DIFFERENCES IN MOTHERHOOD PENALTIES ACROSS ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS GROUPS IN ISRAEL

By Michelle J. Budig, Vered Kraus, and Asaf Levanon

Across developed countries, women are more educated, more frequently employed, and receive higher wages than at any point in history. Yet, combining work and family responsibilities remains challenging for most women. Mothers are more likely to work part-time or not at all, relative to childless women and men. Moreover, a wage gap widens for mothers with each child they have, holding all else constant. Some countries reduce work-family conflict through supportive work-family policies such as generous parental leave, subsidized childcare, and family allowances. Despite this, in most developed countries, many women feel forced to choose between work and family priorities, which, in addition to reduced employment and wages, contribute to high and rising rates of childlessness, delayed fertility, and smaller than desired family sizes.

In our recent Gender & Society article, we examine employment and pay outcomes for mothers in a country where, at the aggregate level, women “have it all.” Israel presents a unique context for studying motherhood’s impacts on employment and earnings: it is characterized both by high fertility and marriage rates and by high rates of women’s education and employment. Compellingly, past research finds small motherhood penalties in Israel. Yet, Israel is also marked by strong disparities among ethnic and religious groups, and differences in motherhood penalties among groups have been unexplored. Ours is the first study that uses longitudinal data to examine motherhoods’ employment and wage penalties among different groups within Israel. Given substantial social and economic inequality between Israeli Jews and Israeli-Palestinians, we explore whether the overall finding of few motherhood penalties among all women in Israel remains true when we examine Jewish, Muslim, and Christian women separately. Importantly, we examine whether motherhood penalties are reduced in the public sector, with its stronger anti-discrimination policy and work-family policy enforcement. Further, we consider whether differences across the public and private sector employment shapes differences in motherhood penalties across ethnic and religious groups.

First, a bit of context: The Israeli population is diverse with sharp socioeconomic cleavages. It is comprised of Jews (75 percent), Muslims (20 percent), Christians (2 percent) and other minorities. Of these, Jews are the most socioeconomically privileged group and Muslims are the least privileged. High levels of ethno-religious segregation in where people live, where they work, and the occupations they hold contribute to significant inequalities in educational attainment, employment rates, earnings, and economic opportunity. Residential segregation shapes disparities in the-quality of schooling and educational attainment across communities. Access to social services, public transportation, and public and private sector work are all more constrained in ethnic and religious minority communities. In addition, family formation patterns differ among these groups, with later marriage and age at first birth among Jews, compared to Muslims and Christians, although Jewish and Muslim women have similarly high completed family sizes. Together, these conditions underpin dramatic differences in educational attainment and employment among ethnic and religious groups, with Jewish women being highly educated, highly engaged in the labor force and commanding the highest pay, followed by Christians and, quite distantly, Muslims on all measures.

Using newly available panel data we find that motherhood deters employment more strongly among Israeli-Palestinians than among Jews. Following a birth, Jewish women return to employment at higher rates and more quickly, with almost 70 percent being employed within 9 months of giving birth. This is robust among all Jewish women, regardless of educational attainment. Christian and Muslim women with post-secondary education are employed at similar rates to Jewish women following a birth. However, Christians, and especially Muslims with moderate and low educational attainment have longer periods of non-employment following a birth, and among the least educated, one-third of Muslim mothers remain non-employed at 2.5 years post-birth. These patterns reflect the impact of both structural and cultural factors: Muslims are more likely to live in remote communities with fewer job opportunities, poor public transportation, and little accessible childcare. These challenges are amplified by cultural norms encouraging direct care of mothers for children, which is more common for women with lower educational attainment.

Considering the motherhood wage penalty, we find penalties for each child among the least educated women in all groups. Among the least educated, the length of labor market absence following a birth and job experience are strong contributors to motherhood penalties, variously accounting for 24 to 53 percent of baseline penalties among groups. These penalties decline as education increases. At the medium level of education, we observe motherhood wage penalties for Jewish and Christian women, but not among Muslims. For all groups, highly-educated women incur smaller motherhood wage penalties, and in some cases receive motherhood wage premiums. Particularly among Muslims, children are associated with wage premiums among the highly educated. We explore this surprising finding by examining the characteristics of their labor force participation.

Muslim women who meet all three criteria – highly educated, employed, and mothers – are relatively rare, compared to Jewish women. To illustrate, employment rates of mothers at 18 months post-birth are, 47 percent for Muslims, compared to 84 percent of Jews. Of the employed, 36 percent of Muslims have a college degree, compared to 51 percent of Jews. This select group of employed, highly educated Muslim mothers are strongly segregated: fully 88 percent of highly educated Muslim mothers are in the public sector, compared with 49 percent of their Jewish counterparts. The majority of Muslim mothers in this category are teachers (63 percent) compared to Jewish mothers (26 percent). In Israel, teachers are covered by a strong collective bargaining agreement that offers higher pay to women with children. This enhancement of maternal earnings may contribute to the findings of wage bonuses for motherhood for highly educated Muslim mothers. In addition, the Israeli public sector is characterized by stronger enforcement of anti-discrimination and work-family policies. It is not surprising, then that public-sector employment, particularly for Muslims, is associated with higher post birth employment, lower motherhood penalties, and motherhood premiums among the highly educated. Our findings suggest that increasing educational attainment and public sector employment among Israeli-Palestinians may reduce inequality across religious and ethnic groups in terms of motherhood’s impact on employment and earnings.

Our findings are highly relevant to policy addressing gender and ethnic inequality. Because vulnerable workers – minorities and the least educated – incur the highest economic costs for childbearing, efforts to increase educational attainment are crucial in reducing mothers’ employment inequalities, particularly for Muslims and Christians. In addition, our study underscores the importance of public-sector employment in supporting Israeli-Palestinian mothers’ employment and pay, with its stronger employment protections and support for combining work and family.

Michelle J. Budig is a professor of sociology and senior vice provost at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has focused on labor market inequalities, wage penalties for paid and unpaid caregiving, work–family policy, and nonstandard employment. Her research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Journal of Marriage and the Family, and numerous other professional journals.

