Pink-Collar Play: How Gendered Career Preferences and Constraints are Reflected in Leisure

• In Event: 40820 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Gender and Work

Abstract

Sociologists have long been interested in occupational inequality for its persistent and pervasive impact on people’s everyday lives. Contemporary scholarship on occupational inequality emphasizes that gender shapes access to and treatment within occupations and workplaces. Women’s labor and work are also diminished on a structural level, where women-dominated careers are under-compensated and undervalued. These pink-collar careers, such as nursing, teaching, and customer service, usually require physical care or emotional management of others. While scholars often point to physical differences, gatekeepers, social expectations, and gendered preferences as the primary causal factors leading to women's saturation in specific careers, these factors are difficult to disentangle. In this paper, we argue that video games are a novel site to study gendered career segregation because, similarly to how women opt into paid work, they also opt into leisure times that are also hierarchical. However, the anonymity of online video games reduces most of the causal factors, enabling us to study how preference and time constraints structure choice when the impact of bodies, gatekeepers, and social expectations are all relaxed. Using a survey of 4,270 and interviews with 53 people who play video games, we investigate whether and to what degree gender shapes people's selection into types of games the way it does into types of work. Many of the constraints and preferences women cite when selecting pink-collar careers (e.g., competition, harassment, reputation, difficulty, time requirements, and children) are mirrored in their selection of pink-collar games. These games, like feminized careers, are awarded lower prestige. We identify multiple typologies that shape women’s selection into different genres of video games based on the constraints that are most impactful to them. This study contributes to understanding the friction between socialized gendered agency and gendered constraints by significantly relaxing the constraints.

Authors

• Jeremy Brenner-Levoy, Davidson College

• Annie McGhee, University of Cincinnati