Revisiting Gender Inequality: Women in Masculinized Spaces

• In Event: 035 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 20. Masculinized Spaces

Abstract

Public reforms, judicial rules, social movements, and overall social change have opened opportunities for women within the labor force and the sporting institutions in the last several decades. However, within each of these spheres remains the notion that some jobs and sports are "appropriate" for men, while others are "appropriate" for women. Tied to ideological notions of femininity and masculinity, and gender essentialist understandings of male and female bodies, this allows for certain "male-dominated" occupations and "male-appropriate" sports to limit opportunities for women. While scholars have been researching these spaces for decades, these two realms have been seemingly divorced from one another, with few direct links being drawn between the two in scholarly literature. Despite their divorced nature, there are sweeping similarities between the findings within these two distinct bodies of literature. This article reviews the literature on occupations discussed as "male-dominated" and "male-appropriate" sports, identifying areas of convergence within these previously distinct literatures. Additionally, due to the consistent findings within these literatures, I will argue that future research should examine these as "masculinized spaces," or spaces in which an overarching masculine ideology pervades. Considering these spaces as "masculinized" offers the ability to move beyond thinking about these spaces as simply numerically dominated by males. This will also allow research to better consider how gender is experienced within spaces where most or all of the participants are female, like sex-segregated military units and all-female contact sports teams, but an overarching masculine ideology still requires that participants embrace masculine characteristics.

Author

• J.A. Carter, Miami University-Hamilton