Blog 8 - Country focus United States

  The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or simply America, is a country consisting of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area. Most of the country is in central North America between Canada and Mexico. With an estimated population of over 328 million, the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world (after China and India). The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City. The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy by nominal GDP, the second-largest by purchasing power parity, and accounts for approximately a quarter of global GDP. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is 4% of the world total, it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank very high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity. It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending, and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally (The World Factbook, 2017).

Current issues for women

Social attitudes

More recent research in 2012 has found that attitudes towards gender and societal roles have changed very little since the mid-1990s, with attitudes hovering at about sixty to seventy percent egalitarian.

This study theorized that an "egalitarian but traditional" gender frame emerged in popular culture during this period, which supports each gender assuming their traditional roles without appearing sexistor discriminatory and is responsible for this backlash. Benevolent sexism, sometimes referred to as chivalry, which holds women as something to be protected, also has psychological effects. Women who hold these views are more likely to have less ambitious career goals and men who hold these views tend to have a polarized and stereotyped view of women, made up of both very favorable and very unfavorable traits. In such cases, the stereotyped view of women is "favorable in content and yet prejudicial in [its] consequences," and attempts to provide justification for discriminatory behaviors presented as helpful or paternal (Jost, John T.; Kay, Aaron C., 2005). 

Sexual assault

Research conducted at Lycoming College has found the enjoyment of sexist humor to be strongly correlated with sexual aggression towards women among male college students. In addition, studies have shown that exposure to sexist humor, particularly humor related to sexual assault, can increase male aggression and their tendency to discriminate against women. One study also asserted that the attitudes behind such humor creates an environment where such discriminatory and possibly violent behavior is acceptable. Men’s tendency to self-report the likelihood that they would commit sexually violent acts has also been found to increase after exposure to sexist humor, as reported by researchers from the University of Kent (Ryan, Kathryn M.; Kanjorski, Jeanne, 1998).

Political participation

The Center for American Women and Politics reports that, as of 2013, 18.3% of congressional seats are held by women and 23% of statewide elective offices are held by women; while the percentage of Congress made up of women has steadily increased, statewide elective positions held by women have decreased from their peak of 27.6% in 2001. Women also make up, as of 2013, 24.2% of state legislators in the United States. Among the one hundred largest cities in the United States, ten had female mayors as of 2013.In 1977, political science professor Susan Welch presented three possible explanations for this underrepresentation of women in politics: one, that women are socialized to avoid careers in politics; two, that women's responsibilities in the home keep them away out of both the work force and the political arena; and three, women are more often than men members of other demographic groups with low political participation rates. In 2001, M. Margaret Conway, political science professor at the University of Florida, also presented three possible explanations for the continuation of this disparity: one, similar to Welch's first explanation, sociological and societal norm discourages women from running; two, women less frequently acquire the necessary skills to hold a political leadership position from nonpolitical activities; and three, gatekeeping in party politics prevents women from running(Conway, M. Margaret (2001).

Workplace Inequality

The United States is falling behind other Western countries in the percentage of women engaged in the workforce. Researchers from the Institute for Women's Policy Research at the University of CaliforniaHastings College of Law argue that this growing gap is due to a lack of governmental, business and societal support for working women. They ranked the United States last out of 20 industrialized countries in an index that measured such programs as family leave, alternative work arrangements, part-time employment, and other means to make workplaces more flexible and family friendly. The United States is also the only industrialized nation that does not have a paid parental leave policy mandated by law, and is one of only four countries worldwide that does not; in addition, fully paid maternity leave is only offered by around 16 percent of employers in the United States (Hall, Katy; Spurlock, Chris, 2013).

