Changes in the gender structure: Inequality at the individual, interactional, and macro dimensions

As a society, we’ve made tremendous progress towards gender equality over the past several decades. Yet, there remains significant inequality between women and men. Furthermore, when we look closely at some of the progress made towards gender equality, we find it considerably less impressive than surface appearances. In this article, we review the updated framework of Risman’s (2017) gender structure theory and argue that it can help us make sense of the progress we’ve made as well as analyzing inequality as it persists between women and men. Using gender structure theory, we then show how gender is simultaneously reproduced and contested across the individual, interactional, and macro levels of society within three major social domains: work, family, and gender identity.