sex segregation essay

Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense

Though school sports are typically sex-segregated, a new generation of kids isn’t content to compete within traditional structures.

Shira Mandelzis fell in love with flag football while playing on her middle-school team. An avid snowboarder and all-around athletic kid, she loved the energy she felt while on the field, and the camaraderie engendered by the intensely physical game. So last summer, heading into her junior year at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, Mandelzis decided to sign up for football. She would be the only girl, but it was a no-cut, no-tryout team, so she figured the worst she’d have to deal with would be not feeling welcomed by the team. Instead, soon after she’d filled out the enrollment form, Riverdale’s athletic director reached out to Mandelzis about specific requirements she would have to meet in order to join the team.

Because Mandelzis was a girl trying to join a boys’ sport, she had to abide by a set of “mixed gender” sport regulations that the New York State Education Department passed back in 1985 . These rules, which were developed in part to protect girls from harm during competitions, required that Mandelzis submit a record of her past performance in physical-education classes, a doctor’s physical documenting her medical history, and assessments of her body type (height and weight, joint structure) and sexual maturity level (breast and pubic-hair development measured according to a medical guideline known as the Tanner Scale ). Once she passed a fitness test, including a one-mile run, sprints, push-ups, and curl-ups, she sent her scores to a closed-door panel including physical-education staff, other administrators of the school’s choosing, and a consulting physician. The panel then set out to determine whether Mandelzis was, essentially, strong, developed, and athletic enough to play a contact sport with boys—even though those boys needed to prove no such thing.

Although Mandelzis’s exact experience may seem rare, it exemplifies the way many people still view sports as a perfectly reasonable venue in which to enforce exclusion on the basis of sex. School sports are typically sex-segregated, and in America some of them have even come to be seen as either traditionally for boys or traditionally for girls: Think football, wrestling, field hockey, volleyball. However, it’s becoming more common for these lines to blur, especially as Gen Zers are more likely than members of previous generations to reject a strict gender binary altogether. Maintaining this binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.

Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think . And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men , researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. “Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!” Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email. She said that this complexity means it doesn’t make sense to separate sports by sex in order to protect women athletes from getting hurt. “If safety was a concern, and there was evidence to select certain bodily characteristics to base safety cut-offs on, then you would see, say, shorter men excluded from competing with taller men, or lighter women from competing with heavier women, across sports.” We do see weight-class separation in boxing, rowing, and wrestling, yet it’s far from the norm across all sports, and isn’t typically seen as a method of integrating athletes of different sexes—though it could be. Old notions of sex as a marker of physical capability are changing, and more research is making clear that sex differences aren’t really clear at all.

Regulations like the ones Mandelzis encountered in the Bronx don’t affect girls alone. Colin Ives, who graduated from Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, this year, “basically had a [field hockey] stick in my hand for my whole life,” he told me on Zoom. His mom, Jenny Leffler, is an English teacher and field-hockey coach at the school, so Ives grew up attending practices and games, and took to the sport. Around the world, field hockey is played mostly by men, but here in the U.S. it’s typically seen as a girls’ sport. So Ives had to go through the same New York State mixed-gender-competition rules to get on the team. He was approved by his school’s panel to play during his freshman and sophomore years (the pandemic canceled his junior season). But last year, Ives went through the process, and just days before his first league game his head of school informed Leffler that Ives was not allowed to play. Hackley had approved his petition to play, but the other private high schools that make up the Ivy Preparatory School League, which Hackley is a part of, voted to not allow Ives to play.

As with many kids who play sports in school, Ives’s teammates were his close friends, and they wanted to play together. Ives told me that the girls on his team (as well as on opposing teams) expressed support for him to play because the idea that he was “too good” to play with them felt discriminatory toward them. “It’s belittling to them to know that their own heads of school or their own athletic directors or whoever they would credit for making these decisions didn’t think that they were strong enough or had the physical capabilities to play against me,” Ives said. Just as Mandelzis told me that she could take a hit as well as the boys on her football team, Ives said the assumption that he’d be a danger to girls is an oversimplification. “There are players on teams that we play that are faster than me, that are stronger than me, that can hit the ball harder than me. So I knew that [the league’s] arguments didn’t really have any basis in that regard.” (A representative of the Ivy Preparatory School League did not respond to requests for comment.)

In recent years, the question of who can play on what team has developed into a full-blown front in the culture war, based in large part on the fear that transgender girls will unfairly take over girls’ sports because of sweeping generalizations about biological athletic advantages. As of this writing, 18 states have passed laws to ban trans girls and women from playing on certain school teams (some laws ban trans boys and men from certain teams as well). But perhaps what’s missing most from that debate is the question over why there are rigidly segregated girls’ teams and boys’ teams at all.

The insistence on separating sports teams strictly by sex is backwards, argues Michela Musto, an assistant sociology professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied the effect of the gender binary on students and young athletes. “Part of the reason why we have this belief that boys are inherently stronger than girls, and even the fact that we believe that gender is a binary, is because of sport itself, not the other way around,” she told me by phone. The strict sex segregation we’ve instilled in sports at all levels gives the impression that men and women have completely different capabilities, but in reality, she said, the relationship between sex and athletic capability is never so cut-and-dried. “There are some boys who also could get really hurt if they were competing against other boys in contact sports.” Researchers have noted for years that there may even be more diversity in athletic performance within a sex than between the sexes. One recent small study in Norway found no innate sex difference when it came to youth-soccer players’ technical skills. The researchers hypothesized that the gap they did find between girls and boys was likely due to socialization, not biology.

While the need to separate athletes by sex is still held firmly by many as a way to protect girls and women from harm, many people advocate for moving to a more integrated and inclusive approach. The Women’s Sports Foundation, founded by the tennis legend Billie Jean King, offered guidance on how girls and boys can equitably compete with and against each other: “If the skill, size and strength of any participant, female or male, compared to others playing on the team creates the potential of a hazardous environment, participation may be limited on the basis of these factors, rather than the sex of the participant.” In other words, if a girl on the football team needs to be assessed for her size and strength for safety reasons, so should all of the boys.

The panel at Riverdale ultimately approved Mandelzis’s request to play on the football team, but she felt unfairly treated and violated by the physical exams. She won’t return to the gridiron this fall, or to Riverdale. “Going through the regulations was so infuriating for me, because there were these freshman [boys] who are 100 pounds and half my size and all they had to do was sign up,” she told me by phone. “And the fact that my ability to get on the field had to be tested simply because of my gender, when I had more experience than these other people, was just very upsetting for me.” When reached for comment, a representative for Riverdale told me that the school agrees with Mandelzis about the state regulations. “We encouraged Shira to try and change New York State regulations for all young women playing sports, as we agree with her that the whole panel review system is seriously flawed, outdated, and sexist; therefore, we attempted to help connect her with elected officials and state lobbyists.” Mandelzis is, in fact, trying to overturn the regulations; she’s retained a lawyer who has made a formal request to the New York State Education Department to revoke the guidelines, citing a violation of Title IX and the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. (Department officials acknowledged receipt of the letter and said they plan to review and respond to the request.)

Mandelzis’s lawyer, Iliana Konidaris, told me that the existence of these mixed-gender-competition guidelines in New York has effects beyond the playing field. “The sports field is not … a niche issue,” she said. “It’s where a lot of students get their sense of fairness, sportsmanship, equality, culture, and confidence.” This became starkly clear to Musto, the University of British Columbia researcher, when she recently spent months observing sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at a school in California to assess how gender informs education. The gender binary’s influence on schoolkids crystallized for her when she interviewed nearly 200 students and the one subject they commonly identified as a “boys’ subject” was P.E.

But some young people seem intent on challenging the binary sports system. In 2018, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations , 2,404 girls played high-school tackle football, up from fewer than 1,000 in 2008. Around the country, the number of girls on wrestling teams increased to 28,447 in the 2019–20 season from just 4,975 in 2005. In 2019, Trista Blasz, a then-12-year-old wrestling phenom, was denied her request to join Lancaster High School’s junior-varsity boys’ team through the New York guidelines. According to the Washington Post , the Lancaster district medical director wrote on Blasz’s medical evaluation , “Girls don’t play boys sports in Lancaster schools.” Shortly after news of his response broke, the doctor’s contract was terminated, and Blasz was allowed to wrestle. Earlier this year, a pinfall win in a match helped earn her school a divisional title .

A different youth-sports world is possible. Musto has observed a swim team in California, for instance, whose athletes are separated by ability rather than sex; it has changed how the kids view one another. “It wasn’t a big deal if they had to share lanes with one another or they were competing against one another during practice. Gender wasn’t the primary thing that was shaping the perceptions of who was a good athlete or not,” she said. But as long as laws and general practice of youth sports remain rooted in the idea that one sex is inherently inferior, young athletes will continue to learn and internalize that harmful lesson.

Sex Segregation in Sport: A Denial of Rights and Opportunities for Health

Caroline Voyles

In April 2019, Caster Semenya, the two-time Olympic champion sprinter from South Africa, lost her appeal with the Court for Arbitration for Sport. The court ruled, with judges voting 2-1, in favor of a cap on testosterone levels for women in elite athletics competition, forcing Semenya to take drugs to artificially lower her testosterone to compete in certain women’s events. 1 A number of writers and organizations responding to the ruling cited human rights concerns. 2 A month later, Semenya appealed the ruling in a Swiss court. Her lawyers said in a news release that her case “focuses on fundamental human rights.” According to Semenya’s lawyers and supporters, the regulation is arbitrary in defining gender based on an artificial threshold. More significantly, it can be understood as discriminatory and violating the right to participate in cultural life (which includes the right to participate in sport) and the right to the highest attainable standard of health.

But beyond the effect of this ruling on the ability for an Olympic gold medalist to compete without being forced to take testosterone-lowering drugs (which ironically include a steroid, glucocorticoid) are the questions it raises about sex segregation in sports more generally, and whether this is itself a violation of human rights.

While a majority of individuals identify as either male or female, non-binary sexes and genders (those that are not either male or female) are culturally or legally recognized in several countries around the world. These include the hijra of South Asia, Two-Spirit identities in American Indian communities, non-binary individuals in North America, and the kathoey in Thailand. These third gender identities are in addition to diversity relative to biological sex; intersex conditions are present around the world, in which a person’s physical make-up is not clearly categorizable as male or female, including hormonal levels, as perhaps in the case of Semenya.

Despite the diversity in sex and gender in many cultures, the world of sport remains largely sex-segregated with few co-ed or gender-neutral options. Most athletic competitions beginning in youth separate girls from boys and women from men. And while this may foster a more even playing field for girls and women in some sports and encourage their participation, it leaves little opportunity for those who transgress binary gender norms to compete. Those with non-binary identities may not feel affirmed in their identity by being forced to choose between the male or female team.

In addition to sports being recognized in human rights treaties as part of the right to participate in cultural life and the right to health, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, while not explicitly referencing athletics, articulates in Article 31 the right of the child “to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child”. 3 This emphasis on recreation and play encompasses the world of youth sports. As a recent study revealed that almost 3% of teens identified as transgender or non-binary, a potentially sizable population experiences exclusion from sport at youth levels. 4 Failing to include these children and adolescents is discriminatory and contrary to the principles of universality and non-discrimination in the field of human rights.

The ruling against Semenya claimed the integrity of women’s sports was being protected by preventing women with elevated testosterone levels from competing. However, several sports environments – for example, ultimate frisbee at the high school level, co-ed recreational leagues at the adult level, and gender minority-inclusive sports such as roller derby and horse racing – have demonstrated that women can enjoy participation and compete successfully alongside men. Additionally, many youth sports are gender-integrated at the youngest ages. The existence of mixed-gender teams suggests that there is value to athletes of different genders playing alongside one another. Expanding these opportunities may be of particular value to those who are non-binary or intersex, but explicit policies should be incorporated to ensure safe and affirming athletic spaces.