Sex discrimination in employment

Jane Wilke from the University of Connecticut found that men's support the idea that men should be the sole source of income in a married couple decreased from 32 to 21 percent from 1972 to 1989;

 in practice only 15 percent of households were supported by a male spouse's income alone at the time of the study. Women continuously are being mistreated and sexually discriminated against explicitly in the workplace today. This has been an ongoing issue and will continue until something changes in the occupational sphere. According to a study conducted by researchers at California State University, Northridge, when an individual with a PhD applies for a position at a university, that individual is significantly more likely to be offered a higher level of appointment, receive an offer of an academic position leading to tenure, and be offered a full professorship if they are a man when compared to a woman of comparable qualifications. However, these findings have been disputed, with multiple studies finding universities pushed to hire more women, resulting in females being given a 2:1 advantage over males in science, technology engineering and mathematics fields (Williams, Wendy M.; Ceci, Stephen J, 2015).

Another study found that women were significantly less likely to receive a job offer or an interview for a high-paying waiter position when compared to equally qualified men; this study also found that such hiring discrimination may be caused in part by customer's discrimination of preference for male wait staff, but that it could not be concluded, since the male/female gap could be explained by the fact that more female waiters than male, such that the preferred hiring of male waiters could help equality. Similarly, research conducted at the University of California, Davis focusing on academic dermatology revealed a significant downward trend in the number of women receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health, which the authors concluded was due to a lack of support for women scientists at their home institutions(Cheng, Michelle A.; Annie Sukhov; Hawa Sultani; Koungmi Kim; Emanual Maverakis, 2016). 

Occupational segregation by gender

Occupational gender segregation takes the form of both horizontal segregation (the unequal gender distribution across occupations) and vertical segregation (the overrepresentation of men in higher positions in both traditionally male and traditionally female fields). According to William A. Darity, Jr. and Patrick L. Mason, there is a strong horizontal occupational division in the United States on the basis of gender in 1990, the index of occupational dissimilarity was 53%, meaning 53% of women or 47% of men would have to move to a different career field in order for all occupations to have equal gender composition. While women have begun to more frequently enter traditionally male-dominated professions, there have been much fewer men entering female-dominated professions; professor of sociology Paula England cites this horizontal segregation of careers as a contributing factor to the gender pay gap (England, Paula, 2005).

Housework

US women spend over twice as much time on housework as men, averaging an extra 65 minutes per day (7.6 hours per week) as of 2010. If the women are employed, or highly-paid, they don't do less housework. In fact, when women work or earn more than their husbands, they do more housework. This has been explained to make their career success less threatening and reassert traditional sexuality. US women are reluctant to delegate housework to men partly because they believe that it won't be done properly. Women are, on average, more concerned about undone housework, an attitude gap that has been attributed to socialization and societies that hold women responsible for the state of the home. In households and societies where gender equality is more highly valued, less time overall is spent on housework. (Treas, Judith; Tai, Tsuio , 2016). Researchers from the University of Maryland have found that while men have steadily begun to perform more household labor since 1965, most of the essential and traditionally feminine tasks are still carried out by women; men generally carry out more nonessential or infrequent tasks, such as taking out the trash or mowing the lawn. While both genders tend to have roughly equal amounts of leisure time, men have more uninterrupted leisure time when compared to women(Bittman, Michael; Wajcman, Judy, 2000). 

Pay Gap

With regards to the gender pay gap in the United States, International Labor Organization notes as of 2010 women in the United States earned about 81% of what their male counterparts did.[40] While the gender pay  gap has been narrowing since the passage of the Equal Pay Act, the convergence began to slow down in the 1990s.In addition, overall wage inequality has been increasing since the 1980s as middle-wage jobs are decreasing replaced by larger percentages of both high-paying and low-paying jobs, creating a highly polarized environment. However numerous studies dispute the claim that discrimination accounts for the majority of the pay gap. When adjusting for industries commonly chosen, "choices" often being the result of gender stereotypes, hours worked, and benefits received, the pay gap returns to 5%, which has been attributed to less aggressive pay negotiating in women. One study actually found that before 30, females made more than males, and hypothesized that choosing a family over a career resulted in the drop of the female wage advantage during the thirties.

