Equality in the Workplace – Gender

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Race, class and gender still create many institutional challenges to equality in the workplace. As a senior manager, it is your responsibility to address these equalities in the workplace. For this assignment, you will draft a memo to the CEO the discusses the following:

  • Describe an issue involving gender in the workplace.
  • Identify a local, state, or federal law that is being violated.
  • Outline how this issue violates the local, state, or federal law that protects these equalities.
  • Provide two to three solutions to resolve this issue.

Your paper should meet the following requirements:

  • 2-3 pages in length, not including cover and reference pages.
  • Formatted according to APA guidelines.
  • Cite a minimum of two academic peer reviewed scholarly sources to support your responses.

You are expected to convey complex ideas in a clear, concise and organized fashion, using the required and recommended readings from the course for analytical support.

Refer to the Critical Thinking Rubric in the Module 2 Folder for additional information.

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The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment Gender and Work Contributors: Harriet Bradley Edited by: Stephen Edgell, Heidi Gottfried & Edward Granter Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment Chapter Title: "Gender and Work" Pub. Date: 2015 Access Date: May 25, 2018 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446280669 Online ISBN: 9781473915206 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473915206.n5 Print pages: 73-92 ©2015 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book. SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference Gender and Work Harriet Bradley In post-war sociology, work became a major concern, building on the classic accounts of capitalism and industrialization offered by Marx, Weber and Durkheim. In particular, a rich tradition of case studies of particular workplaces grew up. Excellent and influential texts such as Goldthorpe and Lockwood's Affluent Worker studies (Goldthorpe et al. 1968), Robert Blauner's Alienation and Freedom (1964), Eli Chinoy's Automobile Workers and the American Dream (1955) or Huw Beynon's Working for Ford (1973) were largely, and in some cases completely, concerned with male workers. Indeed as this list shows, factory work, and in particular car assembly, had become paradigmatic of work relations. The work of women was largely, in Sheila Rowbotham's (1977) memorable phrase, hidden from history! Now, of course, looking back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is widely accepted that the typical worker in the deindustrialized nations of the Global North is more likely to be a women working in retail or a call centre than a male factory worker. In between then and now, however, gender made its big entry into the curriculum. There had been previously a few pioneering studies which focused on women's labour, and which would prove an inspiration to researchers in the 1970s. Some examples are the historical studies by Clark (1910, reprinted 1982) and Pinchbeck (1930, reprinted 1981) that looked at the labour of women before and during industrialization in Britain; the exploration of women's ‘double burden’ of work inside and outside the home by Myrdal and Klein (1956) and Nye and Hoffman (1963); and studies of housework by Gavron (1966) and Lopata (1971). However, the real surge of interest in gender and work occurred in the 1980s, as a result of the influence of second-wave feminism in the academy in America, Britain, Europe and Australia. Exploration of the many ways in which ‘work', no longer limited to ‘employment’ but extended to include domestic and reproductive work, is gendered has produced a rich and extensive corpus of theory and research. This body of work is the subject of this chapter. It starts by looking at the original rediscovery of ‘women's work’ by 1980s feminists, then considers the consolidation of studies of gendered work in the next two decades, speculates on the directions of study taken during sociology's ‘postmodern moment', and continues by looking at the contemporary scene and the position of women and men within the globalizing economy. For reasons of space, this chapter draws mainly on studies of women in Europe and America, with statistical data taken chiefly from the UK. However, to conclude there is a brief section on gendered work in a more global context. Throughout the chapter it is urged that we need to consider both paid and unpaid work if we want to understand gender differences and divisions. The other major theme is the importance of context in shaping both gender relations and also the sociological study of them. In particular, specific political and economic conjunctures produce changes in gender relations and in the interests of those who study them. INVISIBLE NO LONGER: THE EXCAVATION OF WOMEN'S WORK This is clearly illustrated in the burst of interest in researching women's work in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Post-war expansion of higher education, and 1960s affluence and youth rebellion had produced a batch of young radical female scholars and research funding was easier to come by, relative to now. There were a number of key influences informing the exciting case studies of women employees that emerged in these years. As well as the background of second-wave feminism, there was a strong input from Marxism which was the Page 2 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference dominant radical perspective in sociology at that time. In addition, the highly influential work of Braverman (1974) had stimulated an interest in close study of particular ‘labour processes’ as illustrated by the institution of the International Labour Process Conference. Finally, there were a number of powerful and engrossing case studies and ethnographies of male factory workers (for example, Beynon 1973; Burawoy 1982; Dore 1973; Edwards 1979; Goldthorpe et al. 1968; Haraszti 1978; Kamata 1982; Linhart 1981; Nichols and Beynon 1979), which served as templates for women scholars wishing to explore women's work. The case studies by researchers such as Glucksmann (writing as Cavendish, 1982), Pollert (1981) and Westwood (1984) opened up the world of women's employment, showing both the negative and positive aspects. Women factory workers were ill-paid compared to men and were confined to the lower levels of the organizational hierarchies. Their work was socially defined as less skilled, although it might be described as expert; when Sally Westwood tried to work as a machinist to carry out ethnographic research in a hosiery factory, she simply could not achieve the necessary speed and dexterity. The work was often tightly controlled, either intrinsically by demanding piecework systems or externally by close supervision: Westwood observed how the women were tied to their machines, while the male knitters were able to move around the factory floor. Milkman (1985) offered a rather more positive view of women factory workers, observing their important role in labour movement struggles in America's major cities. Of course women's work does not just take place in factories. Studies of clerical work and the professions began to open up understanding of the role of women in these areas (Crompton and Jones 1984). Spencer and Podmore (1987) showed how women in professions dominated by men were faced with a ‘double bind': if they appeared feminine in their behaviour and appearance they were judged to be out of place ‘in a man's world', but if they adopted a masculine style at work they were deemed to have spoiled their identities as women. Pringle's work on secretaries (1989) revealed that the women justified their own subjection to men by negative views about their own sex as being bitchy and stated their preference for having a male boss. ‘Pink-collar’ work was seen as acceptable for women, requiring them to provide low-level service for men in managerial roles and adding a decorative element to office life. Despite the restrictions they faced, however, the women factory workers studied by Westwood had developed rich and supportive shop-floor cultures and valued their jobs for the companionship and conviviality they offered. Indeed, a theme that runs throughout studies of women workers is that of escape from home and domesticity into a world of friendship and gossip. A common motivation women offer for returning to work after a spell at home is ‘wanting to make something of myself': not to be just a wife and mother. The later revealing study by Hochschild (1997), The Time Bind, argued this point strongly; the women she studied complained that their work in the home was invisible and undervalued and it was only in the workplace that they could feel a sense of self-worth, achievement and recognition. So while men tended to talk of escaping from work, to the home, the bar or the sports ground, women experienced an escape into work. This perception was buoyed up by the discussion of housework (Friedan, 1963; Oakley, 1974). Oakley argued that both the invisibility and immeasurability of domestic work led to its low-status and lack of value; women she studied felt trapped and isolated in the home. There was limited social support for women struggling with a heavy burden of childcare and housework (as is still the case today). If the husband was a high-earner the cage of domestic drudgery might be gilded, but it was still a cage. Friedan referred to the full-time housewives Page 3 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference who unaccountably appeared bored and disappointed despite their comfortable lifestyles as suffering from ‘the disease without a name'. Because husbands went out to work, they were seen to have the right to leisure after work, but, as Deem (1986) found in her study of leisure and gender in Milton Keynes, since domestic work never seems to end, married women had virtually no real leisure time. Men, of course, like Hochschild's respondents, find self-worth and identity at work, as was demonstrated in Cockburn's (1983, 1985, 1991) studies of the gendering of work. In particular, her study of printing workers (1983) revealed how the change of the printing process, from hot metal technology to computerized page setting, left the men feeling ‘emasculated’ with the loss of skills and their inability to fix their computers when they broke down. Under industrial capitalism, pride in being the ‘male breadwinner’ became a recompense for long, gruelling hours of work; and despite the prevalence of dual-earning households in the second half of the twentieth century, masculinity is still very bound up with breadwinning. Suicide rates among unemployed men are high. In terms of theory, many of these 1980s studies employed some form of Marxist analysis alongside their feminism. Hartmann's (1981) well-known account of the ‘unhappy marriage’ of feminism and Marxism was one of many attempts to theorize the interrelationship of capitalism and patriarchal domination; she argued that taking over concepts from Marxist analysis and