In a letter to the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the entity responsible for the regulation affecting Semenya, UN Special Rapporteurs described testosterone caps as discriminatory against women, stating that these regulations diminish “their chances to participate in the sports competition category in line with their gender, as well as the enjoyment and exercise of their human rights, including the right to health…the right to employment, and to their livelihoods.” 5 While this document was not discussing sex segregation in sport generally, the same implications apply for those with non-binary identities and intersex conditions due to a lack of inclusive policies and practices.

Steps need to be taken towards ensuring all genders have the opportunity to participate in sports. States have legal human rights obligations both to protect all people’s right to participate in sport and they also have duties to prevent third parties from discriminating against non-binary and intersex individuals. States could mandate that educational settings, for example, have at least one gender-inclusive sports team in their institutions. States must also progressively implement policies that are inclusive of non-binary individuals and promote gender-inclusive sporting environments. As the Special Rapporteurs also state in their letter to the IAAF, “it is critical to strengthen the integration of human rights principles…to protect intersex people from these abuses and from discrimination, including in sports, and to combat root causes of these abuses including harmful stereotypes, stigma, and pathologization.” 6 While some States have recently allowed for a third, non-binary gender option on legal documents, for example, other States have regressed in their protections for gender minorities, limiting their entrée into certain sectors of society such as the military. The creation of a sporting environment in which non-binary and intersex individuals are legally and socially recognized would also help their inclusion and acceptance in other parts of society.

Human rights frameworks describe the principle of participation as necessary for the full realization of human rights. When attempting to establish eligibility criteria and promote opportunities for inclusion for all athletes, gender minority individuals should have a voice in the discussion, alongside cis-gender identified athletes. Incorporating gender minorities into decision-making advances not only human rights, but international sport entities’ missions to promote “sport for all” (IAAF, 2019) and to “put athletes at the heart” of the sports movement (IOC, 2019) and can build a foundation for more inclusive societies worldwide. 7

Caroline Voyles is director of student placement and partnership development and a PhD candidate in the department of Community Health and Prevention at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health

• Court of Arbitration for Sport (2019). Semenya, ASA and IAAF: Executive Summary. Retrieved on May 28, 2019 from: https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/CAS_Executive_Summary__5794_.pdf
• Human Rights Watch (2019). Caster Semenya loses appeal for equal treatment. Retrieved on June 27, 2019 from: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/05/01/caster-semenya-loses-appeal-equal-treatment ; Neophytou, N. (2019, May 3). Caster Semenya’s fate isn’t about running. It’s about human rights. Retrieved on June 27, 2019 from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/opinions/caster-semenya-case-about-human-rights-not-running-neophytou/index.html ; Doorey, J. (2019, May 1). Why the Caster Semenya case is a human rights issue. Retrieved on June 27, 2019 from: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/iaaf-caster-semenya-human-rights-1.5115453
• UN General Assembly (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child , 20 November 1989, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 1577, p.3 available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx
• Rider, G.N., McMorris, B.J., Gower, A.L., Coleman, E., Eisenberg, M.E. (2018). Health and care utilization of transgender and gender nonconforming youth: a population-based study. Pediatrics, 141 (3).
• OHCHR (2018). Regulations regarding eligibility for the female classification (athletes with differences of sex development) (OL OTH 62/2018).Retrieved on June 27, 2019 from: https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Health/Letter_IAAF_Sept2018.pdf
• IAAF (2019). About the IAAF. Retrieved on June 14, 2019 from: https://www.iaaf.org/about-iaaf ; IOC (2019). Our Vision. Retrieved on June 14, 2019 from: https://www.olympic.org/careers-at-the-ioc/life

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

11.3 Gender Inequality

Learning objectives.

• Understand the extent of and reasons for gender inequality in income and the workplace.
• Understand the extent of and reasons for sexual harassment.
• Explain how and why women of color experience a triple burden.
• Describe how and why sexual orientation is a source of inequality.

We have said that the women’s movement changed American life in many ways but that gender inequality persists. Let’s look at examples of such inequality, much of it taking the form of institutional discrimination, which, as we saw in Chapter 7 “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control” , can occur even if it is not intended to happen. We start with gender inequality in income and the workplace and then move on to a few other spheres of life.

Income and Workplace Inequality

In the last few decades, women have entered the workplace in increasing numbers, partly, and for many women mostly, out of economic necessity and partly out of desire for the sense of self-worth and other fulfillment that comes with work. This is true not only in the United States but also in other nations, including Japan, where views of women are more traditional than those in the United States (see the “Learning From Other Societies” box). In February 2010, 58.9% of U.S. women aged 16 or older were in the labor force, compared to only 43.3% in 1970; comparable figures for men were 71.0% in 2010 and 79.7% in 1970 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010). Thus while women’s labor force participation continues to lag behind men’s, they have narrowed the gap. The figures just cited include women of retirement age. When we just look at younger women, labor force participation is even higher. For example, 76.1% of women aged 35–44 were in the labor force in 2008, compared to only 46.8% in 1970.

Learning From Other Societies

Women in Japan and Norway

The United Nations Development Programme ranks nations on a “gender empowerment measure” of women’s involvement in their nation’s economy and political life. Of the 93 nations included in the measure, Norway ranks 1st, while Japan ranks 54th, the lowest among the world’s industrial nations (Watkins, 2007). This contrast provides some lessons for the status of women in the United States, which ranked only 15th.

Japan has historically been a nation with very traditional gender expectations. As the image of the woman’s geisha role in Japan illustrates, Japanese women have long been thought to be men’s helpmates and subordinates. As Linda Schneider and Arnold Silverman (2010, p. 39) put it,

Many more Japanese women work outside the home now than just a few decades ago and now make up almost half the labor force. However, the percentage of all management jobs held by women was just 10.1% in 2005, up only slightly from its 6.6% level in 1985. Japan’s work culture that demands 15-hour days is partly responsible for this low percentage, as it is difficult for women to meet this expectation and still bear and raise children. Another reason is outright employment discrimination. Although Japan enacted an equal opportunity law for women’s employment in 1985, the law is more symbolic than real because the only penalty it provides for violations is the publication of the names of the violators (Fackler, 2007).

In sharp contrast, Norway has made a concerted effort to boost women’s involvement in the business and political worlds (Sumer, Smithson, Guerreiro, & Granlund, 2008). Like other Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Sweden) that also rank at the top of the UN’s gender empowerment measure, Norway is a social democratic welfare state characterized by extensive government programs and other efforts to promote full economic and gender equality. Its government provides day care for children and adult care for older or disabled individuals, and it also provides 44 weeks of paid parental leave after the birth of a child. Parents can also work fewer hours without losing income until their child is 2 years of age. All of these provisions mean that women are much more likely than their American counterparts to have the freedom and economic means to work outside the home, and they have taken advantage of this opportunity. As a recent analysis concluded,

While the United States ranks much higher than Japan on the UN’s gender empowerment measure, it ranks substantially lower than Norway and the other Nordic nations. An important reason for these nations’ higher ranking is government policy that enables women to work outside the home if they want to do so. The experience of these nations indicates that greater gender equality might be achieved in the United States if it adopted policies similar to those found in these nations that make it easier for women to join and stay in the labor force.

The Gender Gap in Income

Women have earned less money than men ever since records started being kept. Women now earn about 80% of what men earn.

John Jacobi – receptionist answering phone at suburban eye care – CC BY 2.0.

Despite the gains women have made, problems persist. Perhaps the major problem is a gender gap in income. Women have earned less money than men ever since records started being kept (Reskin & Padavic, 2002). In the United States in the early 1800s, full-time women workers in agriculture and manufacturing earned less than 38% of what men earned. By 1885, they were earning about 50% of what men earned in manufacturing jobs. As the 1980s began, full-time women workers’ median weekly earnings were about 65% of men’s. Women have narrowed the gender gap in earnings since then: their weekly earnings now (2009) are 80.2% of men’s among full-time workers (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). Still, this means that for every $10,000 men earn, women earn only about $8,002. To turn that around, for every $10,000 women earn, men earn $12,469. This gap amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime of working.

As Table 11.2 “Median Annual Earnings of Full-Time, Year-Round Workers Aged 25–64 by Educational Attainment, 2009” shows, this gender gap exists for all levels of education and even increases with higher levels of education. On the average, women with a bachelor’s degree or higher and working full time earn almost $20,000 less per year than their male counterparts.

Table 11.2 Median Annual Earnings of Full-Time, Year-Round Workers Aged 25–64 by Educational Attainment, 2009

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). Current population survey: Annual social and economic supplement. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032010/perinc/new03_127.htm .

What accounts for the gender gap in earnings? A major reason is sex segregation in the workplace, which accounts for up to 45% of the gender gap (Reskin & Padavic 2002). Although women have increased their labor force participation, the workplace remains segregated by gender. Almost half of all women work in a few low-paying clerical and service (e.g., waitressing) jobs, while men work in a much greater variety of jobs, including high-paying ones. Table 11.3 “Gender Segregation in the Workplace for Selected Occupations, 2007” shows that many jobs are composed primarily of women or of men. Part of the reason for this segregation is that socialization affects what jobs young men and women choose to pursue, and part of the reason is that women and men do not want to encounter difficulties they may experience if they took a job traditionally assigned to the other sex. A third reason is that sex-segregated jobs discriminate against applicants who are not the “right” sex for that job. Employers may either consciously refuse to hire someone who is the “wrong” sex for the job or have job requirements (e.g., height requirements) and workplace rules (e.g., working at night) that unintentionally make it more difficult for women to qualify for certain jobs. Although such practices and requirements are now illegal, they still continue. The sex segregation they help create contributes to the continuing gender gap between female and male workers. Occupations dominated by women tend to have lower wages and salaries. Because women are concentrated in low-paying jobs, their earnings are much lower than men’s (Reskin & Padavic, 2002).

Table 11.3 Gender Segregation in the Workplace for Selected Occupations, 2007

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2010 . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab .

This fact raises an important question: why do women’s jobs pay less than men’s jobs? Is it because their jobs are not important and require few skills (recalling the functional theory of stratification discussed in Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations” )? The evidence indicates otherwise: women’s work is devalued precisely because it is women’s work, and women’s jobs thus pay less than men’s jobs because they are women’s jobs (Magnusson, 2009).

Studies of comparable worth support this argument (Stone & Kuperberg, 2005; Wolford, 2005). Researchers rate various jobs in terms of their requirements and attributes that logically should affect the salaries they offer: the importance of the job, the degree of skill it requires, the level of responsibility it requires, the degree to which the employee must exercise independent judgment, and so forth. They then use these dimensions to determine what salary a job should offer. Some jobs might be “better” on some dimensions and “worse” on others but still end up with the same predicted salary if everything evens out.

Some women’s jobs pay less than men’s jobs even though their comparable worth is equal to or even higher than the men’s jobs. For example, a social worker may earn less money than a probation officer, even though calculations based on comparable worth would predict that a social worker should earn at least as much.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0.

When researchers make their calculations, they find that certain women’s jobs pay less than men’s even though their comparable worth is equal to or even higher than the men’s jobs. For example, a social worker may earn less money than a probation officer, even though calculations based on comparable worth would predict that a social worker should earn at least as much. The comparable worth research demonstrates that women’s jobs pay less than men’s jobs of comparable worth and that the average working family would earn several thousand dollars more annually if pay scales were reevaluated based on comparable worth and women were paid more for their work.

Even when women and men work in the same jobs, women often earn less than men (Sherrill, 2009), and men are more likely than women to hold leadership positions in these occupations. Census data provide ready evidence of the lower incomes women receive even in the same occupations. For example, female marketing and sales managers earn only 68% of what their male counterparts earn; female human resource managers earn only 68% of what their male counterparts earn; female claims adjusters earn only 83%; female accountants earn only 72%; female elementary and middle school teachers earn only 90%; and even female secretaries and clerical workers earn only 86% (U.S. Department of Labor, 2008). When variables like number of years on the job, number of hours worked per week, and size of firm are taken into account, these disparities diminish but do not disappear altogether, and it is very likely that sex discrimination (conscious or unconscious) by employers accounts for much of the remaining disparity.

