Sex Role Attitudes Among High School Seniors

The book traces the history of gender bias toward women throughout history and contains a study specifically geared toward bias, which occurs in the careers of women, and demonstrates that the participation of females and males in the workforce is quite evident. A considerable amount of research exists that describes the lack of gender equity in the workplace. What is happening in the workplace and what should be happening in the workplace, in fact, appears to be quite different. This empirical study includes original surveys, secondary analyses of the data, and reports that offer significant factors with regards to gender equity in the workplace. As reported in numerous pieces of literature, men are often unable to understand what women want which is carried over into the workplace with the feeling that people act and talk differently. Consequently, the workplace hurts women. The reader will also become familiar with other enlightened people in our democracy who have assisted with this struggle in their efforts to improve and to bring further attention to gender equity.

The essays included in this volume honor a truly gifted teacher and sociologist, John C. Pock. After a brief stint at the University of Illinois, Pock moved in 1955 to Reed College, a highly regarded but very small liberal arts institution (roughly 1,000 students) located in Portland, Oregon. Pock has spent the rest of his career (to date) there. During his forty-year tenure at Reed College, the sociology department usually had only two faculty members. Even so, during this period as many as 104 students graduated with majors in sociology and 69 established professional careers as sociologists. (A listing, which is assuredly incomplete, of Reed students during Pock's tenure who went on to professional careers in sociology is presented in an appendix to this volume.) Many of these sociologists have been extremely successful and influential within the discipline. Reed sociologists have taught or are teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Michigan, Northwestern, Stanford, UCLA, Wisconsin, and other leading U.S. academic departments. Others have been employed as researchers in such prominent institutions within and outside the United States as RAND, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Opinion Research Center, the East-West Center, the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Sloan Foundation, and the Australian National University.