Girls’ and women’s participation in athletics and sports has meant that women are now competing at the most elite levels in most international athletic competitions. When they began competing, the differences between men’s and women’s world record times were sizeable. But gaps between men and women in athletic achievement have been declining. Women’s and men’s world records in all sort of sporting competitions are converging. It’s one small example of a larger trend in gender relations. Consider the gender gap in world record times in the 1500-meter race (see FIGURE 9.6). You might notice two trends. First, although men’s world records are still faster than women’s, women’s world record times have decreased at a much higher rate than men’s. Second, as of the 1980’s, it appears as though women’s progress converging toward men’s world record times seemed to stall. There is more than one way to consider this shift. One way of making sense of the stall in the gap here is that perhaps we are reaching the biological limits of male and female bodies and the gap we still see today is more the result of biology than anything else. What is curious is that gender gaps stalled on a variety of different measures at a similar time.

FIGURE 9.6 World Record Times in 1500-Meter Running for Women and Men, 1912–2015

Consider the gender wage gap. In FIGURE 9.7, you can see how the gender wage gap has closed over time. Similar to the gender gap in world record times for the 1500-meter race, the gender wage gap closed over the course of the twentieth century, and seems to have stalled during the 1980s as well. Additionally, the closing of the gap here seems to have more to do with decreases and stagnation in men’s wages than increases in women’s wage (a fact we will address in more detail in Chapter 14, on the workplace).

FIGURE 9.7 Shifts in the Gender Wage Gap, 1940–2012

When sociologist Arlie Hochschild discovered what she came to call the “second shift,” she also coined another term—the “stalled revolution” (Hochschild 1989). What she discovered was that, despite enormous gains in gender equality in the labor market, heterosexual women had achieved minimal gains on the home front. The stalled revolution refers to the fact that, although women are much more likely to earn a living wage on their own, men have not responded in kind and participated more in work around the house. Indeed, although men’s weekly hours dedicated to housework in heterosexual couples have increased in recent history (and the hours women spend have been decreasing), a similar gap remains, and progress toward equality seemed to stall at a similar point in time (Sayer 2016). Similarly, we’ve seen a great deal of progress in college majors become desegregated through the 1980s (England 2010). Look back at the chart illustrating women’s representation in films (FIGURE 9.1) and you’ll note that progress on the Bechdel Test appears to stall right around the same time.

As these examples all illustrate, significant gains have been made toward gender equality in relatively recent history; the general trend is one of gender convergence. And when we examine these trends intersectionally, we can also say that some groups of women have benefited from these changes more than others (middle-class, young, heterosexual, white women, for instance). But it’s also true that a great deal of the progress toward gender equality seems to have stalled. The convergence of all manner of gender gaps began to slow and stall between 1980 and 1990. Sociologists are still at work considering whether, how, and why remaining gaps might be related to a common collection of social factors.