Litigation has suggested or revealed specific instances of sex discrimination in earnings and employment. In July 2009, the Dell computer company, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $9.1 million to settle a class action lawsuit, brought by former executives, that alleged sex discrimination in salaries and promotions (Walsh, 2009). Earlier in the decade, a Florida jury found Outback Steakhouse liable for paying a woman site development assistant only half what it paid a man with the same title. After she trained him, Outback assigned him most of her duties, and when she complained, Outback transferred her to a clerical position. The jury awarded her $2.2 million in compensatory and punitive damages (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2001).

Some of the sex discrimination in employment reflects the existence of two related phenomena, the glass ceiling and the glass escalator . Women may be promoted in a job only to find they reach an invisible “glass ceiling” beyond which they cannot get promoted, or they may not get promoted in the first place. In the largest U.S. corporations, women constitute only about 16% of the top executives, and women executives are paid much less than their male counterparts (Jenner & Ferguson, 2009). Although these disparities stem partly from the fact that women joined the corporate ranks much more recently than men, they also reflect a glass ceiling in the corporate world that prevents qualified women from rising up above a certain level (Hymowitz, 2009). Men, on the other hand, can often ride a “glass escalator” to the top, even in female occupations. An example is seen in elementary school teaching, where principals typically rise from the ranks of teachers. Although men constitute only about 20% of all public elementary school teachers, they account for about 44% of all elementary school principals (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009).

Women constitute only about 16% of the top executives in the largest U.S. corporations, and women executives are paid much less than their male counterparts. These disparities reflect a “glass ceiling” that limits women’s opportunities for promotion.

Baltic Development Forum – Kristovskis meeting – CC BY 2.0.

Whatever the reasons for the gender gap in income, the fact that women make so much less than men means that female-headed families are especially likely to be poor. In 2009, about 30% of these families lived in poverty, compared to only 6% of married-couple families (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2010). The term feminization of poverty refers to the fact that female-headed households are especially likely to be poor. The gendering of poverty in this manner is one of the most significant manifestations of gender inequality in the United States.

Sexual Harassment

Another workplace problem (including schools) is sexual harassment , which, as defined by federal guidelines and legal rulings and statutes, consists of unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or physical conduct of a sexual nature used as a condition of employment or promotion or that interferes with an individual’s job performance and creates an intimidating or hostile environment.

Although men can be, and are, sexually harassed, women are more often the targets of sexual harassment, which is often considered a form of violence against women (discussed in Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality” , Section 11.4 “Violence Against Women: Rape and Pornography” ). This gender difference exists for at least two reasons, one cultural and one structural. The cultural reason centers on the depiction of women and the socialization of men. As our discussion of the mass media and gender socialization indicated, women are still depicted in our culture as sexual objects that exist for men’s pleasure. At the same time, our culture socializes men to be sexually assertive. These two cultural beliefs combine to make men believe that they have the right to make verbal and physical advances to women in the workplace. When these advances fall into the guidelines listed here, they become sexual harassment.

The second reason that most targets of sexual harassment are women is more structural. Reflecting the gendered nature of the workplace and of the educational system, typically the men doing the harassment are in a position of power over the women they harass. A male boss harasses a female employee, or a male professor harasses a female student or employee. These men realize that subordinate women may find it difficult to resist their advances for fear of reprisals: a female employee may be fired or not promoted, and a female student may receive a bad grade.

How common is sexual harassment? This is difficult to determine, as the men who do the sexual harassment are not about to shout it from the rooftops, and the women who suffer it often keep quiet because of the repercussions just listed. But anonymous surveys of women employees in corporate and other settings commonly find that 40%–65% of the respondents report being sexually harassed (Rospenda, Richman, & Shannon, 2009). In a survey of 4,501 women physicians, 36.9% reported being sexually harassed either in medical school or in their practice as physicians (Frank, Brogan, & Schiffman, 1998).

Sexual harassment in the workplace is a common experience. In surveys of women employees, up to two-thirds of respondents report being sexually harassed.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sexual harassment cases continue to make headlines. In one recent example, the University of Southern Mississippi paid $112,500 in September 2009 to settle a case brought by a women’s tennis graduate assistant against the school’s women’s tennis coach; the coach then resigned for personal reasons (Magee, 2009). That same month, the CEO of a hospital in the state of Washington was reprimanded after a claim of sexual harassment was brought against him, and he was also fired for unspecified reasons (Mehaffey, 2009).

Women of Color: A Triple Burden

Earlier we mentioned multicultural feminism, which stresses that women of color face difficulties for three reasons: their gender, their race, and, often, their social class, which is frequently near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. They thus face a triple burden that manifests itself in many ways.

For example, women of color experience “extra” income inequality. Earlier we discussed the gender gap in earnings, with women earning 79.4% of what men earn, but women of color face both a gender gap and a racial/ethnic gap. Table 11.4 “The Race/Ethnicity and Gender Gap in Annual Earnings for Full-Time, Year-Round Workers, 2009” depicts this double gap for full-time workers. We see a racial/ethnic gap among both women and men, as African Americans and Latinos of either gender earn less than whites, and we also see a gender gap between men and women, as women earn less than men within any race/ethnicity. These two gaps combine to produce an especially high gap between African American and Latina women and white men: African American women earn only 63.0% of what white men earn, and Latina women earn only 54.6% of what white men earn.

Table 11.4 The Race/Ethnicity and Gender Gap in Annual Earnings for Full-Time, Year-Round Workers, 2009

These differences in income mean that African American and Latina women are poorer than white women. We noted earlier that about 31% of all female-headed families are poor. This figure masks race/ethnic differences among such families: 21.5% of families headed by non-Latina white women are poor, compared to 40.5% of families headed by African American women and also 40.5% of families headed by Latina women (Denavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2010). While white women are poorer than white men, African American and Latina women are clearly poorer than white women.

Sexual Orientation and Inequality

A recent report by a task force of the American Psychological Association stated that “same-sex sexual and romantic attractions, feelings, and behaviors are normal and positive variations of human sexuality” (Glassgold et al., 2009, p. v). A majority of Americans do not share this opinion. In the 2008 General Social Survey, 52% of respondents said that “sexual relations between two adults of the same sex” is “always wrong.” Although this figure represents a substantial decline from the survey’s 1973 finding of 74%, it is clear that many Americans remain sharply opposed to homosexuality. Not surprisingly, then, sexual orientation continues to be the source of much controversy and no small amount of abuse and discrimination directed toward members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community.

These individuals experience various forms of abuse, mistreatment, and discrimination that their heterosexual counterparts do not experience. In this respect, their sexuality is the source of a good deal of inequality. For example, gay teenagers are very often the targets of taunting, bullying, physical assault, and other abuse in schools and elsewhere that sometimes drives them to suicide or at least to experience severe emotional distress (Denizet-Lewis, 2009). In 38 states, individuals can be denied employment or fired from a job because of their sexual orientation, even though federal and state laws prohibit employment discrimination for reasons related to race and ethnicity, gender, age, religious belief, and national origin. And in 45 states as of April 2010, same-sex couples are legally prohibited from marrying. In most of these states, this prohibition means that same-sex couples lack hundreds of rights, responsibilities, and benefits that spouses enjoy, including certain income tax and inheritance benefits, spousal insurance coverage, and the right to make medical decisions for a partner who can no longer communicate because of disease or traumatic injury (Gerstmann, 2008).

Household Inequality

We will talk more about the family in Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality” , but for now the discussion will center on housework. Someone has to do housework, and that someone is usually a woman. It takes many hours a week to clean the bathrooms, cook, shop in the grocery store, vacuum, and do everything else that needs to be done. The best evidence indicates that women married to or living with men spend two to three times as many hours per work on housework as men spend (Gupta & Ash, 2008). This disparity holds true even when women work outside the home, leading sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1989) to observe in a widely cited book that women engage in a “second shift” of unpaid work when they come home from their paying job.

The good news is that gender differences in housework time are smaller than a generation ago. The bad news is that a large gender difference remains. As one study summarized the evidence on this issue, “women invest significantly more hours in household labor than do men despite the narrowing of gender differences in recent years” (Bianchi, Milkie, Sayer, & Robinson, 2000, p. 196). In the realm of household work, then, gender inequality persists.

Key Takeaways

• Among full-time workers, women earn about 79.4% of men’s earnings. This gender gap in earnings stems from several factors, including sex segregation in the workplace and the lower wages and salaries found in occupations that involve mostly women.
• Sexual harassment results partly from women’s subordinate status in the workplace and may involve up to two-thirds of women employees.
• Women of color may face a “triple burden” of difficulties based on their gender, their race/ethnicity, and their social class.
• Sexual orientation continues to be another source of inequality in today’s world. Among other examples of this inequality, gays and lesbians are prohibited from marrying in most states in the nation.

For Your Review

• Do you think it is fair for occupations dominated by women to have lower wages and salaries than those dominated by men? Explain your answer.
• If you know a woman who works in a male-dominated occupation, interview her about any difficulties she might be experiencing as a result of being in this sort of situation.
• Write a short essay in which you indicate whether you think same-sex marriage should be legal, and provide the reasoning for the position you hold on this issue.

Bianchi, S. M., Milkie, M. A., Sayer, L. C., & Robinson, J. P. (2000). Is anyone doing the Housework? Trends in the gender division of household labor. Social Forces, 79 (1), 191–228.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2010). Employment & earnings online. Retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/opub/ee/home.htm .

DeNavas-Walt, C., Proctor, B. D., & Smith, J. C. (2010). Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2009 (Current Population Report P60-238). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.

Denizet-Lewis, B. (2009, September 27). Coming out in middle school. The New York Times Magazine MM36.

Fackler, M. (2007, August 6). Career women in Japan find a blocked path. The New York Times , p. A1.

Frank, E., Brogan, D., & Schiffman, M. (1998). Prevalence and correlates of harassment among U.S. women physicians. Archives of Internal Medicine, 158 (4), 352–358.

Gerstmann, E. (2008). Same-sex marriage and the Constitution (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Glassgold, J. M., Beckstead, L., Drescher, J., Greene, B., Miller, R. L., & Worthington, R. L. (2009). Report of the American Psychological Association task force on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Gupta, S., & Ash, M. (2008). Whose money, whose time? A nonparametric approach to modeling time spent on housework in the United States. Feminist Economics, 14 (1), 93–120.

Hochschild, A. (1989). The second shift: Working parents and the revolution at home . New York, NY: Viking.

Hymowitz, C. (2009, May 1). For executive women, it can be lonely at the top. Forbes . Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/01/executives-c-suite-leadership-forbes-woman-power-careers.html .

Jenner, L., & Ferguson, R. (2009). 2008 catalyst census of women corporate officers and top earners of the FP500 . New York, NY: Catalyst.

Kangas, O., & Palme, J. (2009). Making social policy work for economic development: The Nordic experience [Supplement]. International Journal of Social Welfare, 18 (s1), S62–S72.

Magee, P. (2009, September 22). USM settles with ex-student. Hattiesburg American . Retrieved from http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/hattiesburgamerican/access/1866160481.html?FMT=ABS&date=Sep+22%2C+2009 .

Magnusson, C. (2009). Gender, occupational prestige, and wages: A test of devaluation theory. European Sociological Review, 25 (1), 87–101.

Mehaffey, K. C. (2009, September 15). Chelan hospital board fires CEO. The Wenatchee World . Retrieved from http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2009/sep/15/chelan-hospital-board-fires-ceo .

National Center for Education Statistics. (2009). The condition of education . Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/section4/indicator34.asp .

