Gendered Lives: Gender Inequalities in Production and Reproduction

With a focus on gendered lives, this edited book takes a dual stance not only in analyzing changes in gendered lives, but considering as well how further change towards greater gender equality might be achieved.The Editors aim to push what they term the "well-worked field" of gender inequality in new, innovative, and timely directions.To achieve this, the chapters in this volume all take a life-course perspective, relying on longitudinal analyses.Their approach is dynamic, in analyzing how both individuals and social institutions "do gender."Time, technology, and social, familial, and policy changes are taken into consideration.The geographic focus is largely the UK.The book is the product of a five-year research initiative, where researchers from varying disciplines with different theoretical stances and reliance on different methodologies met to together attempt to answer a set of questions about gendered lives.The presumption of this process was that the sum of the interactions over time would exceed that of individual efforts.The book is divided into three sections, preceded by an unnumbered introduction: gendered lives unfolding across time, gender inequalities in the household and workplace, and gender inequalities in a changing world.Eight chapters comprise the book, all written by well established researchers, mostly from the UK.There is no concluding chapter.The introduction highlights the overarching stance of the book, describes trends in gender inequality and equality in the UK, and then summarizes some of the major findings of the research, focusing on the unexpected.Of the latter, two are brought to the fore in the introduction.First is the finding from research by John Hobcraft and Wendy Sigle-Rushton (Chapter 1), based on two-point-in-time analyses of national studies in Britain, comparing cohorts born in 1958 with those born in 1970 to see whether there are common predictors of adult disadvantage by gender.Adult outcomes are consistently found to be linked to childhood experiences, but the surprise finding is that although women are more likely to be disadvantaged as adults than men-a well known reality-the mechanisms that link childhood experiences with adult outcomes are found to be similar for men and women.This suggests that a complex interplay is involved of gender with social institutions and factors, with the need for a more nuanced approach to capturing the dynamics of gender inequalities across the life course.The second unexpected finding highlighted in the introduction comes from multi-method research by Fran Bennett, Jerome De Henau, Susan Himmelweit, and Sirin Sung on the processes by which heterosexual couples work out their household finances (Chapter 4).Little is known about how household income is shared by couples, although it is widely presumed, particularly by policy, that income is shared equally.What is found is that gender roles in couples matter to how satisfied couples are with their household income.For both men and women, the job of the man matters more.Other interesting findings also emerge from the research reported in this book.For example, in examining changing career trajectories of men and women over time, Erzsebet Bukodi, Shirley Dex, and Heather Joshi

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