Data from 44 societies are used to explore sex segregation by field of study. Contrary to accounts linking socioeconomic modernization to a "degendering" of public-sphere institutions, sex typing of curricular fields is stronger in more economically developed contexts. The authors argue that two cultural forces combine in advanced industrial societies to create a new sort of sex segregation regime. The first is gender-essentialist ideology, which has proven to be extremely resilient even in the most liberal-egalitarian of contexts; the second is self-expressive value systems, which create opportunities and incentives for the expression of "gendered selves." Multivariate analyses suggest that structural features of postindustrial labor markets and modern educational systems support the cultivation, realization, and display of gender-specific curricular affinities.

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The amount of attention devoted to women and women's issues has increased dramatically in the last five decades throughout the world. In this article we examine the cultural construction of women that guided such action by analyzing texts that were produced and activities that were undertaken in relation to women by international organizations from 1945 through 1995. We show that the modernist principles of universalism, liberal individualism, and rationality provided the culturalframework for this global project. We compare the ways in which two issues important to women, education and genital mutilation, were constructed by global actors and the implications of this meaning making for action over time. Our analysis reveals an important link between the extent to which an issue is constructed to be consistent with the modernist principles and the extent to which it receives global attention.

Expanding on the work of Ulrich Beck and other social theorists, the central thesis of this article is that individuals in contemporary North American society are increasingly motivated by the need to alleviate expanding levels of perceived risks associated with interpersonal love relationships and mate selection. In response to these perceived risks, men and women today are altering their relationship patterns in such a way that the process of relationship formation and assessment has become increasingly rationalized. As a result, a paradox has been created between the rational management of interpersonal risk associated with romance and the production of risk. This article is primarily a theoretical treatment of the issues, augmented with data on the social history of adolescence, courtship, and marriage and a review of the literature on mate selection processes in contemporary society.During the past two decades, a number of seminal works have focused attention on the effects of modernization on interpersonal intimate relationships, especially within the context of marriage and the family.

This article develops an approach to cross-national research on the status of women that merges theoretical and methodological concerns. The approach consists of understanding the concept status of women within three dimensions—political, economic, and cultural. The article differentiates between a public and a private domain within each dimension. To understand and compare the status of women in different countries, it is argued that it is imperative to study the interrelationships among the dimensions and domains of status of women. Contrasting the approach taken here with that of extant research on gender inequality and with efforts to locate a universal measure of women's status provides an illustration of the complexity involved in analyzing the status of women, the meaninglessness of talking globally about a single measure of status of women, and the necessity to go beyond male-centered measures of status to capture more fully women's status and experiences.