Reskin, B., & Padavic, I. (2002). Women and men at work (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Rospenda, K. M., Richman, J. A., & Shannon, C. A. (2009). Prevalence and mental health correlates of harassment and discrimination in the workplace: Results from a national study. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 24 (5), 819–843.

Schneider, L., & Silverman, A. (2010). Global sociology: Introducing five contemporary societies (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Sherrill, A. (2009). Women’s pay: Converging characteristics of men and women in the federal workforce help explain the narrowing pay gap . Washington, DC: United States Government Accountability Office.

Stone, P., & Kuperberg, A. (2005). Anti-discrimination vs. anti-poverty? A comparison of pay equity and living wage reforms. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 27 (5), 23–39. doi:10.1300/J501v27n03_3.

Sumer, S., Smithson, J., Guerreiro, M. d. D., & Granlund, L. (2008). Becoming working mothers: Reconciling work and family at three particular workplaces in Norway, the UK, and Portugal. Community, Work & Family, 11 (4), 365–384.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2010 . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab .

U.S. Department of Labor. (2008). Highlights of women’s earnings in 2007 . Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (2001). Jury finds Outback Steakhouse guilty of sex discrimination and illegal retaliation. Retrieved from http://www.eeoc.gov/press/9-19-01.html .

Walsh, S. (2009). Dell settles sex discrimination suit for $9 million. Retrieved from http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/dell-settles-sex-discrimination-suit-for-9-million .

Watkins, K. (2007). Human development report 2007/2008 . New York, NY: United Nations Development Programme.

Wolford, K. M. (2005). Gender discrimination in employment: Wage inequity for professional and doctoral degree holders in the United States and possible remedies. Journal of Education Finance, 31 (1), 82–100. Retrieved from http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/jef.html .

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Sexual Harassment and Occupational Segregation: The Impact of Sexual Harassment on Women in the Trades

By Lia Cohen

October 5th, 2019. Tradeswomen march at the annual Tradeswomen Build Nations Conference in Minneapolis. Photographer: Lia Cohen

Although women make up almost half of the workforce, they make significantly less money than their male counterparts in nearly all fields. 1 Research suggests that more than half of the wage gap can be attributed to occupational segregation—the fact that women and men tend to work in different occupations and sectors of the economy. 2  In addition to pay concerns, women disproportionately face the threat of sexual harassment in the workplace. For women looking to move from low-wage work to work that can sustain a family, “middle-skills” jobs in the trades can help lift them out of poverty or economic hardship.

Despite this positive attribute of trade jobs, the US workforce has been unable to fill them. A 2017 report estimates that 70 percent of employers in the construction and skilled trades industries are having a hard time finding skilled workers, and six out of every ten positions in manufacturing alone are going unfilled as a result of the growing skills gap. 3 As half of the US population, women could be a huge part of filling that deficit. Although women are willing and able to work in these trades, they represent only 10.8 percent of construction and building inspectors, 3.1 percent of first-line supervisors of construction and extraction workers, and 2.2 percent of pile drivers, operating engineers, and other equipment operators, for instance. 4  Besides the lack of opportunity for women to get hired, the best-paying “middle-skills” jobs are often in predominantly male fields, with high levels of harassment, and women who get those jobs could ultimately find themselves pushed back out.

In March of 2019, I traveled to Washington DC to intern at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) to conduct independent research. I set out wanting to build on my prior research interests and explore the intricacies of the wage gap, paid family leave, and other workplace inequities, as well as the policy solutions to address them. Working with the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund team, however, the issue that came up again and again from the people we worked with was sexual harassment and violence in male-dominated fields, with strikingly similar accounts coming from across industries. I spoke with my director about the prevalence of the issue, found that there was limited academic research centering these women, and decided to shift my research to document some of their experiences.

For the next eight weeks, I phone-interviewed 16 women in the skilled trades about their experiences in the field, and compared their responses to the existing literature on the topic. I listened to what each tradeswoman proposed as necessary change, with some of them being optimistic, and some unable to imagine anything changing for the better in their lifetimes. What they described was a sector direly in need of reform and support for survivors and tradeswomen of all identities. In recognizing that people who have been subjected to sexual harassment may identify in different ways at different times, I chose to use both the terms ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ in my research and in this blog.

My research examined whether experiencing sexual harassment drives women out of male-dominated, “middle-skills” jobs, and if so, how that happens. To select interviewees, I reached out to the Tradeswomen Taskforce asking to be put in contact with women in male-dominated fields who would like to discuss their experiences with harassment. One woman in the Taskforce posted the request in several tradeswomen Facebook groups, and many women very quickly reached out to me to discuss. I responded to everyone who reached out, and had the privilege of learning about the experiences of these women first hand. The women were from all over the country, and ranged in trade from construction workers to union pipefitters and everything in between.

The results of the interviews suggest that harassment does drive women out of male-dominated, “middle-skills” jobs, specifically in the trades, and at a relatively high rate. While some women endure the harassment for decades or even their entire careers, I found that a majority of women, especially if they report harassment, are driven out of their jobs regardless of how much they want to be there. A large majority of the interviewees had seen multiple examples of women being driven out of work, either in their specific trades or in other trades with women they knew or had worked with. More than half of the interviewees had left their jobs because of harassment, with several more leaving or finding themselves unable to return for related reasons. Those who had never left, never seen anyone leave, or both, expressed that they had several mechanisms for dealing with it. These ranged from confronting the harassment in person to enduring or avoiding harassers, but they said it took a toll on them either way. These findings are in line with the literature showing the link between harassment and job change. Though this study uses a small sample, the wide diversity of occupations within the skilled trades that they come from, and the small number of women in these fields in the first place, means that their stories provide important and far-reaching insights.

The interviewees’ experiences confirm that the solutions must be multipronged. Victims of harassment need legal protections and enforcement, but also substantive policy changes and transformation at higher levels. The trades need leadership from industry leaders and decision makers to ensure that survivors do not just have protections once the harassment has already happened, but before it even occurs. Creating a pipeline for more women to enter these trades is a first step, but it must be supplemented by improved workplace harassment protections and retention strategies, so women are not pushed back out. Employers must respect the legal right of women to report and combat retaliation efforts, and complaints must be taken seriously. When the harassment is so severe that the perpetrator needs to be removed from a job, protections must be in place that ensure the victim’s rights and ability to work are not compromised. For cases where women want the harassment to stop, but not necessarily to have their coworkers removed (as occurs in a majority of cases), researchers are exploring the benefits of restorative justice and other less punitive solutions. 5

In today’s environment, just a year later, the coronavirus has changed life as we know it and the world is in many ways a different place. Sexual harassment and assault, at home, online, in the workplace, in healthcare, and elsewhere, however, remain rampant. As I write this, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has diminished Title IX protections for student survivors, the coronavirus is making its way across the globe, and the Black Lives Matter movement is growing domestically and internationally, sparking cries to defund the police. Meanwhile, domestic violence, one of the most longstanding global pandemics, is reaching historic numbers due to quarantine lockdowns. 6 Most domestic violence survivors are women, children, and LGBTQ+ individuals—among them also tradeswomen. 7  And with the systemic injustices of the criminal legal system coming into the spotlight once again, survivors domestic or workplace sexual violence and harassment could be even more hesitant to come forward to the police or other authorities. For those survivors who do come forward, very few offenders get charged, prosecuted, or face any legal consequences.

In the skilled trades, like in so many industries, work is slow during the pandemic, but virtual or remote work is often not an option. Many of the interviewees said that women are the first to go when there are job cuts; they considered it highly plausible that tradeswomen face higher rates of shutdown-induced unemployment than their male counterparts. Across the country, unemployment is disproportionately affecting women of color. 8 In many states, workplaces are opening back up before it is safe to do so in order to stimulate the economy, rather than providing payment or loan/home/rent relief, etc. For those whose jobs are continuing, the work is even more dangerous with the threat of COVID-19. If the past is any guide, it is not hard to imagine that supervisors are taking harassment complaints even less seriously by arguing that they have more important things on their plates. As we face an oncoming recession, so-called austerity measures by companies in all industries, including the trades, are likely to roll back already under-invested on-the-job improvements, including diversity and safety efforts for tradeswomen.

At the same time, national and global awareness for the #MeToo movement and injustices against BIPOC communities are creating openings for transformation that did not seem possible a short time ago. The coronavirus pandemic and the systemic racism plaguing the US are making people reimagine what “normal” could look like. As more Americans face unemployment than in any time since the Great Depression, the skilled trades can employ people with competitive wages, while building and restoring vital infrastructure, from old roads and bridges to the foundations needed to build a green future. 9  However, in order to ensure the promise of the skilled trades to lift women, LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color out of poverty and economic hardship, industry leaders must address and condemn sexual harassment and sexual violence in the trades. It is time to enact anti-sexual-violence policies, improve workplace conditions, increase pipelines for non-white and non-male candidates, change workplace culture, and listen to and center survivors.

Lia Cohen graduated from UCLA this spring with degrees in International Development Studies, Public Affairs, and Environmental Systems and Society. During her quarter studying in Washington DC with the UCLA Center for American Politics and Policy, she conducted a capstone project on the impact of sexual harassment on occupational segregation and wages for women in male-dominated, “middle-skills” jobs, particularly in the trades. As a Fall 2019 recipient of the CSW Travel Grant , she presented her research at the Women Build Nations Conference in Minneapolis. Lia is excited to deepen her advocacy outside of academia.

• National Partnership for Women and Families, “America’s Women and the Wage Gap,” April 2017, www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/workplace-fairness/fair-pay/americas-women-and-the-wage-gap.pdf.
• Hegewisch, A. and A. Tesfaselassie, “The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation 2018,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, April 2, 2019, https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-occupation-2018/ .
• Jackson, K., “Why hiring women in skilled trades is a win-win situation,” The Business Woman Media, October 12, 2017, https://www.thebusinesswomanmedia.com/hiring-women-skilled-trades-win-win-situation/ .
• Hegewisch, A., M. Bendick Jr., B. Gault, B., and H. Hartmann, “Pathways to Equity: Narrowing the Wage Gap by Improving Women’s Access to Good Middle-Skill Jobs,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Washington, DC (2016).
• Tejani, Sharyn, Personal Interview, 2019.
• Bettinger-Lopez, C., and A. Bro, “A Double Pandemic: Domestic Violence in the Age of COVID-19,” Council on Foreign Relations, May 13, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/double-pandemic-domestic-violence-age-covid-19 .
• Bettinger-Lopez, C., and A. Bro, “A Double Pandemic.”
• Frye, J., “On the Frontlines at Work and at Home: The Disproportionate Economic Effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Women of Color,” Center for American Progress, April 23, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/04/23/483846/frontlines-work-home/ .
• Long, Heather, and Andrew Van Dam, “US unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era,” Washington Post, May 8, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/08/april-2020-jobs-report/ .

UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center, 1500 Public Affairs Building, BOX 957222, Los Angeles, CA 90095-7222

The CSW|Streisand Center at UCLA acknowledges our presence on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples.

Related Sites

• College of Letters & Science
• Social Sciences Division
• College Magazine
• College Feedback
• LA Social Science
• UCLA Blue Print

Campus Resources

• Maps, Directions, Parking
• Academic Calendar
• University of California
• Terms of Use

Social Sciences Division Departments

• Aerospace Studies
• African American Studies
• American Indian Studies
• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Asian American Studies
• César E. Chávez Department of Chicana & Chicano Studies
• Communication
• Conservation
• Gender Studies
• Military Science
• Naval Science
• Political Science

Sex Segregation in the Workplace: Trends, Explanations, Remedies (1984)

Chapter: front matter.

