The social practice and regulation of cycling as ‘A Boy’s Thing’ in Irish secondary schools

Despite low levels of cycling to secondary education across the adolescent population in Ireland, there is, in addition, a pronounced inequality in rates of ridership between teenage girls and boys, with nearly 10 times as many boys cycling to school compared to girls. In light of this disparity, the Green-Schools #andshecycles campaign was created to explore and address the cycling gender gap among second-level students. Emerging from this campaign, this paper details qualitative research exploring this gender gap, drawing on focus groups with teenage girls and boys across Ireland. Using grounded theory methodology, a theory of cycling as 'A Boy's Thing' was generated. This theory makes sense of how cycling as a social practice is continually enacted, reproduced and regulated as a practice of and for boys among Irish adolescents, through related practices of exemplifying masculinity, incompatible femininity and processes of gender regulation. It has significant implications in considering the effects of gender as a configuration of social practice (Connell, 2005) or performance (Butler, 1990) on cycling, and how cycling is a uniquely gendered practice/performance in particular contexts. In light of this theoretical interpretation, two approaches for tackling the Irish second-level cycling gender gap are provided: first, promoting cycling among teenage girls by making cycling more compatible with dominant practices of femininity; second, promoting cycling among teenage girls by publicly rejecting and subverting dominant practices of femininity and processes of gender regulation relating to cycling in present day Ireland. 

The Social Practice and Regulation of Cycling as ‘A Boy’s Thing’ in Irish Secondary Schools

Despite low levels of cycling to secondary education across the adolescent population in Ireland, there is, in addition, a pronounced inequality in rates of ridership between teenage girls and boys, with nearly 10 times as many boys cycling to school compared to girls. In light of this disparity, the Green-Schools #andshecycles campaign was created to explore and address the cycling gender gap among second-level students. Emerging from this campaign, this paper details qualitative research exploring this gender gap, drawing on focus groups with teenage girls and boys across Ireland. Using grounded theory methodology, a theory of cycling as ‘A Boy’s Thing’ was generated. This theory makes sense of how cycling as a social practice in continually enacted, reproduced and regulated as a practice of and for boys among Irish adolescents, through related practices of exemplifying masculinity, incompatible femininity and processes of gender regulation. It has significant implications in considering the effects of gender as a configuration of social practice (Connell, 2005) or performance (Butler, 1990) on cycling, and how cycling is a uniquely gendered practice/performance in particular contexts. In light of this theoretical interpretation, two approaches for tackling the Irish second-level cycling gender gap are provided: first, promoting cycling among teenage girls by making cycling more compatible with dominant practices of femininity; second, promoting cycling among teenage girls by publicly rejecting and subverting dominant practices of femininity and processes of gender regulation relating to cycling in present day Ireland.

Gender, Regulation Efficiency and Informal Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Regulation efficiency is essential in addressing the growing informal sector in developing countries because informality thrives with an inefficient legal and regulatory framework of an economy. This paper, therefore, seeks to explore the effect of regulations on informal employment across a panel of 36 sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2018. The study includes both the business and labour aspects of regulation to analyse the effect. The fixed effect and GMM method of panel regression analysis was adopted to achieve the objective of the study. The result suggests that an increase in labour regulation efficiency is associated with a reduction in informal employment while there exists no significant relationship between efficient business regulation and informal employment. The study further investigates how the outcomes affect both genders and the output. The study suggests that efficient labour regulation is gender-specific, as the result is only consistent for the male. It is therefore imperative to incorporate more female gender-specific incentives in the social and labour regulations to compensate for the imbalance of social roles of women that may affect their choice to work in the formal or informal sector.

LEGAL STATUS OF WOMEN-HIGHLANDERS IN THE END OF 1920S – FIRST HALF OF 1930S: EXPECTATIONS AND REALITY

The modern legal status of a Russian woman and the establishment of conditions for achieving equality between men and women have been in the focus of the state and society. In this regard, the study and generalization of the historical experience of gender regulation in Soviet Russia (1917–1991), especially in the late 1920s – early 1930s, is of undoubted scientific and practical interest, by the end of which the authorities announced the solution to the “women’s question”. The issues of the legal status of the Russian women are reflected in works of native, as well as regional and foreign experts. Modern historiographical groundwork, new sources (starting from the normative and record-keeping documents to materials of periodicals and ego-documents), the use of the principle of historicism, systematic and anthropologic approaches, comparative-historical, comparative-legal and descriptive methods allow to reveal the legal status of women-highlanders of Dagestan. The study aims to demonstrate how in the conditions of the polyethnic region the Soviet legislation of the first decades of Soviet power, making adjustments to the rights and obligations of a highland woman who was under the great influence of Islam and the historically established traditions of Dagestan society, changed its position and provided new opportunities for implementation women’s aspirations in everyday, economic, professional, political and cultural life. The paper provides estimations on some “traditional” practices of women, who were discontented with policies carried out by the Soviet power and who organized public marches. As a result of the study, the authors come to the conclusion that the Soviet authorities viewed women as their ally in socialist transformations, and the legal and economic equality of men and women, recorded in Soviet laws, created conditions for the involvement of women in all spheres of life of the Dagestan society. At the same time, during the period under review, the predominance of the traditional form of the family continued to be ensured by the strictest social control.

