UNITED STATES: Stanford Professor Calls Women's Equality 'Stalled and Uneven'

After nearly three decades of staggering progress for gender equality in the workplace, the classroom and in households, nothing significant has happened since the mid-1990s, says Stanford Sociology Professor Paula England.

England's lecture, "Can We Moved Beyond the Stalled Gender Revolution?" emphatically kicked off the Clayman Institute's Winter 2011 series dedicated to exploring critical issues surrounding gender in Stanford's Levinthal Hall Thursday. This series' theme is "Moving Beyond the Stalled Revolution."

Although women are pouring into every level of collegiate education at higher rates, England maintains that not much has changed in the grand scheme of gender equality. She presented numerous graphs comparing proportions by sex in departments (ranging from electrical engineering to education) representing of women in upper division programs.

"Notice how all the action more or less happened in the mid-1980s," England said of a graph charting the percentage of business majors by sex. "Since then, very little has changed."

England's colleagues agree that the progression of gender equality has stalled. Professor Shelley Correll of Sociology and the director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research described England in a few short phrases.

"[There are] two facts that are very Paula," she told the audience before the presentation. "One is crystal-clear thinking. The other is the relentless pursuit of empirical evidence."

In her hour-long talk, England described her three objectives: determining whether women change more than men, whether these changes vary by class and whether the changes have continued to occur.

While women have made amazing progress in nearly every measure of equality--and have even equaled or surpassed men in some categories--on the whole, women are still systematically deprived of many advantages society affords men, said England. This is true for women from the start of college education to their entrance into exclusive occupations, England illustrated with graphs and statistics.

England used education as a proxy for class background. She determined that women who do not achieve higher levels of education (assumed to be of a lower socioeconomic status) are still forced into dead-end, mostly female, low-paying labor markets that hold them back from achieving true parity with their male counterparts.

England concluded that "The Gender Revolution" had hit a rut. Citing numerous displays and data that showed a drop-off in progress nearly two decades ago, she posited that society still has a great amount of work to do to achieve full equality for women.

But one of the questions of the night remained uncertain--when will the gender revolution have run its course? "The gender revolution will be complete when there's no more sex gap pay, discrimination by gender, peer group pressure, metaphors in language based on gender," said England, "and when interpersonal relations between men and women are entirely egalitarian."

England has been teaching Sociology since 1975 and has taught at some of the nation's strongest universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern University, before arriving at Stanford. During her career, she has won a host of academic and career awards, including three fellowships, an honorary doctorate from Whitman College, her alma mater, and two career awards for her work in gender and family research. She is currently on leave at New York University.