Gender And Employment Essay Research Paper GENDER

Gender And Employment Essay, Research Paper

GENDER AND EMPLOYMENT

The debate about the relative significance of gender has been important to the understanding of structural force in people s lives. The meaning of place has to be incorporated into this understanding for us to fully appreciate the ways in which these structural forces work. There is a need to make a distinction, also between women and men concerning their perceptions and roles within the workforce in today s contemporary society.

The distinction between sex and gender made popular in Britain by Oakley, that sex relates to the biological division whereas gender relates to the parallel and socially unequal division into femininity and masculinity (Oakley, 1972:128-57, 1981:41-62) has been extremely useful both politically and theoretically. It allowed the development of thinking that stressed the social rather than the biological determinants of a wide range of behaviours and enabled an oppositional stance to biologisms that attempted to tie women to subordinate positions on account of largely immutable biology. The influence of the distinction has been extensive not just within sociology where it became commonplace but in a wide range of social science thinking and in journalism. It is frequently heralded as having made a profound contribution to feminist thinking and to have placed a powerful argument in the field of sociology.

Before the outbreak of World War Two women did not play a major role in the workplace. Giddens argues however that women in pre-industrial societies had considerable influence in the household, which in those times were not separate from the various productive activities (Giddens, 1998:318). This idea changed after the Industrial Revolution, as many men moved away from home to mechanised factories, lessening the involvement of women in the economic process. Women soon became more associated with domestic values and responsibilities, which feminists would argue have tied them to inequality past and present.

The labour shortage during the war years of both World War One and World War Two however majorly influenced women s participation in the paid labour force. By June 1941, the number of women workers was already higher by 100,000 than in 1931, an 89% increase in keeping with the general upswing in employment. Soon after this date, an unusual demand for female labour outside the home began to make itself felt. At the peak of female employment, in Canada, in the autumn of 1944, more than 1,000,000 women were working full time alone. (Pierson, 1994:5)

Women contributed greatly to the war effort, in the armed forces, in factories and in previously considered male jobs, such as welding and shipbuilding. In the course of the war, an unprecedented proportion of women left the domestic sphere to enter public employment and service. Finally, a few women rose to positions of considerable responsibility and influence.

During this time there appeared to be an equalising of the roles and responsibilities of men and women in society. However, those supporting this trend did not pay any attention to the possibility that equalisation usually involved a masculining of women s roles. Post-war planners also saw most women returning to the home at the end of the war, or women being the secondary earner, or only unmarried women having jobs and when the war ended men returned to their old jobs, however the pre-established pattern had been broken.

Gender inequality, therefore, is nothing new, both paid and unpaid forms of work consistently exhibit patterns of inequality. Analyses illustrate the way jobs are immutably assigned to one sex or the other, for example McEwen, 1990. Only men were considered breadwinners, with women s role to supplement income, wars aside. (Milkman, 1987:68) For example, the traditional image, and one gaining resurgence now with employers, was that employees put in extra effort beyond the paid circle. This however, does not allow for other responsibilities in the lives of women.

Women now account for half those employed in total, the most significant rise being among married women. (Giddens, 1998:319) However, women are proportionately much lower than men in the paid labour force, 74% of the male population between twenty-five and sixty is in paid employment, and the proportion of men in paid employment has not altered much over the last century. This is compared to the overall rate for women in the UK being 53%.

Only a fraction of these women however were employed in managerial positions (Grint, 1991:157). For example, in 1986 only 1.8% of managers at National Westminster bank were women. With growing recruitment to the ranks of junior and middle management, the issue of gender has become crucial in understanding the route organisations will follow into the next century. This has been a marked change from the composition of the workforce in past decades. Figures suggest this will happen sooner rather than later, with a general increase in jobs for women and a decrease in those for men (Evans, 1990:176). With the steady rise in single parent families, evidence of greater inherent intelligence and the better communication skills of women, there has been a surge in women s employment and the grades they achieve once they get there.

Analysis has traditionally viewed discrimination of women employee