trying to apply them to relations between the sexes meant that inevitably class was seen as more significant than gender, which tended to slide into the background. However, writers like Cavendish (1982) and Pollert (1981) explored carefully how class and gender came together to structure working-class women's lives. Capitalism and patriarchy were seen to combine to construct women as a cheap form of labour; profits for the owners were increased and men were able to maintain their dominance in the family because of their superior earnings. This partly explains men's resistance to allowing women to enter ‘their jobs'. Whatever women do tends to be devalued just because it is done by women. Depressingly, the tobacco workers studied by Pollert seemed to accept that men ‘deserved’ to earn more. It would take decades of feminist campaigning to change this attitude in any way at all. Long before Crenshaw (1989) coined the term ‘intersectionality', these studies were exploring the interrelation of class, gender, age and ethnicity in the factory workers’ experience. Pollert (1981) noted the age division among the workers in the tobacco factory. Young women viewed their jobs as just a temporary stage before getting married and having children, and their earnings as giving them access to a world of romance and consumer pleasures. The older women, who knew that a return to the factory to support household needs was the likely future for them, appeared, nonetheless, to allow the young to retain this illusion of freedom. The influential work of Glenn (1992) showed how in the United States class and gender intersected with race, especially in the context of the past history of slavery, to construct a view of African American women, along with other women of colour, as a suitable source of caring labour, an association that continues today (see Chapter 24). Another study of the interplay of ethnicity, class and gender in a specific context was Phizacklea's Unpacking the Fashion Industry (1990), a study of the garment industry in the Midlands of Britain. Restricted in their employment options by racism, male immigrants turned to self-employment. Little capital was needed to set up a small workshop to turn out cheap clothing. The men typically employed family members and relatives on low wages to operate machines; women had no option but to take these jobs, because they had come to the UK as dependants on their male relatives and often had limited language skills. Minority ethnic women are characteristically pushed the lowest position in occupational Page 4 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference hierarchies, working in private-sector care homes, as office cleaners or hotel maids. Two decades later Bridget Anderson's (2000) revealing study of domestic servants in the capital cities of France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain showed how migration rules and restrictions still continue to shape immigrant women's lives, trapping them as virtual slaves to exploitative employers. GENDERED WORK: SEXUAL DIVISIONS OF LABOUR These early case studies laid the ground for the study of gender and work for the next three decades. Since then a massive body of work, firmly grounded in empirical research but backed up by theoretical analysis, has accumulated, studying the processes of gendering. The work has been supported, at least during the 1980s and 1990s by what I termed a ‘climate of equality’ (Bradley 1998) symbolized and legitimized by the passing of various key pieces of legislation under the auspices of the European Union, following on from the passing of equalities legislation in the United States. Readers critical of the EU during the moment of eurosceptism that emerged as a result of the euro crisis in the 2000s should be aware of the crucial role of the EU in compelling member states to fall in line with its equality and diversity policies. Neoliberal capitalist employers freed from the constraints of the EU would be quick to shed equality machinery which they regard as blocks to profit accumulation and the free market. The key concepts to emerge from this epoch of study were the gender (and racial) segregation of work, the sex-typing of jobs, and the broader notion of gendering. Joan Acker (1990) provided a classic analysis of how the labour market, workplace and jobs were gendered. She argued that gendering was involved in the division of labour, including the construction of hierarchies, in which men took the top jobs, and the ‘sex-typing’ of jobs, typified as women's work or men's work. Gendering also was manifest in the symbols and imagery within organizations, alongside patterns and rituals of interaction. A particularly significant aspect of gendering lay in the way male and female bodies were differently valued in the workplace. Men were ‘at home’ in the workplace, women were intruders, often pushed into separate departments – ‘women's spaces’ like the typing pool or the beauty salon. In all these ways men and women, masculinities and femininities are marked out as different. Gendering, therefore, must be seen as an active and continuous process by which jobs as they are developed are associated with either women or men; this hardens out into the prevailing structure of the sexual division of labour. Through these processes masculine and feminine identities are affirmed and consolidated at work. As we spend so much of our time at work, workplaces are important sites of identity formation, though of course not the only ones. But they do have a strong effect on our adult selves. As Westwood (1984) stated, girls enter the factory and come out as women. The world of paid work into which young women of all classes enter is one marked by gender segregation, whether of a naked and obvious sort or something more subtle. It is orthodox to see it as having two dimensions (Hakim 1981). Horizontal segregation is the clustering of women and men into separate occupational categories (women are nurses and secretaries, men are bricklayers and drivers of heavy goods vehicles): as these job examples, plucked at random, show it is usually easier for men to insert themselves into jobs seen as ‘women's work’ than for women to move into male specialisms. Table 5.1 shows the concentration of women and men in the UK in broad occupational categories in 2013. Although there are national variations in the precise jobs which are seen Page 5 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference as ‘men's’ and ‘women's’ work, roughly similar patterns would be displayed in most countries of the Global North. Table 5.1 Percentage share of employment of women and men by occupational categories in 2013 Percentage Men Women Managers and Senior Officials 66.9 33.1 Professional Occupations 50.3 49.7 Associate Professional and Technical Occupations 57.4 42.6 Administrative and Secretarial Occupations 23.4 76.6 Skilled Trades Occupations 90.0 10.0 Caring, Leisure and Other Service Occupations 18.0 82.0 Sales and Customer Service Occupations 37.3 62.7 Process, Plant and Machine Operatives 88.6 11.4 Elementary Occupations 54.3 45.7 Source: Labour Force Survey. The table shows the dominance of men in skilled trades (90%) and factory work (89%) while women are the clear majority in three sectors: caring and leisure services, retail and customer services, and secretarial and administrative jobs. The former two of these are notoriously poorly paid, with limited promotion chances. Gottfried (2013) provides figures for the US which show the concentration of women in a variety of caring occupations in 2010: 91% of registered nurses, 88% of home health aides, 89% of maids and cleaners, 95% of childcare workers, and 86% of home care aides. Women also make up over 80% of teachers and teacher assistants, secretaries, receptionists, bookkeepers and clerks. Page 6 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference Although the proportions of women and men in the professional groupings are shown as roughly equal in Table 5.1, we know that men tend to dominate in the better-paid professions. Moreover, if we move to more precise job categories, segregation becomes more marked. As the table shows, male-dominated sectors show higher degrees of segregation. This is partly because, as noted earlier, men themselves often jealously protect these areas from female entrants through exclusionary practices (Walby 1990; Witz 1992). Kanter's classic study of the corporate world (1977) showed how male bonding, what she termed ‘homosociality', was disrupted by female presences. Male surveyors in Addison's study of universities (2014) told her how they had to tone down their banter and stop swearing when women joined their unit. Women who take on ‘men's work’ may often find themselves the victims of harassment and bullying (Bradley, 1998). Male preference for working with their own sex is also a factor in the vertical dimension of gender segregation, the clustering of women in the lower posts in occupational pyramids and male domination of the top posts. Thus, for example, Eagly and Carli reported in 2007 that in the largest 50 corporations in the EU women made up only 4% of CEOs and 11% of top executives. As was argued in Men's Work, Women's Work (Bradley 1989), while the structure of gender segregation shifts, accompanying both technological and sectoral developments and broader processes of socio-economic and cultural change, what remains constant is that there is such a structure. Maria Charles (2003) has explored this in comparative perspective, revealing its worldwide persistence. In her work with Karen Bradley she studies the link of labour market segregation with educational choice of disciplines in 44 countries at various levels of development, noting the dominance of men in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in all countries. Charles and Bradley note that the degree of segregation in these subjects is higher in the more developed countries. They explain these findings in terms of the greater stress put on individual freedom and self-expression within Western values, which inform career choice; this is backed by the strength of enduring cultural beliefs which they describe as ‘gender essentialist ideology’ (2009: 924). It may be that in other countries economic imperatives and concern for family well-being may lead women into technical arenas. For example, in Malaysia many women choose to study engineering. However, there are structural as well as cultural factors at play: thus in Malaysia women end up within the engineering industry in administrative not technical or on-site roles, because travel and work on site are not seen as compatible with women's ascribed cultural roles and responsibility for the home (Rokis 2004). Horizontal gender segregation tends to be most marked in the lower-levels of the social class structure, especially in manual and craft skills. All-male and all-female specialties are less evident in the service sector, where women's employment is anyway prevalent. Women and men tend to work together in schools, offices and hospitals, though vertical segregation is still evident. Crompton and Sanderson (1990), however, developed the idea of ‘gendered niches’ to account