Cecilia Ridgeway: Framed by Gender: How Gender Persists in the Modern World

In an advanced industrial society like the United States, where an array of processes work against gender inequality, how does this inequality persist? Integrating research from sociology, social cognition and psychology, and organizational behavior, Framed by Gender identifies the general processes through which gender as a principle of inequality rewrites itself into new forms of social and economic organization. The book argues that people confront uncertain circumstances with gender beliefs that are more traditional than those circumstances. They implicitly draw on the too-convenient cultural frame of gender to help organize new ways of doing things, thereby re-inscribing trailing gender stereotypes into the new activities, procedures, and forms of organization. This dynamic does not make equality unattainable, but suggests a constant struggle with uneven results. Demonstrating of how personal interactions translate into larger structures of inequality, the book offers a distinctive analysis of the troubling endurance of gender inequality.

Framed by Gender: How Gender Persists in the Modern World, Oxford, 2011