Vered Kraus was an Emerita professor of sociology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her work focused on social stratification and inequality, especially gender and ethnic inequality in the labor market. She published several books and articles, including Facing Barriers: Palestinian Women in a Jewish-Dominated Labor Market, Promises in the Promised Land: Mobility and Inequality in Israel, and Secondary Breadwinners: Israeli Women in the Labor Market.

Asaf Levanon is a senior lecturer in the department of sociology and the head of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Poverty and Social Exclusion at the University of Haifa. Building on social stratification research and life course scholarship, his work examines how institutions affect life-course outcomes. His work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Methods and Research, Social Science Research, and other professional journals.

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Roma: Domestic Work Researchers Respond to Highly Acclaimed Film, Part I

Winner of a Golden Globe and recipient of several Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, Roma, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, follows a year in the life of a domestic worker and the Mexico City family that employs her. Although the film has spawned many conversations among critics and audiences, and even domestic worker advocates, the voices of expert researchers of domestic work in Latin America have often been absent. Spoilers abound!

Here is the first part of a blog that will offer critiques of the film by members of RITHAL (a network of researchers who study domestic work in Latin America). If you are interested in learning more about RITHAL, please contact Erynn Masi de Casanova. Casanova also provided the translations from Spanish to English for some of these essays.

“Labor” and Care in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma

By Romina Cutuli

“Labor” is, in Hannah Arendt’s terms,[1] that set of activities as trivial as they are necessary for sustaining life. In what seems to be an anthropological constant, we observe the delegation of a particular social group—because of class, race, and gender—to carry out these activities. This intersectionality is crystallized in the character of Cleo. Beyond the praise of film critics and the disappointment of some mainstream audiences, what does Roma tell us about domestic work? Among the critiques I’ve seen online, one is constant: the film’s slow pace. The cadence of Cleo’s labor, its ephemeral and thus repetitive character, is our first impression of the cinematographic experience. The tasks get repeated, as do the reasons for going back and doing them again. These are so many snapshots of the repetition, intensified by an ending that suggests a cycle. Here comes the spoiler alert: the labor will take place day after day, without any of the magic we see in other film genres, in which repetition can be undertaken through supernatural means.

It’s nature that imposes this labor on us, says Hannah Arendt. Nature reminds us of our animal-ness and keeps us from transcending death. As Arendt anticipated and Katrine Marçal gracefully put it, “work” and “action” need this “labor” to happen first.[2] Care implies constant presence, as Gorz notes.[3] Cleo is there to serve breakfast, to pick up clothes, to save a life by risking her own. Unlike the case of a firefighter or a doctor, the economic cost of her permanent presence is amortized over time and the true value of her labor is never calculated. To build a world of things, to leave our mark and make our aspirations reality, we have to avoid domestic work, either by living a simple, childless life, or perhaps, through the commodification of domestic work as gendered and low-cost.

And here emerges another aspect of the intersectional inequalities expressed in Roma. These unequal relationships are necessary so that some people can transcend the everyday. So that Antonio, barely in the film, can run in the rain like a love-drunk teen, Sofía (his wife and Cleo’s employer) has to manage the daily life of the home and four children. So that Sofía can work full-time in publishing, have time let down her hair and time to herself, there must be a Cleo. A young, poor, indigenous woman, the last link in a chain of inequalities. The freedoms of some are possible only through the bondage of others, and material socioeconomic inequalities ensure that these types of social relations reproduce themselves.

Sofía’s freedoms are curtailed so that Antonio can be free. For Sofía to maintain some bit of freedom, there have to be poor, marginalized women whose only means of subsistence is selling their labor power round the clock in other people’s homes. When you put it like that, the injustice is inexcusable. We look for gentler ways to describe how some people are able to rise because of the invisible work of others. So we have the idea of an “ethic of care.” Women’s personal sacrifice becomes recognized and idolized, for example, in Cuarón’s “homage to the women in his life”—as people have described Roma. This recognition is the paltry recompense for women’s low-paid or unpaid work. Morever, this homage does not come from women who dedicate most or all of their lives working for others, with few employment alternatives, but is created and consumed by those who do have a choice. This essentialized view of the cost-free devotion of the poor woman worker, quiet and ever-present, is the sugary coating that helps us swallow the hard pill of inequality: inequality that benefits the subject who does have a voice. Gratitude covers over the inequality that never changes and is never questioned.

Inequality becomes silence. Cleo’s voice is literally absent, but Cuarón’s is not. He speaks to her, about her, and through her. Her silence leaves room for the powerful to speak. In Roma we hear once again the same voice already expressed in legislative debates, newspaper articles, and even academic research. Even in the act of recognition, the worker’s words are absent. The domestic worker is always someone we have, not someone who is, in our class-marked discourse. The romanticized view of this unconditional devotion, which asks little or nothing in return, is the voice of privilege. The end of the film suggests a trace of first-person experience, when Cleo dares to put into words an unconfessable feeling. They go home, the patio is full of excrement. She takes the clothes up to the roof to wash them. She gives up her life so that others can live, love, and suffer. And win Golden Globes. In Roma, once again, the subaltern could not speak. 

Romina Cutuli, Assistant Investigator, CONICET, Work Studies Group, Center of Social and Economic and Social Research, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (Argentina). Romina’s research focuses on labor markets and public policy in relation to domestic work in Argentina.

The Troubling of “We”: An Intersectional Perspective on Roma

 

By: Jaira J. Harrington

In one memorable scene from Roma, Sofía proclaims, “We are alone. No matter what they tell you, we women are always alone.” Yet this “we” is only conveniently explored by Sofía when she can sense herself losing the legitimacy, power, and stability that she has enjoyed as the woman of the house. The parallel lives that Sofía (employer) and Cleo (domestic worker) lead only intersect when Sofía brings up salient questions of women’s solidarity across difference. Using an intersectional lens to examine this gendered “we” can reveal both convergences and how race and class create distance.

Cleo is of indigenous descent. Despite the internal dramas of her work life in an affluent neighborhood of Mexico City, she is not immune to the larger political conflicts of the time. The land rights of her people and family are under constant threat, and at one point she hears her mother’s property has been seized. With little room to process her personal and communal grief, she is expected to quietly manage these issues and emotions along with her employer’s personal difficulties. She absorbs misdirected aggressions from Sofía as they both work through their problems.

