Showing papers on "Women's work published in 2001"

Women's Work?

Abstract: American schoolteaching is one of few occupations to have undergone a thorough gender shift yet previous explanations have neglected a key feature of the transition: its regional character. By the early 1800s, far higher proportions of women were teaching in the Northeast than in the South, and this regional difference was reproduced as settlers moved West before the Civil War. What explains the creation of these divergent regional arrangements in the East, their recreation in the West, and their eventual disappearance by the next century? In Women's Work the authors blend newly available quantitative evidence with historical narrative to show that distinctive regional school structures and related cultural patterns account for the initial regional difference, while a growing recognition that women could handle the work after they temporarily replaced men during the Civil War helps explain this widespread shift to female teachers later in the century. Yet despite this shift, a significant gender gap in pay and positions remained. This book offers an original and thought-provoking account of a remarkable historical transition.

Women's Work Roles and Their Impact on Health, Well-Being, and Career: Comparisons Between the United States, Sweden, and The Netherlands

Abstract: As women have become more assimilated into the work-force over recent decades, they have realized considerable changes in their work roles which may contribute to health problems and other negative outcomes such as marital strain and diminished job status. The purpose of this review was threefold: (1) to synthesize data on the distribution of women's work efforts in the areas of paid employment, household chores, and childcare; (2) to outline research which addresses the impact of women's workload on their well-being and careers; and (3) to make international and gender comparisons regarding women's work responsibilities. Our findings showed that women from each of the three countries examined--the United States, Sweden, and The Netherlands--contribute more effort to household chores and childcare and less to the workplace than men do. As a result, their total workloads appear to be somewhat greater and more diffusely distributed than those of men. Heavy workloads may adversely affect women's health, especially in the presence of certain role characteristics (e.g., having a clerical, managerial, professional, or executive position, or caring for young children). Heavy work responsibilities may also undermine marital happiness, particularly if there is perceived inequity in the way partners share household work. Finally, women's total work responsibilities often impact their careers due to compensatory reductions in work commitment and job status. These observations point to the need for further research on women's workload and work roles, on the relationship of work to well-being, and on methods of preventing or alleviating adverse effects on overburdened workers.

Shifting the Risk: New Employment Patterns, Informalization, and Women's Work

Abstract: The paper argues that the processes of informalization of jobs observed during the past decades have affected both high and low income countries. Starting at the micro level of the firm, the emphasis is on how economic restructuring and globalization have generated the growth of informal activities—resulting in the vicious circle of poverty and economic insecurity for an important proportion of the population. The second part of the paper analyzes the growth of women's participation in informal activities, emphasizing that there are contradictory forces at work regarding women's employment. Despite a stubborn persistence of gender discrimination and obstacles to women's advancement, progress has taken place on several fronts, such as in the education field and in the absorption of female labor in many production processes. The paper concludes by pointing out that poverty eradication programs must emphasize the need to generate decent jobs without which these programs will continue to be ineffective. In addition, re-distributive mechanisms and different forms of social protection are needed to counteract the forces and policies generating economic insecurity.

Who cares? : women's work, childcare, and welfare state redesign

Abstract: By focusing on childcare and systematically comparing national experiences in Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, and the European Union, Who Cares? provides detailed information on recent social policies and a clear perspective on welfare state redesign. Many countries have now designed childcare policies to reconcile family and work. Some encourage parents to provide their own childcare by granting parental leave; others encourage parents to stay at work by supporting childcare services. Using the case of childcare policy, the contributors to this volume examine how public policy choices over the last three decades have been fashioned by specific understandings of the gendered division of labour. The authors of the country studies analyse specific childcare strategies and place them within the larger context of state approaches to women's roles. They argue that an examination of the direction and the form of social spending, in this period when such spending is under attack, contributes to our understanding of new principles of citizenship as they have been developed and articulated by governments. Who Cares? highlights the connection between childcare and employment, and makes a significant contribution to the literature on citizenship and women's work.

WOMEN'S WORK AND WORKING WOMEN: The Demand for Female Labor

Abstract: The demand for female labor is a central explanatory component of macrostructural theories of gender stratification. This study analyzes how the structural demand for female labor affects gender differences in labor force participation. The authors develop a measure of the gendered demand for labor by indexing the degree to which the occupational structure is skewed toward usually male or female occupations. Using census data from 1910 through 1990 and National Longitudinal Sample of Youth (NLSY) data from 261 contemporary U.S. labor markets, the authors show that the gender difference in labor force participation covaries across time and space with this measure of the demand for female labor.

