Gender and Stratification: The Effects of Social Marginalization

A myriad of studies indicate American women do not enjoy the same opportunities to attain high status positions as do American men. As researchers seek to understand how gender impacts social stratification, they often overlook the fact that workplace status is not a valid indicator of a woman's social class. Social stratification of women encompasses a complex mix of factors including her spouse's socioeconomic status, how she handles her private realm responsibilities, her personal workplace status, and how she has been socialized to a position of marginalization or empowerment during her adolescence. This paper focuses on the impacts of the marginalization of adolescent girls.

RESEARCH STARTERS

ACADEMIC TOPIC OVERVIEWS

Stratification & Class in the U.S. > Gender & Stratification: The Effects of Social Marginalization

Overview

Myriad studies indicate American women do not enjoy the same opportunities to attain high-status positions that American men do. This is no surprise as power, privilege, and status have most usually been rendered more available to men across time, countries, and cultures (Marini, 1990). Researchers continue to work to identify why status differences continue to exist despite various attempts at equalization. Primary contributors to this phenomenon are believed to be biological differences, assigned social roles, and the division of labor. Researchers argue over how these three factors can be used to adequately measure status differences based on a person's sex. Many scholars hypothesize that women's status is on the rise; women earn a larger percent of higher education degrees than in the past, women can increasingly be found in high-status occupations (albeit in low numbers), men are reported to take on relatively larger portions of private realm duties (e.g., child care, house cleaning, etc.), and leaders are more careful to include both genders when speaking publicly (Chafetz, 1984; Marini, 1990; Sanday, 1973; U. S. Census Bureau, 2006). Yet, arguments remain that women are not attaining equitable opportunities for status as quickly as previously anticipated.

Status Attainment & Workplace Status

In seeking to explain why higher status appears to be an elusive goal for women, researchers have sought to understand intersections between biological differences and gender status in the workplace (Friedl, 1975), societal structures/barriers and gender status in the workplace (Chafetz, 1984; Sanday, 1973), and the impact of how women perceive their societal roles (Gilligan, 1982). Many well-meaning researchers have simplistically equated status attainment solely with workplace status for women, thereby confounding their own studies of gender stratification by attempting to shoehorn women into a male-oriented model of status attainment (Irigary, 1985). Women gain and lose status in American society in ways that are more complex than their male counterparts, due to the secondary role assigned to them within the societal structure. A woman's status is easily affected by the person she marries and by how they maintain their private realm duties as they juggle their responsibilities in both the private and public realms.

The workplace cannot be deemed the sole reliable measure (nor a realistic indicator) of status stratification for women for several reasons (Zipp & Plutzer, 1996). One reason is that the status of a woman's husband has historically had a parabolic effect on whether a woman even entered the workforce. This meant that women with husbands of low socioeconomic status often lacked the skills to enter the competitive workforce while women with husbands of high socioeconomic status were afforded the opportunity to decide to remain at home to pursue personal interests and rear their children. Single women and women with husbands whose socioeconomic status were somewhere in the middle of the range were those most likely to enter the workforce as viable competitors for high-status workplace positions. Low numbers of women married to both high-status and low-status husbands, were not in the competitive job market, and high numbers of all women were in-between in the job market.

Similarly, female homemakers who are widowed or divorced might find themselves thrust back into the competitive workforce. Although they may possess high levels of training and experience that were accumulated prior to their child-bearing years, they often experience bias due to their decision to remain at home and tend to private realm duties (e.g., caring for children, keeping the household running properly, etc.) prior to the life change. Their often high levels of training and job experience are dismissed as being "old," or they are viewed as holding a low level of commitment to their public realm duties due to their years of absence from the workplace.

However, research conducted in the 2000s has called into question the degree to which a spouse's socioeconomic status matters in determining a woman's status. Damaske (2008) found that a contemporary American woman's intergenerational and intragenerational social mobility depended more on her own career initiative and efforts than those of her spouse, especially as most women surveyed married after having attained their present social status.