for the more subtle forms of segregation in the professions. Witz (1992), in her rich account of the development of the professions, used a Weberian analysis of different forms of ‘social closure'; over time outright exclusionary tactics gave way to job segregation as men secured the most prized specialisms for themselves. For example, in medicine men tend to be surgeons and hospital consultants, while women tend to be GPs and paediatricians. In the legal professions women go for family law, men for corporate law and criminal law. Female students and recruits in these areas still quickly become aware of subtle processes of channelling as they come into contact with professionals, many of whom use tactics such as sexual harassment, sexist jokes and patronizing statements to undermine their selfconfidence and sense of competency. Page 7 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference Nonetheless, apart from the manual trades which are still highly segregated, the boundaries between men's and women's work can be seen to have gradually eroded over the decades since the 1980s, as part of the general worldwide increase in the proportion of women entering paid employment. This trend has been described as the ‘feminization of (paid) work’ (unaccompanied by quite such an influx of men into unpaid work!). Bradley et al. (2000) distinguished three aspects to feminization: the proportional increase of women in the labour force; the growth in post-industrial societies of service jobs seen as more suitable for women, and the transformation of work tasks with greater demand for ‘soft skills’ and customer-facing activities, which women were considered to possess to a greater degree than men. In addition, the current global trend of informalization of labour, with both men and women increasingly forced into insecure labour, is making the conditions of work for men closer to those historically experienced by women. Labour force statistics for the UK illustrate these trends. Over the past decades there has been a rise in the percentage of women aged 16 to 64 who are in employment and a fall in the percentage of men. In June 2013 67% of women aged 16 to 64 were in work, an increase from 53% in 1971. For men the percentage fell to 76% in 2013 from 92% in 1971. However, it is important to note that nearly half these women worked part-time hours (42% as opposed to only 12% of men (ONS, 2013)). This is a worldwide trend. Might feminization be slowly bringing an end to segregation and the sex-typing of jobs? Segregation is notoriously difficult to measure over time, given that the nature of occupations and jobs continuously evolves. By and large studies suggest that there has been a degree of desegregation over the past decades but that it is mainly due to the decline of ‘traditional’ male jobs. A study of segregation in Denmark by Emerek revealed that in both 1997 and 2003 less than 25% of both women and men worked in ‘mixed’ jobs (where women make up 40– 60% of employees), and 30% of each sex held male or female-dominated jobs (where 80% of the jobs were held respectively by men and by women) (Emerek 2006). When one digs down into job specificity and content, the degree of segregation will characteristically increase. A good example is Bergman's analysis of a seemingly ‘integrated’ organization: a Swedish university. While in terms of formal position in the hierarchy nearly half of women and threequarters of men worked in mixed occupations, at the level of jobs the figures shrunk to around a third for each sex and at department level only a quarter were working in integrated areas (Bergman 2006). We may conclude from this that gender segregation, although less stark than in the past or in many countries of the Global South, is quite persistent and that, by and large, men and women tend to do different things in their workplaces. One way that the tasks performed by the sexes differ is that women are more often involved in jobs characterized by what Arlie Hochschild (1983) termed ‘emotional labour’ in her classic study of air hostesses. This refers to the requirements of many customer-facing and caring jobs. As well as performing practical tasks for customers and clients, the worker is expected to make them feel comfortable and offer appropriate emotional support and reassurance. To do this employees have to learn to handle and restrain their own emotions, in effect putting on a false self. In her analysis of this ‘emotion work’ which the employee must learn to carry out Hochschild distinguished between surface acting and ‘deep’ acting, when the assumed behaviour becomes a permanent aspect of one's self. Emotional labour is often closely associated with ‘body work', which has been studied notably by Wolkowitz (2006; Wolkowitz et al. 2013). The work of beauticians, therapists, masseurs, nurses, sports coaches and others often involves close and intimate contact with the bodies of Page 8 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference clients and customers. Such work is often performed by women, as this is deemed to guard against inappropriate sexual meanings being imputed to the performance of the body task. Wolkowitz argues that such work is on the increase in contemporary capitalism, partly because of the importance of branding and also because of the cultural value increasingly put on beauty and ‘fitness’ by ordinary men and women. It is instructive that in common parlance among young people ‘fit’ means both healthy and good-looking. Gimlin (2007) notes that although the various forms of body work are on the increase, they can carry stigma because of the associations with sexuality (the connection of massage with ‘massage parlours’ and prostitution is an obvious link) and with the waste products of the body. Thus people who perform such maintenance work on other people are often low-paid and female. Here we see how age and class intersect with gender, because, for example, those who perform beauty therapy for celebrities are well rewarded, while the most stigmatized form of body work is probably the care of the elderly. Indeed, domiciliary carers and cleaners, for example, are seen as being at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy because of the jobs’ image of ‘dirty work', and because the skills involved are seen as ‘natural’ to women and thus as holding less social value than those forms of skill acquired through training, such as technical (and largely male) skills. Shildrick et al. (2012), in their study of employment in Teesside, report the manager of a café telling them ‘all the staff are women, obviously … they are better at cleaning and cooking’ (2012: 72). Yet as work by Hebson (2013), Hayes (2013) and others has shown, many of the women who look after old people love their work and take pride in performing it well, often going the extra mile to help out their clients, despite the terrible pay. Nishikawa and Tanaka (2009), looking at care workers in Japan, posit the idea that care workers are, in effect, knowledge workers, drawing on a range of tacit and learned skills. This is a prime example of the continued devaluation of a job, just because it is performed by women. SEX AND IDENTITY AT WORK: POSTMODERN EXPLORATIONS? The rise in body work along with increased consumerism have had important impacts on employers’ usage of labour. Increasingly recruitment, particularly of young women and men, is based not just on skills and qualifications but on appearance and sexuality (Adkins 1996). This is particularly the case in the hospitality and leisure industry, in which, as noted above, women predominate. The waitresses in the American restaurant chain, Hooters, exemplify this trend, being required to wear skimpy revealing costumes and flirt with the male customers. To avoid charges under equality legislation, the young women are obliged to sign a disclaimer in their contract that they accept these conditions as part of their work. Similarly studies of female airline attendants by Hochschild and others reported that they were carefully scrutinized over their appearance, make-up and hairstyles, and even monitored for weight. Thus, labour becomes aestheticized and sexualized (Witz et al. 2003). This suggests an interesting shift in the nature of gendered work in recent decades. Indeed, here was a curious homology between the development of western economies in the late twentieth century and developments in the study of gender and work. Theorists of capitalism such as Ray and Sayer (1999) and Du Gay (1996) argued that there was a degree to which culture had become more embedded in the economy: cultural and creative industries were becoming more dominant and corporations were more concerned with brand and image. The mass markets were becoming more individualized and concerned with style and differentiation. At the same time sociology took a ‘cultural turn’ under the influence of postmodern and post-structural thinking. This led to new interests in the study of work; attention turned from material factors to an interest in work cultures, identities of masculinity Page 9 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference and femininity, embodiment, and sexuality. The studies discussed above were symptomatic of this shift. A key text in the study of class and identity was Beverley Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender (1997). Using concepts drawn from Bourdieu, Skeggs showed how young workingclass women training as care workers distinguished themselves from ‘the poor’ or, as she put it, ‘disidentified’ from their working-classness by affirming their respectability in their dress and behaviour. A recent study by Addison (2014) also uses a Bourdieusian framework to explore how people learn to ‘play the game’ if they are to thrive in the workplace; in her study of workers in universities she again observed how people sought to conform to norms of respectability in dress, language and demeanour in order to avoid seeming like ‘a fish out of water'. Others have studied the range of subjectivities and identities available to women. Another important study dealing with some of these themes was McDowell's research into women working in the city. McDowell pointed out that female bodies presented themselves as the ‘other', intruding into a male world. These bodies were seen as ‘leaky’ and dangerous, bringing sexual temptation into the workplace; women menstruate, women are emotional and shed tears. Thus the women in her study had to tread a fine line in choosing what to wear for work each day: there was no standard uniform of suit and tie as there was for men. Wearing trousers was seen as aping masculinity and discouraged, but on the other hand women had to be careful about revealing too much flesh and appearing too fluffy and pretty. Women aspiring to managerial roles were counselled to wear navy or grey suits with pastel blouses (Kaye 2014). Male bodies are regarded as the norm and in order to be accepted women have to find acceptable modes of self-presentation and forms of femininity not perceived as too challenging. It is the same fine line young women students have to walk to avoid being labelled a slut or ‘dog’ on the one hand or unattractive, boring