Barbara J Risman
Biographic Data
| ID | 100548 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barbara J Risman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barbara J |
| FAMILY NAME | Risman |
| SIGNATURE | RISMAN B J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1396 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
A Case of Sticky Gender? Persistence and Change in the Division of Household Labor during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Contemporary research finds that gender continues to provide an organizing framework for couples' allocation of household labor. To explain this outcome, scholars focus on how structural arrangements and cultural beliefs contribute to the persistence of gender inequality in domestic labor. Yet scholarship has yet to fully clarify what combination of cultural and structural factors create persistent gender inequality in household labor. We use the…
Enforced Togetherness: Change and Continuity in Relationship Satisfaction among Parents during the Covid-19 Pandemic
This paper investigates how the sharp increase in time spent at home due to COVID-19-related restrictions shaped parents' relationship satisfaction with their partners. Drawing on 78 in-depth interviews with heterosexual partnered parents with at least one child aged 18 or under, we find that this experience of what we call "enforced togetherness" had varied effects on couples' relationships. More than half of the respondents (fifty-five percent)…
Not Just They/Them: Exploring Diversity and Meaning in Pronoun Use among Non-Binary Individuals
Gender-neutral pronouns, such as they/them, have been studied as a site of identity affirmation and, at other times, contestation for non-binary individuals. In this study, we draw from interviews with 123 non-binary individuals to better understand the role of pronouns in these individuals' lives. We find that pronoun practices are ontoformative-they actively (re)construct the meanings attached to gender and gender identities. Yet, not all non-b…
Farewell from the 2020-2023 Editorial Team
Gender & Society In a Post-Roe Era
The Gender Revolution on Greek Row
How has the gender revolution impacted the campus Greek world? Interviews with women in sororities from the 1970s and today point to both continuity and change. Citing their sexism and segregation of white and wealthy students, alumna of sororities at elite universities have begun social movements to abolish the Greek system
Sayhername: So Much More Than a Hashtag: Introduction to the Symposium
What does the Research Teach Feminists about the Possibility of Organizational Change
At the winter meeting of SWS [Sociologists for Women in Society] in 2019, Barbara [Risman] heard Julia [McQuillan] give her SWS Feminist Lecture and was totally fascinated. The U.S. National Science Foundation had been spending millions of dollars each year to promote gender transformation on college campuses, hoping to increase the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. What had we learned about …
The Gendered Impacts of Covid-19: Lessons and Reflections
An Issue of Feminist Analysis: During a Global Pandemic
Moving Forward
Transitions
Reply to Regnerus
Is Recreational Sex a Social Problem? Or, What's Wrong with Kids Today
Attitudes and the Stalled Gender Revolution: Egalitarianism, Traditionalism, and Ambivalence from 1977 through 2016
Empirical studies show that though there is more room for improvement, much progress has been made toward gender equality since the second wave of feminism. Evidence also suggests that women's advancements have been more dramatic in the public sphere of work and politics than in the private sphere of family life. We argue that this lopsided gender progress may be traced to uneven changes in gender attitudes. Using data from more than 27,000 respo…
The Innovators
This chapter introduces the innovators and provides a portrait of them. The chapter analyzes these innovators at the individual, interactional, and macro level of the gender structure. The chapter begins at the individual level of analysis because these young people emphasize how they challenge gender by rejecting requirements to restrict their personal activities, goals, and personalities to femininity or masculinity. They refuse to live within …
Millennials as Emerging Adults
This chapter begins by providing a historical context for the Millennial generation. Growing up is different in the 21st century than before; it takes much longer. Given how many years youth take to explore their identities before they emerge into adulthood with stable jobs and committed partners, the chapter reviews what we now about “emerging adulthood” as a stage of human development. The chapter also highlights a debate in social science as t…
Bringing Gender into the Emerging Adulthood Literature
This chapter begins with an overview of the thematic trends that emerged across chapters in these analyses including the relationship between gendered identities and sexuality and the subjective negativity most respondents feel toward their bodies. The analyses are summarized to help understand contemporary meanings attached to masculinities and femininities, as well as to the powerful role of culture to frame understandings about the self, even …