Researchers have not paid much attention to the effects of women and girls being socialized into marginalized positions in society via exclusionary language, their experiences within organizational structures, and the behaviors of significant adults during their early adolescence. Each of these factors needs to be more fully examined to understand the gendered social stratification extant in American society. This paper will explore the latter of these three factors.

Marginalization of Young Women

Marginalization appears to be potentiated by many variables. Its roots are often deeply embedded within a society, and many times, the oppression is felt but not acknowledged as such by those who are marginalized (Friere, 1971). When considering the process of marginalization, it is important to be cognizant that the process is both ambiguous and complex.

During adolescence, girls work to create a self-identity, a sense of hope, and their potential places in society. Adolescence is informed by the wealth of their individual childhood experiences. These foundational experiences shape many of the responses, thoughts, and actions of each girl. When marginalization informs adolescent development, girls often do not feel valued, included, listened to, or intelligent during the junior high/middle school experience. Some girls discover alternative paths to self-empowerment; other girls may not fare so well. Educational ambition and performance often decline by the time girls enter high school if they have not established a sense of hope, self-efficacy, and empowerment (Gariglietti, McDermott, Gingerich, & Hastings, 1997). This may impede their ability to attain high social status as adults.

However, girls should not be viewed as victims of marginalization. A victim role assumes the girls have no recourse in the situation and implies these girls must be rescued when, in fact, girls are quite capable of rescuing themselves if provided a little support. Girls first need to become cognizant of the ways in which they are marginalized and then they must choose to eradicate the marginalizing variables. They can only become empowered through consciousness of marginalizing factors coupled with personal actions and decisions (Friere, 1971).

Socialization of Girls

Three fields of influence tend to inform the ways girls are socialized to a marginalized place in society. They include:

* Attitudes appearing to originate in the society in which she lives;

* Factors embedded in the culture of the educational system; and

* Self-limiting views or temperaments.

Attitudes Appearing to Originate in the Society

Parental and societal actions and ideologies affect a young person's self-image and conceptualization of his or her ability to succeed. Girls often look to their mothers or other women in the community as mentors. These women have the power to instill either a sense of hope and self-efficacy or despair in girls' perceptions of their abilities and societal value (Gariglietti, McDermott, Gingerich, & Hastings, 1997). Parents' gendered communications with their adolescent children tend not only to reinforce body consciousness and the importance of niceness and pleasantness in girls, but also to encourage egalitarian gender roles and, to a lesser degree, toughness. Boys, on the other hand, are reminded less often of egalitarian gender roles but more often of body consciousness, toughness, and interestingly, niceness and pleasantness (Epstein & Ward, 2011). Epstein and Ward (2011) posit that the niceness and pleasantness messages aimed at boys are interpreted as more situational--i.e., "be nice to your sister"--and those received by girls as being universal--i.e, always be nice and pleasant.

American conceptions of gender have traditionally created devaluation and inequity. Sex has been discursively constructed as a power/knowledge relation (Foucault, 1980) and is used in society to categorize people in a convenient manner. Luce Irigary (1985) posits that sex is not even considered a system of binary difference; rather, it is constructed by our society as a "logic of the same." That is, we recognize one sex (i.e., male) and have identified attributes to define success and status based on maleness. Anything that is not male is, by default, considered female; uniquely feminine attributes have not been used to craft a definition of success and status for females. The fallacy in this manner of thinking is that it makes it impossible to consider femininity as something "self-determining, separate from, and independent of masculinity" (Irigary, 1985; Walkerdine as cited in Gilbert, 2001).

According to Gilbert (2001), "the source of [girls'] oppression lies, not in their biological bodies, but in the meanings that is given to those bodies: that is, in our discursive constructs of them" (p. 299). Girls should not be trained to be "substitute men" (p. 291) when sources of equity are pursued. For a girl to thrive, she must be free to create for herself a "personality consistent with women's healthy psychological development rather than one defined [only] in relation to men" (Dressel & Molson, 1996, p. 216).

