Showing papers on "Women's work published in 2005"

Women's Work, Dirty Work: The gynaecology nurse as 'Other'

Abstract: This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out 'women's work'. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially 'difficult': cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially 'distasteful': termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The 'tainted' nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of 'dirty work' but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as 'special', requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out 'dirty work'. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re-affirms their 'womanly' qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as 'different', as 'special', as the 'other'.

Women’s Work and Divorce: A Matter of Anticipation? A Research Note

Abstract: The most common hypothesis on the positive association between wives’ work and divorce is that the wife’s work increases the risk of divorce. Critics argue that the causal direction is the other way around and that women adjust their working hours in anticipation of divorce. These competing hypotheses are tested by comparing the effects of wives’ work between divorces that differ in the extent to which they were expected. Because women who do not expect to divorce are not able to adjust their working efforts prior to divorce, it is argued that, if anticipatory behaviour plays a role, the effect of wives’ work should be smaller when the divorce was unexpected. The results lend weak support for anticipatory behaviour. The effect of wives’ full-time work is smaller for unexpected divorces. However, the effect of full-time work is also relatively strong when the divorce was fully unexpected. Moreover, the effects of wives’ work and working hours do not differ significantly between divorces varying in the extent to which they were expected. These findings suggest that there is something about wives’ work that increases the divorce risk.

Beyond Employment Working time, living time

Abstract: The compilation of economic statistics, and particularly those relating to labour, directly reflect the prevailing perspective of the economics discipline, and are manifested in abstractions in the form of models entirely and exclusively focused on market production. In the majority of labour surveys and statistics, thus, domestic work is neither economically relevant nor does it even have the status of ‘work’. The aim of this article is to suggest new ways for studying the working time and living time of women and men, on the basis of a non-gendered methodological proposal implemented in the city of Barcelona - a non-androcentric labour force survey that incorporates both domestic and market work.

Women's Work: Gender Equality vs. Hierarchy in the Life Sciences:

Abstract: In bureaucratic firms, and increasingly in the courts, the received wisdom is that if management is serious about promoting equal opportunity, it will institute and monitor formal evaluation procedures. These formal procedures are there to guard against subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination processes such as cognitive bias, in-group preferences, attribution errors, network-based social exclusion, harassment, and targeted discrimination. But what happens to equal opportunity when the organizational context is not bureaucratic and hierarchical? It is this question that Smith-Doerr examines in her study of women Ph.D.s’ careers in the life sciences. SmithDoerr’s previous work with Powell, Koput, and others on the networked form of the biotechnology industry provides the substantive focus for answering this question. Life science Ph.D.s typically end up in three destinations: academia, pharmaceutical companies, and, increasingly, biotechnology startups. With a strong mix of historical, qualitative, and quantitative analysis, Smith-Doerr examines the impact of gender on scientists’ careers across these organizational contexts.

Being Involved and Making a Difference Empowerment and Well-Being Among Women Living in Poverty

Abstract: Background:The relationships between poverty, empowerment, and health are of theoretical and practical interest to nurses, yet few researchers have examined volunteerism in poor communities from a holistic health perspective. Purpose:This study explores the experiences of women engaged in community volunteer work in the context of economic poverty. Method:Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with 8 women, ages 21 to 77 years, who qualified for federal assistance or self-identified as low-income and were currently involved in volunteer community work.Findings:Participants’ stories of being involved and making a difference illustrated women making connections, developing relationships, gaining knowledge and skills, increasing self-esteem and confidence, reaching out to help others, and strengthening communities. Conclusion:At both the individual and community level, well-being was enhanced through women’s community volunteerism in the context of economic poverty. Implications:At the individual and...

Protecting Family and Race. The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work