Commitment to Work Among Welfare-Reliant Women

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to describe the work of welfare-reliant women and to reveal commitment to work in the experiences of 84 welfarereliant, rural women interviewed for this study. Understanding the domains where welfare-reliant women exhibit commitment to work may help policy makers, trainers, and employers design and implement interventions that enhance chances of success for these women in the formal, paid workforce. Discussion focuses on the women's formal labor force participation in the past and desire for wage work in the future; barriers to labor force participation, both personal and in the rural job market; informal work and the work of care; support networks; survival strategies for making ends meet while receiving welfare; and the stigma of welfare receipt. Key Words: family policy, welfare reform, women's work. There are many impediments, at societal and individual levels, to families moving from welfare reliance to full-time paid labor Well-known barriers include lack of job skills, low educational attainment, single-parent households and heavy family responsibilities, severely limited employment opportunities in local communities (especially in the rural South), lack of reliable transportation, and lack of quality affordable child care (Brayfield & Hofferth, 1995; Browne, 1995; Hao, 1995; Harris, 1996; Nord & Beaulieu, 1997). Recent research suggests that it is not just these obstacles, but a pileup of severe, persistent problems that impede employment success for welfare-reliant women (Zedlewski, 1999). There is another impediment that rests just under the surface of public discourse among employers, trainers, politicians, and the general citizenry: the belief that some welfare reliant adults resist efforts to move them into the formal workforce. Some employers call this problem a lack of "willingness to work" or absence of a work ethic (Gilens, 1999; Kirschenman & Neckerman, 1991; Monroe, Blalock, & Vlosky, 1999). Work ethic is described as responsibility, dependability, pride in a job, loyalty to an employer, and commitment to work, and the welfare reliant population is stereotyped as uniformly deficient in its work ethic (Kirschenman & Neckerman; Rose, 1995; Task Force, 1993). Such thinking is flawed on many levels. There is solid evidence that the welfare-reliant population is heterogeneous in terms of many defining characteristics, including previous participation in the formal labor force and the circumstances that precipitated the need for public assistance (for reviews, see Jencks, 1992; Task Force, 1993; Taylor Jackson, & Chatters, 1997). Furthermore, most people who participate in the welfare system do not rely on welfare for long periods of time, although participants appear to be stereotyped by the small core of individuals who are chronically dependent on public assistance (Friedlander & Burtless, 1995; Harris, 1996; Rank, 1994a, 1994b; Rosenbaum & Popkin, 1991). Despite such empirical data, the American people and their public officials show a broad willingness to stigmatize the poor, including the working poor and families reliant on public assistance, and to base policy reforms on such stereotypes (Gilens, 1999). The purpose of this article is to describe the work of welfare-reliant women. We will attempt to uncover various ways (where they exist) in which marginalized women exhibit commitment to informal and formal work, for the purpose of helping policy makers, trainers, and employers design interventions that enhance chances of success for these women in the formal workforce. Finally, the foregoing issues will be examined in the context of the rural and remote rural Southern communities in which these families are being asked to achieve wage-based self-sufficiency (see Lobao, 1996). Although poverty and welfare reliance are disproportionately concentrated in both urban centers and in remote rural areas, poverty and welfare research to date has focused on urban areas (Jensen & Tienda, 1989; Task Force, 1993). …

Entrepreneurs at Home: Secluded Muslim Women and Hidden Economic Activities in Northern Nigeria

Abstract: Muslim women are frequently perceived as oppressed and subjugated people with marginal, or even counterproductive, economic role in the society. The paper argues that the Muslim Hausa women in Northern Nigeria, through hidden economic activities in their households, can bypass the open market and contribute significantly to the economic progress of the society. The paper also argues on the basis of the comparison between Muslim and nonMuslim women that Islam does not inhibit economic activities of Muslim Hausa women. Differences between Muslim and non-Muslim women were found. While strictly secluded Muslim women were hardly found in factories, they contributed to the economy by involving themselves in the hidden informal economic sector. (Ed.)

Economic restructuring, financial crises, and women's work in Mexico.

