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Essay on Sexual Orientation-Based Employment Discrimination
In the recent, postmodern society, gender is given a very substantial salience; social class and race are not thought to be similarly important as determinants of inequality. Where self-determination, perceptions of sense of worth, and patterns of interaction are weighed so deeply, the social stratification based on racial distinctions and race-based animosities figures less prominently. Women, as of today's characteristic role stereotyping and the resulting gender imbalance in the work force, are reduced to subordinate places, and there is no denying this obvious fact. Within academic and corporate settings, this inequality is constantly alluded to, and it is significant that such analysis is more commonly made by white female scholars and behavioral scientists than by those of African American descent or by their white male colleagues. In status ascription, identity, and group consciousness, gender description figures prominently. So long as race is not seen as the central element in defining the nation's opportunity structure, there can be no understanding of why the American race-based democracy continues to be confronted by the "quandary.
The gender perception as a substitute emphasizes the resiliency of gender inequality and elements that work against change in the gender division of labor. According to gender theorists, unpaid work is not a gender-neutral bundle of chores that women perform out of comparative advantage or lower resources but instead integral to the reproduction of unequal power relations between women and men. Further, not doing unpaid work, or at least avoiding certain activities, is one way men display masculinity and reinforce their structural and cultural power.
Hence, this perspective predicts that sharply differentiated gendered time use patterns may have been fine-tuned to reflect changing demographics, economics, and norms but the recreation of gender inequality continues to be a fundamental product of gendered time allocations. Definitions of acceptable feminine behavior have broadened to include wage earning; however, women's performance of domestic labor is still part and parcel of being a "good" wife and mother......