Abstract: I Introduction AMERICAN ECONOMICS BECAME a professional, expert policy discipline during the Progressive Era (roughly 1890-1920), a period that marked, not coincidentally, the beginning of a vastly more expansive state relationship to the economy. By World War I, the U.S. government created the Federal Reserve, amended the Constitution to institute a personal income tax, established the Federal Trade Commission, applied antitrust laws to industrial combinations and to labor unions, and restricted immigration, while state governments regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted "mothers' pensions," capped working hours, and set minimum wages. (1) Professional economists, especially the progressives among them, played a leading role in the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy. What is less well known is that eugenic thought deeply influenced the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy. Progressive Era economics, like the regulatory state it helped found, came of age at a time when biological approaches to social and economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists (and other social scientists) argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers--whom they labeled "unemployables," "parasites," and the "industrial residuum"--so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Immigrants, blacks, and those deemed defective in character or intellect were regarded by leading labor legislation activists less as victims of industrial capitalism than as threats to the health and well-being of deserving workers and of society more generally. Mostly neglected by historians of American economics, these invidious distinctions crucially informed the labor and immigration reform that is the hallmark of the Progressive Era (Leonard 2003a). (2) This crude, eugenically informed sorting of workers into deserving and undeserving classes was applied to women as well. Many reformers classified women among the "unemployable." In the United States, where nearly all Progressive Era labor legislation applied to women exclusively, laws regulating women's work were promoted for the benefits thought to obtain when women were removed from paid employment. Leading progressives, among them women at the forefront of labor reform, advocated excluding women from the labor force on the grounds that (1) work outside the home threatened women's health and morals; (2) working women usurped jobs that rightly belonged to male heads of household entitled to a "family wage"; and (3) women in the labor force improperly abandoned their eugenic duties as "mothers of the race." (3) The progressive justifications for women's labor legislation were diverse. Paternalists invoked women's health; moralists invoked women's virtue; "family wagers" sought to protect fathers from the economic competition of women; "maternalists" promoted the virtues of motherhood; and eugenicists advocated for the eugenic health of the race. (4) But all of these different justifications for women's labor laws shared two common characteristics: all were founded upon invidious distinctions between the sexes, and all argued that society is better off when women are excluded from work for wages. II The Influence of Eugenic Thought BIOLOGY INFORMED PROGRESSIVE ERA social science enough that one cannot fully understand the economic ideas that underwrote labor and immigration reform without also understanding the biological thought that influenced them. The relationship between American economic reform and the biology of human inheritance remains relatively unexplored because, new scholarship notwithstanding, the influence of eugenics is poorly understood. Eugenics is still widely regarded as an aberrant, pseudoscientific, laissez-faire doctrine, a 20th-century version of Gilded Age social Darwinism that was wholly abandoned after the eugenic atrocities of German National Socialism. …

Women's Work-Related and Family-Related Discrimination and Support in Academia

Abstract: Academia remains a male-dominated occupational realm, even though women have made great gains as actors in higher education. The interconnections of work-related and family-related discrimination experiences and work-related and family-related support are analyzed, drawing on over 100 semi-structured interviews with and written accounts of academic women in 11 Finnish universities from all major disciplinary fields. Finland provides an interesting research context, characterized by relatively high gender equality in both academia and society more generally. Exploring academic women in this setting reveals several paradoxes, namely those of: feminization of academia; family-friendly policies; academic motherhood; and academic endogamy.

Housewives and Servants in Rural England, 1440-1650: Evidence of Women's Work from Probate Documents

Abstract: This essay examines the work patterns of housewives and female servants in rural England between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Despite the fact that such women expended the majority of female work-hours in the rural economy, their activities remain a neglected topic. Here probate documents, wills, inventories and probate accounts are used alongside other types of sources to provide insight into women's work. The three parts of the essay examine the proportion of female servants employed in different households and localities, the types of work that servants and housewives undertook and the scale and level of commercialisation of four common types of women's work.(READ 30 April 2004 AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KENT AT CANTERBURY)

Public Sector Reform and Women's Work in Poland: ‘Working for Juice, Coffee and Cheap Cosmetics!’

Abstract: The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com Copyright Blackwell Publishing [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

Women's Work on the World Wide Web: How a New Medium Represents an Old Problem

Abstract: This article examines how iVillage.com, one of the most popular World Wide Web portals for women, advises them on how to integrate the demands of wage and domestic labor. Specifically, the article focuses on the implications such advice has for gender relations within the family and for feminist politics in U.S. society. Discursive strategies in advice generated by iVillage.com support the ideology of postfeminism, which promotes individual consumer-based solutions for a primarily middle-class audience over politics addressing the gendered division of labor, both within individual families and in social structures. Such commercial Web-site discourses are consistent with those constructed by other mainstream media.

Women Doing Men's Work and Women Doing Women's Work: Female Work and Pay in British Wartime Engineering

Abstract: Extreme demand pressures coupled with acute skill shortages in the run up to World War II caused British engineering companies to break down existing production processes into smaller constituent parts. This allowed the employment of persons trained over narrower ranges of skills and helped to create an exponential growth of female jobs, from 10.5% of total engineering employment in 1939 to 35.2% by 1943. Women were officially classified into those doing men's work and those doing women's work. Using a unique data set provided by the Engineering Employers Federation, this paper examines female work and pay from 1935 (the first year of rearmament) to 1942 (the peak of production activity) in more detail than has been previously undertaken. It features the pay and hours of piece- and time-rated women, female-male wage ratios, and an assessment of the war's longer term impact on the female labor market.