I don’t mean to downplay the pain and trauma both women experience. They’re both emotionally, economically, and physically abandoned by their male partners whose personal visions for their futures did not include the women who were mothers to their children, born and unborn. Yet, the differences in their lived experience of pain and desertion are striking.

When Sofía accepts that her husband has moved on and will no longer financially support her and her children, she chooses to work at a publishing company. Cleo could not even conceive of such an option in her position of relative economic dependence.[4] While Sofía has the support of her mother, Cleo relies on her fellow in-house domestic worker friend, Adela, but mainly takes this journey alone. Cleo’s closest kinships are in the remote rural towns from which she has been isolated due to her work. The family she works for becomes her own, but this intimacy has boundaries. These boundaries are most evident during a difficult childbirth, where Cleo is shown without the support of her employer-family and is truly left alone.

With an intersectional analysis that fully acknowledges the multiple identities that constitute the lived experience of both women, the gulf between them becomes clear. Though we have two narratives of enduring struggle, the options for a young, poor, rural, indigenous, unmarried domestic with an unplanned pregnancy are completely different than those of a financially established, educated, married, and wealthy elite white woman. The universal experience of “we” that Sofía invokes between herself and Cleo is a rhetorical lacuna that women of color experience with remarkable regularity.

Roma brings to light a broader feminist issue of solidarity across difference. The silencing of distinct oppressions among and between women is worth a critical re-imagining. An unexamined “we” undermines feminist politics when it ignores the power dynamics within the category “women.” An intersectional perspective can give us the tools to see the multiplicity of oppressions and the potential spaces for liberation for all women.

Jaira J. Harrington, Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova University. Jaira’s research focuses on domestic workers’ movements in Brazil.

 

[1] Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.

[2] Marçal, Katrine. 2017. Who cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? A story of women and economics. Pegasus Books.

[3] Gorz, Andre. 1995. Metamorfosis del trabajo. Editorial Sistema.

[4] Domestic workers’ social, economic and political precarity is well-documented by the International Labour Organization: https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/domestic-workers/lang–en/index.htm

[5] Cleo’s harrowing experience with childbirth is common for indigenous women around the world. For more information on global research on indigenous women, childbirth complications and infant mortality, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has the following study: https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/resource-pdf/factsheet_digital_Mar27.pdf

Teaching about Gender-Based Violence in Schools

 

By Garnett Russell, Julia C. Lerch,  and Chirstine Min Wotipka

According to United Nations estimates, more than a third of women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lives (UN Women 2015). In some countries, more than three quarters of women have experienced sexual or gender-based violence (GBV). Long before the #MeToo movement, feminist scholars and activists focused on gender-based violence as a core feature of gender inequality. As more young people and students get involved in the movement around the world, to what extent are students taught about GBV in schools?

We view schools as important sites of socialization for future generations and to address gender inequalities. However, at the same time, schools are inherently gendered institutions reinforcing a patriarchal notion of the state and unequal power relations. Given that discussing sex or related topics such as GBV was and continues to be taboo across many cultures, we aim to examine whether and how discussions of GBV are incorporated into school curricula and textbooks. In our research, we investigate the extent to which textbooks from countries around the world incorporate mentions of GBV. We quantitatively analyze data coded from more than 500 textbooks from 76 countries to understand what factors explain discussions of GBV in textbooks.

We see textbooks as artifacts of the state and indicative of the civic values and cultural norms around gender equality that the state endorses. Consequently, what is included in textbooks is important in changing or reinforcing patriarchal norms and practices in society more broadly.

In our research we argue that GBV is incorporated into textbooks due to the influence of the women’s human rights movement and the radical feminist reframing of GBV as a human rights violation, as well as the incorporation of taboo topics around sex into school curricula. We argue that the growing attention to GBV in the 1990s was linked to broader concerns around human rights and development. In particular, the framing of women’s rights as human rights in the Declaration against Violence against Women (DEWAV), but also the growing attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis allowed for GBV to be brought to the forefront as a human rights issue. GBV is now framed as a human rights violation and a global social problem.

We find that discussions of GBV are more common after 1993, when DEWAV was issued. While textbooks hardly mentioned GBV in the 1950s and 60s, by the 1990s, 20 percent of countries in our sample mentioned GBV in their textbooks; this number was close to 30% of countries in the last period of analysis (2005-2011).

Surprisingly, incorporation of GBV as a topic in textbooks is evident across books from both Western and Non-Western countries, and is actually more common in books from Non-Western countries. This may be due to the relevance of GBV in recent years in countries affected by violent conflict and mass rape, such as in Rwanda, or domestic violence in the Latin American context and the urgency to address these topics.

Despite the rising trends of including GBV, our analysis also shows that many countries still do not discuss GBV in their textbooks. Thus, more attention should be given to the importance of schools, curricula, and textbooks in teaching youth about GBV.

In addition, we find that GBV is more common in textbooks that also discuss women’s rights and is thus clearly framed as a human rights issue. We also find that GBV is more visible in textbooks from countries linked to the global women’s movement through non-governmental organizations and conferences. Contrary to what one might expect, countries with more violence against women (measured by female homicide rates) or stronger civil liberties for women are not necessarily more likely to discuss GBV in their texts.

Our research demonstrates the importance not only of highlighting the prevalence of GBV and sharing stories of sexual assault and harassment but also the need to address the social structure, norms, and beliefs that sustain GBV. Education has a potentially critical role to play not only in raising awareness but in shifting attitudes around gender-based violence across diverse contexts.

Garnett Russell is an Assistant Professor of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the Director of the George Clement Bond Center for African Education. Her research focuses on human rights, gender, and citizenship in conflict-affected and post-conflict contexts. Recent publications appear in Social Forces, Comparative Education Review, International Sociology, and International Studies Quarterly. Her book on how education is used for peacebuilding and reconciliation in Rwanda is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press.

Julia C. Lerch is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the sociology of education and comparative sociology. Current projects examine the provision of education in humanitarian emergencies and the influence of the global institutional environment on school curricula worldwide. Recent publications appear in Social Forces, International Sociology, Globalisation, Societies, and Education, and the European Journal of Education.

