Whiteness as a Gendered Framework: How White Chicagoans Explain Ethnoracial Inequality in Unemployment

Abstract

Research on racial attitudes has long examined how white Americans explain ethnoracial inequality, but it often treats race and gender as separate, independent dimensions of analysis. In this article, I investigate how whiteness itself operates as a gendered interpretive framework that shapes how white women and men understand racial inequality. Using data from the 2018 Chicago Area Survey, which included a dual split-ballot experiment varying the race and gender of target groups, I analyze how white respondents explain unemployment rate disparities among Black and Latinx women and men. Across the sample, white Chicagoans were more likely to endorse structuralist than individualist explanations for racial inequality, yet their interpretations depended on both respondent and target gender. White women expressed less support for structural explanations when asked about Latina women’s unemployment than about Latino men’s, while white men’s responses did not vary by target gender. These findings show that the gender of both the perceiver and the perceived shapes how members of the dominant racial group interpret inequality. I argue that such patterns reveal how whiteness functions as a gendered social framework through which inequality is rationalized and moral boundaries are drawn. Rather than treating racial attitudes as gender-neutral, I show that explanations for inequality are shaped by both respondent gender and the gender of the racialized group being evaluated. By conceptualizing whiteness as a gendered interpretive framework, I demonstrate how dominant-group members differentially recognize structural disadvantage across racialized men and women.