The Denial of Personal Disadvantage Among You, Me, and All the Other Ostriches

Abstract

All throughout America, and in many other parts of the world as well, sex roles appear to be shifting. Medical schools and law schools boast of in­ creasing numbers of female students, and their faculties have begun to hire and sometimes even tenure women. Large corporations have admitted women to the formerly all-male enclaves of executive responsibility, and women are increasingly visible in the lower ranks of corporate life, in the vast cadres of middle management, and in the less glamorous offices of small business. The mass media treat the female penetration of the paid labor force and the male involvement in the family as important news items, and some commentators even speak of the revolution in sex roles. But if the initial image is one of vigorous change in gender asymmetries, closer scrutiny of both domestic and work life reveals more stasis than change. Look at the division of domestic labor. Virtually every systematic study portrays the traditional imbalance: females perform the bulk of domestic labor and males retain the power to make major family decisions (Pleck, 1983). While the sex differentials diminish somewhat when wives have independent careers, especially careers that produce a lot of income, the actual imbalances persist far more than one would guess from media portraits of the "new husband" or of the "symmetrical family" (Silber­ stein, 1987; Steil & Turetsky, 1987). If life in the intact family does not benefit women as much as it benefits men, life after divorce usually in­ creases the disparity. Divorce makes women much poorer while making men slightly richer (Weitzman, 1981). Consider also the facts about the paid labor market. Study after study confirms our fears and disappointments. Unemployment and underem­ ployment plague female workers more than male workers. Then, when women do find employment, they are shunted into a comparatively small number of occupations. Even when women enter professions, the profes­ sions tend to splinter (he becomes the corporate lawyer, she becomes the estates lawyer; he becomes the surgeon, she the pediatrician) so that every­ where the sex segregation of the labor market is preserved. Women are also, of course, undercompensated relative to men. Since World War II,