Christine Min Wotipka is Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. Her research centers around two main themes examined from cross-national and longitudinal approaches. The first relates to gender and higher education, namely women in faculty positions. The second explores the incorporation of women, children, and human rights issues in school textbooks. Her articles have appeared in Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Feminist Formations, and Comparative Education Review.

The Unfinished Gender Revolution: Lessons from Russia

By Sarah Ashwin

Revolutions tend to stop at the threshold of the private household, doing little to liberate women from domestic inequality. Even the “gender revolution” of women’s increased access to employment, education and birth control in countries such as the US since the 1960s is generally viewed by scholars as “stalled” (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891243210361475). Along with continued inequality in employment, a key item of unfinished business is domestic inequity, with women continuing to perform the lion’s share of domestic and caring labor despite their mass entry into paid work (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/000312240406900601). How does such stalling occur? Here I examine the iconic case of the Russian revolution of 1917 and its aftermath.

Women’s liberation from what the Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, called their “state of household slavery” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/sep/23a.htm) was a declared aim of the new Soviet state. But women’s emancipation was not viewed as a goal in itself. It had an economic and political purpose – to draw women into the labor force so they could contribute to the industrialization drive, and to induct them into Soviet public life, turning them from “kitchen slaves” into Soviet citizens.  What Lenin called “exceptionally petty” domestic labor such as cooking was to be socialized in public institutions (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/sep/23a.htm). This ambition is perfectly illustrated by the 1931 Soviet poster “Down with Kitchen Slavery!  Yes to a new way of life!”

The “enslaved” woman of the past is pictured in a cramped, dark private kitchen, forced to wash clothes by hand and use a tiny stove. A woman worker opens a door to a vision of the socialist future featuring a bright, airy factory, canteen, nursery and club. In the “new way of life” women would be able to participate in employment and public life, with domestic and caring labor performed by state institutions. Women did indeed join the labor force in successive waves so that by 1970 nearly 90 per cent of working age Soviet women were in full-time work or study.  But the ideal of socialized household labor never became a reality except in the sphere of childcare. Since the state made no effort to encourage men to perform “exceptionally petty” labor in the household – men were expected to devote themselves to what was perceived as more productive, industrial labor – women were left with a notorious “double burden” of full-time work and domestic labor which persisted until the end of the Soviet era and beyond.

My article with Olga Isupova focuses on how this legacy has impacted gender ideology; that is, women and men’s beliefs about how domestic and paid work should be configured. Despite high women’s employment during the Soviet era, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1994, an international survey found nearly two thirds of Russian women and 70 per cent of men supported the statement “a man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family” (International Social Survey Programme http://w.issp.org/menu-top/home/). We use data from 115 interviews with 23 young women who we followed between 1999 and 2010 to understand how such beliefs are sustained and how and when they are challenged.

We link gender ideology to the macro-environment of a society in relation to gender – what researchers call its “gender order” – and to the micro-level of interaction between men and women in which gender researchers argue individuals are constrained to “do gender” – that is, to demonstrate their masculinity or femininity through their behaviour (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891243287001002002). The Soviet gender order influenced gender ideologies in two important ways.  First, although the state promoted women’s employment it did not challenge traditional conceptions regarding gender and domestic labor. For example, a modified version of the male breadwinner norm persisted, with Soviet economic writings taking it for granted that wives should earn two-thirds of their husband’s wages (https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Women_in_Soviet_Society.html?id=rtWfengNqQ8C&redir_esc=y). This reinforced the idea that domestic labor was women’s responsibility (even when Lenin was agitating for the socialization of domestic labor, he assumed women would staff the new institutions (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/sep/23a.htm). Second, the Soviet Union had comprehensive censorship and all forms of independent organization, including feminism, were banned. This made it hard for women to analyze their situation and question men’s domestic privilege. The difficulty is brilliantly captured in Natalya Baranskaya’s 1969 novella A Week Like Any Other (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JXZvMAEACAAJ&dq=Baranskaya+a+week+like+any+other&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitm4vk8pzbAhXjCcAKHQyyBfsQ6AEIJzAA), which depicted the struggles of a full-time Soviet working mother who performed all the housework even though she and her husband were both scientists. The heroine is portrayed as exhausted, unhappy and perplexed, but rather than critiquing the gender inequity that leaves her so burdened, she blames herself asking, “What is the matter with me?” Attempts to live up to the ideal of the Soviet superwoman perfectly balancing work, motherhood and household management left many women asking the same question.

Artist: Mariya Samokhina 

In the post-Soviet era, the relaxation of censorship and increased freedom to organize has made it easier for women to access alternative ideas and question traditional gender relations. Nevertheless, nearly a decade after the Soviet collapse, some young women in our study were unable to imagine egalitarian gender relations despite being fiercely critical of the “kitchen slavery” faced by their mothers. It should also be noted that freedom of association and information are again under threat in Russia today under Vladimir Putin, though the impact of this on the gender division of domestic labor is still unclear.

As well as being institutionalized within the gender order, traditional or egalitarian ideas are enforced (or not) in the everyday interactions of men and women. Women themselves can reinforce traditionalism when they expect men to perform as breadwinners. We found that the ideal of the male breadwinner was an important prop to traditionalism, with traditional women using men’s superior wages to explain why housework was a woman’s responsibility even when both partners worked full time. But some women in our study also became more egalitarian, and we found that this was easier after they met supportive men with whom they could imagine an egalitarian relationship. Individuals’ gender ideologies are therefore shaped both by dominant ideas within the gender order and by interaction, with the two influencing each other.

We saw quite significant change during the 10 years of our study, with some women moving towards egalitarianism and others, though self-identified as heterosexual, giving up on men and embracing what we called an “ideology of independence”. Although the second position gave women facing difficult challenges a sense of agency and dignity, it left men unchanged and free from domestic and caring responsibilities, a dynamic which is sensitively analyzed in Jennifer Utrata’s book on Russia’s lone mothers (http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100573890). The ideology of independence is the necessary shadow of male breadwinner ideal, and has provided a safety valve for gender traditionalism.

The struggle between gender traditionalism and egalitarianism continues globally. We think situating gender ideology in the context of particular gender orders and relating this to the everyday micro-interactions of men and women aids our understanding of how this dynamic unfolds in different contexts.

