Post #2

For the purposes of this post, the term sex segregation will be defined as the segregation of jobs by sex. In their piece, “Gender Inequality in Paid Employment”, England and McCreary say, “Men and women generally hold different jobs requiring different kinds of skills. This segregation is attended by a sex gap in pay.”

Sex segregation is definitely apparent at Arizona State University. What stands out most is the high number of women engaged in performing clerical work throughout the university. In the Political Science Department, two of the three academic advisors are women, and all of the clerical staff is female. A male dean heads practically every college within Arizona State, and the President of the university is a man. In the Athletic Department, women fill the building performing the clerical work needed to keep our program going, and there is only one male academic coach, and he works for part of the football team and the wrestlers, more men.

Over the summer while contemplating my academic future, I looked into salary for political science professors at Arizona State, and not to my surprise, at all levels of employment, no matter if a woman was a full professor or associate professor, they made less than a man holding the same position.

Of course the wage gap persists as men loose their jobs in this economic time. It isn’t about who is working, it is about what type of job they are working. According to an NPR report, men in manufacturing and construction jobs have been the hardest hit, and as these sectors have shrunk, the health sector, three quarters of which is composed of women, has grown. That doesn’t mean that nurses’ wages have grown. No matter what, women still make less money than men, about seventy cents on the dollar that men hold. Women are being forced to work more, taking second jobs, yet still earning less than men.

My home life definitely reproduced stereotypical gender roles. Although both of my parents worked full time jobs most of my life, my father, until last year, made more per year than my mother. My father is a heavy equipment operator (manual labor) and my mother does accounting and payroll for a huge engineering corporation (clerical work). Both my parents played into the gender roles set forth by our society, my mother performing most of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, and my father mowing the lawn, fixing the cars, and being the all-around “fix-it man.” My mother is the one who handles the finances in the house, and she was the only one of my parents who attended college and received a degree. My father barely made it out of high school.

My mother would like to think that she has broken away from the patriarchy our society teaches, and she has done a great job in teaching my sister and myself that women do not need to rely on men for anything. However, in her actions as we grew up, constantly cooking and cleaning while my father sat around, did not enforce her teachings. Now that my parents relationship is pretty much over, they act as roommates and never talk, my mother is much more independent and refuses to do anything for my father.