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Assortative mating fundamentally shapes the characteristics of families and the reproduction of populations. It organizes people into families and determines the characteristics of parents. In this article, I review the literature on the causes and consequences of trends and variation in assortative mating. Explanations for why assortative mating varies have been dominated by modernization theory, but perspectives emphasizing economic inequality and gender inequality have gained momentum in recent years. Underexplored is how changes in the structure of search have affected mate selection. The idea that assortative mating affects inequality and population composition is one of the primary motivations for its study but, until recently, has rarely been tested empirically. I review the literature on the consequences of assortative mating for (a) inequality within generations, (b) inequality between generations, (c) long-run population change, and (d) relationship quality and dissolution. I conclude with suggestions for future research.

This article investigates the determinants of orgasm and sexual enjoyment in hookup and relationship sex among heterosexual college women and seeks to explain why relationship sex is better for women in terms of orgasm and sexual enjoyment. We use data from women respondents to a large online survey of undergraduates at 21 U.S. colleges and universities and from 85 in-depth interviews at two universities. We identify four general views of the sources of orgasm and sexual enjoyment—technically competent genital stimulation, partnerspecific learning, commitment, and gender equality. We find that women have orgasms more often in relationships than in hookups. Regression analyses reveal that specific sexual practices, experience with a particular partner, and commitment all predict women's orgasm and sexual enjoyment. The presence of more sexual practices conducive to women's orgasm in relationship sex explains some of why orgasm is more common in relationships. Qualitative analysis suggests a double standard also contributes to why relationship sex is better for women: both men and women question women's (but not men's) entitlement to pleasure in hookups but believe strongly in women's (as well as men's) entitlement to pleasure in relationships. More attention is thus given to producing female orgasm in relationships.

Despite rapid changes in women's educational attainment and continuous labor force experience, convergence in the gender gap in wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s. Using CPS data from 1979 to 2009, we show that convergence in the gender gap in hourly pay over these three decades was attenuated by the increasing prevalence of \"overwork\" (defined as working 50 or more hours per week) and the rising hourly wage returns to overwork. Because a greater proportion of men engage in overwork, these changes raised men's wages relative to women's and exacerbated the gender wage gap by an estimated 10 percent of the total wage gap. This overwork effect was sufficiently large to offset the wageequalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in educational attainment and other forms of human capital. The overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, where long work hours are especially common and the norm of overwork is deeply embedded in organizational practices and occupational cultures. These results illustrate how new ways of organizing work can perpetuate old forms of gender inequality.

This article addresses a paradoxical stance taken by young straight men in three groups who identify aspects of themselves as \"gay\" to construct heterosexual masculine identities. By subjectively recognizing aspects of their identities as \"gay,\" these men discursively distance themselves from stereotypes of masculinity and privilege and/or frame themselves as politically progressive. Yet, both of these practices obscure the ways they benefit from and participate in gender and sexual inequality. I develop a theory of \"sexual aesthetics\" to account for their behavior and its consequences, contributing to a growing body of theory regarding the hybridization of contemporary masculinities and complicating theories of sexual practice.

Using longitudinal time diary and survey data from a community sample of dual-earner couples across the transition to parenthood, the authors examined change in divisions of paid and unpaid work and assessed the accuracy of survey data for time use measurement. Mothers, according to the time diaries, shouldered the majority of child care and did not decrease their paid work hours. Furthermore, the gender gap was not present prebirth but emerged postbirth with women doing more than 2 hours of additional work per day compared to an additional 40 minutes for men. Moreover, the birth of a child magnified parents' overestimations of work in the survey data, and had the authors relied only on survey data, gender work inequalities would not have been apparent. The findings have important implications for (a) the state of the gender revolution among couples well positioned to obtain balanced workloads and (b) the utility of survey data to measure parents' division of labor.

Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing women's descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the group's gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alternatives, using experimental data with many groups and links between individuals’ attitudes and speech. We find a substantial gender gap in voice and authority, but as hypothesized, it disappears under unanimous rule and few women, or under majority rule and many women. Deliberative design can avoid inequality by fitting institutional procedure to the social context of the situation.

After becoming consistently more egalitarian for more than two decades, gender role attitudes in the General Social Survey have changed little since the mid-1990s. This plateau mirrors other gender trends, suggesting a fundamental alteration in the momentum toward gender equality. While cohort replacement can explain about half of the increasing egalitarianism between 1974 and 1994, the changes since the mid-1990s are not well accounted for by cohort differences. Nor is the post-1994 stagnation explained by structural or broad ideological changes in American society. The recent lack of change in gender attitudes is more likely the consequence of the rise of a new cultural frame, an \"egalitarian essentialism\" that blends aspects of feminist equality and traditional motherhood roles.

Why has progress toward gender equality in the workplace and at home stalled in recent decades? A growing body of scholarship suggests that persistently gendered workplace norms and policies limit men's and women's ability to create gender egalitarian relationships at home. In this article, we build on and extend prior research by examining the extent to which institutional constraints, including workplace policies, affect young, unmarried men's and women's preferences for their future work-family arrangements. We also examine how these effects vary across education levels. Drawing on original survey-experimental data, we ask respondents how they would like to structure their future relationships while experimentally manipulating the degree of institutional constraint under which they state their preferences. Two clear patterns emerge. First, as constraints are removed and men and women can opt for an egalitarian relationship, the majority choose this option, regardless of gender or education level. Second, women's relationship structure preferences are more responsive than men's to the removal of institutional constraints through supportive work-family policy interventions. These findings shed light on important questions about the role of institutions in shaping work-family preferences, underscoring the notion that seemingly gender-traditional work-family decisions are largely contingent on the constraints of current workplaces.

Sociologists have examined gender inequalities across a wide array of social contexts. Yet, questions remain regarding how inequalities arise among autonomous groups pursuing economic goals. In this article, we investigate mixed-sex entrepreneurial teams to unpack the mechanisms by which gender inequality in leadership emerges, despite strong pressures toward merit-based organizing principles. We theorize the potentially competing relationships between merit and gender and explore the contingencies moderating their effects. Drawing on a unique, nationally representative dataset of entrepreneurial teams sampled from the U.S. population in 2005, we use conditional logistic regression to test our hypotheses. We demonstrate that merit's effect becomes much larger when multiple merit-based criteria provide consistent predictions for which team member is superior to others, and when entrepreneurial founders adopt bureaucratic templates to construct new ventures. However, gender stereotypes of leaders pervasively constrain women's access to power positions, and gender's effect intensifies when spousal relationships are involved. Women have reduced chances to be in charge if they co-found new businesses with their husbands, and some family conditions further modify women's chances, such as husbands' employment and the presence of children.

In the 1980s research on men shifted from studying the \"male sex role\" and masculinity as a singular trait to studying how men enact diverse masculinities. This research has examined men's behavior as gendered beings in many contexts, from intimate relationships to the workplace to global politics. We consider the strengths and weaknesses of the multiple masculinities approach, proposing that further insights into the social construction of gender and the dynamics of male domination can be gained by focusing analytic attention on manhood acts and how they elicit deference from others. We interpret the literature in terms of what it tells us about how males learn to perform manhood acts, about how and why such acts vary, and about how manhood acts reproduce gender inequality. We end with suggestions for further research on the practices and processes through which males construct the category \"men\" and themselves as its members.