Session 5: Inequality, Gender, Race, Intersectionality

Gender and Race have an impact on social position: (Bourdieu 3D social space)
● Georgiana Cavendish → duchess, author, pol power BUT unable to hold office, victim of
domestic abuse
● Barack Obama → pol trajectory influenced by race

What are the processes of inequality?

Charles Tilly (Durable Inequality, 1998)
● exploitation (Marxian sense) and opportunity hoarding (strategies
implemented by utility-seeking individuals)
● long-term effects → Evicted: “selling houses on contract” in 1950s to black →
responsibilities of home ownership wo rights = eviction + massive profits
● 1966 landlord = 20x profit

Cecilia Ridgeway (“Why status matters for inequality”, 2014)

● multilevel analysis + status biases in micro sociological processes
● How do status beliefs create material inequalities?

● Status biases in judgement and behaviour:

○ “Demand side” – ↓confidence + energy with which XXX put themselves
forward
○ “Supply side” – ↓willingness to pay attention + positively evaluate XXXs
efforts
■ Same idea “sounds better”
○ Indv from more privileged status group (men, white, mid) – systematically
pushed into positions of ↑resources + power – seen as better at valued social
tasks – legitimises inequalities

● Associational Preference Biases

○ Idv prefer higher status cuz status spreads through association → systematic
incentives to associate w higher
■ White prefer to live w white, black prefer to live in mixed (even
from controlled for socioecon)
■ Women prefer working for male bosses
○ High status ingroup bias – prefer ppl like themselves (hiring)
○ Divide interests of low status btwn supporting own + networking → directs
high status to position of power and resources

● Reactions to Status Challenges

○ Motive for gs to defend their valued “sense of group position”
○ Ex. Taylor Swift: men are strategic, women are calculated → dominant vs
domineering

● THUS: symbolic boundaries produce social boundaries which reinforce =

vicious circle of causality.
 Gender
● Gender – social system that establishes a distinction and a hierarchy btwn sexes
and btwn practices, values and representations associated to them (Bereni)

Social system NOT indv characteristic
● classification of social world → establishes fixed
distinction btwn 2 sexes and assigns each indv to a
sex
● Dif socialisation: trained to adopt different
behaviours, tastes
● socialised to heterosexuality
● Not only way to see the world but also way to
organize edu
Hierarchy between sexes = system is self-fulfilling,
self-reinforcing
● valuation of masculine characteristics (natural
superiority of men) = men achieve more than
women
● rationality, activity and aggressivety –
social superiority of men
● Blue vs Pink → imp cause associations BUT
Christianity – blue (women cuz Virgin Mary) vs
pink (men Jesus red)

Christine Delphy: “The Main Enemy”

● 1970s: marxism on rise → had to prove that women were not only mistreated, but also workers
● “when we find both material exploitation and a devaluing ideology applied to the same group, the
logical primacy of the first is the inevitable conclusion”
● Women (reprod + domesic labour = unpaid/undervalued) VS men (prof labour = paid)
● Economic basis of patriarchy is the “domestic mode of production”
○ Gender-based division of labour = legitimation for domination
○ source of econ dependence for women in couple + exploitation by men = "the private is
political"
● + Bourdieu = rejection of essentialism (gender as a natural fact)
○ Gender-specificity of habitus → shapes identity + seen as nature
○ social division of labour between man and woman → symbolic violence

● Limited change in patterns w housework

○ Housework (76.5%), clean(86.5%) – women who work spend ↑22%
○ Pronounced asymmetry

Gender inequalities in the French labour market:

● 80% of part-time workers are women (circular causality btwn inequality household + labor market)
● Full-time monthly wages ↓20%
● Pensions are ↓31%
● Occupational segregation: male-dom vs female-dom econ sectors
○ administrative work, teaching, health and social welfare = 64% of women
○ Lowest wages
● “Glass ceiling” in the academic world
○ 57.6% students in undergrad, 22.5% professors, 14.8% academic officers
○ Impact on capital accumulation:
■ Self-censorship, stigmatisation
■ Higher exchange rate → inability to convert cultural into econ
 Race
● Race – a “symbolic category, based on phenotype (physical appearance
and constitution) or ancestry (family lineage) and constructed according to
specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural
category” (Desmond)

