IDST 1002H Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Third Gender, Occupational Segregation, Social Inequality
14 Jun 2018
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Gender and development: one step forward, two steps back?
• There are many forms of social inequality
• We are all biologically male or female (1 in 2000 babies are born intersex)
Gender: socially constructed roles and responsibilities differentially ascribed to females and
males that organize communities and societies
• Sex vs. gender: biological differences vs what society expects someone to be
• Public tasks and private tasks are strongly connected
• Private tasks: allocated primarily to women (care)
• Public tasks: allocated primarily to men (production)
• Gender shapes capabilities
• Third gender (some cultures have more than two genders)
• Most common third gender is when males are raised as daughters
Two implications of gender:
1. Gender is relational
2. Gender relations are historically constructed
Colonialism altered gender relations, deepening or creating inequalities
• Connected subsistent societies and markets to colonial states
• Four changes:
1. Increased social space between work and home, between public and private
2. Facilitated loss of women’s control over land, tools, seeds, and incomes
3. Created situation in which paid work was valued and unpaid work was not
4. Increased containment of women into household-based, private, unpaid,
domestic work
3 processes of gender in international development:
1. Work
• Work: anything that one could theoretically pay someone else to do for you
• But labour services produced by members of a household for the use of
members of that household are not counted within the definition of work
• Marriage reduces economic consumption
• Unpaid Care and Domestic Work:
• Unpaid: person doing an activity does not receive a wage and the work is
not counted in production or as employment
• Care: activity serves people and their well-being
• Domestic: takes place in the home
• Work: the activity requires conscious expenditures of time and energy
• In every part of the world, women spend more time on unpaid
work than men do
• Unpaid care and domestic work limits job choices
• Helps explain occupational segregation and gender gaps in wages
• Across OECD, women make up only 85% of what men make
• Result of this is gender-based global inequalities in the distribution of wealth,
incomes, and work
2. Social Norms and Values
• Created in families, schools, faiths, communities, and by the state (not laws)
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