Factors Embedded in the Educational System

Embedded in the culture of the educational system are the subtle and not-so-subtle biases exhibited by teachers and administration. Teachers have often been implicated in the academic marginalization of girls. This makes intuitive sense because they represent the service delivery point within the system. Children spend several hours a day under the care and tutelage of teachers, who become powerful informers to the children they teach. Children constantly watch and monitor a teacher for clues as to whether the teacher likes them, considers them to be smart, values them, and thinks they can succeed.

Intersecting with the issues of the marginalization of girls in the educational system are the boys who also attend the school. In the educational arena, boys have often monopolized the classroom setting through learned rule-breaking behaviors, effectively demanding the bulk of the teacher's time and energy and making themselves the center of attention (Baxter, 2002; Sadker, 1999). Conversely, girls have tended to follow the classroom rules and often been expected to help control the boys. This has often been detrimental to their education as well as to their future ability to attain high social status because girls have been stereotyped as less aggressive, less independent, and less ambitious than boys and thus often viewed as incapable of pursuing or succeeding in the hard sciences and the business world (American Association of University Women, 1991).

In the early 1990s, Sadker and Sadker (1994) reported that teachers asked boys more questions than they asked girls, particularly questions involving academic content. In addition, teachers gave more constructive feedback (both verbal and nonverbal) to boys than girls (Jussim & Eccles, 1992; Kelly, 1988). School became a place in which girls experienced and struggled with the existing power differentials and learned their societal place in the periphery while the boys maintained their position on center stage.

It is a difficult task to construct meaning from the complex, ambiguous power relations that exist in a public school. Late-twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century language and gender literature examined the power differential between girls and boys in three ways:

* Deficient-girls' talk was found to be less powerful than boys' talk;

* Different-girls' talk differed stylistically and was undervalued as compared to boys' talk; and

* Girls were often silenced by the more dominant, aggressive boys' talk (Coates, 1995; Swann, 1992; Swann& Graddol, 1988).

Baxter (2002) conducted research that substantiated claims that girls were less valued, less confident, and less effective than boys as speakers in public school settings. She posited that girls were set into powerful subject positions in the classroom (i.e., girls were socialized to be more collaborative, good listeners, and supportive in public discourse) while rendered powerless in the same instance by socialization that encouraged them to follow rules regarding hand raising and not interrupting (whereas the boys were not corrected for speaking out of turn or interrupting the girls). Girls, during discourse in the classroom, were subjected to a stream of interruptions, guffaws, and distractions from many of the boys in the classroom. These distractions did not allow the girls the ability to develop an articulated point of view in a sustained way. This seemingly lent to the development of girls' lowered self-concept, loss of hope, personal view of being less capable, and inability to perceive themselves in high-status positions based on their own merits (Baxter, 2002).

Research conducted in the early 2000s, however, found that the power dynamics in schools had become more complicated. Theran (2009) found that feminine gender socialization did not appear to affect adolescent girls' level of voice with authority figures, as prior research had suggested, though it did lower level of voice among classroom peers. Rather, race, school concentration of ethnic minorities, and parental attachment had greater effects on level of voice. Moreover, academic achievement among girls, and simultaneous declines in boys' achievements, in the latter 1990s and early 2000s led many to believe that girls are no longer face sexism in the classroom (Ringrose, 2007; Pomerantz, Raby & Stefanik, 2013). Girls themselves have embraced "girl power" and postfeminist discourses that advocate feminine niceness, disclaim sexism and victimization, proclaim individual agency, and reject feminism (Pomerantz, Raby & Stefanik, 2013).