Gender choice in assisted reproductive technologies: opportunities, dangers, prospects

Today, assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are a birth rate factor, which allows almost every person to give birth to a child, regardless of health. Fully reliable gender selection is only possible through pre-implantation diagnostics (PGD) as part of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Usually preference is given to boys, and the problem turns from individual family into a socio-gender problem, which can only be solved at the state level. While traditional methods of gender regulation involved selective abortions or killing of newborns («infanticide»), modern ART technically solves the issue at the pre-implantation stage, but entails ethical, psychological and financial problems that require special control. By prohibiting sex-selective abortions, the state limits the possibility of gender choice at the stage of conception to the risk of inherited diseases transmission due to fears of seriously disturbing natural gender balance, creating prerequisites for «genomocide». According to the National ART registries, Surveys of the International Federation of Fertility Societies for 2010–2019, Russian and foreign «hospital» statistics and the media, the article shows increase in the popularity of PGD that makes it possible to make a gender choice. In Russia, where the number of children in a family rarely exceeds two, and reproductive clinics perform all IVF programs, the choice of child’s gender is possible only with medically-justified PGD, and almost always performed at the expense of the patient. The only perspective in this situation is inclusion of such a PGD in the Compulsory Health Insurance system, when the gender of an unborn child becomes an additional, and its health — the main result.

Categorical Exclusions: How Racialized Gender Regulation Reproduces Reentry Hardship

Since gender organizes key reentry services such as housing, formerly incarcerated people seeking resources must successfully inhabit a gender category. Drawing on seven months of ethnography and 79 interviews with service providers and formerly incarcerated transgender people, I show that these organizational practices of gender categorization are racialized and impact resource access. Most gender-segregated housing programs rely on biology-based definitions of gender. These gender rules create workable options for trans men to stay with women, but bar trans women from women’s spaces. Once in gendered housing programs, clients need to navigate gender assessment in interactions. Trans men employed several strategies to establish gendered selves who were easily categorized as either male or female, which allowed them to access stable housing. Gender sanctioning posed a major problem for black trans women. Black trans women were highly scrutinized in women’s programs, characterized as illegitimate based on biological definitions of gender, and harassed for any perceived deviation from gender norms. When harassment escalated into conflict, they were expelled from programs. Regulation of black trans women’s womanhood led to systematic material deprivation. By understanding the connections between categorical exclusions and exclusion from resources we can better understand the reproduction of reentry hardship and inequality more broadly.

Anxiety and Gender Regulation

This chapter returns to the concept of gender assessments, this time examining how they work after parents have determined their child is transgender. While many parents perceived themselves to be acutely vulnerable to state regulation, families with sexual-minority parents or racial-minority children were much more likely to have interventions into their lives by the state. When the state actually did intervene, however, it was with great consequence, and those interventions intensified the inequalities those families already suffered. Families with the greatest emotional and material resources, however, could marshal the state to assist them in problem solving, demonstrating the double life of the state (as enforcer and as resource provider) and the ways in which it exacerbates preexisting inequalities.

Gender and Regulatory Regimes

The fifth chapter continues the focus on regulatory regimes, now turning to gender and taking up ideology and socialization rather than coercion. This chapter first considers some short stories by Tagore. Specifically, it examines the role of humiliation in the inhibition of boys’ empathic response, especially sensitivity about attachment needs. From here, the chapter turns to Woolf’s Orlando. In this novel, Woolf presents a situationist account of gender regulation. Orlando’s apparently masculine or feminine behaviors are provoked by such seemingly trivial situations as the nature of his/her clothing. Woolf nuances the situationist account by showing that some forms of situated behavior, as well as thought and feeling, are likely to become habitual through repetition. In short, it is not differences in minds that produce differences in behaviors, which in turn create social situations. Rather, differences in social situations produce differences in behaviors, leading to differences in thoughts and feelings.