masculinity found in betting shops in London is maintained through myriad everyday practices which reward certain kinds of gendered performances while at the same time suppressing alternatives. The article shows how particular spaces may become gendered as an unanticipated consequence of legislation and how contingent gendered associations are both naturalized and, at the same time, subjected to intense attention.     

“Behind Every Great Man…”: The Male Marriage Wage Premium Examined Qualitatively

Studies across diverse national contexts reliably show that married men earn more than unmarried men, but the mechanisms responsible for this are still disputed. This article explores the male marriage wage premium from a new perspective, using longitudinal qualitative data from Russia (N = 94). Qualitative research is particularly suited to identifying underlying processes and, by analyzing men's accounts of the influence of their marital trajectories on their work, the authors were able to reexamine existing hypotheses and develop new ones. They propose 4 mechanisms that they hypothesize can influence men's work motivation and performance: premarital planning, 2 distinct “breadwinner” effects using expectancy and self determination theory, and monitoring by wives. They integrate these mechanisms within gender theory, arguing that the treatment aspect of the male marriage wage premium is an outcome of the “coproduction” of masculinity within marriage. Their recontextualization of existing theory also enables them to reveal weaknesses in the specialization hypothesis.     

Raymond Williams and sociology

The purpose of this article is to recover Williams as a major theoretical inspiration for the social sciences, specifically, as the inaugurator of what might be regarded as a research paradigm, cultural materialism. In the first section, Williams's encounter with the discipline of sociology is traced and distinguished as a critical alternative to the presently ascendant – at least in the USA – neo‐Durkeimian school of ‘cultural sociology’. In the second section, his cultural‐materialist programme is proposed as a powerful analytical framework for the study of culture and society today. In the final section, a key concept of Williams's cultural materialism, mobile privatization, is selected illustratively and proposed as a powerful analytical tool for studying the production and technological mediation of typical modes of communicative sociality in the early twenty‐first century.