Sex Segregation

Sex segregation simply means the separation of the genders. It shows men being segregated into one type of existence and women into another type of existence. It can mean what jobs men do as opposed to what jobs women do. It can be in the workplace or the home, either one.

I worked at ASU for twenty-three years before leaving nearly four years ago. When I started working at ASU in 1983, I feel in looking back that sex segregation was very strong, at least in the management and clerical sides of things. I started out not working in the academic affairs side of the campus, but more in student support. At that time, it seemed very much like you saw males strongly dominating management positions, while females dominated the clerical positions.

The only way one seemed to see sex desegregation was if student workers were being employed. I worked in the film inspection room of the now defunct film library of ASU. There, we would hire males and females alike to sit and repair films.

While not working at ASU anymore, I am still on campus a lot because of going to school and also because my wife works on campus. I am really pleased to see far more women in higher level management positions on campus than they used to be. By the same token, I feel I see a lot more males filling positions that were once totally dominated by females. I can definitely attest to how hard breaking the sex segregation walls down can be as I am a male administrative assistant. One would never have thought twenty or thirty years ago of seeing a male doing what I do now.

My own socialization at home was the typical stereotypical upbringing that men did the manual labor and management type positions while women either stayed home and raised the children and took care of the house while men went out and “brought home the bacon.” This is very strongly related to patriarchy in that the father was supposed to be the “head of the household” while the mother submitted to whatever the father said. Though I was brought up to believe this, that is not how it was in my own home. My mother “wore the pants” and earned a lot more money that my father did. The really sad part about this is that, while my mother earned more money throughout her life than my father did, the United States government paid her about fifty percent less per month on social security that it did my father just because he was a male and she was a female.

Sex segregation, as it relates to our current economy and men losing their jobs, does not seem to have had a positive effect on the wages women earn. I really don’t believe it will have any positive effect because I don’t see employers raising women’s wages just because their spouses are out of work. While great strides have been made in sex desegregation, there is still a long, long way to go.