Sarah Ashwin is a professor of industrial relations in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics. Her recent publications develop different aspects of gender theory by interrogating Russia’s stalled gender revolution.

Mothers and Moneymakers: How Gender Norms Shape U.S. Marriage Migration Politics

By Gina M. Longo

Sarasusan, a white divorcee and single mother of two from Virginia, and Hicham, an Arab factory worker living in the desert town of Tan-Tan, Morocco met on MySpace in December 2009, and immediately hit it off.  In June of 2010, Sarasusan traveled to Morocco to meet Hicham for the first time.  Over the course of three years, Hicham traveled to internet cafés daily to talk to his future wife and stepdaughters. In January 2013, she finally could afford to bring her daughters to Morocco to meet Hicham in person. Upon her return to the U.S., she filed for a K-1 (fiancé) visa petition with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

While they began dreaming of the day they could marry, they didn’t realize their nightmare had already begun. After a year and a half, the first petition and subsequent appeal were denied.  At his interview, the U.S. consulate officer in Morocco told Hicham that their relationship appeared fraudulent or strictly for immigration papers. He was given no further explanation.  In July 2015, Sarasusan married Hicham in Morocco, but her daughters, due to high airfare costs were unable to come. Upon returning home, Sarasusan saved money to start a new immigration petition for her husband. Sarasusan began seeking advice from other petitioners online, and crafted her evidence package based on much of this advice.  It was not until September 2016 that Sarasusan and her daughters were able to embrace Hicham on U.S. soil.

Foreign nationals who marry U.S. citizens have an expedited track to naturalization, so immigration officials worry that some will use fake marriages to obtain a green-card.  Early U.S. immigration and citizenship policies addressed these concern by blocking white women in racially mixed relationships. Native-born women citizens lost their citizenship status if they married foreign nationals, and could not initiate immigration petitions for foreign-born husbands. Consequently, this enabled a gendered and racialized citizenship model that defined white, native-born men as full citizens and women as second-class citizens.

Today, these policies have been replaced with preferential processing for immigrants with U.S. family ties.  So, U.S. immigration officials require that “green card” petitioning couples demonstrate that their relationships are “valid and subsisting” (i.e., for love) and not fraudulent (i.e., for immigration papers). Immigration officials warn U.S. citizens in such relationships to beware of red flags, or details about a couple’s relationship that raise suspicions of marriage fraud, such as large age differences, short courtships, or requests for money.  These requirements and red-flag warnings are supposedly gender- and racially-neutral, but migration itself is not.  Thus, like Sarasusan, men and women petitioners with foreign partners from different world regions often seek advice from experts and other petitioners about how to overcome potential obstacles to their petitions’ success.

In my Gender & Society article, “Keeping it in ‘the Family’: How Gender Norms Shape U.S. Marriage Migration Politics,” I used an online ethnography and a text analysis of conversation threads on a large online immigration forum where U.S. petitioners exchange such advice.  I compared two of the sites’ sub-forums, the Middle East/North African forum (MENA), where members are predominately white U.S. women coupled with MENA-region men; and the Belarus/Russia/Ukraine forum (BRU), where white U.S. men pair with BRU-region women, and analyzed how forum-members define red-flag warnings and the requirements for a “valid and subsisting relationship” to label a relationship “real” or “fraudulent.”  These conversations reveal members’ own experiences with immigration officials and their understanding of genuine marriages for immigration purposes.

I found that petitioners connect generic relationship criteria and warnings in U.S. immigration policy with racialized and classed gender ideologies and expectations surrounding an idealized image of the white, Middle-class, “American family.” Women should be mothers and caretakers, and men should be breadwinners.  Both men and women petitioners use sexual and gendered double standards surrounding women’s sexual agency, fertility, and desirability to determine which red flags will concern immigration officials and for whom.  Women’s sexuality and gender differentially structure the process of negotiating red flags for men and women petitioners, and the right to confer citizenship onto a foreign partner. This provides privileges to men citizens, allowing them to pursue of foreign women abroad and to bestow their citizenship status more freely upon their chosen mates. However, women citizens with the same intentions are considered desperate fools, incapable of controlling their emotions or the border. Consequently, citizen-women’s relationships appear more suspect and in need of policing.

Why is this important? Although media coverage on U.S. immigration often centers on issues surrounding DREAMRs, refugees, and undocumented people, approximately 50 percent of the one million-plus immigrant visas issued in 2015 (i.e. “green-cards”) were for U.S. citizens’ immigrant spouses/fiancés (Department of Homeland Security 2015). These rates have remained consistent since 1908 (Lee 2013), making these beneficiaries the largest groups of visa-holders with a pathway to citizenship. These immigration cases largely shape the nation and conceptions of citizenship.  Through this online forum, members become unofficial border police before cases ever reach an immigration officer.  Although, discriminatory U.S. immigration and citizenship laws of old have been abolished, I find that when citizens use ideological understandings about gender and family themselves to give each other petitioning advice, explicitly discriminatory policies are not necessary to uphold and legitimize racialized and gendered citizenship hierarchies.  My findings highlight how conversational negotiations in virtual spaces are consequential for re-imagining intersectionally gendered citizenship and the policing of national identities and borders.

For an even further in-depth look at this research please also listen to the recent SAGE podcast on this article.

Gina Marie Longo is a PhD Candidate of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in the sociology of gender, race and ethnicity, immigration, and digital sociology.  Her current research focuses on how the U.S. spousal reunification system (re)constructs and polices citizenship and nation.

DEALING WITH MOTHERHOOD

By Heidi Grundetjern

Mothers who use and deal illegal drugs find themselves in particularly complex gendered situations. For these mothers, by being involved in crime and being perceived as failing to live up to normative gender expectations, they are stigmatized two-fold in society. In addition, they operate in a gender-stratified drug market supported by masculine “rules of the game.” Men often exclude women from accessing lucrative positions because of presumed dedication to caregiving.

Maternal Identities among Women in the Illegal Drug Economy

In my research, I examine motherhood among women who are part of the hard drug economy in Norway. Although such mothers have in common having little access to normative motherhood, I found vast variation in maternal identities among the mothers in this study. I identified four maternal identities, patterned by their gender performances and work situations: grieving mothers, detached mothers, motherly dealers, and working mothers. Timing of pregnancy, time spent with children, control over drug use, and place in the drug market hierarchy contributed in explaining their maternal identities.

