ABSTRACT
How does gender inequality persist in an advanced industrial society like the contemporary United States, in which many economic, legal, institutional, and political forces work against it? In this chapter I argue that people’s everyday use of gender as a primary means for organizing their social relations with others is a powerful social process that continually re-creates gender inequality in new forms as society changes (Ridgeway 2011). The use of gender as an 974initial framing device for relationships with others spreads gendered meanings, including assumptions about inequality embedded in those meanings, beyond contexts associated with sex and reproduction to all spheres of social life that occur through social relationships. Through gender’s role in organizing social relations, gender inequality is rewritten into new economic and social arrangements as they emerge, preserving that inequality in modified form throughout socioeconomic transformations.