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

sex Segregation .~ +~ Workplace l Treed Ions "S. ~ 4~/~/W' Remedies Barbara F. Reskin, Editor Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education National Research Council NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS Washington, D.C. 1984

NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS 2101 CONSTITUTION AVENUE, NW WASHINGTON, DC 20418 NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance. This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engi- neering, and the Institute of Medicine. The National Research Council was established by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy's purposes of furthering knowledge and of advising the federal government. The Council operates in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy under the authority of its congressional charter of 1863, which establishes the Academy as a private, nonprofit, self- governing membership corporation. The Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in the conduct of their services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. It is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. The National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine were established in 1964 and 1970, respectively, under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Sex segregation in the workplace. Revised versions of papers originally presented at a workshop held in May 1982. 1. Sex discrimination in employment- United States Congresses. 2. Sex discrimination against women United States Congresses. I. Reskin, Barbara F. II. National Research Council (U.S.~. Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues. HD6060.5.U5S475 1984 331.4'133'0973 84-8342 ISBN 0-309-03445-0 Printed in the United States of America

Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues ALICE S. ILCHMAN (Chair), President, Sarah Lawrence College CECILIA BURCIAGA, Office of the President, Stanford University CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN, Department of Sociology, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York LAWRENCE M. KAHN, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois GENE E. KOFKE, American Telephone and Telegraph Co., New York ROBERT E. KRAUT, Bell Communications Research, Murray Hill, N.~. JEAN BAKER MILLER, Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, Wellesley College ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Georgetown University Law Center GARY ORFIELD, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago NAOMI R. QUINN, Department of Anthropology, Duke University ISABEL V. SAWMILL, The Urban Institute, Washington, D.C. ROBERT M. SOLOW, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology LOUISE A. TILLY, Department of History, University of Michigan DONALD J. TRElMAN, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles BARBARA F. RESKIN, Study Director MARIE A. MATTHEWS, Administrative Assistant . . .

Contributors JAMES N. BARON, School of Business, Stanford University ANDREA H. BELIER, Department of Family and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois SUE E. BERRYMAN, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California WILLIAM T. BlELBY, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara FRANCINE D. BLAU, Department of Economics and Institute of Industrial and Labor Relations, University of Illinois MARY C. BRINTON, Department of Sociology, University of Washington PAMELA S. CAIN, Department of Sociology, Hunter College MARY CORCORAN, Department of Political Science and Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan GREG J. DUNCAN, Department of Economics and Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan KEE-OK KIM HAN, Department of Family and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois SHARON L. HARLAN, Center for Research on Women, Wellesley College MARYELLEN R. KELLEY, College of Management, University of Massachusetts, Boston MARGARET MOONEY MARINI, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Vanderbilt University KAREN OPPENHEIM MASON, Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center, University of Michigan BRIGID O FARRELL, Center for Research on Women, Wellesley College MICHAEL PONZA, Department of Economics, University of Michigan BARBARA F. RESKIN, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan PATRICIA A. BOOS, Department of Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook RACHEL A. ROSENFELD, Department of Sociology and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina MYRA H. STROBER, Center for Research on Women and School of Education, Stanford University LINDAJ. WAITE, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California WENDY C. WOLF, Public/Private Ventures, Philadelphia V

Contents Preface . 1 Introduction. Barbara F. Reskin 1 · V11 I EXTENT, TRENDS, AND PROJECTIONS FOR THE FUTURE 2 Trends in Occupational Segregation by Sex and Race, 1960-1981 . Andrea H. Beller 3 A Woman's Place Is With Other Women: Sex Segregation Within Organizations William T. Bielky and James N. Baron 4 Job Changing and Occupational Sex Segregation: Sex and Race Comparisons Rachel A. Rosenfeld 5 Commentary Pamela Stone Cain 6 Occupational Sex Segregation: Prospects for the 1980s Andrea H. Beller and Kee-ok Kim Han v 9 11 27 56 87 91

II EXPLAINING SEGREGATION: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 7 Occupational Segregation and Labor Market Discrimination Francine D. Blab 8 Toward a General Theory of Occupational Sex Segregation: The Case of Public School Teaching Myra H. Stroloer 117 144 9 Commentary: Strober's Theory of Occupational Sex Segregation . . . 157 Karen Oppenheim Mason 10 Work Experience, Job Segregation' and Wages Mary Corcoran, Greg]. Duncan, and Michael Ponza 171 11 Sex Typing in Occupational Socialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Margaret Mooney Marini and Mary C. Brinton 12 Commentary .... Wendy C. Wolf 13 Institutional Factors Contributing to Sex Segregation in the Workplace 233 Patricia A. Roos and Barbara F. Reskin 14 Commentary: The Need to Study the Transformation of Job Structures..... Maryellen R. Kelley III REDUCING SEGREGATION: THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INTERVENTIONS 15 Job Integration Strategies: Today s Programs and Tomorrow s Needs B rigid O'Farrell and Sharon L. Harlan . 265 267 16 Occupational Desegregation in CETA Programs . . . . . . . . . . 292 Linda ]. Waite and Sue E. Berryman 17 Commentary ..... Wendy C. Wolf 308 18 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 Francine D. Blab vim

Preface The segregation of the sexes into different occupations, industries, and (within firms) specific jobs is one of the most stable and striking features of the American workplace. Although the sexes have become increasingly similar in their likelihood of employment outside the home, within the workplace women and men differ dramatically in the kinds of jobs they hold. Sex segregation is problematic for several reasons. Most importantly, it promotes and sustains the wage gap between the sexes. Barring substantial changes in the ways that jobs are evaluated and wages set, women's prospects for economic parity will depend on their migration into mainstream "male" jobs, away from the many low-paying jobs~most frequently hell] by women. In view of the pervasiveness of segregation and its adverse consequences for women, in 1981 several groups sponsored an examination of sex segregation in the workplace by the Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues of the National Research Council. The sponsors are the U.S. Department of Ed- ucation, the Employment and Training Administration of the U. S. Department of Labor, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The committee's mandate was twofold: to convene a major interdisciplinary work- shop on job segregation and to prepare a state-of-the-art report on the topic. The two-day workshop, held in May 1982, brought together two dozen scholars. This volume includes revised versions of several papers presented there and the remarks of commentators, along with three papers the committee subsequently commis- sioned. These papers served as a resource to the committee in preparing its final report, Women's Work, Men's Work: Segregation on the Job, and stand as a com- panion to that volume. The purposes of the workshop were to bring together scholars from several disciplines to review the evidence for various theoretical explanations for segregation and to report empirical research they were conducting that would enlarge our understanding of its extent, form, and causes. For this reason some of the papers, · ~ vie

ant! thus the chapters in this volume, primarily review the literature (Blau, Marini and Brinton, Boos and Reskin, and O'Farrell and Harlan), while others offer up- to-date empirical findings (Belier, Bielby and Baron, Beller and Han, Rosenfeld, and Waite and Berryman). Two papers combine the presentation of original research with either a critical review of a theoretical perspective (Corcoran, Duncan, and Ponza) or the presentation of a new theoretical approach (Strober). Many of the authors of this volume thank colleagues or assistants for their help. The workshop at which most of these chapters and comments were first presented and this volume also benefited from the work of several people, to whom ~ express my appreciation. As study director of the committee, Barbara F. Reskin was a valuable intellectual resource and an able manager of our work. Marie A. Matthews, administrative assistant to the committee, was indispensable in organizing the work- shop. The members of the Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues and Heidi I. Hartmann, as associate executive director of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, helped identify workshop par- ticipants, participated in the workshop, and refereed papers for inclusion in this volume. Christine L. McShane, editor for the commission, worked with the authors and the National Academy Press in producing it. This volume would not exist without the behind-the-scene contributions of these people, and ~ thank them warmly. ALICE S. }LCHMAN, Chair Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues · · ~ vail

Sex Segregation .~ +~ Workplace Trends, Explanations, Remedies ~ .

How pervasive is sex segregation in the workplace? Does the concentration of women into a few professions reflect their personal preferences, the "tastes" of employers, or sex-role socialization? Will greater enforcement of federal antidiscrimination laws reduce segregation? What are the prospects for the decade ahead? These are among the important policy and research questions raised in this comprehensive volume, of interest to policymakers, researchers, personnel directors, union leaders—anyone concerned about the economic parity of women.

READ FREE ONLINE

Welcome to OpenBook!

You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

Show this book's table of contents , where you can jump to any chapter by name.

...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter .

Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

View our suggested citation for this chapter.

Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

Get Email Updates

Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free ? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released.

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Original Language Spotlight
• Alternative and Non-formal Education 
• Cognition, Emotion, and Learning
• Curriculum and Pedagogy
• Education and Society
• Education, Change, and Development
• Education, Cultures, and Ethnicities
• Education, Gender, and Sexualities
• Education, Health, and Social Services
• Educational Administration and Leadership
• Educational History
• Educational Politics and Policy
• Educational Purposes and Ideals
• Educational Systems
• Educational Theories and Philosophies
• Globalization, Economics, and Education
• Languages and Literacies
• Professional Learning and Development
• Research and Assessment Methods
• Technology and Education
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Sex segregated schools to challenge gender and racial bias.

• Kathryn Herr , Kathryn Herr Montclair State University
• Kathleen Grant Kathleen Grant The College of New Jersey
•  and  Jeremy Price Jeremy Price Montclair State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1337
• Published online: 27 October 2020

Sex segregated schooling in the United States is one of the fastest-growing movements in education in the 21st century. The current movement toward single-sex schooling is embedded in a national discourse of school choice and an adoption of market principles in education. This framing espouses that when schools compete for educational consumers, the needs of those currently underserved in U.S. schools will be better served and their academic performance will improve. Scholars argue that there are three main rationales typically put forward for sex segregated schools: they will eliminate distractions and harassment from the other sex; they can address the espoused different learning styles of boys and girls, and, finally, they can remedy inequities experienced by low-income students of color. Many of the single sex schools have large proportions of low-income youth of color. In general, while the sex segregated structure of these schools seems to offer opportunities to disrupt gendered stereotypes, there is little evidence that this occurs. Instead, as society’s conceptualizations of sexuality and gender evolve, single-sex education upholds a largely heteronormative and cisgendered understanding of gender and sexuality. Much of the research documents a reinforcement of gendered stereotypes and heterosexism. The literature on single-sex schools for boys also presents a puzzling mix of academic success for some boys, and no significant difference for others. There is little attention to the accomplishments and current experiences of girls in single-sex schools at the K–12 levels. Research shows that successful schools, whether they are single-sex or coeducational, tend to have factors in common like creating strong mentoring relationships and keeping smaller class sizes. In sum, research would indicate that the rationales noted earlier to justify the development of sex segregated schools are not much realized in the research.

• single-sex schools in the United States
• gender segregated schools
• black male academies

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Education. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 19 July 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [185.66.14.236]
• 185.66.14.236

Character limit 500 /500

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Women in Sports — Sex Segregation: Should Sports be Segregated by Gender

Sex Segregation: Should Sports Be Segregated by Gender

• Categories: Competitive Sports Women in Sports

About this sample

Words: 853 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 853 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited

• Chrisler, J. C., & Pryzgoda, J. (Eds.). (2012). Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology: Volume 2: Gender Research in Social and Applied Psychology. Springer.
• Coakley, J. J. (2017). Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies. McGraw-Hill Education.
• Cunningham, G. B., & Pickett, A. C. (2018). Sex and Sport: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Routledge.
• Dashper, K. (2012). Gender and Sport: A Reader. Routledge.
• Fink, J. S. (2015). Sexuality and the Sporting Body. Routledge.
• Messner, M. A. (2011). It’s All for the Kids: Gender, Families, and Youth Sports. University of California Press.
• Pryzgoda, J., & Chrisler, J. C. (2000). Definitions of Gender and Sex: The Subtleties of Meaning. Sex Roles, 43(7-8), 553-569.
• Rowe, D. (2015). Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity. Routledge.
• Whisenant, W. A., & Pedersen, P. M. (2019). The Sociology of Sport: A Global Perspective. Human Kinetics.
• Young, K., & White, P. (Eds.). (2018). Sport and Gender in Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Life

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3 pages / 1358 words

4 pages / 2017 words

2 pages / 710 words

1 pages / 584 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Women in Sports

Athena is one of the most complex and intriguing characters in Greek mythology. As the goddess of wisdom, warfare, and strategy, she possesses a unique set of character traits that set her apart from the other Olympian deities. [...]

