The article directly and indirectly refers to anthropological and philosophical texts which strive to discover and present the gender factor as important in the light of the humanities. The author refers to “Literackie nie-nazywanie. Onomastykon polskiej prozy współczesnej” (Literary Not-naming. Onomasticon of the modern Polish prose) by Magdalena Graf and indicates the femininity factor as a relevant one also in onomastics.

One of the main traits of a society of reflexive modernity is the critical analysis of categories that in the past appeared unquestionable. Socio-cultural gender and health or illness/mental disorders are categories of this type. Above all, they are socially constructed, that is, they are dependent on culture and on political, economic, and religious factors. The author undertakes to analyse the relations between the diagnostic criteria used in the international system of classifying mental diseases (DSM-IV and ICD-10) and traditional schemas of masculinity and femininity. Confirmation of the incidence of particular diseases in connection with gender is the author’s entry point for seeking answers to why individuals suffering from certain illnesses/mental disorders display behaviour corresponding to traditional gender roles, even though contemporary gender roles are fluid in many respects, and hypotheses about biological differences as causes of incidence of disease in men and women have not been empirically confirmed.

The author analyzes attitudes to the phenomenon of sexuality on the basis of two theoretical perspectives, the evolutionary and the feminist, between which there has long been conflict. In his opinion, however, they are only seemingly contrary. The main texts of both trends of thought concern entirely different problems and at the substantive level there is basically no contradiction between them. It is important that evolutionary theory often undermines existing cultural schemas, although this is rarely perceived by proponents of feminist theories. Evolutionists, in turn, rather too often identify feminism with radical social constructivism. Another extreme is a view that could be described as evolutionary sexism, consisting in justifying the gender status quo by reference to biological essentialism. After elimination of the extreme approaches, which are rare in any case, it is possible to use the results of evolutionary research in the debate over gender equality and to transform the two monologues into a cohesive dialogue; this, in the author’s opinion, is an important task for empirically oriented social theory.

This paper thoroughly examines the gender patterns of religious activity within the Vietnamese – the largest non-European migrant community in Poland. Basing on the result from anthropological field-work which I conducted in two pagodas currently operating in the suburbs of Warsaw I analyse this issue in the light of traditional gender patterns of religious life in Vietnam, as well as in the context of the politicisation of spiritual life under communist rule. The results of my research prove that whether a religious institution will become a ‘women’s sphere’ or will remain under the influence of male actors depends to a great extent on its political emplacement and relations with formal institutions of the Viet-namese state.

The aim of this paper was to estimate the gender wage gap in Poland and in the 16 NUTS2 Polish regions in 2010, and to verify the predictions of the spatial monopsony model for Poland with a newly created, harmonized database for wages of individuals in Poland. According to the model, the unexplained part of the gender wage gap, identified with wage discrimination, tend to be lower in regions with more competition between employers.

The results of the analyses performed in this paper show that in more urbanized regions the average wages are higher than in the rural ones. In each of the 16 NUTS2 Polish regions, women earn less than men. Raw differences in wages between men and women are largest in the most urbanized regions but a significant part of the differences in those regions can be explained by differences in workers’ characteristics, especially by different sectoral structure of employment. The part of the gender wage gap which remains unexplained, and in the literature is commonly attached to discrimination, is the highest in rural regions of Eastern Poland in line with the predictions of the spatial monopsony model.

Artykuł poświęcony jest problemowi legitymizacji obecnych w dyskursie Kościoła rzymskokatolickiego w Polsce wypowiedzi na temat gender i praw reprodukcyjnych z lat 2012–2017. Jego celem jest rekonstrukcja sposobów, w jakie przedstawiciele Kościoła uprawomocniają swoje stanowisko we wspomnianych polach dyskursywnych oraz odpowiedź na pytanie o rolę, jaką pełni wykorzystanie zróżnicowanych legitymizacji o charakterze religijnym i świeckim w kontekście obecności Kościoła w sferze publicznej. Prezentowane dane są wynikiem jakościowej analizy treści dokumentów Konferencji Episkopatu Polski oraz publicznych wypowiedzi polskich biskupów, takich jak: wywiady w mediach, kazania, wystąpienia konferencyjne. W warstwie teoretycznej i metodologicznej artykuł odwołuje się do założeń perspektywy społecznego tworzenia rzeczywistości (Berger i Luckmann), koncepcji dyskursywnego konstruowania legitymizacji (van Leeuwen) oraz założeń SKAD (the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse).