or a ‘dyke’ on the other. The point here is that femininity and female embodiment need constant effort, care and monitoring, while masculinity is an unthinking ‘default’ identity. That this identity work is an ongoing progress is nicely expressed in this statement from McDowell: Men and women do not come to work with their gender attributes fixed in place but rather ‘do’ gender in the workplace, inscribing gendered characteristics on the body in ways which conform to or transgress accepted patterns of behaviour. (McDowell 1997: 133) While McDowell's respondents struggled with these issues, a happier spin was put on sexuality at work by Halford et al. (1997). They argued that the expression of heterosexuality at work, within appropriate limits, was actually welcomed by managers as improving employee morale. The managers believed that the stimulation provided by the presence of the other sex in the workplace encouraged teams to work harder and more creatively. The introduction of mixed working groups can thus be seen as a form of control of workers, one that humanizes the workplace and thereby promotes compliance. However, this development of working environments as sites of heteronormativity brings problems with it. Although, as the quotation above from McDowell stresses, it is also possible for employees to demonstrate transgressive forms of behaviour, it is very difficult for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people to ‘out’ themselves at work without experiencing stigma and discrimination; which is widely reported, for example in a cross-European survey by the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA 2013). Moreover, Hearn and Parkin (2001) show that high levels of sexual harassment and, in some environments such as the armed forces, extreme forms of sexual violence such as rape, are the consequences of the sexualization of work. Page 10 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference This period of research into gender then drew upon ideas of the ‘culturization of work’ (Du Gay 1996; Strangleman and Warren 2008), turning away from the more economic aspects of work to study identities, sexualities and embodiment as key features of the gendering of employment relations. Workplaces were viewed as active sites of identity construction, where prevalent discourses of femininity and masculinity shaped patterns of behaviour of female and male employees, encouraging conformity and emphasizing the difference and separation of the genders (Whitehead 2002). In such processes, views of appropriate masculine and feminine attributes may subtly alter, as dominant groups seek to maintain their power positions in the hierarchy. Thus Wacjman (1988) noted that in the face of the feminization of jobs, men were taking steps to be seen to acquire and deploy ‘soft skills', while women may have to adopt masculine attitudes such as workaholism, toughness and ruthlessness if they are to succeed in a male world. There is a double bind here, though as noted by Arianna Huffington commenting on the case of Jill Abramson, who was sacked as editor of the New York Times: There's no question that the language being used – that she was ‘brash', ‘abrasive’ these are words used almost exclusively about women. Men tend to be ‘driven’ and ‘authoritative'. There's no doubt that there is a double standard for women at the top. (Interview in the Guardian, 2 June 2014) Like many other women who gain positions of power and authority, Huffington was frequently told that she was ‘difficult'. A classic example is that of Hillary Clinton who was perpetually defamed and criticized in the press because she did not conform to the standard view of how a president's wife should behave, present herself and be dressed. GENDER AND RECESSION: ‘LA LUTTE CONTINUE' One notable element of some of these discussions emerging from the post-structural and cultural turn in feminist thinking was an assumption – sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit – that the problems of gender inequality and disadvantage, at least in their more obvious forms, were diminishing and that patriarchal attitudes were in retreat. As Bea Campbell puts it: In the twenty-first century the prevailing faith is that the age of patriarchy is over, the world's institutions have given up on it; women are winning and feminism, therefore, is passé; and if women aren't there yet then it is only a matter of evolution. (2013: 2– 3) Certainly in the late 1990s and early 2000s female students often informed me that ‘we're all equal now'. Linked to this was the notion of post-feminism: the opening up of the labour market to women, their academic achievement and the outstripping of boys by girls in school examinations (a European-wide phenomenon), while the rise of dual-earning families and joint parenting practices was seen to signal the end of economic inequality between the sexes. Even Sylvia Walby, in general no friend to postmodernism and post-structuralism, seems with hindsight to have taken an over-optimistic view in documenting the switch away from a domestic gender regime so that most women were able to work for wages rather having the obligation to see mothering and housework as their main or only tasks in life (Walby 1997). In the twenty-first century this optimism seems misplaced. As was argued in Myths at Work (Bradley et al. 2000), the feminization of the labour force did not mean an end to gender segregation, either vertical or horizontal. Looking back, the achievement of second-wave feminism was to help well-qualified middle- and upper-class women fight their way into Page 11 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference management roles and make some headway into the elite, traditionally male-dominated, professions, though not to the very top. It did little for working-class women, as manual work remained highly segregated by gender and jobs in the bottom end of the service sector, such as retail and private care, remained poorly rewarded with limited promotion chances. Above all, there has been no re-evaluation of care and reproductive work. In their book Hard Times, Tom Clark and Anthony Heath (2014) note how inflation over the period of austerity in the UK (especially the rise in the prices of food, energy and petrol) affects not only the poor, but people in the middle ranges of society. An example they cite is Maria, a mother working full-time, who lives in Cricklewood in London. Her earnings give her £1,400 a month; her rent is £1,385. That leaves her just £15 per month. In the school holidays childcare costs her £28 a day. Childcare in the UK is the most expensive in Europe. The National Childcare Trust reckons that a couple with two children will have to pay around £7,500 per year for childcare. Women like Maria can only survive by means of child tax credits: even those have recently been cut. In the run-up to the current UK election, Chancellor George Osborne spoke of freezing tax credits and benefits for more years: a terrible blow for lone mothers and mothers in poor working households. No wonder many women yearn for the kind of state involvement in universal childcare provision provided in the Nordic countries. In Sweden the cost of childcare for each child at a subsidized nursery is about £113 a month. At the higher end of the social ladder, even the most privileged and well-qualified middleclass women can find it hard to access and to retain the highest-level jobs – the recent cases of Jill Abramson, noted above, and of April McMahon – Vice Chancellor of Aberystwyth University, who was subject to online petitions for her resignation, show the troubles women face when they reach positions of power. Decisive and authoritarian behaviour, typical of many male CEOs, is not seen as acceptable in women. Meanwhile many women (including myself) have been told they are too soft and emotional to take top jobs: the persistent double bind. Moreover, the long-hours culture which afflicts the corporate world in many countries, especially the UK and the US, deters women with children from seeking top jobs, as do the increasing demands of intensive contemporary motherhood: the school runs, the ferrying of children to after-school activities and the schools’ demands for parental (usually maternal) involvement (Lareau 2003). We can state, then, that women remain in the lower echelons of the division of labour and above all are constrained in their choices by the continuation of the ‘dual burden'. Despite men as fathers showing greater commitment to engaging with their children and sharing in parenting, in the majority of households in every country in the world women bear the major responsibility for domestic labour, both childcare and housework. Oriel Sullivan and Jonathon Gershuny have been studying domestic work using time use data for many years. Their studies show that from the 1970s to the 2000s in the UK, the time when women were moving into paid work, men's contribution to the daily chores of housework – cooking and cleaning – increased at the rate of about one minute per day per year (Gershuny and Kan 2012; Sullivan 2000), although the gap between women's and men's contribution is decreasing. Table 5.2 highlights the disparities in women's and men's daily input into domestic labour and childcare. Table 5.2 Daily contributions of men and women to domestic labour at different time periods Year Page 12 of 23 Women: average minutes daily Men: average minutes daily The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at Housework 1975 197 20 Housework 2004 146 53 Childcare 1970s 26 10 Childcare 2000s 42 17 SAGE Reference Source: compiled from Campbell (2013), drawing on the work of Gershuny, Sullivan and Kan. If the housework gap is narrowing, the situation around childcare is stark (the lower overall times for childcare reflect the fact that not everybody has children). Not only do men do less than women, but women's daily input has increased since the 1970s, reflecting issues discussed earlier (the cost of childcare, the rise of intensive mothering). This, of course, continues to restrict women's labour market participation and progress. Budig and England (2001) found that the wage penalty for motherhood in the USA was 7%. This has subsequent effects on both pensions and promotion chances. When women have children they step off the career ladder while men continue to climb; and women returners may find themselves setting their feet back on a lower step. A recent survey in Australia revealed that a third of women reported having experienced depression after childbirth (Campbell 2014). An interesting study by Paula Nicolson (1998) on post-natal depression analysed the ‘baby blues’ in terms of loss of identity and potential. The mothers experienced a shift in selfhood, often compared to an earthquake. While mothers stop paid work all together or, characteristically, move to part-time jobs, the counter-tendency is for men to take on more working hours, working overtime to ensure the family has enough for its increased needs (ONS 2013). It is reported that 70% of fathers employed in the City of London work 10-hour days, meaning both that women find it hard to take such jobs and that fathers can