The Contributions of Intracohort Change and Population TurnoverThis paper addresses the processes underlying the dramatic shift in beliefs about women's work and family roles in the United States over the past two decades. Following Mason and Lu (1988), we posited this shift to be a function of actual change in individual opinions, as well as changes in population membership that result from births and deaths. Using pooled cross-sections from the General Social Surveys (1977to 1996, we found that although demographic processes and microlevel attitude change are both important in understanding attitude trends, the contribution of cohort succession is substantially greater now than in the period that Mason and Lu examined. Multivariate analyses show that (a) the sex difference in attitudes is greater among recent cohorts, and (b) the strong association between education and attitudes that characterized earlier cohorts is significantly weaker among cohorts born after 1945.The division of labor by sex constitutes a highly visible symbol of gender inequities (Jackman, 1995). The salience of such inequities has increased with the erosion of the male-dominated labor force that characterized the United States

This article draws on participant observation in a law enforcement academy to demonstrate how a hidden curriculum encourages aspects of hegemonic masculinity among recruits. Academy training teaches female and male recruits that masculinity is an essential requirement for the practice of policing and that women do not belong. By watching and learning from instructors and each other, male students developed a form of masculinity that (1) excluded women students and exaggerated differences between them and men; and (2) denigrated women in general. Thus, the masculinity that is characteristic of police forces and is partly responsible for women’s low representation on them is not produced exclusively on the job, but is taught in police academies as a subtext of professional socialization.

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It is widely accepted that the conflict between women’s family obligations and professional jobs’ long hours lies at the heart of their stalled advancement. Yet research suggests that this “work–family narrative” is incomplete: men also experience it and nevertheless advance; moreover, organizations’ effort to mitigate it through flexible work policies has not improved women’s advancement prospects and often hurts them. Hence this presumed remedy has the perverse effect of perpetuating the problem. Drawing on a case study of a professional service firm, we develop a multilevel theory to explain why organizations are caught in this conundrum. We present data suggesting that the work–family explanation has become a “hegemonic narrative”—a pervasive, status-quo-preserving story that prevails despite countervailing evidence. We then advance systems-psychodynamic theory to show how organizations use this narrative and attendant policies and practices as an unconscious “social defense” to help employees fend off anxieties raised by a 24/7 work culture and to protect organizationally powerful groups—in our case, men and the firm’s leaders—and in so doing, sustain workplace inequality. Due to the social defense, two orthodoxies remain unchallenged—the necessity of long work hours and the inescapability of women’s stalled advancement. The result is that women’s thin representation at senior levels remains in place. We conclude by highlighting contributions to work–family, workplace inequality, and systems-psychodynamic theory.

Domestic violence represents a crucial underpinning of women's continued subordination, which is why much scholarly and activist energy has been expended in designing, implementing, and evaluating programs to reduce it. On the basis of three years of fieldwork, the authors analyze the interactional processes through which masculinity was constructed in one such program. They find that facilitators had success in getting the men to agree to take responsibility, use egalitarian language, control anger, and choose nonviolence, but the men were successful in resisting taking victims' perspectives, deflecting facilitators' overtures to be emotionally vulnerable, and defining themselves as hardworking men entitled to a patriarchal dividend. The authors' analysis contributes to understandings of how hegemonic masculinity is interactionally constituted, and it adds evidence to the debate about such programs' effectiveness by raising the issue of how well the program met its goal of transforming masculinity.A s shelter workers in the 1970s became familiar and increasingly frustrated with men who repeatedly battered the same or different women, they and pro-feminist men created the first batterer intervention programs, or BIPs (National Institutes of Justice 2003). On the basis of their knowledge of battered women's experiences, they understood men's violence as a way to maintain power and control over women, and they designed programs to change batterers' masculinity. As states responded to activist pressure by arresting batterers (Mirchandani 2006), courts AUTHORS' NOTE: We are grateful for the comments of Daphne Holden, Margaret Leaf, Patricia Yancey Martin, Michael Schwalbe, and anonymous reviewers. Studies assessing whether men's participation in BIPs decreases their violence have proliferated in the past 25 years. Research from the 1980s typically reported success, although these early studies lacked control groups and relied on arrest reports rather than victim reports (Hamberger and Hastings 1993). These were followed by research using "quasi-experimental" designs comparing program completers to dropouts or to other control groups and, more recently, experimental designs comparing convicted batterers randomly assigned to BIPs to those assigned to community service/probation. Although researchers continue to debate methodological issues (Gondolf 2001), and some programs may work better than others, Feder and Wilson's (2005) meta-analysis of the most rigorous distribution.