CMS 498
Gender at Work Chapter 9
Susan Chase Communicating Gender Diversity; A Critical Approach
Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco – Catherine Helen Palczewski
Sage Publications, Inc 2007
Thousand Oaks, California
Gender at Work
“Women and men are never only women
and men, each person possesses and
intersectional identity.” Kimberlle’ Crenshaw
Discrimination laws were failing black women
Crenshaw explores how Title VII of the 1964
U.S. Civil rights act is failing black women.
If a black woman sought redress employers would demonstrate
how
They treated black men fairly and were not
sexist because they treated white women
fairly.
Crenshaw(1989) concludes that “the intersectional experience is
greater than the sum of racism and sexism” and thus attention to intersectionality is essential to
explain,
“the particular man in which Black women
are subordinated” (p.59)
Discriminatory gender constructions based on sex & race
Are most manifested at work
Chapter 9 looks at the exploration of the intersecting ways in which
People participate in the “saying and doing” of gender in the workplace.
(Marin, 2003,p.342)
We must look at communication about work and
not just communication in the workplaces to
understand the complex relationship between
work and gender.
The act of women leaving the
workforce to take care of their
children is called off- ramping
Communication problem in U.S. & Britain
reporting that many women are off-ramping
Claim that many women are leaving is incorrect – no economic data to support
may make employers think twice about hiring a young woman over a man
There are other factors influencing women leaving the work force
Recession
Work structure unfriendly to family forcing mothers to choose
Family structure – partners unable or unwilling to off-ramp
Difficulty on-ramping
Off-ramp is not viable for all women
More Black women are single parents.
They earn more than their husbands.
• Need help supporting
extended family.
• View work as elevating
• Their status as women
• & elevating their family,
• Extended family & race.
Choice?
• “Whether women choose to on-or off-ramp, their
choices are constrained and defined by institutional
structures.
This chapter discusses
• Communicative practices through which work
constructs gender
• Communication about gender that constructs work
What is work? Who works? How do you
work? Where does work take place?
• The western bias is that you get paid for work, it
occurs outside the home and taking care of your
children is not work.
Who stays home with the kids?
• Hetero male same sex female same sex
• 22% one partner
Stays home
• .3% dads 26% 1 partner stays home
• 25% mom (Bellafante, 2004)
Work expectations- not consistent among sexes
• “Work organizations are ‘masculinized’”(Britton
1999,p.469)
• Work is not a gender or sex neutral institution
• The description of work as an institution has
masculine characteristics.
Work is social institution in that it is what makes Americans American!
A man is not a real man unless he is employed
• (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005)
• The job a man does is a major basis of his identity
and what it means to be a man (messerschmidt,
1996,p33)
Every male in the U.S. is
expected to work • Women with small children are exempt from this
expectation
UNLESS
• They are on welfare
• Work –good Welfare -bad
“An amazingly persistent pattern is
repeatedly reproduced with
gender/sex i.d. of jobs” (Acker, 1990, p. 145)
Male dominated vs. Female dominated
occupations • Male Female
• Prestige less of all
• Authority
• Autonomy
• $
How organizations maintain gendering
• Communicative practices of
Organizational structure
Ideology
Interaction among workers
Construction and maintenance of
individual identities
(Britton 1999, p.456)
Power at work
• Power permeates work in complex ways (mumby 2001)
Boss to worker
Between workers as a result of sex or race privilege
Conflicting institutions Family/Work
• Mothers criticized for putting kids in daycare
• Mothers on welfare staying home criticized for not
working
• Mink, 1995, pp.180-181
Work values seen as opposite of Family values • Work and family as opposite social institutions each
with different demands, values and goals as a result
tension causing people to feel they must choose
one over the other.
• The choices are gendered, raced and classed.
Work family balance found in Nordic countries • Work and home structured to support each other
• Work pay continues during parental leave
• Benefits encourage both parents to take time off
from work
• Other countries offer many work from home
scenarios
As of 2000 51% of U.S. mothers with children
under the age of 1 were employed
Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and Family
leave act of 1993
• Allows up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for
pregnancy, personal or family reasons
• Objective to make sure people affected by
pregnancy and caregiving are not penalize and
able to return to work after leave.
Legal change is not enough
Communication must change also!
• “The process of convincing requires not only that a
given policy be accepted but also that a given
vocabulary(or set of understandings) be integrated
into public repertoire”
Celeste Condite (1990 p. 6)
Vocabulary needed to change
• Discussion of work and childbearing
changes needed
Maternity leave = benefit (a bonus or
business choice and not a guaranteed
right)
Pregnancy = disability ( a condition
belonging to one person, which also
renders the other parent absent)
This limited vocabulary means that even
with laws and policies in place, work’s
male-centered structure continues to
present challenges to women who are
about to be parents. Albrecht (1999)
Work and Education • Studies show African American women and
subordination at work their experiences start in
school where they are steered away from particular
work aspirations(Parker, 2003).
• How African American women are talked to and
about influences the types of work they and others
consider suitable.
Emotions - Its not about sex difference
• Men and women are emotional at work, but for men it is not coded as emotional.
• What others count as an emotional expression depends on the expresser’s sex/gender (Parkin, 1993)
• Emotions considered appropriate when expressed by a man are perceived inappropriate when expressed by a woman (Hearn 1993)
Assumption of Progress • A sex gap in earnings exists across almost all
employment categories( Chen et al, 2005)
• 2003 women’s earnings declined in relation to mens
• High in 2002 of 76.6% of mens salaries
• 2003 down to 75.5%
• Job and prestige held constant
Organizations are not gender neutral
(Acker, 1990,p.139)
• Top corporate levels women earn 8% to 25% lower
• Lag behind in bo the advancement and pay was worse in 2002 than they were in 1995
• Only 5 out of 10 industries studied did women hold a number of management jobs proportionate to their representation in the workforce
• (Blau & Kahn, 2000, p.1)
5 reasons for attention to gender and organizations
1. Sex Segregation of work paid and unpaid
2. Income and status inequality between men and women and how this is created through organizational structure
3. How organizations invent and reproduce cultural images of sex and gender
4. The way in which gender, particularly masculinity, is the product of organizations processes
5. The need to make organizations more democratic and more supportive of humane goals.
These are intersecting processes that make issues of power, control and dominance gendered.
Acker
The way men and women socially construct each
other at work affects their work experiences
• This tends to impair women worker’s identities and confidence (Martin 2003 p. 343)
Women are primary in Care work
“Interlocking systems of gender and racial oppression act to
concentrate women and people of color in those
occupations that are lower paying and lower status”
• Duffy 2005 p. 72
Sexual Harassment Not just about something a man does to a woman but
it is “a tool or instrument of gender
regulation….undertaken in the service of hetero-
patriarchal norms. These norms, regulatory,
constitutive, and punitive in nature, produce
gendered subjects: feminine women as sex object
and masculine men as sex subjects.
Sexual Harassment
• Not something men do to women because they
are women, but something that people do to other
people to maintain strict gender / sex binary norms
and inequalities. Which allows for us to recognize
the harassment of masculine men and feminine
men by women and men. (Frake 1997)
Why do men base their bonding on the sexual
objectification of women?
• Culture of hegemonic masculinity, men become men by performing their virility in front of other men. (Quinn 2002)
Conclusion • Every person engages in work, paid or unpaid
• Work as an institution both genders and is gendered
• My learnings from this chapter are;
It is important to see not only how we as people gender our co-workers but how work as an institution genders an organization and how communication within society and organizations effect how we feel about and act toward each other at work.