have minimal involvement in childcare (Campbell 2013). The earthquake for men is more like a tremor! All these trends, which persisted through the 1990s and into the 2000s were intensified by the world recession of 2008, which can be said to have made gender equality one of its many casualties, as was the case in earlier recessions (Edgell and Duke 1983) Interestingly, in both the US and the UK there was initial talk of a ‘he-cession’ as the first casualties were men in the hard-hit financial and construction sectors (Gottfried 2013). However, while male employment rallied with the slow economic recovery, in the longer run women suffered more greatly. The Fawcett Society, which lobbies for women's rights in the UK, described it as a ‘triple whammy'. First, the slashing of jobs in the public sector as part of the austerity regime meant that many women lost decent well-paid jobs, and were forced into unemployment or into insecure, badly paid work. Second, welfare benefits were cut, leaving disadvantaged women struggling to maintain their families (witness the massive spread in food banks in the UK). Third, many state-run and voluntary-sector services and schemes designed to bridge the gap between poor families and the world of work were axed, depriving more women of jobs and cutting off other forms of support. Widespread youth unemployment, even among graduates, has increased the numbers of young adults remaining in the family home post- Page 13 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference education, adding to the burden of domestic work for mothers. Arguably the erosion of equal opportunities can be seen in the longer context of the rise of neoliberal forms of capitalism (Walby 2011). The ideology of freeing up the market has unleashed a ruthlessly competitive form of corporate strategizing, involving the shedding of secure jobs and their replacement with insecure jobs such as the infamous ‘zero-hour contracts'. The auguries for women are worrying. In the academic sector in the UK, universities are targeting older workers in non-professorial posts for redundancies and voluntary severance, replacing them with armies of temporary workers on fixed-term contracts and hourly pay rates. In the retail sector, a major employer of women, automatic tills are replacing female cashiers, and the giant supermarket chain Asda (Walmart's UK operation) announced in 2014 that it was intending to restructure, cutting out numbers of middlemanagement jobs, many of which will be held by women – supervisory and lowermanagement roles in retail have been one area where traditionally women without higher qualifications can climb up internal career ladders and gain reasonable salaries. In the UK the privatization of domiciliary care for the elderly deprived numerous women of local authority jobs with good pay and conditions. Private care companies do not pay for travel costs or waiting time, pushing the real wages of their employees below the level of the minimum wage, which stood at £6.31 per hour in 2014 in the UK for those aged over 21. These changes are legitimated by a liberal ideology of meritocracy which justifies increased pay differentials in terms of market needs and the ‘war for talent'. The obscenely high bonuses paid to top bankers are a notable example, but this process also contributes to the continued undervaluation of work performed by working-class people and women, as noted by McDowell: The shift from ‘brawn’ to ‘brain’ jobs, for example, is celebrated in the contemporary vision of a knowledge-based economy, where the trivial daily tasks of servicing the economy are ignored. (McDowell 2009) The outlook for women in the post-recession recovery, then, seems bleak: the loss of decent jobs and the rise of insecure contracts push many of them into the precariat. This is the concept developed by Standing (2011) to describe the worldwide phenomenon of people trapped in episodes of insecure low-paid employment. Shildrick et al. define the precariat as ‘both the working poor and the insecurely employed, but most importantly [those who] lack a secure work-based identity normally associated with building a “career” and belonging to an occupational community’ (2012: 25). However, Shildrick et al. dissent from Standing's view that this leads to psychological deterioration and loss of the work ethic. They note that people who lose better-paid more skilled work are being ‘bumped down’ into low-paid insecure jobs. It has been noted in this chapter that attacks on welfare and the public sector and education mean that many of these are women, who retain their commitment to employment. Moreover it can be argued that in certain sectors skilled work, too, has been subjected to precarity; examples are digital media and computing and, notably, academia, which in the UK has the second-largest proportion of temporary workers after the hospitality industry (Bradley 2014). The precariat, then, is a rather different proposition to the former related groupings, such as the ‘lumpenproletariat’ or ‘underclass'. Indeed, Standing has recently argued that new forms of oppositional politics may spring from the precariat. However, membership of it is stressful and exhausting and particularly for those also bearing responsibility for caring for children. GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF GENDER The precariat as described by Standing is a global phenomenon, and in the poorer countries Page 14 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference women are strongly over-represented among its ranks of the casualized and temporarily employed. Indeed, many aspects of gendering of work are fairly universal. However, as has been emphasized throughout this chapter, contexts – economic, political and ideological – are extremely important. Globalization provides the context for the next phase of the gendering of work and is therefore an important topic for the new generation of feminist researchers, sometimes referred to as the third wave (Gottfried 2013). The study of globalization has in the past been led by male theorists (for example, Jameson 2000; Robertson 1992) and has not necessarily been gender sensitive. There is a need, then, for ‘putting gender at the centre of considerations of globalization’ (Basu et al. 2001: 994). Acker (2004) argues that the conditions of globalization appear to strengthen male domination of women in both the spheres of production and reproduction. This can be linked to Connell's (2007) analysis of how globalizing hegemonic masculinities are developing as a result of the current global configuration. He points to the emergence of the heroic colonizer as a key figure in the imperial epoch: marked by a ruthless individualism but also with a view of paternalistic responsibility for dominated groups, be it colonial subjects, women or children. By contrast the new hegemonic figure is the transnational business leader: equally individualistic but with a commitment to apparently rational business practice and economic imperatives that take no account of the well-being of the dominated, and may even condone violence as necessary. The snatching of young rural women in South-East Asia to work in factories or in the sex industry springs to mind. These are powerful arguments but perhaps may oversimplify the complexities of global relationships (Williams et al. 2013). There are differences in the sexual division of labour around the world, resulting from levels of economic development and, particularly, from religious beliefs and political configurations. This final section will give a necessarily brief overview of some of those differences. In almost every country there has been an increase in women's employment over the past years (Perrons 2004). However, the level of participation is highly variable as Table 5.3 shows. These figures do need to be treated with some scepticism as the methods of recording work are likely to vary from country to country. Much of women's work in the Global South is invisible, carried out as family labour, on the farm or in the home, or in the informal sectors. Street vendors of produce (craft and agricultural) and of street food, peddlers and market traders are another category which may not be recorded. Nonetheless, the figures, even if not totally accurate for each country, reflect a major range of differences in women's involvement in the public economy. The countries with the lowest participation rates are Arab and Muslim countries where traditional values prohibit women working alongside men who are not family members and where women are largely excluded from the public sphere. Table 5.3Female labour market participation (economic activity) rates in selected countries, 2012 (female population aged 15+) Page 15 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference Another country where there is low female participation is South Korea, which is discussed by Beatrix Campbell (2013) as an example of women's oppression in the global context. Like other East Asian societies, and some Mediterranean countries, the culture has a very traditional stance on women, who are seen as fitted for domesticity and care of their families. Three-quarters of married women do not work and among those that do the gender pay gap is 38%. Campbell states that 70% of women workers are in precarious work. In this society women remain highly dependent on men and this is a major problem where women do not have free access into the labour market. It means that women are highly vulnerable to violence and abuse. Along with social conservatism, religion (in the Korean case Confucianism) may possibly be implicated in the denial of paid work to women. In the areas of Iraq and Syria dominated by Islamic State, young women enticed from the US, UK and Europe to join in building a new society based on a strict version of Islamic values find themselves confined to household duties as ‘jihadi brides’ (Khaleeli 2014). In many countries women's work is primarily either contained within the home o r i n agriculture. Twice as many women as men work in agriculture in the Global South. Momsen (2009) describes the typical patterns of the sexual division of labour. Men tend to do the heavy work such as land preparation, and herding of animals which involves moving distances from home and driving cattle or goats; while women do repetitive work for example, weeding or planting, take care of smaller animals and tend market gardens. In Africa women in subsistence farming are responsible for fetching water and fuel. These patterns reinforce women's identification with the home (Bradley 1989) and as secondary labour to men as primary farmers. As farming becomes modernized, men take command of the machinery such as tractors and harvesters. However, when men leave the farm to look for work in towns, or travel abroad for better economic opportunities, women may take charge of the farm and carry out some of the heavier tasks. In countries such as China where modernization and globalization have been accompanied by a growth in female participation and a move from agricultural and informal work into industrial work, the situation is rather different but still highly exploitative. Women are employed