Gender as a Social Structure
Handbook of the Sociology of Gender
Where the Millennials Will Take Us
In this book Barbara J. Risman uses her gender structure theory to tackle the question about whether today’s young people, Millennials, are pushing forward the gender revolution or backing away from it. In the first part of the book, Risman revises her theoretical argument to differentiate more clearly between culture and material aspects of each level of gender as a social structure. She then uses previous research to explain that today’s young …
Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure
Changes in the gender structure: Inequality at the individual, interactional, and macro dimensions
As a society, we've made tremendous progress toward gender equality over the past several decades. Yet there remains significant inequality between women and men. Furthermore, when we look closely at some of the progress made toward gender equality, we find it considerably less impressive than surface appearances. In this article, we review the updated framework of Risman's (2017) gender structure theory and argue that it can help us make sense o…
Great Stories about Ladies without Partners All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation . By Rebecca Traister. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016
Southern Sociological Society Presidential Address: Are Millennials Cracking the Gender Structure
In this article, which grew from my presidential address at the 2016 Southern Sociological Society Meetings, I offer a revision of my theoretical argument that we should conceptualize gender as a s
Gender As a Social Structure: Theory Wrestling with Activism
In this article, the author argues that we need to conceptualize gender as a social structure, and by doing so, we can better analyze the ways in which gender is embedded in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of our society. To conceptualize gender as a structure situates gender at the same level of general social significance as the economy and the polity. The author also argues that while concern with intersectionality …
From Doing To Undoing: Gender as We Know It
This symposium honors the importance of (West and Zim erman 1987) as a conceptual contribution to social th ught. I offer a critique not of the original concept but of how it has come to be used or, as I argue, misused. First, the concept has been so integrated into the sociological lexicon that the implicit feminist critique embedded within it sometimes disappears entirely. Second, the feminist use of doing gender has become so diffuse that we h…
Attitudes and the Stalled Gender Revolution: Egalitarianism, Traditionalism, and Ambivalence from 1977 through 2016
Empirical studies show that though there is more room for improvement, much progress has been made toward gender equality since the second wave of feminism. Evidence also suggests that women's advancements have been more dramatic in the public sphere of work and politics than in the private sphere of family life. We argue that this lopsided gender progress may be traced to uneven changes in gender attitudes. Using data from more than 27,000 respo…
Doing It Fairly: A Study of Postgender Marriages
Little is known about married couples who share the responsibilities of paid and family work without regard for prescriptions. Fifteen married couples who divide household work and child care equitably and without regard to are interviewed to determine how they arrived at this arrangement and what consequences such a distribution of household labor has on their relationship. Findings suggest that there are four paths to an equitable division of h…
Intimate Relationships From a Microstructural Perspective: Men Who Mother
This article argues that individuals paradigms have predominated social scientific explanations for gendered behavior in intimate relationships but that a microstructural paradigm adds necessary additional information. The results of a study designed to test the relative strengths of individualist and microstructural explanations for 'mothering behavior' are presented. The microstructural hypothesis is that single fathers will adopt parental beha…
From sex roles to gender structure
This article has two goals, an intellectual history of gender as a concept and to outline a framework for moving forward theory and research on gender conceptualized as a structure of social stratification. The authors' first goal is to trace the conceptual development of the study of sex and gender throughout the 20th century to now. They do this from a feminist sociological standpoint, framing the question with particular concern for power and …
The Declining Significance of Gender
It Goes Hand in Hand with the Parties: Race, Class, and Residence in College Student Negotiations of Hooking Up