Grieving Mothers

For the grieving mothers, motherhood was vital to their identities despite having lost custody of their children and having limited contact with them. Their strong embodiment of femininity suggested that motherhood fit neatly with their identities. The lost opportunity to engage in mothering on a daily basis brought them seemingly endless grief, which had pushed them into heavier drug use. In the drug economy, they held lower positions in the hierarchy. Holding on to motherhood as pivotal to their identities continuously fueled their grief, yet their sadness was important for negotiation of the stigma they faced.

Detached Mothers

Like the grieving mothers, the detached mothers had lost custody of and had limited contact with their children. Yet, their identities stood in stark contrast, as they did not attempt to present themselves close to normative motherhood expectations. They were young and still adjusting to their adult identities when they had children, all of whom were unplanned. After losing custody they (re)turned to embracing their masculine identities as “one of the guys,” an identification that had emerged as an adaptation to the male-dominated context they were in. This enabled them to partly mitigate some of the emotional stress of losing a child and navigate the drug economy more successfully than did the grieving mothers.

Motherly Dealers

The motherly dealers had significantly more contact with their children. They constructed uniform identities that accommodated being both mothers and dealers. These mothers were relatively successful dealers, had their children prior to entering the drug economy, and had previously lived conventional family lives. They drew on maternal responsibilities when accounting for their involvement in the drug economy, and emphasized care and sociability as business strategies. Although they could not escape the stigma of failing to living up to normative motherhood expectations, they created leeway for themselves by widening such ideals.

Working Mothers

The working mothers took sole care of their children despite being active dealers. They differed from the others by not only combining mothering and paid work (i.e., drug dealing) but also by separating the two. By coming close to the normative mothering ideals, they reduced the stigma of being mothers and users/dealers. Still, other challenges surfaced as they faced the paradox of performing according to expectations of two highly different domains. For these mothers, such expectations were likely heightened, as the gap between work and home domains were more substantial than what occurs in most legitimate occupations.

 The Constraint of Motherhood Ideologies

Scholars have argued that mothers cannot escape the presence of normative motherhood in their constructions of maternal identities. The detached mothers were the exception that confirms this rule. Rejecting dominant motherhood norms seemingly also required rejecting femininity. Their experiences, as with the experiences of the rest of the mothers in this study, are a powerful reminder of the omnipotence of motherhood ideologies, and how those ideologies constrain mothers whose social positions make them unattainable.

Heidi Grundetjern is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Her research focuses on the role of gender in illegal drug markets, with a specific emphasis on the experiences of women who deal drugs.

Young Men’s Involvement in Hormonal Contraception: Paradox or Possibility?

By Ann M. Fefferman and Ushma D. Upadhyay

It may seem like a no-brainer that women tend to take care of hormonal contraception.  They should have the right to choose a method, use that method, and manage side effects in a way that works best for them. Women have a wide range of methods to choose from, including the pill, patch, vaginal ring, implant, and intrauterine device. These methods allow people to ditch the condom and enjoy increased sexual pleasure and spontaneity with lower chances of having an unintended pregnancy.

But does the fact that these contraceptive methods affect women’s bodies mean that men don’t see a role for themselves in pregnancy prevention?   No. Some men do see themselves as partners in contraceptive use and management. Our research identifies how young men are involved in contraceptive management in helpful and supportive ways. Our research focuses on young low-income men and women of color and the ways they work together to manage contraception without restricting women’s choices. We show examples of men helping with contraception, such as coming to appointments with their partners, discussing risk of pregnancy with partners, helping to choose a method, and reminding partners to take pills or to remove the vaginal ring. We also note how men and women work together to prevent pregnancy despite the different circumstances constraining their choices, such as immigration laws, gang membership, neighborhood violence, and poverty. In this way, our research works against the stereotypes often applied to young low-income men of color when people talk about unintended pregnancy.

While our research shows these positive examples of how young men can work within or against difficult circumstances to support women with contraception, we also show how they aren’t as “feminist”, or “egalitarian”, as they might think. Even though the men in our study were really involved in choosing and using contraception, they still thought women were the ones responsible for contraception and its effective use. Men were just helpers, much like many men “help” in the kitchen or “help” with taking care of the kids. Men used language that seemed equitable, saying that they were not responsible for contraception because they did not want to undermine women’s ability to make choices about their own bodies. Even women we interviewed agreed with these ideas.

The assumption here is that men cannot respect women’s bodies and choices while still taking responsibility for the possibility of an unintended pregnancy.  Following this logic, men then can use their secondary place in contraception as a justification for assigning blame or shame to women when contraception fails. We aim to show in our research that m en’s involvement in contraception and men’s accountability for unintended pregnancy are not mutually exclusive. Men can help with contraception and also share in contraceptive responsibly (including when contraception fails). Men and women can work together to change these norms and help sustain a positive, respectful place for men in contraceptive management.

Ann M. Fefferman, MA is a PhD candidate in Sociology at University of California, Irvine. Her research interest focus broadly on gender, masculinities, reproductive health, the family and inequalities.  Currently, she is working on her dissertation, which investigates and compares masculinities in different stages of reproduction, with a focus on contraceptive management, pregnancy intentions, and abortion decision-making. In particular she intends to further her studies in medical sociology.

Ushma D. Upadhyay, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and Director of Research for the University of California Global Health Institute’s Center of Expertise in Women’s Health, Gender, and Empowerment. She holds a National Institutes of Health Career Development Award to study gender-based power among young men and women and its effect on contraceptive use. Her current research focuses on the development and validation of the Sexual Health and Reproductive Empowerment for Young Adults (SHREYA) Scale.

How Do Race and Gender Show Up In Youth Sexual Health Promotion?