on low wages and in poor, often dangerous conditions, such as in the factories of Foxconn, where Apple products are produced. In such organizations women from rural backgrounds are often virtual prisoners, sleeping in cramped dormitories on the factory premises. The treatment of these typically young women is reminiscent of the way women and children were utilized in Page 16 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference the transitions to industrialism in the Global North. Lee (2007) explores the way young women from rural parts of China are drawn to the cities and trained to become effective service workers in the ‘modern’ sectors of the economy, employed as nannies, waitresses, hostesses, beauticians, and so on. However, these young migrant women are, Lee shows, only paid about half a standard urban wage. Particularly notorious in this respect are the maquiladoras of Mexico where cheap clothes for the export market are produced by armies of women. These factories were located near the border with the United States to mop up the flood of illegal migrants from Latin America. Women are forced into these unpleasant jobs in order to help support their families and pay for their children's education (Williams et al. 2013). Salzinger's case study of the maquiladoras (2003) highlights the way that young women are presented as the ideal source of sweated labour in these factories, mirroring Lee's account of China. As happened also in the phase of early industrialization, globalization constructs a model of ‘productive femininity'. Proponents of globalization point to the way that the current phase of economic development has promoted world tourism, alongside new and increased flows of labour migration. These trends have consequences for women as workers. In many countries of the Global South opportunities open up for women in hotels and restaurants and, less pleasantly, young women are lured into the sex tourism industry, often by initial promises of bar work in the big city. Meanwhile migration, which in the decades after the Second World War during the era of industrial reconstruction typically involved male workers later joined by their families, has increasingly been feminized, with women comprising an estimated 49% of international migrants. Rather than migrating as part of a process of family reunification, many such women are moving as independents seeking better forms of employment. One factor informing this trend is the phenomenon of global care chains, in which, typically, an impoverished mother in a developing country will hand over care of her own children to a daughter or relative while she moves to the city to act as a nanny for the children of another woman, who will go to Europe or the Americas to care for the children of middle- or upperclass women. Money then flows back from the migrant down the care chain (Hochschild 2000; Perrons 2004). Of course not all migrants are poor, or indeed from the Global South. Certain features of globalization, such as the right of EU citizens to work in member states, the development of global markets in higher education, or the movement of skilled IT workers from India to Silicon Valley, have encouraged the growth of a migrant labour force of skilled professionals often described as ‘cosmopolitans’ (Devadason 2010; Favell 2009). This highlights the complexities surrounding the gendering of jobs on a global scale. In some cases these processes appear to involve reinforcement of traditional gender roles (especially in terms of domesticity, reproduction and care), but on other occasions they challenge them by opening up new horizons for women from differing cultural backgrounds (Williams et al. 2013). It is therefore necessary to look specifically at the different contexts in which new forms of work are evolving. Currently the notion of intersectionality is increasingly being utilized in exploring how particular patterns of gendering are specific to people of different ages, ethnic backgrounds or religious groupings. The concept found popularity through the work of Crenshaw which studied how racial and gender dynamics intertwined in America to produce particular patterns of disadvantage for women of colour. It has subsequently been taken up by rights organizations in particular, and informs much current research. Page 17 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference A major contribution to the notion came from Leslie McCall (2005), who discerned three different strands, or methodological approaches, within the broad church of intersectional thinking. The anti-categorical approach was that of post-structuralists who sought to deconstruct the existing categories of analysis, such as ‘woman’ or ‘Black'. The second, intracategorical, approach was the more conventional modernist stance which saw the categories of inequality as having a real existence but wanted to explore divisions within them. Finally, the inter-categorial approach was espoused by McCall herself, who saw it as a halfway position between the other two: a critical engagement with the relationships between the groups in such a way as to challenge the categories. This approach is particularly interested in those who breach the existing categories, such as transgender people. Intersectionality has not been without its critics. One such is Nash (2008), who argues that the concept is vague, lacks a clear methodological procedure, is too focused on Black women as its quintessential subject and lacks evidence that it is a coherent account of women's experiences as agentic subjects. However, she states her aim is not to dismiss the concept but to refine it. In my own view, we should not treat it as a theory, but rather a perspective, a lens through which to view work relations and inequalities. One could argue that the concept of intersectionality was a way of incorporating the post-structuralist stress on difference into modernist theorization. Currently a feminist lens on gender and work is likely also to be an intersectional lens. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Beatrix Campbell has recently produced a manifesto, The End of Equality (2013) arguing that we are in a new epoch, that of ‘neo-liberal neopatriarchy'. While one might quibble with the term, I think she is right in her belief that we are seeing a return of patriarchal attitudes encouraged by the advocates of neoliberal capitalism, their hatred of the state and fetishism of the market. Perhaps stirred up by right-wing media and the trolls of social media, it seems that it is now becoming respectable to make derogatory remarks about women, ethnic minority citizens and LBGT people. Female medical students interviewed for a project, DARE, in Bristol reported that the kind of ‘everyday sexism’ uncovered by Laura Bates on her website of the same name (Bates 2014) was common in their hospital experience – persistent jokes, patronizing remarks, comments on their appearance, touching and so forth, which undermine women and mark them out as ‘other’ in the workplace. In this way powerful men continue to normalize the world of work as masculine. Despite gains made by women in many countries since the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, recent economic and political developments pose a real threat to that progress. Austerity has not been kind to women. But clearly the impact of austerity has been mediated by class and ethnicity. The widening gap between rich and poor is evident in many countries of the Global North (Piketty 2014). Women in the wealthiest social groups and who hold jobs high up in corporate structures are isolated from the impacts of the recession and austerity politics. But, given the increasingly demanding time arrangements of both paid labour and the labour of motherhood, most women today, apart from those rich enough to purchase full-time childcare, face what Banyard calls ‘the impossible choice of caring for her children or advancing her career’ (2010: 73). While equality and diversity legislation and policies are designed to make employment opportunities open to all, such apparent equality is, as Banyard points out, an illusion: employers are still wary of appointing young married woman who they suspect may become pregnant (requiring them to pay for maternity leave plus providing cover), while 300,000 women in the UK lose their jobs each year after pregnancy and childbirth (2010). Page 18 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference The mutual relationship between domestic and reproductive labour and paid work in the labour market continues to lie at the heart of gender inequalities; a useful approach to exploring this is Glucksmann's notion of the total social organization of labour. Glucksmann (1995) argues that work is not only carried out in the sphere of production, but in the spheres of reproduction and consumption, and we need to explore the complex linkages between the three. Thus, for example, women enter the labour market not as ‘free agents’ like men, but charged with responsibility for childcare (reproduction) and household maintenance (consumption). This is why women cannot compete equally with men. There can be no doubt that neoliberal policies, as Campbell forcefully argues, have not been favourable to the cause of gender equality, given the attacks on state welfare and the erosion of employee rights which characterize neoliberal political regimes. The strengthened support in the 2014 European elections for right-wing parties with anti-immigration policies suggest that an unfortunate side effect of austerity has been a recrudescence of racism and xenophobia. It is likely that ethnic minority women, given their clustering in publicly funded jobs will suffer particularly. While in the US the presidency of Barack Obama has perhaps meant that equality and diversity policies have not faced such an attack, the recent events in Ferguson (extensive rioting after the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager) show how strongly divided by race the nation remains. In addition, increasing competition for good jobs has been shaped by changes in many countries to retirement and pension rights as a result of the global phenomenon of ageing populations. Against this depressing picture, some positives can be gleaned by highlighting the actions of individuals and groups around the world protesting these trends, sometimes in the name of third-wave feminism, sometimes under the rubric of pro-democracy movements, with crowds setting themselves against the economic orthodoxies embraced by most political elites. A new generation of young feminist researchers is campaigning for women's rights, often using the intersectionality framework in their work. Within the Global South, NGOs and local women's groups continue to seek better employment openings for women. The effects of globalization may be seen as contradictory: the dominance of the transnational corporations, the ‘race to the bottom’ and the informalization of work push women into poverty and insecure jobs; but at the same time cultural and informational flows may encourage women to seek the openings they learn are available in other countries. The gendered nature of contemporary migration and its impacts both on individual women and their families is a fruitful area for further research. As the consequences of these seismic social shifts play themselves out, there will be continued need both for further detailed research into the gendering of work, informed by a sensitivity to intersections with class, ethnicity and age and contextualized in terms of neoliberal globalization, and for a vigorous feminist politics affirming the right of women to decent, well-paid jobs backed with Scandinavian-style state support for families’ caring needs. References Acker, J. (1990) ‘Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations'. Sociology, 23: 235–40. Acker, J. (2004) ‘Gender, capitalism and globalization'. Critical Sociology, 30(1): 17–58. Addison, M. (2014) Knowing how to ‘play the game’ at work: A study of class, gender and emotion work in Higher Education. PhD, University of Newcastle. Adkins, L. (1996) Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family and the Labour Market. Milton Keynes: Open University. 