Gender Inequality

Based on case studies of four organizations that were sued for pay discrimination, Legalizing Gender Inequality challenges existing theories of gender inequality within economic, sociological, and legal contexts. The book argues that male-female earnings differentials cannot be explained adequately by market forces, principles of efficiency, or society-wide sexism. Rather it suggests that employing organizations tend to disadvantage holders of predominantly female jobs by denying them power in organizational politics and reproducing male cultural advantages. The book argues that the courts have, by uncritically accepting the market explanation for wage disparity, tended to legitimate and to legalize a crucial dimension of gender inequality.

This contributed volume explores the status of women in the economies of countries at various developmental stages. Issues covered include, first, evidence of economic and social inequality throughout the world. Second, gender inequality in many societies can be explained by inadequate investment in human capital. Third, by overlooking women's nonmarket output, countries generally overlook women's economic contributions to a nation. Finally, with economic progress women become healthier as well as better educated and trained. Part I addresses the interaction of economic development and gender inequality, while Part II discusses women in France, Mexico, Nigeria, and Turkey. Part III considers some special concerns facing women.

Gender and Welfare State Regimes focuses on the interrelationships between aspects of the welfare state and labour market policies in structuring and transforming gender relations across a broad spectrum of countries. The book examines the construction of gender in various government welfare policies and illustrates how the specific qualities of the welfare state reinforce or counteract gender inequalities.

Providing students with basic information about social problems, this text also aims to teach them a strategy for understanding these issues. It explains how to distinguish between individual and structural analyses and place issues the correct context.

Samuel Cohn teaches at Texas A&M University.

In this lucid and subtle investigation, Sylvia Walby, one of the world's leading authorities on gender shows how undoubted increases in opportunity for women in Europe and America have been accompanied by new forms of inequality. Individual chapters look at the phenomenon of flexible work and its influence on the total labour market, at gender politics and social theory, at the gendering of citizenship and nationhood and at gender in the context of European integration. This eagerly awaited successor to Walby's classic Theorising Patriarchy will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in how questions of gender remake and are remade by the social and economic conditions in which they occur.

At the end of the twentieth century, after four world conferences on women, debates on the impact of economic development on the lives and status of women - including their life-options and opportunities for betterment - continue unresolved. Is patriarchy on the decline, or is it merely its form that is changing? What effect does development have on gender relations, and how do patriarchal structures affect the development process? The chapters in this book were written for a UNU/WIDER research conference convened to explore two parallel phenomena: the changing position of women and gender relations and the relevance of the concept of patriarchy, and the impact of development--and especially industrialization and wage work--on women and gender. They address questions through theoretical, historical, and empirical approaches, and provide critical analysis and macro- and micro-level data for Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian sub-continent, the Nordic region, and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Following an introduction and overview (Part 1), the book is divided into two main parts. Part II offers historical and theoretical perspectives on the evolution of women's positions in the course of development, with contributions by Sylvia Walby, John Lie, Elizabeth Dore, Sheila Carapico, Leela Kasturi, and Jane Parpart. Part III focuses on industrialization, state policies, and women workers, with contributions by Ruth Pearson, Helen Safa, Rita Gallin, Valentine Moghadam, Guy Standing, and Tuovi Allen. The book ends with an appendix of statistical tables providing descriptive data on women in the countries under consideration and others. The contributors are well-known academics and researchers who utilize the methods of economics, sociology, history, and feminist analysis in their case studies of economic development and women's positions.