The wage gap between men and women remains a durable form of gender labor market stratification. In this article, we integrate gradational measures of gender perceptions with standard models of the binary gender wage gap. Specifically, we articulate two pathways through which gradational gender perceptions may assist in explaining the disparity in wages between people who identify as men and women: the “gender atypicality” perspective and the “masculinity premium” perspective. Drawing on original survey data from more than 4,000 workers in the low-wage service sector in the United States, we find that, on average, men and women receive higher wages when they are perceived as more masculine and that differences in perceived masculinity assist in explaining some of the binary gender wage gap. While this main set of findings aligns with the “masculinity premium” perspective, we show that this pattern is far from universal. It holds only among woman-dominated jobs and does not hold for tips. Additionally, women who are perceived as more masculine also report higher levels of gender discrimination and sexual harassment. Together, these findings contribute to our understanding of the gender wage gap, encourage the use of more gradational and perceptual measures of gender, and point to important heterogeneity in the ways that these processes operate.
Drawing on participant observation and 139 in-depth interviews following a California megafire, this paper demonstrates how disasters work as social settings that generate and organize access to what I term “provisional masculine resources” while providing opportunities to articulate inequalities as natural and inevitable. These data demonstrate how gender regimes maintain flexibility in response to exogenous shocks (i.e., disasters) by shifting the definitions of and access to relational, gendered behaviors. Unequal gender regimes are produced and legitimated in disastrous times by (1) clarifying the complementary traits and behaviors associated with hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, (2) organizing potent social rewards around gendered relationships, and (3) providing opportunities to articulate gendered identities and behaviors as natural. In the case of fire recovery, provisional masculine resources explain how the means through which men accomplish manhood change in availability temporally, at different times producing positive social rewards and negative consequences, yet continuously work to uphold unequal, patriarchal gender regimes.
This article presents a discourse analysis of reproductive policy in Singapore, a small Southeast Asian country with ultra-low fertility rates. Focusing on assisted reproduction between the 1980s and 2024, it shows how egg freezing and in vitro fertilization emerged as “politically versatile technologies” that are simultaneously associated with women’s reproductive choice and patriarchal pronatalism. It theorizes that such versatility arises through shifting and stratified policy provisions, the interplay of different policy domains, and discursive processes conditioned by the political regime. Enmeshed with foreign policy goals, social policies and regulatory approaches to assisted reproduction are justified via an increasingly global interpretation of competing gender ideologies. Furthermore, media policy supports the naturalization of heteronormative and patriarchal “family values,” as state-regulated media deploy emotional frames while spotlighting the connections between assisted reproductive technologies, egalitarianism, and pronatalist social policies that selectively benefit heterosexual or married women. By demonstrating how the ideological versatility of assisted reproductive technologies is discursively maintained by state-regulated media and government actors amid policy change, this article advances the concept of “managed multiplicity” to characterize the patriarchal state’s organization of gendered meanings across policy tools, domains, actors, and broader projects concerning national and international legitimacy.
