Lecture 4: Inequalities of Class, Gender, and Ethnicity

• Class is usually used to describe the level of economic wealth, but can also be cultural (high class / low class)
• Two ways of describing class:

  • Durkheimian: Different levels of wealth along a continuum, where inequalities were considered natural
  • Marxian: Class is one's relationship to the "means of production", where inequalities were based on exploitation and subjugation
  • Proletariat (workers) and Bourgeoisie (owners)
• Economic/Class Inequality exists between, within countries, and across countries
• World Income Distribution:

  • 42 richest people in the world own half the wealth
  • 8 men own more than the poorest half of the world's population
  • 82% of new wealth in 2017 went to the richest 1%, enough to end extreme poverty seven times over
• Comparative Economic Inequality Between Societies:

  • USA: Wealthiest 20% own 85% of the wealth
  • World: Wealthiest 10% own 85% of the wealth
• Inequality WITHIN Societies:

  • Gini Coefficient: ranked 0-1; 0 = perfect equality; 1 = perfect inequality
  • Trade-off between inequality and national income
  • Canada: top 20% earn 43% of income, bottom 20% earn 5.2%
  • In the last 30 years, the income share of the wealthiest 1% increased by 75%, while the share of the poorest 20% fell by 20%
  • Wealth distribution in Canada: top 20% hold 69% of net worth, bottom 60% own 11%
• Race is based on physical differences, while ethnicity is based on cultural identity
• Race Continuum:

  • Races are socially constructed categories arbitrarily dividing humans along a continuum
  • Human Genome Project shows only 15% of genetic variation occurs between 'races', with 85% within 'races'
• Racism: the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination

  • Ethnic discrimination: discriminating due to ethnicity
  • Ethnocentrism: making value judgments about another culture from the perspective of one's own cultural system
• Gender is a set of shared cultural understandings of how men, women, girls, and boys should look and act
• Gender roles are the patterns of behavior that society expects of males and females, learned as part of the socialization process
• Gender Biological Determinists and Structural Functionalists believe that gender roles are natural and related to physical differences
• Gender Inequality:

  • Gender Income Gap: difference between male and female full-time earnings expressed as a percentage of male earnings
  • Canada: 21%, USA: 23%, World: 15.6%, Africa: 23.2%, Asia: 21.2%, Oceana: 13%, Mexico: 15.5%, Europe: 14.5%
• Women commit the majority of child homicides, physical child abuse, and about 25% of child sexual abuse in the U.S.