Since the 1970s, advocates have used the term gender neutral to press for legal change in contexts ranging from employment discrimination to marriage equality to public restroom access. Drawing on analyses of all Supreme Court cases, federal courts of appeals cases, and Supreme Court amicus briefs in which the terms gender neutral/neutrality, sex neutral/neutrality, or sexually neutral/sexual neutrality appear, this study examines how US courts have defined gender neutrality and what the scope and limits of its legal application have been. We find that the courts have defined gender neutrality narrowly as facial neutrality, but nonetheless that this limited understanding has transformed some areas of the law, even if it has had little impact on others. Our analysis confirms earlier feminist skepticism about the sufficiency of gender neutrality to guarantee equality but also points to areas in which the law has yet to exploit the idea's significant potential to address discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
This article examines what sociological research teaches us about gender, power, and harassment in the #MeToo era, showing how the sociological literature on harassment has both shaped and been shaped by legal definitions and scholarship. For instance, like case law, sociological research has tended to focus on the workplace to the exclusion of harassment in other spheres such as housing, as well as on sexual forms of harassment—despite evidence that nonsexual forms of sex-based harassment are even more common and just as harmful as sexual forms. While not all sociological studies of harassment employ an intersectional approach, those that do show that race and gender shape not only who is likely to be targeted but also how different people define and understand harassment. The sociological research suggests that mainstream organizational approaches to harassment fail to reduce rates of harassment and even elicit backlash but that some alternative approaches offer promise. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Drawing on 27 interviews with consultants in the direct selling industry, this article argues that consultants’ motivations to do stigmatized work with low financial rewards are tied to cultural pressures to adhere to intensive mothering ideologies. Some direct selling organizations in the United States are changing from a home party model—selling products out of homes—to a social commerce model—selling and recruiting using social media. Using a gendered organizations approach, these organizations portray themselves as feminine organizations, celebrating caregiving and allowing consultants—predominantly women—to reconcile work-family tensions through flexible work. Yet, this business model incentivizes a small number of financially successful consultants to train a much larger group to perform costly emotional labor for low pay. Consultants use the guilt tied to intensive mothering ideologies as a motivational tool in which they portray the cultural benefits of being a “good mother”—always available to and cultivating her children—as outweighing the emotional cost of doing stigmatized work that strains personal relationships. Rather than financially or emotionally supporting women, these organizations exploit women’s investments in finding individualized solutions to work-family conflict and reaffirm racialized, classed, and sexualized ideologies.
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