Self-Limiting Views or Temperaments

Late-twentieth-century research also suggests girls tend to attribute success to external factors (e.g., luck) and failure to internal factors (e.g., lack of ability). For example, when questioned about difficulties in understanding curriculum concepts, girls reasoned that they were "just not smart enough" to do well in mathematics and science (American Association of University Women, 1991; Kerr, 1996; Reis, 1991), thus negating their likelihood to pursue further knowledge and/or future careers in these areas.

Serf-confidence helps children take risks that may result in failure. Failure is an important part of the risk taking that is inherent in the learning process (Behn, 2003). Students need to be confident enough to incorporate instances of failure into their learning experience while maintaining learning momentum. Petry's study suggests many girls have not developed the requisite self-confidence due to their perceived lack of ability in the academic setting, which has often been reinforced in their educational environment (as cited in Wimer, Ridenour, Thomas, & Place, 2001, p. 86).

These are only a few of the factors that, when combined, work to create the social marginalization that can impede girls' ability to attain high-status positions in their futures. Young girls must also navigate ideological beliefs of religious institutions, the media, and peers as they work toward personal empowerment. They must come to terms with societal attitudes that tend to objectify them in sexual ways while denigrating or ignoring their manifest intelligence. Young girls often appear to allow themselves to be excluded from opportunities for success despite their demonstrated ability to succeed academically.

Status attainment for girls and women is very different from that of boys and men. Although it has been studied for several decades, it is still not clearly understood how marital status, the socioeconomic status of a significant other, lessons in marginalization during adolescence, and actual educational and workplace attainments work to establish the parameters within which a woman can attain and maintain societal status as an adult.

Terms & Concepts

Detrimental: Causing injury or damage.

Discourse: Language/speech used in a way that organizes knowledge, ideas, and experiences into a formal and orderly expression of thought on a subject.

Empowerment: To have the power to retain one's own agency and free will.

Equitable: Dealing fairly and equally with all concerned. Not to be confused with equal.

Hypothesize: To create an assumption that is empirically tested to realize its validity.

Ideology: The integrated assertions, theories, and goals that create the general belief system for a group of people.

Marginalization: The state of being relegated to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group.

Self-efficacy: One's personal belief regarding one's level of capability and ability to influence situational outcomes (Bandura, 1994).

Societal Structure: A social framework used to divide groups into a hierarchical order. This order is imposed on all of society and its dominant groups' beliefs are expected to be adopted by all of the lesser groups within the order.

Socioeconomic Status (SES): Social status as it is related to or concerned with the interaction of economic and social factors.

Status: Position or rank of prestige in relation to others in a hierarchy.

Stratification: A division or arrangement into layers of classes, castes, or social groups.

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Suggested Reading

Ault, A. (2011). Gender socialization. In M. Shally-Jensen (Ed.), Encyclopedia of contemporary American social issues (pp. 1009-1015). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Pub. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from EBSCO online database eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). http://search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=e000xn a&AN=469700&site=ehost-live

Anyon, J. (1980). Social class and the hidden curriculum of work. Journal of Education, 162.

Goyette, K. A. & Mullen, A. L. (2006). Who studies the arts and sciences? Social background and the choice and consequences of undergraduate field of study. Journal of Higher Education, 77, 497-538. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO online database Education Research Complete, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=t rue&db=ehh&AN=20280633&site=ehost-live

Lakoff, R. T. (2010). Gender. In J.-O. Ostman, J. Verschueren, & J. Jaspers (Eds.), Society and language use (pp. 152-168). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Pub. Co. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from EBSCO online database eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). http://search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=e000xn a&AN=340321&site=ehost-live

Sellers, J., Woolsey, M., & Swann, W. (2007). Is silence more golden for women than men? Observers derogate effusive women and their quiet partners. Sex Roles, 57(7/8), 477-482. Retrieved June 16, 2008 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX http://search.ebscohost.com/login.asp x?direct=true&db=sih&AN=26638321&site=ehost-live

Speer, S. A. (2005) Gender talk: Feminism, discourse, and conversation analysis. New York, NY: Routledge.