Artykuł przedstawia eksploracyjne rozpoznanie mechanizmów segregacji zawodowej pod względem płci na rynku pracy na przykładzie wybranych grup zawodowych: strażaków, kurierów i kierowców autobusów. Prowadzona analiza pozwala na zrozumienie czynników wspierających lub osłabiających utrzymywanie się męskich wzorców w tych miejscach pracy i grupach zawodowych. Celem było zbadanie społecznych mechanizmów segregacji na rynku pracy ze względu na płeć przez skoncentrowanie się na męskich doświadczeniach pracy w zawodach zmaskulinizowanych. Doświadczenia mężczyzn analizowano w perspektywie zmieniającego się świata pracy. Efektem jest typologia trzech światów męskiej pracy: grupę zawodową broniącą męskości, grupy zawodowej wyzyskiwanej za pomocą męskości oraz grupy zawodowej nieprzywiązanej do męskości.

The Karatepe inscriptions contain an intriguing image of a woman walking fearlessly with spindles. This image builds on the symbolism of the spindle in the ancient Near East as an emblem of femininity and highlights the gendered language of the passage in which it occurs. In the context, the figure of the woman with spindles is contraposed with the image of the fearful man. The contrast between them portrays the magnitude of the positive changes accomplished by Azitawada, the ruler who commissioned the inscriptions.

The situation of transsexual persons in Poland is not precisely known; there are only estimates determining the scale of the phenomenon. The lack of information fosters stereotypes and, not infrequently, injurious appraisal; fear of the unknown is also produced, and is gradually turning into widespread prejudice. A social analysis of the phenomenon of transsexuality is hampered by the predominance of the hetero-normative discourse, including in scholarly spheres. The basic issue addressed by the author is the acceptance of transsexual persons, viewed from the perspective of their own personal experiences. These observations concern both the sphere of personal life as well as functioning in the macro-social space (school, work, etc.). In each of these spheres, a change of gender produces complications with which transsexual persons must grapple as they strive to live in harmony with their psychologically intuited gender.

The article addresses the relation between the grammatical gender and the linguistic encoding of sex distinction (natural gender). Our goal is to problematize the category of gender as a multipart and multifunctional linguistic phenomenon operating in diverse dimensions of a language. The analysis of Italian and Polish languages illustrates that grammatical gender – whose main function is to signal syntactic relations between text constituents – and natural gender – whose main function is to encode information about the sex of a referent – are in principle autonomous and independent linguistic phenomena which are however strongly interrelated in a linguistic system through a morphological and syntactic interface.

Based on empirical research conducted in Hungary and Poland in 2016–2017, as well as on analysis of social media, blogs and newspaper articles, this article discusses Hungarian and Polish attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. Against a historical background, we analyse how the Hungarian and Polish governments responded to the large-scale influx of Muslim refugees during the 2015 ‘migration crisis’. The anti-immigrant narratives, fueled by both governments and the right-wing press, resulted in some-thing akin to Islamophobia without Muslims. Instead of portraying the people arriving at the southern border of Europe as refugees seeking safety, they described the migration process in terms such as ‘raid’, ‘conquest’ and ‘penetration’. These narratives often implied that Muslims will combat Europe not only with terrorism but with the uteruses of their women, who will bear enough children to outnum-ber native Poles and Hungarians. The paper ends with a discussion of positive attempts to improve attitudes towards refugees in Poland and Hungary.

Based upon the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which language influences thought, we may affirm how social stereotypes remain bound by stereotyped usages of language. Hence, speaking is never neutral as it is underpinned by a way of thinking, of communicating, of being. The sexist usage of language encapsulates a function of emphasis at the semantic level and an obscuring function in morphological terms. We thus question what sexism in language means in order to inquire as to how the ways we make use of language may influence our ways of thinking and, consequently, our ways of acting.

Various quantile regression approaches are implemented to analyze thecharacteristics of Italian data on earnings in the tails. A changing coefficientspattern across quantiles shows increasing returns to education along the wagedistribution. A quantile decomposition approach shows that higher educationgrants higher return at all quantiles, thus implying additional, non-linear returnsto higher education throughout the entire pattern of the earning distribution.Wage gender gap displays a decreasing pattern across quantiles, and it doesnot disappear at the higher quantiles. The southern workers penalty decreasesacross quantiles as well for highly educated workers.