  According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the primary cause of this gap is discrimination manifested in the tendency of women to be hired more frequently in lower paying occupations, in addition to the fact that male dominated occupations are higher paying than female dominated occupations, and that, even within comparable occupations, women are often paid less than men. In medicine, female physicians are compensated less, despite the fact that evidence suggest that the quality of care female physicians provide may be higher than that of male physicians. In addition to the gender pay gap, a "family gap" also exists, wherein women with children receive about 10-15% less pay when compared to women without children. According to Jane Waldfogel, professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University, this family gap is a contributing factor to the United States' large gender pay gap. She also noted that men did not seem to be affected by this gap, as married men (who are more likely to have children) generally earned higher than unmarried men (Darity, William A.; Patrick L. Mason, 1998). 

Government Response

   So, with all these issues the Us government, over time has passed several legislations to address gender inequality. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which insured women's suffrage, was ratified. In addition, the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor was created to monitor working conditions for women in the workforce. In 1961, the President's Commission on the Status of Women was started, initially chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. This commission found that women were suffering considerable workplace discrimination. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act was passed, which made it illegal for a woman to be paid less than a man working in the same position. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also made discriminatory hiring on the basis of gender illegal. The affirmative action policy of 1965 was expanded in 1967 to cover women as well as racial minorities. In 1973, women's right to safe and legal abortion was established by the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade. In 1968, sex-segregated job advertisements were declared illegal by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, this decision was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1973; this allowed women to apply for higher-paying jobs formally restricted only to male applicants. In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments, which reads "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in,

 be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance," was passed (Imbornoni, Ann-Marie, 2013). 

    In 1986, in the decision of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, sexual harassment was established as illegal and discriminatory. The Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 guarantees that new parents can retain their jobs for 12 weeks after the birth of the child; this unpaid leave is the only form of paternal leave protected by law in the United States. In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act provided legal protection, as well as funds and services, for rape victims and victims of domestic violence. United States v. Virginia established in 1996 that gender-based admission practices violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and establishing a separate all-female school would not suffice as an alternative

to integrating an all-male school. Most recently, in 2009 the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 provides employees (usually female) who suffer from pay discrimination to file a complaint with the government ((Imbornoni, Ann-Marie, 2013).

   The Equal Rights Amendment, which reads, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex", was first introduced to Congress in 1923 and successfully passed both houses of Congress in 1972. However, it failed to be ratified by an adequate number of states and died in 1982.The United States is one of only a few countries which have not ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Imbornoni, Ann-Marie, 2013).

References :

The World Factbook, 2017, Central Intelligence Agency. Retreived from https://www.cia.gov/library/Publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2087rank.html

Imbornoni, Ann-Marie, 2013. "Timeline of key events in the American women's rights movement 1848–1920”. Retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/history/womens-history/timeline-us-womens-rights-1848-1920

Imbornoni, Ann-Marie, 2013. "Timeline of key events in the American women's rights movement 1848–1920". Retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/history/womens-history/timeline-us-womens-rights-1921-1979

Imbornoni, Ann-Marie, 2013. "Timeline of key events in the American women's rights movement 1980–Present".Retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/history/womens-history/timeline-us-womens-rights-1848-1920

Jost, John T.; Kay, Aaron C., 2005. "Exposure to benevolent sexism and complementary gender stereotypes: consequences for specific and diffuse forms of system justification".

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Conway, M. Margaret, 2001. "Women and political participation". Political Science and Politics. 34 (2): 231–233

Williams, Wendy M.; Ceci, Stephen J, 2015. "National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (17): 5360–5365.

Hall, Katy; Spurlock, Chris, 2013. "Paid parental leave: U.S. vs. The World (INFOGRAPHIC)"

Cheng, Michelle A.; Annie Sukhov; Hawa Sultani; Koungmi Kim; Emanual Maverakis, 2016). "Trends in National Institutes of Health Funding of Principal Investigators in Dermatology Research by Academic

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Treas, Judith; Tai, Tsuio , 2016. "Gender Inequality in Housework Across 20 European Nations: Lessons from Gender Stratification Theories". Sex Roles. 74 (11–12): 495–511.

Bittman, Michael; Wajcman, Judy, 2000. "The rush hour: the character of leisure time and gender equity". Social Forces. 79 (1): 165–189

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