Patriarchal White Supremacy at Work: Sexual Harassment and the Wage Gap
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
Important preface: we need to hold psychological pain with care, we need to treat survivors of harassment compassionately, provide them with ample health care, and we need to create spaces for women to heal. To say that this healing work is not sociological work is not to say it’s not important. I am a sociologist, but when I need healing I go see my therapist or my primary care physician; I go to my books or to my best friend. Hopefully this helps us to see that while we need to talk about individual-level health care and self-care, this work and these conversations are not sociological in their focus.
The push that I was going for this week was to shift the conversation away from individuals and towards institutions. It’s a hard shift, but it’s necessary to develop a “sociological imagination” (Mills). It’s even harder when talking about something that is so psychologically damaging — this makes it much easier for us to stay in the realm of “personal troubles” (Mills) and to focus on how it feels to be harassed and to place the responsibility for social change on the shoulders of those who are being harassed. But, we must shift the conversation into the realm of “public issues” (Mills).
Since we need to take a sociological approach for the purposes of this class, this means that we must focus our lens on the institutions that make such patterns of harassment possible. This means when trying to figure out who/what to “blame” for the continuation of such a dehumanizing offense, we must look to POLICIES and to the people in POWER who are responsible for enacting those policies. When writing and talking and thinking about harassment in the workplace sociologically, we should be talking about patriarchal white supremacy and how it functions in the U.S. context to organize capitalism.
Both of the articles focused on workplace harassment and how that impacted women’s position within the larger economy. In this context, the psychological damage of harassment functions as a vehicle to drive women out of the labor market and to drive down women’s overall earnings. Both of the articles focus on male-dominated workplaces and how women are treated in this context so as to maintain patriarchal power; both of the articles highlight how women are seen as a threat to that power. Their psychological diminishment leads to their economic diminishment.
Victim-blaming conversations function hegemonically to keep our attention away from what will actually produce change. The continuation of oppression (in this case harassment) should not ever be explained through the lens of individual failure (e.g. “she should have left” or “she should have stood up for herself sooner”). To reiterate, these kinds of “status quo stories” (Keating) function to keep our attention away from the true source of the oppression: the policies and the people in power who are responsible for enacting those policies. Rather than blaming the victim, we should be exploring the cultural power of victim-blaming narratives and their role in maintaining oppressive policies and practices over time.
To return to the sociological argument that there’s a reciprocal relationship between patriarchal white supremacy and capitalism, let’s talk about the wage gap. We’ve learned over the past two weeks that the wage gap emerges from many sociological patterns: sexual harassment, the “glass ceiling,” the “glass escalator” (Williams), the “racialized glass escalator” (Wingfield) and the “step stool” (Alegria). We can see that, for example, both the glass ceiling and systematic harassment push women out of higher paying fields. When women do make moves into these male-dominated spaces, they aren’t protected or mentored in the same way, and they have to be White and to “bargain with patriarchy” (Kandiyoti) in order to dip their toes in power through management level positions.
One thing that becomes clear from this scholarship is that the wage gap doesn’t exist simply because one woman makes less money than one man in the same position. That’s one route to the wage gap, but there are many others: denied promotions, lost wages from sick time, being pushed out of higher paying professions, and being harassed into lost games and lost incomes. The wage gap persists across women’s lifetimes, so that when women’s paid careers come to a close, their accumulated lifetime earnings are less than men’s, regardless of their pay at individual moments in time (Williams).
We also need to explore how these institutional patterns function at the intersections. Serena Williams’ experience at her workplace, as Claudia Rankine explores in Citizen, isn’t because she’s African American or because she’s a woman. It’s always both. The White men who experience the “glass escalator” and the White women who experience the “step stool” don’t experience it because they are white or because they are men (in the case of the escalator) or women (in the case of the step stool). It is always both: an intersection. It’s not an either/or question: is it gender OR race? It’s always a both/and question: how do gender and race function in relation to each other to shape a particular dynamic? Williams is experiencing patriarchal white supremacy through simultaneous gendered norms that expect certain kinds of “feminine” behaviors as well as racialized norms that expect her to be respectable. Both of these dynamics fall into the framework of “respectability politics” (Cooper) whereby the oppressed are expected to behave their way into the good graces of those in power. In all of the workplaces that were the focus of this scholarship we can see these norms of behavior at play, and how they impact all women in the workplace while also diverging across race with a disproportionate impact on women of color.
One of the questions that I asked this week was: who benefits? And, this always requires a nuanced answer. As one of your classmates pointed out, in the context of the commodification of black rage, the true beneficiaries are not the Black artists or athletes, but the White capitalist class that’s profiting off of the artists (Tsang). In the context of the “step stool” (Alegria), while it might seem that the White women that are allowed to move into management are the beneficiaries, the ways in which hegemonic gendered norms are maintained in engineering through these steps into management make clear that the “patriarchal dividend” (Connell) really goes to men in the industry.
Hopefully you can see how the push to the sociological allows us to shift our attention away from individuals and towards the social patterns within social institutions that function to maintain patriarchal white supremacy. Doing this institutional deep dive allows us to see how hegemonic systems produce “status quo stories” (Keating) (such as victim-blaming) and gives us more tools for thinking through social change.
Change — both personal and collective — emerges from deeper understanding.
Please take good care of yourselves and others,
Dr. Monica