Abstract: This paper contributes to our understanding of the social impact of economic restructuring and globalization in Mexico by analyzing changes in entry-level employment across three generations of Mexican women. Using retrospective data, we relate the divergent period conditions represented by each cohort to the process of labor market incorporation and other facets of first employment, namely first occupation, class of worker, and firm size. The analysis tests human capital, new international division of labor, and household strategy explanations of the response of female employment to macro-economic fluctuations. Results indicate that rising levels of human capital were central to increases in women's labor force participation across generations and improved labor demand conditions during growth cycles were an important impetus for women's incorporation into professional and more formal types of employment. We also find support for international division of labor perspectives, as women's representation in manufacturing (maquiladora) employment grew substantially over time. Overall, household survival theories best captured the effect of economic restructuring and globalization on women's work. Economic downturns and financial shocks triggered women's labor market incorporation, particularly among married women, lending strong support to the idea that in periods of economic uncertainty women join the labor market in order to diversify household earnings and protect against deteriorating family incomes. However, this labor market push was concentrated in domestic and self-employed occupations and in smaller firms, findings that portend challenges to the long-term prospects of women's work in Mexico.

The Influence of Qualifications on Women's Work Histories, Employment Status and Earnings at Age 33

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between women's qualifications and their labour-market participation up to the age of 33 for a cohort of women born in Great Britain in one week of March 1958. The period of the life-cycle on which the analysis focuses is one during which many women are attempting to juggle the competing demands of young children and employment. In Britain, with very limited institutional support for retaining employment during family formation, we examine the role which occupationally specific qualifications exert in helping women to return to paid employment. The second part of the paper focuses on the occupational attainment of women at age 33, operationalized using log hourly earnings. The earnings equations are corrected for possible selectivity bias into employment. The paper makes an important theoretical distinction between occupationally specific and non-occupational qualifications. We argue that, for women, occupational qualifications are associated with greater attachment to the labour-market following the birth of children. By including work history variables in the earnings equation we are also able to examine the consequences for women's wages of having time out of the labour market

Women and AIDS caregiving: women's work?

Abstract: In this ethnographic study, I examine personal, kinship, and social obligations and the role of women in the traditional Thai family. Under what circumstances do women take on the responsibility to care or not care, and how do they cope with the disease and care when they are also infected? Fifteen women who were afflicted or affected by HIV/AIDS participated in in-depth interviews and participant observations. Analysis employed mainly qualitative methods following Spradley. I show that women who are responsible for caring for both themselves and others, including members of their immediate families or extended family members, face a double jeopardy by virtue of their inferior role and status. When HIV-infected women experience illness, sometimes they feel split; they are incapable of functioning normally, yet they are obligated to do "What they've got to do." Women as carers feel that they have to care because they want to free someone else from suffering despite the fact that they are also suffering. Wo...

Women's Work?: American Schoolteachers, 1650-1920

Abstract: This text blends quantitative evidence with historical narrative to show that distinctive regional school structures and related cultural patterns account for the initial regional difference in proportions of female teachers in schools in America.

Women's work and symptoms during midlife: Korean immigrant women.

Abstract: SUMMARY Purpose. To describe how Korean immigrant women tend to describe their work experiences within their daily lives and how they relate their work to the symptoms experienced during midlife. Design. Cross-sectional study using methodological triangulation. Using a convenience sampling method, 119 Korean immigrant women were recruited for the quantitative phase, and 21 among the 119 women were recruited for the qualitative phase. Data were collected using both questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics and thematic analysis. Findings and Discussions. The symptoms that the women experienced during midlife were influenced by their work experience, which was complicated by their cultural heritage, gender issues embedded in their daily lives, and immigration transition. Implications. Complexities and diversities in women's work need to be incorporated in menopausal studies.

Women 's Work and Men 's Unemployment

Abstract: E conomists have produced a large literature on the effects of the labormarket outcomes of men on the labor-force behavior of married women in the United States. In this literature, a great deal of attention has been focused on the impact of men's unemployment on the labor-market participation of their wives. In the basic model of family labor-supply decisions, the shortfall in income caused by the husband's loss of work, coupled with the inability to borrow against future earnings, will force some women not currently in the labor market to enter and will increase the labor supplied by those women already in the labor market. This is the so-called added-worker effect. Today, this effect is small or even absent, but in the early twentieth century, it was large.' As late as 1940 the labor-market participation of women whose husbands were unemployed and not on public relief was 50 percent higher than that of women whose husbands were employed.2 By focusing on labor-market behavior, however, we likely understate the degree to which women's labor was used to smooth consumption during periods of men's unemployment. An additional or alternative response would have been to substitute women's labor for market goods in the production of household consumption goods. Women could begin baking bread at home instead of purchasing it from the bakery or could wash clothing at home instead of sending it out to a commercial laundry. Today, the cost savings of such activities would be small, especially as a fraction of total household expenditures. But in the past, these savings could have been

