This research focuses on how children negotiate gender boundaries in middle childhood play. Over a nine-week period, children were observed creating, defining, and altering gender codes in a summer day camp. When girls and boys disregarded pre-described boundaries, they entered an area we refer to as the gender transgression zone. This area of activity, where boys and girls conduct heterosocial relations in hopes of either maintaining or expanding gender boundaries in child culture, is where gender transgression takes place. The study revealed that high-status boys used hegemonic masculinity to regulate both girls' and boys' boundaries by reserving the authority to sanction all gender transgressions. While race and class were salient for girls' homosocial organization and behavior, within this age group they did not appear to influence the boys' status system.
This case study of the banking industry, 1940–1980, examines three competing theories of increases in women's labor force participation. Combining census and industry regulatory data, three models of the feminization process are compared: human capital, dual labor market, and gender queuing. The gender queuing model best explains empirical variation in industry-level feminization. Clerical intensity (the proportion of clerical jobs to all jobs in the industry), especially, makes the substitution of female labor a cost-cutting alternative. Theories of feminization must incorporate spatial and temporal variation in the causal strength of relevant social forces. Gender queuing theory is best equipped to do this, as it allows for better historical interpretation of how varied social forces, both economic and patriarchal, impinge on class and gendered actors. Gender queuing theory subsumes determinants of feminization found in other theories while rejecting both their untenable assumptions and their interpretations of how labor markets actually function.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.