Every place has its quirky attributes, cultural reputation, and distinctive flair. But when we travel across America, do we also experience distinct gender norms and expectations? In his groundbreaking Gendered Places, William Scarborough examines metropolitan commuting zones to see how each region's local culture reflects gender roles and gender equity. He uses surveys and social media data to measure multiple dimensions of gender norms, including expectations toward women in leadership, attitudes toward working mothers, as well as the division of household labor.
Gendered Places reveals that different locations, even within the same region of the country, such as Milwaukee and Madison Wisconsin, have distinct gender norms and highly influential cultural environments. Scarboroughshows how these local norms shape the attitudes and behaviors of residents with implications on patterns of inequality such as the gender wage gap. His findings offer valuable insight for community leaders and organizers making efforts to promote equality in their region.
Scarboroughrecognizes local culture as not value-neutral, but highly crucial to the gender structure that perpetuates, or challenges, gender inequality. Gendered Places questions how these gender norms are sustained and their social consequences.
Industry Reviews
"Gendered Places offers the first sustained, nationally representative analysis of local gender cultures in the United States. While cross country differences have been well documented, Scarborough provides a long-overdue accounting of variability in gender beliefs within the United States. He makes a strong case that places (commuting zones) within the United States vary in their gender norms, that this variation cannot be captured on a single traditional-to-egalitarian continuum, and that the observed spatial differences have real consequences." -Maria Charles, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor of Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men
"Gendered Places attends to a crucial but understudied dimension of place culture: how people understand gender and how that matters for their lives and livelihoods. With careful research and engaging prose, Scarborough reveals the complex and sometimes surprising ways that gender works across cities and regions. Who lives in a place matters-but the story is not so simple. Nor are the stakes, for as Scarborough details, local gender norms have real implications for both the perpetuation and dismantling of inequalities." -Krista E. Paulsen, Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Community Development at Boise State University, and coauthor of Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience
"Scarborough's findings can be extrapolated and make an important contribution to the literature on gender inequality and, specifically, the gender wage gap. Summing Up: Recommended."-Choice
"Three aspects of Gendered Places make this book stand out. One notable feature is the book's open and exploratory tone, especially regarding the concept of local gender norms and discussion of their causes and consequences.... Most important, however, is the idea at the heart of the book-local gender norms. This concept enriches cultural explanations of gender by adding an important spatial dimension to our understanding of gender and gender inequality. On a broader level, Scarborough urges sociologists to look more closely at local communities as sites where gender inequality is produced. This carefully researched book should have special appeal to sociologists of work, gender, and inequality."-Social Forces
"Scarborough tackles the methodological challenge of studying variations and consequences of gender norms at a local scale across the United States.... [T]he methods and findings in this book do offer important new contribution to the understanding of place as gendered. Scarborough presents a strong argument for reading this work as complementary to existing research. He adeptly draws upon both quantitative and qualitative research as well as theory from multiple disciplines not only to build methodological and analytical frameworks but also to position the research findings as engaging with and contributing to much broader questions about gender, place culture, and spatial inequity."-Journal of Urban Affairs