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(2012) Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay Britain. Bristol: The Policy Press. Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Spencer, A. and Podmore, D. (1987) In a Man's World. London: Tavistock. Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Strangleman, T. and Warren, T. (2008) Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis. Sullivan, O. (2000) ‘The division of domestic labour: Twenty years of change?' Sociology, 23(3): 437–56. Wacjman, J. (1988) Managing Like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate Management. Cambridge: Polity Walby, S. (1990) Patriarchy at Work. London: Blackwell. Walby, S. (1997) Gender Transformations. London: Routledge. Page 22 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment SAGE Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.Contact SAGE Publications at SAGE Reference Walby, S. (2011) The Future of Feminism. Cambridge: Polity. Warhurst, C. and Nickson, D. (2001) Looking Good and Sounding Right: Style Counselling in the New Economy. London: The Industrial Society. Westwood, S. (1984) All Day, Every Day. London: Pluto. Whitehead, S. (2002) Men and Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Williams, S., Bradley, H., Devadason, R. and Erickson, M. (2013) Globalization and Work. Cambridge: Polity. Witz, A. (1992) Professions and Patriarchy. London: Routledge. Witz, A., Warhurst, C. and Nickson, D. (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization'. Organization, 10(1): 32–54. Wolkowitz, J. (2006) Bodies at Work. London: Sage. Wolkowitz, J., Cohen, R., Sanders, T. and Hardy, K. (eds) (2013) Body/Sex/Work: Intimate, Embodied and Sexualised Labour. Basingstoke: Palgrave. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473915206.n5 Page 23 of 23 The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia Gender Gap Contributors: Jessica Looze & Michelle J. Budig Edited by: Vicki Smith Book Title: Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia Chapter Title: "Gender Gap" Pub. Date: 2013 Access Date: May 25, 2018 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc. City: Thousand Oaks Print ISBN: 9781452205069 Online ISBN: 9781452276199 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276199.n120 Print pages: 314-318 ©2013 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book. SAGE Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference The concept of the “gender gap” can refer to any systematic difference in women's and men's participation in, or rewards from, paid work. Gender gaps in human capital such as education or work experience, gender gaps in employment participation, and gender gaps in earnings are frequent objects of study. However, the gender gap that researchers and policy makers typically care about the most is the gender gap in earnings. This gap is often measured by comparing the median annual or weekly earnings of women and men who are employed full time, year round. In 2010, the gap in annual earnings was 23 percent (i.e., women earned 77 cents of every man's dollar). The gender gap has narrowed considerably since the early 20th century, yet disparities in women's and men's earnings persist. Moreover, this narrowing has not proceeded in a linear fashion, and the gap has occasionally increased. From the 1900s to the mid-1950s, the gender gap declined from 55 to 36 percent, where it remained until the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1990, the gap narrowed considerably, to 27 percent. This rapid narrowing was in part because of women's rising levels of education and labor market attachment, their movement into historically male-dominated occupations, and the growth of the service economy. Equally important, however, were wage losses for men, because of declines in manufacturing and unionized jobs, and a frozen minimum wage. The 1990s and 2000s brought smaller and uneven progress in reducing the gender gap. Since 2000, the gap has hovered around 23 percent. The size of the gender gap varies by racial-ethnic group, skill level, and age of workers. Intraracial gender gaps are smaller among blacks and Hispanics, compared to whites, partly because of the low earnings of black and Hispanic men. However, white women earned 78 cents of a white man's dollar in 2010, compared to black women's 62 cents and Latinas’ 54 cents. The gender gap is generally larger among highly educated, highskilled workers compared to less-educated, low-skilled workers. This is partly related to the “glass ceiling” effect, or the barriers that women face in moving into the highest positions in organizations. The gender gap is smaller among younger cohorts of workers than older cohorts. A young woman studies at the Pyongyang Embroidery Institute in North Korea in 2007. North Korea has one of the largest gender gaps; its policies and cultural norms support a male-breadwinner and female-caregiver family model. Page 2 of 8 Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia SAGE Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference Although this cohort difference partly reflects the increasing human capital of young women relative to young men, the gender gap grows as cohorts age because of gendered patterns of Page 3 of 8 Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia SAGE Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference balancing paid work and family. Explanations for the gender pay gap are often divided into individual and structural arguments. Individual-level explanations emphasize workers’ human capital, decisions about work and family, and compensating differentials. Structural explanations focus on organizations and labor markets, as well as the actions of individuals within these structures. However, individual and structural processes are reciprocal. Individual-Level Explanations Researchers estimate that gender differences in human capital account for 10 to 50 percent of the gender pay gap. Another quarter is attributable to gender differences in the rates of return to human capital characteristics. Human capital includes education, skills, and experience of the worker. The power of human capital explanations of the gender gap has declined over time because of women's increasingly continuous work histories and the recent reversal in favor of women in college completion. Yet, women still tend to earn different credentials from men: women's degrees emphasize humanities and arts, while men's emphasize physical sciences. Men's degrees often lead to higher-paying jobs. Parenthood and marriage have gendered consequences for labor-market outcomes. Men enjoy a wage premium for children, while women incur a wage penalty. Given the unequal division of household labor, mothers continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of child care and housework, and are more likely to reduce work hours for family reasons. Fathers rarely make these changes, and in fact, many men increase their work hours following the birth of a child. Married women whose husbands work long hours are especially likely to reduce their labor-market participation. Despite the rise of dual-earner couples, family decisions about spousal careers more often benefit the husband's career than the wife's. Women's greater family responsibilities may lead them to accept lower wages in exchange for “family-friendly” jobs. This trade-off, known as compensating differentials, is commonly invoked to help explain the gender gap, yet little support for this explanation exists. In fact, female-dominated jobs are often less accommodating to workers’ caregiving responsibilities, as they provide less autonomy, less flexibility, and less predictability in scheduling than do male-dominated jobs. In addition, the ability to work part time is perhaps one of the most family-friendly features of employment, yet because the gender gap is calculated among only those workers who work full time, yearround, part-time work among women does not explain the gender gap. Some scholars argue that women's job productivity is lower than men's because women may conserve energy for demands at home or be more distracted on the job by family responsibilities. Yet, most studies fail to find evidence of reduced work effort among women; in fact, studies suggest that women actually allocate more effort. However, even if women work as hard as men per unit of time, a gender gap in work hours exists such that men more often work 50 or more weekly hours. This is particularly true in the most highly paid occupations. Both family and employment shape men's and women's social networks in different ways, and this may contribute to the gender gap. Social networks are an important source of job information but are largely segregated by gender. In particular, women's social networks tend to have more repetitive ties among closely knit family and friends. However, loose ties across weakly linked networks, such as men tend to have, are more conducive to learning about employment opportunities. In addition, men's networks include more highstatus contacts than women's, connecting men to more advantageous job information and opportunities. Page 4 of 8 Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia SAGE Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference Structural Explanations Joan Acker developed a widely cited theory about how gendered assumptions are built into the structure of modern workplaces; these structures perpetuate the gender gap. Jobs assume and reward autonomous workers, or individuals with few demands outside those of the job. Men with a full-time homemaker wife most closely adhere to this ideal. For many women, this ideal is difficult to achieve. For professional and managerial women, long hours expected by employers, along with steep penalties for time away from the labor market, make combining paid work and family life difficult. For women in blue-collar jobs, rotating shifts and mandatory overtime can complicate childcare arrangements. Although accommodations aimed at easing the challenge of combining paid work with family responsibilities, such as flexible scheduling, telecommuting, and