Cyberspace meets domestic space: Personal computers, women's work, and the gendered territories of the family home

Abstract: During the early 1990s, marketing discourse in key US magazines attached a newly invented “feminine”; identity to the personal computer, fuelling a second great wave of home adoption. These public fantasies, which attempted to ease the machine into the pre‐gendered spaces of the American family home, drew upon a slate of postfeminist appeals, emphasizing the PC's value in women's work‐both income‐producing and family‐centered. This three‐part paper traces how Utopian expectations for a postfeminist work tool and recommendations about where to place it on the domestic map ultimately collided with the gendered constraints built into the pre‐established territories of the US home. The first part of the paper documents the addition of postfeminist work applications to a formerly masculinized technology; the second part reviews the marketing appeals that extolled the PC's potential to help a woman produce income, manage her household, and provide educational advantages to her children, all at once; the final p...

Globalisation and women's work in South Africa: national and local approaches to economic transformation

Abstract: The South African economy has been undergoing a process of fundamental economic transformation as a result of policies promoting global integration within the global economy. CAROLINE SKINNER and IMRAAN VALODIA suggest that women are bearing the brunt of the costs associated with this transformation. They examine some of the gender dimensions of the transformation process by looking at national and local government's approach to business support and promotion, focusing particularly on the informal economy

Women's Work: Volunteer AIDS Care Giving in Northern Thailand

Abstract: SUMMARY Because persons with AIDS in Thailand usually are cared for by their families, and because government AIDS policy relies upon this assistance for the care of the country's sick, the research reported here addressed the questions: Who are the home and community care givers for PWA? What kind of care do they give? And, What is the impact of care giving on the care giver(s)? Informants were drawn in 1998–99 from a long-term birth cohort study of a non-clinical urban population in the country's province of highest AIDS mortality, Chiang Mai. The study was part of a larger, exploratory ethnographic study of the interplay among health, reproduction and development among persons born in 1964 and their mothers that I began in 1973. Findings include that among care-givers, parents, overwhelmingly mothers, and wives considered it their place, duty and moral benefit to care for adult children or husbands sick with AIDS.

Doing 'women's work'?: men, masculinity and caring

Abstract: [Extract] In this chapter we explore some of the issues concerning men working in the human services. It is an area that has traditionally been seen as women's work and there has been a significant gendered pattern of employment (see Christie 1998). Men are clustered in certain areas of practice and in particular positions such as management. This is not a new phenomenon and has been a major issue of debate in the last 35 years (see Lawrence 1965; Walton 1975; Camilleri 1996; Christie 1998). In addressing these issues, we examine the labour force participation in the community service sector; the issues of gender in the construction of 'care' (in particular how patriarchal discourse has structured the possibilities of men's and women's work); and issues and contradictions of men who remain in direct practice.

Shifting the Risk: New Employment Patterns, Informalization, and Women's Work 1

Abstract: The paper argues that the processes of informalization of jobs observed during the past decades have affected both high and low income countries. Starting at the micro level of the firm, the emphasis is on how economic restructuring and globalization have generated the growth of informal activities—resulting in the vicious circle of poverty and economic insecurity for an important proportion of the population. The second part of the paper analyzes the growth of women’s participation in informal activities, emphasizing that there are contradictory forces at work regarding women’s employment. Despite a stubborn persistence of gender discrimination and obstacles to women’s advancement, progress has taken place on several fronts, such as in the education field and in the absorption of female labor in many production processes. The paper concludes by pointing out that poverty eradication programs must emphasize the need to generate decent jobs without which these programs will continue to be ineffective. In addition, re-distributive mechanisms and different forms of social protection are needed to counteract the forces and policies generating economic insecurity.