Hooking up, or sexual activity outside relationships, is a dominant feature of social life on many college campuses. However, research has yet to explore how social location intersects with campus-level factors to shape students' negotiations of this script. Interview data from 87 undergraduates at an urban commuter university demonstrate the distinction between 'adopting' and 'enacting' sexual scripts. Although the majority of students locate ho…
A double standard for 'Hooking Up: How far have we come toward gender equality
The Gendered Impacts of Covid-19: Lessons and Reflections
Southern Sociological Society Presidential Address: Are Millennials Cracking the Gender Structure
In this article, which grew from my presidential address at the 2016 Southern Sociological Society Meetings, I offer a revision of my theoretical argument that we should conceptualize gender as a s
Gender as Structure or Trump Card
Calling the Bluff of Value-Free Science
Changes in the gender structure: Inequality at the individual, interactional, and macro dimensions
As a society, we've made tremendous progress toward gender equality over the past several decades. Yet there remains significant inequality between women and men. Furthermore, when we look closely at some of the progress made toward gender equality, we find it considerably less impressive than surface appearances. In this article, we review the updated framework of Risman's (2017) gender structure theory and argue that it can help us make sense o…
Making Gender Visible
As the Twig Is Bent: Children Reared in Feminist Households
Methodological implications of feminist scholarship
The gender gap and nuclear power: Attitudes in a politicized environment
The (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsexuals
Student Bodies: Does the Sex Ratio Matter for Hooking Up and Having Sex at College
Using the Online College Social Life Survey, we examine whether the sex ratio of the student body of a college or university affects whether heterosexual students hook up, have relationships, have intercourse, or have attitudes favorable toward casual sex. The gendered dyadic power model predicts that, if men are more interested in having sex than women, as the ratio of women to men goes up, men will increasingly have the upper hand and more sex …
Just the Two of Us: Parent-Child Relationships in Single-Parent Homes
This study compares and contrasts the relative strength of two different theoretical explanations, individualist and microstructural, for the apparent sex differences in parent-child relationships. The strength of each perspective is tested empirically through comparisons of singlecustodial mothers and single-custodial fathers on a variety of dimensions, with particular emphasis on the parent-child dyadic relationship. The findings suggest the im…
Marriage Delay, Time to Play? Marital Horizons and Hooking Up in College
Previous research suggests that an increasing age at first marriage has contributed to the prevalence of sexual hookups on U.S. college campuses. In this article, we use life course and marital horizons theories to analyze the influence of ideal age at first marriage on hooking up among unmarried heterosexual college students. Analyses of the Online College Social Life Survey (N = 17,981) show a positive association between ideal age at first mar…
College Women and Sororities: The Social Construction and Reaffirmation of Gender Roles
Gender socialization in urban societies is acknowledged to occur primarily in preadolescence Risman's analysis of one college sorority displays additional ways in which women adopt role-specific behaviors that are formally encouraged by both official regulations and informally shaped by cultural norms. Her data suggest that the socialization processes and the consequent roles may in fact be inappropriate for facilitating women's adaptation to a c…
A Case of Sticky Gender? Persistence and Change in the Division of Household Labor during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Contemporary research finds that gender continues to provide an organizing framework for couples' allocation of household labor. To explain this outcome, scholars focus on how structural arrangements and cultural beliefs contribute to the persistence of gender inequality in domestic labor. Yet scholarship has yet to fully clarify what combination of cultural and structural factors create persistent gender inequality in household labor. We use the…
Kids Talking About Race: Tween‐agers in a Post‐Civil Rights Era
Our research examines how American children understand and talk about how race matters in their everyday lives. We draw on interviews with 44 middle school children who attend schools in an integrated county‐wide system and find that while some use color‐blind rhetoric, most children in our study know that race matters, while they offer alternative accounts for why and how. Some explain race as social inequality, while others offer cultural accou…
Living Together in College: Implications for Courtship
Implications of cohabitation for courtship were explored in a two-year study of 231 college dating couples. No differences were found between living and other going together couples in rates of marriage or breakup over the course of the study. Differences were found, however, in reports of satisfaction, intimacy, problems, expectations of marriage, the balance of power, and transition to marriage. Results suggest that cohabitation in college may …