● Symbolic category: race is a “social fabrication” place and time specific

○ Dumas (¼ black but adopte white identity) and Du Bois (grow up as black)
but one is seen as white → “one-drop rule”
○ Irish/Jews/Italians/Latin (US Census) → dif race?
○ Latin not race because fear over segregation → arbitrary

● Naturalization of racial taxonomies = “smth created by humans is mistaken

as something dictated by nature”. (Desmond, “What is racial domination?”)
● Gender + race – claimed as being natural by social actors using them → dif from
social class

Perspectives:
● Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
○ One drop rule → tribe affiliation: not good to be white because the threat to
integrity of tribe
● Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves:
○ Brazil “colorist system”, all have a part of “black blood” but still there’s
a hierarchy.
● Ann Morning, The Nature of Race:
○ dichotomy between the White and the Blacks
○ only recently US census integrated the possibility to cross more than
one case & the section of ethnicity in addition to race

What is racial domination? Desmond & Emirbayer (2009), racial domination:

Institutional racism Interpersonal racism:
systemic white domination of people of colour, embedded and Present in everyday interactions cuz
operating in social collectives (or Han domination in CHN) structures of racial dom develop
racialized dispositions that guide
Direct explicit – extermination camps behaviours
Indirect implicit – redlining
● pauperization of black American community Conscious + unconscious biases
● Identify neighbourhoods as riskier → more expensive cuz no
insurance → stick to white

Desmond and Emirbayer’s “5 fallacies about racism” → can be used for gender
● Individualistic Fallacy – need to recognize structural racism ind of indv action (COVID dif black)
● Legalistic Fallacy – abolishing de jure racism does not abolish de facto (basis of critical race
theory)
● Tokenistic Fallacy – presence of black ppl in influential positions =/= no racism (proper way to assess →
whether race plays a role at any pt)
● Ahistorical Fallacy – legacy of slavery and colonialism impact tday
○ dispossession, downward preference formation
○ children taken away from fathers + sold immediately → no expectation of fatherhood + attachment
● Fixed Fallacy – ideas of racism and race develop over time

Racial inequality in the US Erik Olin Wright and Joel Rogers, 2010, “Racial Inequality”
 ● Median income for black households = 60% of white
● Median wealth in black households = 10% of white
● 2000s, 40% black children (-6) live below poverty line (vs. 16,6% of white)
● Bourdieu: power to define what valued cultural capital is → no braids – masking
● Neighbourhood effect:
○ Black: poor grow up in areas where majority also black + poverty
○ White: poor grow up in diverse neighbourhoods → not everyone poor →
resources that might not have in household, have on neighbourhood lvl
(friends, tools, connections)

Intersectionality

● Interwoven systems of inequality (Hull and Smith, 1982, All the women are
white, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave)
○ combination of systems of hierarchization = position in social order.
○ Original experience → women in islam, native women (remote + issues w
policing → perpetrators feel impunity)
● Social movements tend to rely on ideal-typical racial/class situation → ex. Class
struggle btwn white men, first wave of feminism wo race

Sociological Intersectional Approach to Inequalities:

● Questioning unity of a given social group (class, sex or racial group)
● Precise analysis of social mobility
○ women who “make it” to male-dominated occupations and/or in spite
of the glass ceiling (Marry, 2004)
○ who are the men who benefit from the “glass escalator” (Wingfield,
2009)
● Race, class and gender as mutually constitutive.
○ Michèle Lamont The Dignity of Working Men (2000).
○ How class, race and gender play in the way working-class men draw
moral boundaries against people “above” and “below” in France + US:
■ Gendered forms of racialization on the part of white working-
class men – “[Blacks] have less family values” (US)

● Thinking in terms of intersectionality and not merely in terms of intersection

→ not dividing actors into smaller subgroups
● Caroline Perez: “male unless indicated otherwise” → treating women as outside the scope
of the sociological cannon
○ Exogenous to sociology theory – Bourdieu: reliance on fathers

A. Harvey Wingfield (2009) “Racializing the glass escalator”

● “Glass escalator” metaphor (Williams, 1992): men in female field experience
“hidden advantages” boost (vs. “glass ceiling” for women)
● Harvey Wingfield (2009) (fieldwork on nursing) not the case for black men
○ the glass escalator was based on the experience of straight, white,
middle-class men” (Williams, 2013)