Before analyzing how each stratifier of our thesis affects political view, we have to recognize how they influence one another. As gender cannot be affected by class, I will analyze how gender affects the income and social class of a person. Because social class is defined within a family unit, the lump sum of a heterosexual married couple’s income determines their class category. However it is important to recognize that there are large wealth gaps between married heterosexual partners as well as between single men and women. Husbands tend to accumulate more wealth than their wives and in households where this is not the case, the household tends to earn less money than the average husband dominated income households. In some studies, there is little to no wealth gap found between single male and females while in some a significant gap exists. However, on average, single women with children tend to accumulate the least wealth compared to all other types of households. This could be because women are assumed to be the child-rearing members of a household making it harder for them to meaningfully enter the workforce while perpetuating the idea that men should be the breadwinner and cannot stay home and raise children.
Female-dominated occupational fields typically pay less and offer less benefits than the occupations and core industries that men are more likely to be employed, leading to a wage gap. According to the differential exposure theory, gendering both in the workforce and household creates less opportunity or less exposure to structural elements such as stable employment, occupational prestige and income. We must accept the limitation that gender is confounded with marital status of a household which is used to determine class. We will assume that regardless of gender, those in higher classes experience more privilege than those lower however, gendering and wealth disadvantage within the classified household can affect a woman’s perspective. In “Beyond the Intersection: A New Culinary Metaphor for Race-Class-Gender Studies,” author Ivy Ken uses different food analogies to explain the interminglings of different social categories and how it affects a person’s experience.
A person’s experience is likely to form their perspective including, most relevant to us, their political views. She relates a person’s individual experience based on their social categories with the production and perceived taste of a cookie. Just as butter, sugar, flour and eggs intermingle to give flavor, race, class, and gender intermingle to create individual experience. Different combinations of these sets create different products and just as people have unique taste preferences, they have different reactions to their experiences. “Race, class, and gender’s meaning transform when they contact with those who taste them, who are oppressed by them, who get advantages from them, who do not realize who they are, who do them, who use them”(Ken 2008, pg. 164). And these differential experiences are what necessitates a need for every voice to be heard and every experience represented. People with similar sources of oppression and privilege are grouped together and often have similar experiences and thus more similar political perspectives.