Women's Work, Nature and Colonial Exploitation: Feminist Struggle for for Alternatives to Corporate Globalization

Abstract: This article uses Hilkka Pietilas reconceptualization of the economy as three spheres of production (free, protected and fettered) to illuminate the new ways in which neo-liberal globalization is intensifying exploitative capitalist processes. The study focuses on the particular vulnerabilities of women, the value of their unpaid work, and the transformative significance of their resistance.

Iran's new Islamic home economics: An exploratory attempt to conceptualize women's work in the Islamic Republic

Abstract: This is an exploratory attempt at conceptualizing the legal and ideological treatment of women's work in the Islamic Republic of Iran. With an awareness of basic methodological differences, I have borrowed and modified concepts and categories developed in economic theory. The neoclassical economic model recognizes two categories of productive female labour, and thus two types of allocation of female labour time: allocation of time for household production, and allocation of time for labor market. I will argue that the Islamic legal perception of female labor, as applied to the case of contemporary Iran, bears similarity to this theoretical model. Post-revolutionary legal system in Iran however, recognizes three categories of productive female labor: marital duties, household labor; and participation in the labor market. The government has also introduced provisions for compensation of household labor, and considers the first two categories the primary duties of a Muslim woman which leads to the justification for discriminatory policies concerning women's labor market participation and education.

Women's Work, Health, and Quality of Life

Abstract: Discover the unexpected results when occupational health studies include women's unpaid work! This landmark book makes a powerful case for the interrelationship of work (whether paid or unpaid) and health issues. Women's Work, Health, and Quality of Life examines specific occupational attitudes, behaviors, and conditions that affect the well-being of women. The subjects of the studies range from Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong to migrant farm workers in the US, and the conclusions are fascinating.It also presents a reasoned critique of the shortcomings of most scientific research into women's occupational health and offers a paradigm shift with significant consequences. By examining women's unpaid domestic work, caregiving, and volunteer work as well as paid work, Women's Work, Health, and Quality of Life provides a more accurate look at critical health issues. It addresses such vital concerns as the physical and emotional health of women who are giving unpaid care to sick family members, for example, as well as analyzing the effects of paid employment on health. International in scope, Women's Work, Health, and Quality of Life examines vital factors in health and work, including: self-care and social support levels of stress health protective behaviors postpartum and midlife health issuesWomen's Work, Health, and Quality of Life offers a fascinating picture of these vital issues of women's lives. In kitchens, factories, and offices around the world, work has an impact on women's health. This wide-ranging book will be of interest to public health researchers, policymakers, and women's activists.

Women's work in offices and the preservation of men's "breadwinning" jobs in early twentieth-century Glasgow

Abstract: As Britain's industrial economy matured and the volume of administrative work increased, different kinds of clerical jobs and clerical careers became possible. Using examples from a variety of small- to medium-sized enterprises in Glasgow, this article will describe how the main functions of administrative work – financial, secretarial and managerial – were divided both horizontally and vertically in order to preserve secure, well-paid, ‘breadwinning’ jobs for men, leaving routine secretarial work for women. The isolation of women in all-women enclaves carrying out shorthand and typing work and the subsequent devaluation of these as kinds of work were of primary importance in the creation of office work that was explicitly women's work

The role of economic invisibility in development: veiling women's work in rural Pakistan

Abstract: The thesis in this article is that both women's work and its invisibility are essential to development, and at two levels: to the economy of rural households and to the wider development process. For rural households, the case of Pakistan suggests that the veils that conceal women's work shield a portion of household production from the risks and extractions inherent in their involvement with development. This shielded production depends on off-farm natural resources of which the use is also veiled. For States and other development interests, the author suggests that women's work constitutes a subsidy which is intentionally invisible. The subsidy of women's labour is linked to a forest-to-farm subsidy. Women's invisible work, in other words, is not invisible because it is not seen, but because the process of economic development-for both rural households and States and other development actors-requires that it be hidden.

Working Across Borders: Global Restructuring and Women’s Work

Abstract: In this article Young examines the legal regulation of labor mobility, particularly the mobility of women workers from developing countries to Canada and the United States. Of particular importance is the employment relationship between domestic/home workers and their employers. In the era of globalization, domestic, regional and international laws and policies interact to make available to Western employers an easily exploitable supply of laborers from the large pool of Third World women. The legal regime regulating domestic work in Canada and the United State sustains a gendered and racial division of labor and preserves the dichotomy between productive and reproductive activities, thereby maintaining rather than ameliorating women's subordinate status in the workforce.