The (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsexuals
College Women and Sororities: The Social Construction and Reaffirmation of Gender Roles
Gender socialization in urban societies is acknowledged to occur primarily in preadolescence Risman's analysis of one college sorority displays additional ways in which women adopt role-specific behaviors that are formally encouraged by both official regulations and informally shaped by cultural norms. Her data suggest that the socialization processes and the consequent roles may in fact be inappropriate for facilitating women's adaptation to a c…
Gay Children Grow Up: Gender Culture and Gender Deviance
Single Fathers
Intimate Relationships From a Microstructural Perspective: Men Who Mother
This article argues that individuals paradigms have predominated social scientific explanations for gendered behavior in intimate relationships but that a microstructural paradigm adds necessary additional information. The results of a study designed to test the relative strengths of individualist and microstructural explanations for 'mothering behavior' are presented. The microstructural hypothesis is that single fathers will adopt parental beha…
Sociological Research On Male And Female Homosexuality
We review four topics which have dominated the research on homosexuality in the last decade. First, we address the question of etiology which is now best described as the essentialist/constructionist debate. Second, we review the research on the relationship between sexuality and gender role nonconformity. Third, we critique the studies of intimate relationships. Finally, we present a summary of the research on the gay community, including the im…
The Cultural Construction of Sexuality
Illustrates the argument that sexuality is not a 'thing in itself' but a concept that can only be understood with reference to economic, political and social factors
Just the Two of Us: Parent-Child Relationships in Single-Parent Homes
This study compares and contrasts the relative strength of two different theoretical explanations, individualist and microstructural, for the apparent sex differences in parent-child relationships. The strength of each perspective is tested empirically through comparisons of singlecustodial mothers and single-custodial fathers on a variety of dimensions, with particular emphasis on the parent-child dyadic relationship. The findings suggest the im…
Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships
Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States
The gender gap and nuclear power: Attitudes in a politicized environment
An argument for momentary sociological isolationism; or, you don’t always get what you expect
Money in the Family: Financial Organisation and Women's Responsibilities.Gail Wilson
Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution
Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America.Judith Stacey
Comment on Francesca M. Cancian's “Feminist Science”
Methodological implications of feminist scholarship
Making Gender Visible
As the Twig Is Bent: Children Reared in Feminist Households
Doing It Fairly: A Study of Postgender Marriages
Little is known about married couples who share the responsibilities of paid and family work without regard for prescriptions. Fifteen married couples who divide household work and child care equitably and without regard to are interviewed to determine how they arrived at this arrangement and what consequences such a distribution of household labor has on their relationship. Findings suggest that there are four paths to an equitable division of h…
Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition
The Russian Women's Movement: Activists' Strategies and Identities
Seminars for developing women's political activism in Russia provided the basis for field observations and surveys of participants and leaders in the emergent Russian women's movement. The seminars provided an elite sample of activists, including those who were long-term participants in the zhensovety those newly mobilized in Western-influenced, explicitly feminist groups, and the majority, who were engaged in women's NGOs with a variety of speci…
Women in Russia and Ukraine . Rosalind Marsh Women's Voices in Russia Today . Anna Rotkirch , Elina Haavio-Mannila
Feminist Foundations: Toward Transforming Sociology
Introduction Bridging the Gaps in Feminist Sociology PART ONE: THE FOURTH REVOLUTION: CONFRONTING ANDROCENTRISM IN SOCIOLOGY My Four Revolutions - Jessie Bernard An Autobiographical History of the ASA Women and Social Stratification - Joan Acker A Case for Intellectual Sexism Equality between the Sexes - Alice Rossi An Immodest Proposal Reflections Jobs and the Gender Gap - Christine E Bose Bringing Women into the Workplace The Fourth Revolution …
Sociology (55 works) · Political science (40 works) · Psychology (39 works) · Gender Studies (36 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (20 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Social science (14 works)