Cheering is an essential aspect of any sporting event, providing support and motivation for athletes while also fostering a sense of community and camaraderie among fans. However, the value of cheering extends beyond the realm [...]

Columbus Day has been a federal holiday in the United States since 1937, celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. However, the celebration of Columbus Day has become increasingly controversial in recent [...]

Family is a fundamental social institution that has been a subject of study and debate within the field of sociology for many years. The sociological definition of family has evolved over time as society has changed, and [...]

Throughout this paper the issues of women, athletics, stereotyping and opportunities that are/are not available to females in the professional arena of athletics will be explored. Indeed, racism and sexism has traditionally [...]

Courtney Tailor is a model, bikini athlete, an actress – starring in movies and TV shows, such as American Psycho and The Lying Game. She began posting pictures on Instagram @CourtneyTailor in 2014 and gained masses of followers [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Submission Guidelines
• Contributors

The Problem with Sex Segregated Sport

Sex segregated sport is increasingly untenable. As sports authorities and politicians enact flawed attempts to regulate who can and cannot participate in women’s and girls’ sports, the shaky foundations of the current system reveal themselves. Yet gender-integrated sports are perceived as unthinkable to many because they confront taken for granted beliefs about women’s inferiority to men. Sport is the only remaining institutional realm where sex segregation is permissible and, as such, it maintains and reproduces gender inequality. More than any other institution, sport showcases the cultural system of binary sex difference and makes it appear natural. Even people who, on all other fronts, believe in women’s equality to men, find themselves compelled by the argument that men are athletically superior to women. Gender expansive athletes, including trans, non-binary , and intersex athletes, threaten our social, economic, and political systems with disarray.

There are many dangers in uncritically accepting the claim that women need to be protected from male competitors to experience success. First, it reinforces men’s dominance beyond sport, as evidenced by the disproportionate number of men who occupy leadership positions throughout society. Second, it insidiously reifies women’s weakness, denying girls and women the opportunity to develop in competition with boys and men, thereby putting false limits on their capacity to achieve physical greatness. Finally, modern sport turns ideology into reality: our societal belief in female inferiority is mobilized via sex segregated sport to deny girls and women equal opportunities to develop as athletes.

Sport’s role in perpetuating gender inequality is not accidental. The history of modern sport in the West begins with the deliberate exclusion of women . Although women have succeeded in gaining inclusion, the limits of their inclusion have been severely circumscribed by male-dominated leadership of various sporting bodies. The legacy of Western patriarchal ideologies that view women –  at least white women – as “the fairer sex” who are not supposed to be too fast, too strong, or too muscular, continues to shape cultural attitudes. Women who transgress ideologies about gender difference are often severely punished, particularly in sport.

Although the practice of questioning the gender of successful sportswomen occurred throughout the early 1900s, it was not until 1950 and 1968 respectively that World Athletics, (formerly IAAF) and the International Olympics Committee instituted so-called gender verification processes. These formal “sex controls” were intended to ensure adherence to cultural norms regarding binary sex difference and female inferiority. This surveillance began with subjecting women athletes to genital inspection via “nude parades,” was followed by testing sportswomen’s DNA to exclude those with “male” chromosomes, and, most recently, for only those women who appear “suspiciously masculine” to measure their hormone levels. Each of these tests is scientifically flawed: decades of gender verification testing by sports authorities have only proven that sex is not binary but instead expansive. While the practice began with track and field, gender verification extended to several Olympics sports including canoeing, gymnastics, fencing, field hockey, rowing, swimming, volleyball, handball, and luge. In effect, there is hardly a sport in which women are not subjected to this dehumanizing and unscientific practice.

The gender ideology which frames the claim that women’s sports require protection from so-called male pretenders is also a racialized ideology. After all, today’s sporting environments are an outgrowth of the European colonial project that positioned sport as part of a “civilizing” project that was white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal at its core. We see this colonial gender ideology in the heightened attention directed at sportswomen from the Global South who are accused of being too athletically powerful, too “masculine” in appearance, to qualify for female eligibility. Prominent examples are South Africa’s Caster Semenya , India’s Dutee Chand , and Uganda’s Annet Negessa , athletes who were subjected to sex testing because they do not embody Western feminine ideals. To our knowledge, this level of surveillance has not been directed at women from the Global North, except if they are transwomen.

Transgender women are swept up in sport’s gender panic not because they regularly outperform cisgender women – they do not – but because sport is the one realm where cultural beliefs regarding fundamental sex and gender differences continue to be institutionalized. In the past several years, bills designed to delegitimize and exclude trans people in various ways have been introduced in many US state legislatures. Within this larger anti-trans campaign, bills designed specifically to block trans girls and women from participating in “female” sport have been signed into law in many US states and proposed in many others. Backed by a constellation of white supremacist, conservative and hetero-patriarchal organizations and movements in collusion with so-called “ gender critical feminists ,” these campaigns are stoking a gender panic by targeting trans girls and women for surveillance and exclusion. Increasingly, trans boys, men, and non-binary athletes are also swept up in this panic, highlighting how sports is being mobilized as a tool to exclude transgender people from full inclusion in society.

It is no accident that sport is a site for contesting the inclusion of transgender people in society because meaningful inclusion for gender expansive people, including intersex, transgender and non-binary people, threatens to undermine the commonsense bases for the gender inequality that is pervasive throughout society. People who consider themselves to be gender progressive and egalitarian are being recruited to anti-trans campaigns in sport that have significant effects beyond the playing field. This recruitment is possible because of widely held, taken for granted beliefs about male superiority in sport. Presenting trans sportswomen to the public as “male” interlopers who are a threat to cisgender women and girls simultaneously denies transwomen’s claims to womanhood and entrenches binary ideas about sex and gender in ways that also harm intersex athletes and other sportswomen who do not conform to Eurocentric gender norms.

Given the historical and contemporary reasons for sex segregation in sport, there is a heightened need to challenge this practice. To undo such de facto segregation is to redress a longstanding gender inequality in society. Of course, intentional mechanisms are needed to ensure that the legacies of white supremacist heterosexual patriarchy that have reified women’s inferiority are carefully attended to. This effort is well worth it if we want to create a more just and inclusive organizational structure for sport and society more broadly.

Author Biographical Notes

Anima Adjepong is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies at the University of Cincinnati. They research, write, and teach about identity, culture, and social change and are particularly interested in how cultural struggles can bring about social transformation. Dr. Adjepong is the author of  Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra.  They are currently working on a project about women’s football, gendered nationalism, and state-sponsored homophobia in Ghana.   You can follow them on twitter @animaadjepong

Travers is a Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University. Their recent book,  The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution , situates trans kids in Canada and the US, white settler nations characterized by significant social inequality. In addition to a central research focus on transgender children and youth, Travers has published extensively on the relationship between sport and social justice, with particular emphasis on the inclusion and exclusion of women, queer and trans people of all ages. A current research program in this field focuses on gender equity in youth baseball. Travers is Deputy Editor of Gender & Society . You can follow them on twitter @DrBaseball

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

About engaging sports.

Helping readers think beyond the score. Read more…

Subscribe via email

Subscribe to receive an email notification each time a new article is posted on Engaging Sports.

Enter Email Address

Click Here to Subscribe

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Facebook

Recent posts

• #LandBack also means #WaterBack: (Re)visiting Sports on Stolen Waterways
• The Radical Potential of Adaptive Skateboarding and Wheelchair Motocross
• “Do[ing] Hockey Different”: Belonging and World-Building through the Indigenous Girls Hockey Program and Jamborees
• Laughter, the Body, and the Grotesque Realism of CrossFit Culture
• Youth, Sport, and Colonial Selves

Posts by category

Posts by tag.

CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Sex Segregation

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 01 January 2021
• pp 7221–7225
• Cite this reference work entry

• Janine Bosak 3 &
• J Brueckner 3  

145 Accesses

Gender segregation

Unequal distributions, or separation of people according to their biological sex.

Introduction

Sex segregation, or gender segregation, is an enduring phenomenon that is typically defined as an imbalanced distribution of men and women within a given locational dimension such as occupation, professional specialization, industry membership, or education (Charles 2015 ). While absolute separation between the sexes is much less common in the Western world today than it was in the past, relative sex segregation is still a prevalent phenomenon in the workplace. The present entry focuses on occupational sex segregation , which is the separation of men and women into different jobs or different roles within organizations (Harcey and Prokos 2017 ).

Types of Segregation

There are two fundamental types of sex segregation – horizontal sex segregation and vertical sex segregation . Horizontal sex segregation refers to men and women’s unequal dispersion across...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Bettio, F., & Verashchagina, A. (2009). Gender segregation in the labour market: Root causes, implications and policy responses in the EU . Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Retrieved from: https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/39e67b83-852f-4f1e-b6a0-a8fbb599b256

Blackburn, R. M., Browne, J., Brooks, B., & Jarman, J. (2002). Explaining gender segregation. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (4), 513–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/0007131022000021461 .

Article   Google Scholar  

Blackwell, L. (2001). Occupational sex segregation and part-time work in modern Britain. Gender, Work and Organization, 8 , 146–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0432.00126 .

Bosak, J., & Eagly, A. H. (2014). Gender. In P. C. Flood & Y. Freeney (Eds.), Wiley encyclopedia of management: Organisational behaviour (3 rd ed., Vol 11, pp. 173–177). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley.

Google Scholar  

Bosak, J., & Kinahan, M. (2014). Women at work. In P. C. Flood & Y. Freeney (Eds.), Wiley encyclopedia of management: Organisational behaviour (3 rd ed., Vol 11, pp. 517–520). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley.

Bosak, J. & Sczesny, S. (2008). Am I the right candidate? Self-ascribed fit of women and men to a leadership position. Sex Roles, 58 (9), 682–688. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-007-9380-4 .

Bosak, J., & Sczesny, S. (2011). Exploring the dynamics of incongruent beliefs about women and leaders. British Journal of Management , 22 , 254–269. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2010.00731.x .

Browne, K. R. (2006). Evolved sex differences and occupational segregation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27 (2), 143–162. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.349 .

Browne, J. (2016). Segregation. Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/segregation-sociology

Buss, D. M. (1995). Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological science. Psychological Inquiry, 6 (1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0601_1 .

Chang, M. (2004). Growing pains: Cross-national variation in sex segregation in sixteen developing countries. American Sociological Review, 69 (1), 114–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240406900107 .

Charles, M. (2015). Sex segregation. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization (pp. 1–5). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi-org.10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog515.pub2.

Costen, W. M. (2012). Comparable worth. In W. J. Rothwell & R. K. Prescott (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Human Resource Management: Short Entries (pp. 131–135). San Francisco: Pfeiffer. https://doi-org.dcu.idm.oclc.org/10.1002/9781118364741.ch23 .

Eagly, A. H. (1997). Sex differences in social behavior: Comparing social role theory and evolutionary psychology. American Psychologist, 52 (12), 1380–1383. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.52.12.1380.b .

Eagly, A. H., & Heilman, M. (2016). Gender and leadership: Introduction to the special issue. Leadership Quarterly, 27 (3), 349–353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.04.002 .

Eagly, A. H., & Wood, W. (2016). Social role theory of sex differences. In N. A. Naples, R. C. Hoogland, M. Wickramasinghe, W. Ching, & W. Wong, A. (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (pp. 458–476). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi-org.dcu.idm.oclc.org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss183 .

Gutek, B. A. (2001). Working environments. In J. Worell (Ed.), Encyclopedia of women and gender (Vol. 2, pp. 1191–1204). New York: Academic.

