Sex, Gender, and Intimacies - Part 2

• Motherhood penalty


  The gap in pay, benefits, recommended salaries, and perceived competence between mothers and non-mothers in the workplace
• Men at times


  Benefit in the workplace from being a parent
• Ways the motherhood penalty manifests

  • Pay gap
  • Hiring bias
  • Competence perception
  • Maternity leave penalties
  • Daycare problems
• Glass ceiling


  Barriers that women face in promotion, often use to unwritten policies or biases
• Glass escalator


  The ways in which men (often white, heterosexual) are put on a fast-track for promotion
• Gender and sexualities change across cultures; sociologists look at how we are influenced by culture, and how we influence culture
• Sociologists are concerned with the ways culture holds and teaches beliefs about gender and sexualities, and the relationships of cultural beliefs to roles
• Two cases where gender and sexualities are shaped by culture

  • Rural women and queer folks
  • Reproductive justice
• Assumptions about the role of culture influence the identification of, and solutions to, problems
• We cannot think only of gender or only of sexuality, but about their relationships to one another and other identities
• In Canada, we must consider how gender and sexuality link to racialized and Indigenous communities
• Colonial policies impacted Indigenous women and girls differently from men
• Policies derived from European assumptions about the inferiority of Indigenous people and women
• This was in contrast to Indigenous communities, where women were seen as central to the family, were celebrated, and were often leaders
• Under the Indian Act, until 1985, if an Indigenous women married a non-Indigenous man, she and her children would lose their status
• Indigenous men lost status if they gained post-secondary education. If an Indigenous woman married such a man, she would also lose status
• Key assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality

  • Race is not only seen as biological, but tied to knowledge and sexuality
  • Assumed heteronormativity because women were not able to choose whether they want Indian Status or not independently of husbands
  • Western conceptions of marriage and gender (passed through male lineage) regulate who is eligible for status
• On March 11, 2022, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women released its findings on a case brought by an Indigenous Canadian, Jeremy Eugene Matson, on behalf of himself and his children
• He submitted that the Indian Act discriminates against Indigenous women and their children by denying them status, and the right to identify as Indigenous
• Corinne Dettmeijer: '"The entire issue stems from the disrespect of indigenous people's fundamental right to self-identification." "It is further exacerbated by the unequal criteria by which men and women are permitted to transmit indigenous status and identity to their descendants."'
• Committee member: '"By comparison, descendants of indigenous Indian grandfathers would never have lost their status and have always been able to pass on their status to their children"'
• While white women got the vote in 1918, Asian men and women didn't vote until post-WWII, Inuit until 1950 and First Nations in 1960
• Two of the "Famous Five" suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote were also involved in eugenics
• Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy helped establish a Eugenics Board that implemented the forced sterilization of nearly 3000 people
• Murphy also wrote against Chinese immigrants, fearing that they would "corrupt" white women; she also wrote against African-American, Jewish, and Eastern European immigration
• Thus we can see the ways in which the identities of those fighting for women's right to vote were influenced by colonial and oppressive perceptions of race and gender
• Women and the Right to Vote, 1867–1900

  1. 1867: Constitution Act, 1867 entrenches women's exclusion from the vote

  2. 1873: Female property owners in British Columbia are first "Canadian" women to gain the right to vote in municipal elections

  3. 1876: First women's suffrage group set up in Toronto under the guise of a literary society

  4. 1885: Sir John A. Macdonald introduces, then withdraws, an elections act amendment that would have given women the right to vote

  5. 1894: Women's Enfranchisement Association of New Brunswick formed, Manitoba Equal Suffrage Club founded, House of Commons votes down a petition for women's suffrage presented by the Women's Christian Temperance Union

  6. 1900: By this date, most women property owners have the right to vote in municipal elections
• Women and the Right to Vote, 1912–1921

  1. 1912: Manitoba Political Equality League founded in Winnipeg, Montreal Suffrage Association formed

  2. 1914: Flora MacDonald Denison, suffragist journalist and president of the Canadian Suffrage Association, publishes "War and Women"

  3. 1915: Manitoba women are the first in Canada to win the right to vote in provincial elections

  4. 1916: Saskatchewan women get the right to vote, The suffrage movement triumphs in Alberta

  5. 1917: Ontario women get the vote but still cannot sit in the legislature, British Columbia women get the right to vote, Serving members of the armed forces (including women) get the federal franchise through the Military Voters Act, Female relatives of soldiers at the front get the right to vote through the Wartime Elections Act

  6. 1918: Royal assent given to a bill giving women the right to vote in federal elections

  7. 1919: Nellie McClung, heading one of the largest delegations to the Alberta legislature ever assembled, presents a petition demanding the vote for women, Suffragists present a 45,000-name petition to Premier Tobias C. Norris, Electoral law amended—women can now stand for federal office

  8. 1920-1921: First federal election at which women vote under universal franchise, Federal electoral law amended; changes include universal female (and male) suffrage regardless of provincial law