Now that you have completed this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Identify three early theoretical perspectives of social inequality.
2. Discuss key theoretical developments that correspond with each wave of feminism.
3. Explain why post-structuralism made it possible to understand gender in new ways.
4. Analyze the gender pay gap using foundational, feminist, poststructural, and post-colonial theories.
5. Use Queer Theory to analyze sexual orientation as a social construct.

1. Summarize the three early sociological theories.
   Answer: Structural functionalism, also called functionalism, is a macro-level theory concerned with large-scale processes and large-scale social systems that order, stabilize, and destabilize societies. Conflict theory is a macro-level theory that proposes conflict is a basic fact of social life, which argues that the institutions of society benefit the powerful. Symbolic interactionist theory is a micro-level theory concerned with how meanings are constructed through interactions with others.
2. Summarize the three waves of feminism.
   Answer: The “first wave” of the feminist movement began in the mid-19th century and lasted until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote. The focus of the first wave of feminism focused on securing the right to vote for women, striking down laws that give husbands ownership of their wife’s property, and securing women’s access to education and employment. Second-wave feminism applied principles learned from the civil rights movement to challenge gender norms that excluded women from politics and restricted them to the domestic sphere. A major focus of second-wave feminism was to secure the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. This constitutional amendment still has not passed. Third-wave feminism was influenced by earlier waves but has expanded to include a multitude of standpoint-specific feminisms developed by Black women, transnational women, women of the Global South, disabled women, and people who are LGBTQIA+. A defining characteristic of the third wave is coalitional politics, in which the people with diverse identities build alliances that challenge systems of oppression.
3. How does post-structuralism analyze gender?
   Answer: Post-structuralism focuses on how gender is constructed, reproduced, enforced, challenged, and transformed in gendered language and gendered ideas of work, as well as how gender is constructed by individual behavior or performance. More broadly, poststructuralism deconstructs the binary categories of gender.
4. Compare and contrast how early sociological theories, feminist theories, and contemporary theories analyze the gender wage gap.
   Answer: Structural functionalists might look at how values and norms shape societal notions of success in the workforce and how these established values and norms reinforce the division of labor and gender inequality. Interactionists would likely examine how meaning, in the form of race and gender stereotypes and controlling images, is produced and negotiated in social interactions and then translated into wage inequality. Gender conflict theory, inspired by feminism theory, analyzes how economic gender inequality supports patriarchal power structures in the workplace and the marketplace. A feminist theoretical perspective of the gender wage gap helps us see how systems of power like patriarchy create the social conditions that lead to gender-based income inequality. Contemporary theories of gender are concerned with the impact of the global economy in terms of the economic situations of the nations in which they live and also by gender and race.