By Chris Barcelos

Elizabeth Randolph, a white woman in her late 50s, manages a sexual and reproductive health clinic in “Millerston,” a small, former manufacturing city in the US northeast that is known for its high rates of teen pregnancy among Puerto Rican youth. “Not to sound racist at all,” she told me, “but teen pregnancy really is a Latino cultural issue. It’s just not a bad thing if a kid gets pregnant. It’s just much more socially acceptable within that community.” Although Elizabeth was clear that she didn’t want to “sound racist,” she did frame Latinx culture as a cause of Millerston’s high teen birth rates, and this no doubt informed her professional work. Like other people involved in the city’s youth sexual health promotion efforts, her understanding of the effect of culture on sexuality and health are part of what I call a “gendered racial project,” meaning the ways in which race and gender interact to create social meanings, experiences, and inequalities. In sexual health promotion, the ingrained ways in which race and gender show up are often unnoticed by the people who design policies and programs; in Millerston, these professionals are usually not members of the communities they serve. Ideas about race and gender affect the kinds of youth sexual health promotion that communities implement and can reinforce, rather than fix, gender, race, and health inequalities.

My article “Culture, Contraception, and Colorblindness: Youth Sexual Health Promotion as a Gendered Racial Project,” explores how sexual health promotion aimed at young, low-income Latinas in Millerston can be understood as a gendered racial project. I spent three years interviewing professional stakeholders like Elizabeth and participating in coalition meetings, teen pregnancy prevention events, and provider trainings. I found that youth sexual health promoters understand “Latino culture” as stable and uniform in its approach to sexuality and reproduction. They assume that Latinas are against contraception and abortion, and that Latinx families are silent about sexuality and promote teen childbearing within the family. This understanding allows health promoters to justify their efforts to regulate the sexuality and childbearing of young Latinas, including whether they should have sex, what kinds of contraception they should use, and whether they should become parents.

In places like Millerston, where there are high rates of teen pregnancy among women of color, health professionals heavily promote LARC, or long-acting reversible contraceptive (methods such as the IUD, shot, or implant), while downplaying their undesirable side effects. For example, a white social worker in her 40s shared a story about a young client who she characterized as irresponsible because she didn’t want an IUD, while minimizing the client’s real concerns: “There’s all these reasons – they don’t want something inserted into their body, they don’t want to gain weight [sarcastically], there’s all these things, but in my head those are just excuses.” It’s also important to note, as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explains, that many Americans believe we live in a post-racial, “colorblind” society where race no longer matters. Yet, race very much still matters, and imagining that race and racism don’t affect reproductive health allows health promoters to overlook the long history of how LARC has been used to control the childbearing of women of color, disabled people, and others whose sexuality and reproduction are seen as outside the norm.

Fortunately, there are seeds of racial and reproductive justice being planted in Millerston and in the field of sexual health promotion more generally – for example, in partnerships between reproductive justice organizations and the Black Lives Matter movement. Health promoters in Millerston and elsewhere could contribute to planting these seeds by participating in organizing efforts among white people committed to dismantling white supremacy, such as Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), or  by seeking technical assistance and training from national reproductive justice organizations such as Forward Together.  Shifting youth sexual health promotion to incorporate gender, racial, and reproductive justice frameworks means moving from a focus on paternalistically trying to modify “culture” and promoting specific contraceptives, to focusing on how to dismantle racism and enable a world where people can create the kinds of families they want.

Chris Barcelos is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their research uses ethnography, discourse analysis, and visual methods to interrogate how health promotion discourses both reveal and reproduce inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability.

Gender Conformity, Perceptions of Shared Power, and Marital Quality in Same- and Different-Sex Marriages

By Amanda M. Pollitt, Brandon Andrew Robinson and Debra Umberson

Marriage is often considered a place where two equal partners come together to start a life, form a family, and grow old together. However, there has been what seems like an increase in news and blog articles about women in different-sex marriages who feel that their home lives are anything but equal. For example, in her article about emotional labor (http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a12063822/emotional-labor-gender-equality/), Gemma Hartley describes the emotional and relationship toll that being her family’s manager had: “It’s frustrating to be saddled with all of these responsibilities, no one to acknowledge the work you are doing, and no way to change it without a major confrontation.”

Feminist theorists have been talking for decades about heterosexual marriage as a place where inequalities between women and men are created and recreated, and these themes persist even today. Nearly as many women work outside the home as men. Still, women married to men continue to do the majority of unpaid labor in their relationships. This is true even when women make more money and have more highly respected careers than their husbands, and even when their husbands are stay-at-home dads. Clearly, gender inequalities between women and men in marriages persist.

However, what we know about power inequalities in different-sex relationships has relied on comparisons between women and men. These comparisons do not address the degree to which women and men within these couples are gender conforming, or how women conform to femininity and men conform to masculinity. When couples enact gender in conforming ways, this can maintain gender norms and inequalities in relationships, such as the belief that men should hold more power in marriages. For example, some research shows that within marriages in which women earn more income than men, women and men do more and less housework, respectively. These couples recreate relationship inequalities in household labor to maintain gender norms.

Now that we have marriage equality for same-sex couples in the U.S., questions arise about power dynamics and equality within these couples. Some scholars have argued that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in same-sex marriages have more equality in their relationships because the traditional divisions between women and men are not at play. This may be because lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are less gender conforming, or assumed to be, than heterosexual people. There may also be less pressure to adhere to the same power dynamics that heterosexual spouses tend to follow. At the same time, same-sex couples may feel pressure for their relationships to look similar to heterosexual relationships to combat stereotypes and gain legitimacy.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Couple_on_a_bike_(9180325890).jpg

Understanding how gender conformity influences inequalities is important because these inequalities contribute to poorer relationship quality in marriages. In our recent study in Gender & Society, we wanted to explore how gender conformity shaped perceptions of shared power in same- and different-sex marriages and how these perceptions influenced relationship quality. It is important to expand our understanding of relationship dynamics in same-sex marriages which have received much less research attention than different-sex marriages. However, it is also important to consider how gender conformity shapes power dynamics in heterosexual couples.

