Gender Equality in a Comparative Perspective
Final Report Abstract
In “Gender Equality in a Comparative Perspective”, a study of relational inequalities in the subproject “Networks, Social Capital and Gender Inequalities” complements research on gender inequalities in the household and in the labor market by introducing and studying social capital as a contextual complement to human capital. In parallel to human capital, social capital is conceptualized as an investment in social relations with an expected return (also) in the marketplace. It can encompass personal relationships (friendships, informal social support) as well as involvement in more formally organized groups and activities, such as voluntary associations. This study provides support for the insight that voluntary associations are an important factor in structuring social and gender inequality. By joining a voluntary association the individual actor becomes part of a social network. Information, help, emotional or financial support are valuable resources which individuals can access through their contacts to group members; however, the access to social networks and the potential to mobilize embedded resources, captured in the concept of social capital, is unequally distributed among men and women and has ramifications for social inequalities. Membership in voluntary associations may generate and amplify social inequality in other fields such as income, occupational prestige, power in public life and in the household, and in this way underline and enhance gender inequality. There are systematic variations across countries in both membership level and the gender gap in voluntary association memberships. Using an adapted version of the nonprofit regime typology, a study on gender gap reveals that women in the social democratic nonprofit regime have the highest participation rates, followed by conservative and liberal nonprofit regimes. In Mediterranean and post‐socialist nonprofit regimes, women face a dual disadvantage. Their average number of voluntary association memberships is low, both in absolute terms and in comparison to their male counterparts. A further study addressed the mechanisms underlying the varying gender gap, distinguishing between resource deficit and return deficit. Only in social democratic countries men and women on average do not differ in the resource endowments that predict their memberships, and the return to resources they possess does not vary by gender. Finally, since women’s participation in voluntary associations has frequently been linked to their attachment to the labor force, a refined cross‐national and cross‐time study of voluntary association memberships and female labor force participation rate was conducted. Results reveal that affiliational gender gap is diminishing over time. If we differentiate between memberships in instrumental (i.e. work and policy related) and expressive (i.e. social and recreational) voluntary associations, there is evidence that gender gap in instrumental group membership is closing over time. Whereas men were much more likely than women to be affiliated with an instrumental organization in the early 1980s, the gap narrowed substantially by the late 2000s. However, contrary to expectations, this converging trend is not generated by increasing membership rates of women. Rather, the gender gap is closing because women disengage from voluntary associations at a slower rate than men.
Publications
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(2010): Dividing the Domestic: Women, Men and Household Work in Cross‐National Perspective. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Treas, Judith and Sonja Drobnič (eds.)
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(2013): Women and their Memberships: Gender Gap in Relational Dimension of Social Inequality. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 31, 32‐ 48
Peter, Sascha and Sonja Drobnič
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(2014): Social Contacts of Older People in 27 European Countries: The Role of Welfare Spending and Economic Inequality. European Sociological Review, 30, 4: 413–430
Ellwardt, Lea, Sascha Peter, Patrick Präg and Nardi Steverink
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(2015): Gender Inequalities in the Home, in Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn (eds.): Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, Wiley Online Library
Drobnič, Sonja and Leah Ruppanner
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(2015): “Voluntarily Disconnected? A Cross‐national and Longitudinal Study on Gender Differentials in Voluntary Association Participation”. Doctoral thesis
Peter, Sascha