reduced hours of work, are becoming increasingly common in workplaces, individual women incur wage penalties for using these policies. A second way that organizations and their actors may contribute to the gender gap is through discriminatory practices. Although overt forms of gender discrimination are largely phenomena of the past, more subtle, often unconscious, forms of discrimination continue to shape employers’ decisions regarding hiring, job assignments, training opportunities, promotions, and compensation. Stereotypes surrounding men's and women's competence and commitment to work influence these decisions and contribute to the gender gap. Cultural beliefs about what is “appropriate” work for women and men lead to discrimination at the point of hire, as women are often tracked into lower-paying female jobs. These stereotypes may influence employers’ evaluations of workers’ performance on the job. If employers view men as better suited for particularly challenging tasks and assign these tasks accordingly, men are provided an opportunity to develop new skills, while women's skills stagnate. Over time, differences in opportunities provided to men and women cumulate into a substantial skill gap between men and women, widening the pay gap further. Discrimination appears particularly salient with regard to parenthood status. Cultural understandings of “good mothers” (who prioritize children over employment) are at odds with workplace demands, while cultural understandings of “good fathers” (who emphasize breadwinning over all else) align with workplace expectations. Audit studies find that childless women applicants are significantly more likely than equally qualified mothers to be called back for job interviews, are rated as more competent and committed to paid work, and are offered higher starting salaries. However, employers view fathers as the most dedicated and stable employees, most able to handle more challenging assignments, and more deserving of higher wages. Since most adult workers eventually become parents, these forms of discrimination may contribute to the enduring gender pay gap. Resulting from some combination of gender differences in educational fields, gendered social networks, and employer practices, job segregation by gender remains a persistent feature of the U.S. labor market. Gender segregation contributes to the gender gap because jobs with higher proportions of female workers provide lower wages, on average, than jobs with higher proportions of males, even when these jobs require equivalent skills. This disparity is believed to result in large part from a cultural devaluation of the kinds of work that women have traditionally done. Further, scholars have identified a “care penalty,” meaning that above and beyond the proportion of women in a given occupation, jobs that require caring for others pay less than jobs of similar skill levels that do not involve care. The care penalty is in large part because of the association of care with women and mothering, so that providing care is seen as something “natural,” rather than something deserving of compensation. The overrepresentation of Page 5 of 8 Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia SAGE Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference women among care workers may also contribute to the gender pay gap. The underrepresentation of women in management, particularly upper-level management, (the authority gap), is reflective of the “glass ceiling,” whereby even though it appears as though women today have equal opportunities as men to be successful in the workplace, largely invisible processes keep women from reaching the uppermost echelons of workplace authority and privilege. Women's underrepresentation in management matters because managers, especially upper-level managers, are often the key decision makers within firms. Women managers may be less likely to rely on stereotypes, and therefore make more favorable evaluations of other women than male managers. Women managers may also offer other women more access to networking and mentoring opportunities. Greater representation of women in management, particularly high-status management positions, has been linked to smaller gender pay gaps in organizations. Social closure theories argue that privileged groups create social and legal barriers that restrict access to the most desired resources and opportunities in order to preserve these for members of the group. Exclusionary practices within organizations, such as licensing, credentialing, certification, unionization, and association membership, work to raise the wages of particular jobs and ensure that these jobs are reserved for workers in the most privileged groups. These privileged groups may be employers, but oftentimes they are workers’ unions. Historically, unions represented the interests of white male workers and sought to exclude women and minority men from unionized occupations in an attempt to restrict the supply of workers and thereby drive up wages. Unions generally provide higher wages than nonunion jobs, and white men are both overrepresented in unionized jobs and hold more positions of authority in unions. Although women workers are increasingly unionizing, much to their benefit (e.g., unionized childcare workers are paid much higher wages than their nonunionized peers), the legacy of social closure practices by unions controlled by white males continues to contribute to the gender gap. Although female employment rates have risen and gender gaps have narrowed in most industrialized nations, a gender gap in favor of men is found in virtually all countries. Among industrialized nations, the gender gap is largest in Korea, Japan, Germany, and Austria, all of which have strong cultural norms and social policies supporting a male-breadwinner and female-caregiver family model. The pay gap is the smallest in the Nordic countries and several post-socialist countries, including Hungary, Slovenia, and Poland. These countries all have more compressed wage structures (less overall income inequality) and current or former strong policies supporting women's employment and socializing the care of children. Comparative studies of work-family reconciliation polices and wage disparities find that policies encouraging women to take extended parental care leaves or offer family allowances for caregiving tend to increase pay gaps, whereas policies supporting public subsidization of child care and shorter, highly paid maternity leaves are associated with smaller gaps. In addition to wage structures and social policies, researchers also find that the extent of collective bargaining in a country is significantly related to the size of its gender pay gap. Closing the Gender Gap Legislative efforts aimed at closing the U.S. gender gap were first implemented with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which required men and women employed in the same workplace to be paid equally for equal work, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made race and sex discrimination illegal in employment, including recruitment, hiring, pay and compensation, Page 6 of 8 Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia SAGE Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference assignment, training, and promotion. Title VII also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce the law. The EEOC expanded the definition of sex discrimination to include pregnancy. This ultimately resulted in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and paved the way for federally mandated maternity leave policies. Litigation under Title VII has provided compensation to individuals who experienced discrimination and has worked to change workplace policies and practices to create a less discriminatory work environment. Efforts to lessen and prevent discrimination in the workplace, referred to as affirmative action, include changes such as formalizing recruitment strategies, job evaluations, and training opportunities. Though it is difficult to disentangle the effects of affirmative action from those of antidiscrimination legislation and women's human capital gains made since the passage of Title VII, affirmative action has played a role in reducing occupational gender segregation and increasing women's representation in management, thus helping narrow the gender gap. Whereas affirmative action programs, now highly contested, aimed to reduce gender and racial segregation in male- and white-dominated jobs and industries, an alternative policy approach attempted to elevate the pay of jobs largely dominated by women. The Civil Rights Act prohibits sex discrimination in pay only when men and women are performing the same job. Given the high degree of sex segregation in the U.S. labor market, men and women are often not performing the same jobs but nevertheless are performing jobs that require similar skills and effort. In light of the devaluation of “feminine” skills, jobs primarily held by women are paid less than jobs primarily held by men, even when what is required of the worker is comparable. Efforts such as comparable worth, or pay equity, have advocated for the use of gender-neutral job evaluations in order to eliminate this gender bias inherent in wage setting. These efforts have been largely unsuccessful, however, because U.S. courts have predominantly been persuaded by business owners’ arguments that wages must be determined by the market. Recent efforts at closing the gender gap have made little progress. In January 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, lengthening the statute of limitations for filing an equal pay lawsuit. This fueled optimism that legislative attempts to further reduce the gender gap might gain traction. Yet, efforts such as the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would enable workers to disclo...
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Running head: EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE

Equality in the Workplace
Name
Institution

1

EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE

2

Equality in the Workplace- Gender
To: The Chief Executive Officer
From: The Senior Manager
Date: May 26, 2018
Subject: Equality in the Workplace- Gender
The purpose of this memo is to address a few gender issues happening in the
organization. A few female employees have raised the issue of a gender gap in the company, to
the human resource department. Their major concern is the inequality of gender in recruitment,
job promotion, and remuneration. The female employees are in a plea for the organization to
consider the contribution of women since they have an equal impact on the male workers. After
conducting an employee assessment, various issues were identified.
The ratio of women to men who hold senior positions such as managers, supervisors, and
directors is 1:6. This proportion is greatly biased, yet the employees` record shows more
potential for other junior subordinate women who have the right experience and educational
qualification, that can place them at higher positions in the organization (Looze, 2013).
Secondly, the employment reco...


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