We examined survey data collected from both spouses in lesbian, gay, and heterosexual marriages which allows us to consider not only how each spouses’ responses influence their own outcomes, but also how spouses influence their partner’s outcomes. We asked participants to what extent they agreed that their physical appearance and demeanor and interests, hobbies, and skills are typical of someone of their gender. We found that women married to men, men married to women, and men married to men who were more gender conforming believed that their relationships were more equal in terms of how much power they shared. These findings suggest that maintaining masculinity norms is particularly important in relationships involving a male partner. This could be true even among gay men who many would assume have flexibility in gender expression, perhaps because these men want to appear masculine so that their relationship appears more “normal”. Our findings also suggest that power between women and men in different-sex marriages may be seen as more equal when both partners are gender conforming. Considering few heterosexual marriages share power equally between spouses, these couples may perceive greater shared power because their relationship dynamics map onto gender norms and inequalities.

In contrast, we found that gender conformity had little to do with perceptions of shared power among lesbian couples. Inequalities in lesbian marriages may relate to types of femininity we did not measure in our study, such as motherhood roles. These women might also share power by creating relationship dynamics outside normative relationship structures, such as the belief that work inside or outside the home should be divided separately between partners, because there is no male partner in their relationship or because they consider gender less important.

We found that greater perceptions of shared power are better for relationship quality. Though we expected this finding, our work shows that, among women married to men, men married to women, and men married to men, relationship quality may require maintaining gender norms including men’s power in marriages. For different-sex marriages, this finding is in line with research showing that women who believe in traditional gender roles in unequal different-sex marriages have more relationship satisfaction than women who hold egalitarian beliefs in unequal marriages. Finally, we found that partners of men, regardless of their own sex, gender, or gender expression, might need to ensure that the men in their lives perceive there to be shared power in the relationship in order to maintain their own relationship satisfaction. This negotiation of power has the potential to reinforce inequalities in relationships because it is the man’s perception of power that influences their wives’, or husbands’, marital quality. Rather than assuming women and men express gender in conforming ways, we considered how gender conformity is associated with perceptions of power and marital quality to add to our understanding of the ways that gender influences how spouses interact with one another to shape inequalities in marriages.

Amanda M. Pollitt is a NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas-Austin. Her research focuses on the health and wellbeing of sexual and gender minority people across the life course. Currently, she is extending that work into research on intimate relationships.

Brandon Andrew Robinson is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Brandon’s research focuses on gender and sexualities, race and ethnicity, health and HIV/AIDS, and urban poverty and homelessness. Their co-authored book Race & Sexuality is forthcoming with Polity Press.

Debra Umberson is professor of sociology and director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas-Austin. She studies social ties and health across the life course. Recent work considers marital dynamics and health of same-sex couples and racial disparities in the loss of relationships across the life course.

Men and Population Control in Postwar India: The Role of Gendered Knowledge

 

By Savina Balasubramanian

Population control efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have typically focused on managing women’s fertility. This is largely the result of longstanding cultural, political, and scientific associations of reproduction with women. Unsurprisingly, when the Indian state instituted population control as a national policy priority in 1952, it centered its initial efforts on women and the promotion of female contraceptive techniques.

A new focus on men

 Yet, from the 1960s through the mid-1970s, the Indian state expanded its efforts to incorporate men and male contraception. This shift was accompanied by efforts to promote the economic benefits of contraception through mass media targeted at men and interpersonal communication campaigns among government fieldworkers and lay male citizens. During this period, vasectomies accounted for the vast majority of recorded sterilizations in the country. Many occurred in government-authorized “mass sterilization camps”—makeshift events in which thousands of men were persuaded to undergo surgery, often under coercive conditions. These camps were highly theatrical and public affairs, involving poster and media exhibits, song-and-drama routines, and interpersonal exchanges among men and government-appointed “motivators” that touted the economic advantages of planned childbearing. Likewise, the Indian government invested in a heavily marketed, government-manufactured condom brand called “Nirodh.” Together, these communication campaigns were termed the “extension” approach: they attempted to use persuasive information to convince audiences of the relationship between planned conception and economic uplift. How and why did the Indian state come to target men’s reproductive decisions and fertility in these particular ways?

Framing men as “decision-makers”

Through qualitative analyses of primary archival materials, my article in Gender & Society argues that this focus on men was linked to the political influence of social scientific expertise on the Indian program and the gendered aspects of this expertise. Unlike their medical and biomedical contemporaries, social scientists in the field of “family planning communications” framed reproduction as a “cognitive” and not merely biological phenomenon—one that involved beliefs, attitudes, and decision-making. In doing so, they argued that population control was a matter of (1) increasing people’s psychological motivation to use contraception, (2) convincing people that childbearing could be manipulated to achieve economic uplift, and (3) using persuasive mass communications to attain these two goals. However, these arguments reinforced prevailing gendered ideologies that associated rational calculation, social motivation and leadership, and economic participation with masculinity. Working under these gendered assumptions, communication scientists maintained that it would behoove the Indian state to target its nascent communications campaigns on the economic virtues of planned conception at men.

Unfortunately, this understanding of men as primary “decision-makers” in the Indian context obscured Indian women’s influential roles in the family, community, and economy. It also reinforced the notion that Indian women were less concerned with rational calculation and economic decision-making than their husbands, which historians of women in modern India have shown was rarely the case. Intriguingly, the sterilization abuses inflicted on men during Indian Emergency Period of 1975-1977 made the promotion of vasectomies politically “unviable” thereafter, which led to a refocusing of the program on women despite their status as parallel targets of state coercion.

Future research on masculinity, science, and reproductive control

My research undercuts assumptions that men are generally precluded from state-led reproductive control. In postwar India, social scientific knowledge—however myopic—about who contributed to decision-making in the family, economy, and community significantly influenced the Indian state’s attempts to shape men’s reproductive practices. Relatedly, it encourages sociologists of reproduction to analyze the role of social scientific expertise in reproductive control. Doing so means expanding the definition of reproductive control beyond medicalized interventions into the reproductive body to include social and behavioral interventions into reproductive practices and ideologies. Examples of such interventions include sex education for adolescents and young adults, male contraceptive marketing, and even “responsible fatherhood” programs in the contemporary welfare state. As in the Indian case, it is worth exploring whether attempts to govern men’s roles in reproduction might in part be driven by enduring cultural and political associations of men and masculinity with calculative decision-making, rational thought, and economic participation.

Savina Balasubramanian is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. Her research examines the global politics of gender and reproduction, science and technology, race, and law and society. Her previous work has appeared in Political Power and Social Theory and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.