Harcey, S., & Prokos, A. (2017). Gender segregation in work. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory (pp. 1–3). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0461 .

Heilman, M., & Haynes, M. C. (2006). Affirmative action: Unintended adverse effects. In M. F. Karsten (Ed.), Gender, race, and ethnicity in the workplace (Vol. 2, pp. 1–24). Westport: Greenwood Publishing.

Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2015). Sex, gender, and work segregation in the cultural industries. The Sociological Review, 63 , 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12238 .

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Joecks, J., Pull, K., & Vetter, K. (2013). Gender diversity in the boardroom and firm performance: What exactly constitutes a “critical mass?”. Journal of Business Ethics, 118 , 61–72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1553-6 .

Levanon, A., England, P., & Allison, P. (2009). Occupational feminization and pay: Assessing causal dynamics using 1950–2000 U.S. Census data. Social Forces, 88 (2), 865–891. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.0.0264 .

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

Janine Bosak & J Brueckner

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Janine Bosak .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

Todd K Shackelford

Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford

Section Editor information

Tara DeLecce

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Bosak, J., Brueckner, J. (2021). Sex Segregation. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_183

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_183

Published : 22 April 2021

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-19649-7

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-19650-3

eBook Packages : Behavioral Science and Psychology Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Share this entry

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Feminist Majority Foundation

Sex Segregation in Education

Fmf studies of u.s. public school sex segregation, despite evidence that single-sex classes are “educationally unsound,” numbers continue to grow.

FMF multi-year studies document a continued increase in numbers of coed K-12 public schools with single-sex classes and single-sex public schools from 2007 to 2018. They and other research provide substantial evidence that deliberate sex segregation is educationally unsound, economically wasteful, and often unlawful.

In its third national April 12, 2018 study  “Tracking Deliberate Sex Segregation in U.S. K-12 Public Schools”  (PDF) based on information from 2013-17, FMF initially named 794 public coed schools that reported having single-sex academic classes and identified 75 all-girl and 58 all-boy public schools. These results were based on the 2013-14 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) as well as other information we could find by 2017. The U.S. Department of Education released information from the  2015-16 CRDC  on April 24, 2018, after the FMF report with its list of schools was finalized.

Follow-up action is needed to learn about public K-12 schools that plan to continue their sex segregation in the future and to learn if any of this single-sex education is adequately justified using the  2014 single-sex guidance from OCR  (PDF) and other laws and policies. Therefore, FMF is asking Title IX Coordinators and other experts in state education agencies, local school districts and gender equity advocacy to check on the current status of sex segregation. This can be done by contacting the named schools in the April 12, 2018 FMF study along with additional schools listed as having single-sex classes in the 2015-16 CRDC. School District Title IX Coordinators should be able to help with this. The 2015-16 CRDC contains the most current national contact information on Title IX and other Civil Rights Coordinators in K-12 school districts.

We are optimistic that the numbers of public coed schools with single-sex classes can be reduced as educators learn that this sex separation is not justified based on  2014 guidance from OCR , research results, and their own negative experiences. If schools have not stopped their deliberate sex segregation, Title IX Coordinators and others should require that these schools provide evidence-based justifications indicating full compliance with the 2014 OCR single-sex guidance.

The Executive Summary  (PDF) of the April 12, 2018 FMF report  (PDF) includes a U.S. Map of States with Schools Reporting Single-Sex Academic Classes 2013-14 and a map of All-Boy and All-Girl Public Schools in 2017.

The previous 2014 FMF national study “ Identifying U.S. K-12 Public Schools with Deliberate Sex Segregation (2011-14) ” (PDF) was based on the 2011-12 CRDC responses. It listed 805 public K-12 schools with intentional single-sex education by name and state and 67 all-girl public schools and 39 all-boy public schools. ( Read more in the press release  and  news story blogs .) .

The first FMF three-part study  State of Public School Sex Segregation in the United States (2007-2010)  (PDF) released in 2012 was based on responses from the 2006 and 2010 CRDCs and much more – such as verification information from State Title IX Coordinators. It documented 646 K-12 public schools with deliberate sex segregation including 564 coed schools with single-sex academic classes and 47 all-girl and 35 all-boy single-sex public schools. It also provided many examples of how schools violated legal prohibitions against sex discrimination. The three parts of the State of Public School Sex Segregation in the United States (2007-2010) follow: Part I: Patterns of K-12 Single-sex Public Education in the U.S.  (PDF) Part II: Role of States in Addressing Single-sex Public Education  (PDF) Part III: Summary and Recommendations  (PDF)

Problems with Sex-Segregated Public Education

Increased sex segregation is more likely to increase sex discrimination and sex stereotyping in public k-12 education than to reduce it.

After Title IX was passed in 1972, there was a decline in single-sex education even in private K-12 schools and colleges. Instead, the focus was on creating non-sexist coeducational classes and schools. However, since 2002, when the Department of Education signaled its intent to be more flexible in allowing the expansion of sex- segregated education, there was an increase in intentional sex segregation in K-12 non-vocational public education. In 2006, the Department of Education issued  a Title IX regulation  that weakened safeguards against sex discrimination, the sole purpose of Title IX. Noting missing data, the Feminist Majority Foundation’s multi-year studies estimated that there were over 1000 public K-12 U.S. schools with deliberate single-sex academic classes during 2011-17.

Individuals concerned with sex-segregated instruction should be aware of the following:

• Sex segregation erases the existence of trans and non-binary students. All students deserve the right to a safe education that affirms their identity. Sex-segregated schools limit students who don’t fit the gender binary and can put them in uncomfortable and potentially unsafe environments where they could be misgendered or bullied.
• Separate is not equal or fair to all .  It is very difficult to provide even “substantial” equality in sex segregated schools, classes, or activities, whether we are talking about facilities, quality of instruction, levels of expectations, treatment of students, or preference for a particular teacher.
• Sex segregation (allowed under the 2006 regulation changes) is absolute and not totally voluntary.  Even advocates of single-sex education agree that there is more variation within groups of girls and boys than between them, but they ignore this important truth when excluding everyone of one sex from a class intended for all boys or all girls, even if the excluded girls or boys want to enroll.
• Many assumptions about benefits of sex segregation are educationally unsound.   Often the post 2006 sex segregated classes and schools were based on inaccurate claims of innate student differences by sex and related myths that male and female students learn differently and should receive dissimilar instruction. Good educational practices can and do meet the needs of both girls and boys in a coeducational setting by addressing individual needs and by consciously striving for gender equity in curriculum and instruction.
• Research results do not support the superiority of sex segregation in advancing student learning or in decreasing sex discrimination.  It is difficult to conduct fully equitable comparisons of single-sex and coeducational programs or schools to learn what is better, as many other factors may influence the results. Although it is possible that both coeducational and single-sex classes may help either eliminate or increase sex stereotyping, increased sex stereotyping is likely to be more of a problem in sex-segregated classes. The patterns of results from various single studies of sex-segregated education do not show consistent superiority on any outcome measures. Additionally, few of these studies examined outcome measures related to decreasing sex discrimination or sex stereotyping. (See  Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity through Education , 2007, especially  Chapters 9  and  31  and the articles by  Halpern, et al.  and the meta-analysis by  Pahlke, Hyde and Allison. )
• Costs are higher .  The separate operation and facilities for single-sex education are more costly than comparable coeducation. It takes more time and money to assure that all facilities and resources are equitable for both girls and boys in segregated compared to co-educational options. Also, additional resources are needed for staff training and program evaluation and for responding to public information requests and litigation to defend potentially discriminatory practices.
• Evaluations are critically important, but costly .  The monitoring and evaluations needed to assure continued parity with equivalent coeducational opportunities and avoidance of increased stereotyping in single-sex education “experiments” need to be done carefully and rigorously to meet the Department of Education’s own What Works Clearinghouse standards of effectiveness, which are designed for all educational programs and certainly should also apply to single-sex instruction. Obtaining evidence to justify this sex segregation is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.  See Feminist Majority Foundation suggested evaluation guidelines  (PDF). ( The December 2014 Office for Civil Rights Single-sex Guidance (PDF) specifies the need to meet the What Works Clearinghouse standards of effectiveness. )
• The institutions responsible for the single sex education may face lawsuits and Title IX complaints.  The ACLU web page “ Sex-Segregated Schools: Separate and Unequal ” and their campaign “ Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes ” document many of their successful and ongoing efforts to use the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, Title IX, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, and state laws to end sex discrimination associated with this sex segregation .

In summary, most efforts to provide sex-segregated education are detrimental and waste resources that instead should be used to end sex stereotyping and discrimination in coeducational environments, especially for the most vulnerable students who face multiple types of discrimination related to poverty, race, ethnicity, disabilities, and sexual identity or orientation.

Title IX has been a highly effective and popular law. It has withstood many challenges. The 2006 Department of Education regulation that encourages sex segregation undermines the intent of Title IX and will continually threaten the advancement of gender equity in U.S. schools unless there are adequate justifications for any very specific and limited sex segregation as outlined in the 2014 OCR guidance on single-sex education and FMF’s evaluation guidelines. There is no right to discriminate on the basis of sex using federal financial assistance to education. (This section of the FMF sex segregation web page on “Problems with Sex-Segregated Public Education” is also available as a separate PDF Handout.)

Background on Efforts to Stop Discriminatory Publicly Supported Sex-Segregated Education

In March 2004, the U.S. Department of Education proposed changes to the Title IX regulations that would make it significantly easier for schools and school districts to allow single-sex classes and single-sex schools. On October 25, 2006  the Department of Education issued the final changes to its Title IX regulation  without remedying the key objections of the 6,000 people who submitted public comments opposing the 2004 proposed changes.

The original 1975 Title IX regulations used by multiple federal agencies permit  sex-segregated education  under very limited circumstances, such as for single-sex schools and classes when they are needed to overcome the effects of gender discrimination. The 2006 Department of Education Title IX regulation allows K-12 non-vocational single-sex schools, classes, and extracurricular activities in public elementary and secondary schools for a variety of vague purposes such as “the achievement of an important governmental or educational objective”. This 2006 Department of Education Title IX regulation no longer ties the key justification for allowing this sex segregation to overcoming the effects of sex discrimination, the sole purpose of Title IX. 

These 2006 Title IX regulation changes allow separate facilities or classes as long as the gender that is not given the special class or school receives a “substantially equal” coed educational opportunity. “Substantially equal” is not specifically defined in the regulation and there are no instructions in the 2006 regulation on how to learn if the single-sex activities contribute to increased sex stereotyping and sex discrimination or if they contribute to achieving any important governmental objectives such as increased academic achievement. Also, the vague evaluation requirements do not provide explicit guidance on how the school must demonstrate that its single-sex instruction is any more effective than coed instruction.

The Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) and many feminist groups see this weakening of Title IX and related government encouragement of single-sex education as an improper use of Title IX.  The National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education  points out that instead of making it clear that Title IX protects against sex discrimination, these rule changes facilitate sex discrimination and should be rescinded.

Help from recent guidance on stopping sex discriminatory sex segregation

FMF and other equity advocates hope that if education decision makers understand that deliberate sex-segregated public education is legally, educationally, and economically unsound, they will stop allowing it in their schools. If followed rigorously, the following two sets of guidance should help end questionable sex segregation in public education programs and activities.  

In 2013 FMF submitted  “Suggestions for Evaluation Guidelines for Schools Contemplating or Using Single-sex Education“ (PDF)   to the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education and also shared it with our gender equity colleagues. The  Executive Summary (PDF)  of the FMF evaluation guidelines outline three evaluation phases that should be used prior to Title IX coordinators, administrators, school boards, and others approving the initiation or continuation of this sex segregation.

