Gender Stratification

Introduction

Gender stratification is the dividing of people in society into hierarchical levels or strata. Gender stratification can be based on factors including age, authority, ethnicity, gender, poverty, power, and wealth. Most commonly, gender stratification is based on a person's role in the society's mode of production. For example, in a capitalist society, a person who is a worker is in a lower stratum than an owner.

However, although gender stratification played a core role in defining the discipline's central concerns for much of the twentieth century, this now looks increasingly fraught. Even though, the study of gender stratification is technically sophisticated, it is also seen as old-fashioned, parochial and self-referential, unable to come to terms with fundamental features of contemporary social change. This challenge is serious and far-reaching, and poses serious questions about the value of sociological perspectives.THE EMERGENCE OF THE GENDER STRATIFICATION PARADIGM WITHIN SOCIOLOGY

This positivist vision of sociology required the other social sciences to be subordinate to sociology (since the economy, political system, etc. were seen as parts of a wider society). Thus, even the structural functionalism of Parsons, which shored up this classic positivist conception of sociology in the most prestigious American universities into the second part of the twentieth century, rested on shallow foundations. From the 1950s, even as the subject expanded dramatically, sociology fractured, with withering critiques from integrationists and ethno-methodologists, and from those with more radical and practical conceptions of the discipline. (Andersen, 397)

Thus, it was that gender stratification sociology emerged, largely unannounced, as an alternative means of reconciling a discipline in need of some kind of unifying framework. This attempt to redefine the sociological project was compatible with the emerging view that sociology, and was a critical discipline, that questioned established and received ways of thinking. A critical perspective involves a deep scrutiny of social beliefs and perceptions that tend to generate views of the social order as holistic communities of shared interests. (Kendall, 269)

THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER STRATIFICATION

One was the emergence of a new way of defining sociological expertise, which saw the discipline as a kind of academic savant-grade, especially well placed to diagnose current forms of social change. This drew upon elements of classical sociology, notably the concerns of early sociologists to situate their discipline in ...