On Dec. 1, 2014, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education issued long-awaited  “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Single-Sex Elementary and Secondary Classes and Extracurricular Activities” (PDF) . This guidance seeks to provide answers to what public schools providing single-sex education must do to comply with Title IX, the U.S. Constitution and other federal and state civil rights laws to avoid discrimination. The 33 questions and answers in this OCR Dec. 2014 guidance addresses violations of equity principles discussed earlier. For example, they address examples of sex discrimination identified in the FMF multi-year reports for 2007-10 and 2014, the problems with sex segregation outlined in the  FMF handout (PDF) , as well as many of the FMF “Suggestions for Evaluation Guidelines for Schools Contemplating or Using Single-sex Education.” However, this 2014 OCR guidance is based on the 2006 Title IX regulation which equity advocates believe should be rescinded because it allows sex segregation for vague purposes such as “increasing diversity” (in instructional strategies) which has nothing to do with decreasing sex discrimination under Title IX. 

In summary, FMF hopes that education and equity experts, including the required Title IX Coordinators, will identify public schools in their areas that are using deliberate sex segregation. (The FMF studies listing schools with sex segregation by state should help with the initial identification.) After identifying schools with deliberate sex segregation, these experts should work with others to learn if the schools are in full compliance with Title IX, the U.S. Constitution, and other civil rights laws. The FMF and the December 2014 OCR legal guidance should provide an initial framework for making fully informed decisions about allowing any deliberate sex segregation. But the experts should also determine if the sex segregation is improving education better than comparable coeducation and if it is more cost-effective. If there is no convincing evidence that the specific sex segregation is better than comparable coeducation, it should be ended and all efforts should be used to create high quality gender equitable coeducation.

Additional Information

• Busy Boys and Little Ladies: How fake brain science has supported gender segregation in schools  by Lise Eliot.
• “Problems with Sex-Segregated Public Education”
• The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling  by Diane F. Halpern, Lise Eliot, Rebecca S. Bigler, Richard A. Fabes, Laura D. Hanish, Janet Hyde, Lynn S. Liben, Carol Lynn Martin
• The Effects of Single-Sex Compared with Coeducational Schooling on Students’ Performance and Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis  by Erin Pahlke, Janet Shibley Hyde and Carlie M. Allison in  Psychological Bulletin
• American Civil Liberties Union, Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes
• Single-sex schools: A good idea gone wrong?  By David Sadker & Karen Zittleman
• The Myth of the “Boy Crisis”  by Caryl Rivers & Rosalind Barnett
• Sex-segregated Public Schools: Illegal and Unwise  by Vivian Berger
• Title IX at 45: Advancing Opportunity Through Equity in Education , NCWGE, 2017, Chapter on Single-Sex Education: Separation Serves No One
• Title IX at 40: Working to Ensure Gender Equity in Education , NCWGE, 2012, Chapter on Single-Sex Education: Fertile Ground for Discrimination
• Title IX at 35: Beyond the Headlines , NCWGE, 2008, Chapter on Single Sex Education by Sue Klein, Jan Erickson, & Elizabeth Homer
• Rescind Regulations Weakening Title IX Prohibitions Against Sex Discrimination in Education  (PDF)
• The Risks of Sex-segregated Public Education for Girls, Boys, and Everyone  by Susan S. Klein
• FMF’s objections to the proposed 2004 changes
• Other comments on the proposed changes  related to allowing single-sex education from 2001. Available in the archives of the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education.
• Learn more about the assumptions behind the push for sex-segregated schooling  by Patricia B. Campbell & Jo Sanders
• How sex-segregated schooling threatens Title IX – Turning Back the Clock  by Lory Stone
• Title IX and single sex education  by Sue Klein

In This Section

• Education Equity
• Our Education Equity Work
• Threats to Title IX
• Title IX Coordinators
• Sex Segregation

Separating Equals: Educational Research and the Long Term Consequences of Sex Segregation

George Washington Law Review, Vol. 67, p. 451, 1999

189 Pages Posted: 29 Sep 2006

Nancy Levit

University of Missouri at Kansas City - School of Law; University of Missouri at Kansas City - School of Law

The article imports into the legal literature for the first time the full range of single sex education research, from this country and others, and examines sociological research that has been omitted from the debate. Rarely do proponents consider what educational and social effects sex-exclusive schooling will have on boys. Rarer still is any consideration of the effect of educational segregation in a society that is already relentlessly segregated by sex. While the educational research regarding the efficacy of single sex schools is mixed at best, the sociological research is absolutely clear that separation on the basis of identity characteristics creates feelings of individual inadequacy and instills beliefs about group hierarchy. Government separation of equals sends the message that something is contaminatory about the presence of the other (or, as we often say, "opposite") sex. Separating Equals analyzes whether, in light of this sociological and educational evidence, government sponsored sex segregation is constitutional. Proponents argue that equally equipped and funded sex exclusive schools offer a diversity of educational choices. This article examines what is meant by "diversity" in this context. Single sex education adds to diversity only in the sense that it increases the educational options in a school system. But then diversity simply means something other than coeducation within the classroom—in other words, sameness on the basis of sex. Proponents also argue that sex segregated education is a temporary remedy for educational inequities visited on girls. Separating Equals asks how we will make the transition from training students toward sex-exclusivity to preparing students for coeducational lives?

Keywords: single-sex schools, single-sex classes, constitutionality of sex segregation in education, United States v. Virginia, school choice, public school education, coeducation

JEL Classification: I21, I22, I28, J15, J16, J71, J78, J79, K41

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Nancy Levit (Contact Author)

University of missouri at kansas city - school of law ( email ).

5100 Rockhill Road Kansas City, MO 64110-2499 United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics, related ejournals, discrimination, law & justice ejournal.

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Women, Gender & the Law eJournal

Economic inequality & the law ejournal, recommended papers.

Reform or Retrenchment? Single Sex Education and the Construction of Race and Gender

By Verna L. Williams

Embracing Segregation: The Jurisprudence of Choice and Diversity in Race and Sex Separatism in Schools

By Nancy Levit

Theorizing the Connections Among Systems of Subordination

No Boy Left Behind? Single-Sex Education and the Essentialist Myth of Masculinity

By David S. Cohen

Desegregating Teachers

By Wendy Parker

'Who's the Man?': Masculinities Studies, Terry Stops, and Police Training

By Frank Rudy Cooper

Feminism for Men: Legal Ideology and the Construction of Maleness

Our First Unisex President?: Black Masculinity and Obama's Feminine Side

The Strange Career of Jane Crow: Sex Segregation and the Transformation of Anti-Discrimination Discourse

By Serena Mayeri

Ricci v. DeStefano: A Masculinities Theory Analysis

By Ann Mcginley

Sex-Segregated Schools: Separate and Unequal

The ACLU Women's Rights Project works to ensure that public schools do not become sex-segregated and that girls and boys receive equal educational opportunities. In recent years, many school districts have introduced programs that allow for expanded use of single-sex education, often presenting these programs as quick-fix solutions to the array of problems facing many public schools. This trend sharply accelerated in October 2006, when the U.S. Department of Education announced new Title IX regulations making it easier for public schools to implement single-sex schools and classrooms.

In addition to being unlawful, the rationale behind sex-segregated academic programs is bad for kids. These programs are often based on questionable science about how girls' and boys' brains develop and on disturbing gender stereotypes. For example, advocates of sex-segregated schools tell teachers that:

• Boys need a competitive and confrontational learning environment, while girls can only succeed if they work cooperatively and are not placed under stress;

• When establishing authority, teachers should not smile at boys because boys are biologically programmed to read this as a sign of weakness;

• Girls should not have time limits on tests because, unlike boys, girls' brains cannot function well under these conditions; and

• Boys are better than girls in math because boys' bodies receive daily surges of testosterone, whereas girls don't understand mathematical theory very well except for a few days a month when their estrogen is surging.

Although these ideas are hyped as "new discoveries" about brain differences, they are, in fact, only dressed up versions of old stereotypes. Creating sex-segregated schools and classrooms is a waste of time and effort that diverts resources from initiatives that actually will improve the education of both boys and girls—such as reducing class sizes and increasing teacher training. Moreover, these sex-segregated classes deprive students of important preparation for the real, coeducational worlds of work and family. Rather than offering choice, sex-segregated programs limit the education of both boys and girls.

The ACLU opposes sex-segregation in public education that perpetuates antiquated gender stereotypes.

More on the Women's Rights Project's work on sex-segregated schools :

NEWS > ACLU Asks Dept of Education To Investigate Single-Sex Programs Rooted In Stereotypes (12/06/2012) > Back to Coeducation in Wood County: Judge Rules School May Not Separate Students by Sex This Year (8/30/12) > Single-Sex Classes Rooted in Stereotypes Prevalent Across the Nation, Says ACLU Report (8/22/12) > West Virginia Family Challenges Single-Sex Middle School Program Rooted in Stereotypes (8/15/12) > ACLU Launches “Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes” Campaign Against Single-Sex Classes Rooted in Stereotypes (5/21/12) > Following ACLU Demands Pittsburgh Ditches Single-Sex School Plans (11/11/2011) > Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Preparatory School (11/7/2011) > Experimenting with Sex Segregation in the Classroom? Not with My Girls (10/14/2011) > "Science" Says No to Single-Sex Education (9/26/2011) > ACLU Files Lawsuit Challenging Illegal Sex Segregation In Louisiana Public School (9/8/2009) > ACLU Ensures Equal Education For Girls And Boys In Vermilion Parish (8/21/2009) > Alabama School District Agrees To End Illegal Sex Segregation (7/6/2009) > School District in Mobile, Alabama, Agrees To End Illegal Sex Segregation (3/25/2009) > ACLU Asks Alabama School Districts To Disclose Documents On Sex Segregated Programs (12/15/2008) > ACLU Warns Alabama School District That Its Mandatory Sex Segregation Program Is Illegal And Discriminatory (11/12/2008) > ACLU Represents Students In Challenge To Sex Segregation In Kentucky Public School (5/19/2008) > Sex Segregation In Florida's Public Schools A Bad Move, Says ACLU (4/10/2008) > ACLU Requests Georgia School District Disclose Sex Segregation Plans (4/7/2008) > New Education Department Regulations Violate Title IX, Constitution (10/24/2006) > ACLU Wins Major Lawsuit Against Sex-Segregated School in Louisiana (8/3/2006)

CASES > Doe v. Wood County Board of Education > Doe v. Vermilion Parish School Board > Alabama Open Records Act Requests > A.N.A. v. U.S. Department of Education > Selden v. Livingston Parish School Board

RESOURCES > Why Single-Sex Public Education is a Civil Rights Issue (February 2014) > Women's Rights Project Deputy Director Emily Martin and Professor Cornelius Riordan Debate Sex Segregation as an Educational Strategy (February 2008, off-site) > Venus and Mars in Separate Classrooms: The Rise of Single-Sex Education , an article written by the ACLU's Emily Martin and published by the Florida Association of Women Lawyers (Spring 2007) > Statement by the ACLU of Michigan regarding H.B. 4264 , a bill on sex-segregated schools (6/14/2007) > New Title IX Regulations Pose a Serious Threat to Civil Rights of Students (10/26/2006) > NCWGE Memorandum to the Department of Education Requesting Rescission of 2006 Regulations and Seeking Guidance (July 2011) > NCWGE Memorandum to the Department of Education Requesting Rescission of 2006 Regulations (December 2009)

Related Issues

• Smart Justice
• Mass Incarceration
• Women's Rights in Education
• Women's Rights

Related Content

I’d Like to File a Complaint

A.N.A., et al. v. Breckinridge County Board of Education, et al.

Alabama Open Records Act Requests

ACLU Wins Major Lawsuit Against Sex-Segregated School in Louisiana

Related documents, preliminary findings of aclu “teach kids, not stereotypes” campaign, stay informed.

Sign up to be the first to hear about how to take action.

By completing this form, I agree to receive occasional emails per the terms of the ACLU’s privacy statement.