From the valley to the summit: a brief history of the quiet revolution that transformed women's work

Abstract: We can have a meaningful discussion today about "women at the top" only because of a quiet revolution that took place 30 years ago.

Changing Labor Processes of Women's Work: The Haenyo of Jeju Island

Abstract: This article delves into the subject of women and work as applied to the female divers (haenyŏ) of Jeju Island in Korea It supports the development theory critiques about women and confirms Boserup's seminal study Remarkably, the Jeju haenyŏ have been economically productive in the Confucian culture of Korea, but their labor processes have been conditioned by economic as well as non-economic factors The article analyzes the effects of gender in the rise and fall of this women's working group Even though the Jeju haenyŏ have had a relatively higher economic status in the family and community from the colonial period onward, the organization of their production has been closely interrelated with the gendered cultural context Likewise, the decline of the haenyŏ's diving is associated with the further development of capitalism and the reordered gender division of labor

Expanding the Concept of Women's Work: Volunteer Work in the Context of Poverty

Abstract: This qualitative study explored the community volunteer experiences of women living in the context of poverty. A feminist narrative perspective informed the interpretation of the data. The narrative themes identified and discussed were: volunteer work in the context of poverty; the invisible work of discovery and figuring things out; and the community work of mobilizing, organizing, and connecting with others. The findings demonstrate the positive impact of volunteer work on individual women, their families, and communities and contribute to the expansion of the conceptualization of women's work. Implications for public policies and organizational practices related to poverty, work, and volunteerism are discussed.

The Invisible Woman: Aspects of Women's Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract: Contents: Introduction, I. Baudino, J. CarrA(c) and C. RA(c)vauger. Part I Women in the Domestic Sphere: The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and her Status in the 17th and 18th Centuries, Gilly Lehmann The Representation of Housework in the 18th-Century Womena (TM)s Press, Marie-Claire Rouyer-Daney Needlework and the rights of women in England at the end of the 18th century, Christine Hivet Governesses of the Royal Family and the Nobility in Great Britain, 1750a "1815, Sophie Loussouarn. Part II Women in Male Strongholds: The Labour and Servitude of Women in the Highlands of Scotland in the 18th century, Marie-HA(c)lAne ThA(c)venot-Totems Women in the army in 18th-century Britain, Guyonne Leduc Hospital nurses in 18th-century Britain: service without responsibility, Jacques CarrA(c) Claiming their Place in the Corporate Community: Womena (TM)s Identity in 18th-Century Towns, Deborah Simonton Women barred from Masonic a "Worka (TM): a British phenomenon, CA(c)cile RA(c)vauger. Part III Women and the Cultural Scene: The Actress and 18th-Century Ideals of Femininity, SA(c)verine Lancia Women in action: Elizabeth Inchbald, heroines and serving maids in British comedies of the 1780s and 1790s, Angela J. Smallwood Profession: siren a " the ambiguous status of professional women musicians in 18th-century England, Pierre Dubois The Lee sisters: 18th-century commercial heroines, Marion Marceau 18th-century images of working women, Isabelle Baudino. Index.

Women's Work Transitions Around Childbearing

Abstract: There is little known about the extent to which Australian women leave work on commencement of childbearing or return to work afterwards. Of particular interest is whether or not women return to full-time or part-time work. This paper uses work histories collected in Waves 1 and 2 of the Negotiating the Life Course (NLC) Surveys to analyse these transitions for women who had at least one child since 1970. The analysis focuses first on the transition that occurs when the first child is born, using multinomial logistic regression. It then focuses on the return to work —looking at whether it occurs and if so, on the timing and whether it is to full-time or part-time work, using discrete time event history analysis. The multivariate analyses consider, amongst other things, whether there have been changes over time, and the effect of education, marital status and pre-birth job characteristics.

SYMPOSIUM ON EUGENICS DURING THE AMERICAN PROGRESSIVE ERA Protecting Family and Race The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work

Abstract: American economics came of age during the Progressive Era, a time when biological approaches to economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers—whom they labeled "unemployables," "parasites," and the "industrial residuum"—so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Women were also frequently clas- sified as unemployable. Leading progressives, including women at the forefront of labor reform, justified exclusionary labor legislation for women on grounds that it would (1) protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work; (2) protect working women from the temptation of prostitution; (3) protect male heads of house- hold from the economic competition of women; and (4) ensure that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as "mothers of the race." What united these heterogeneous rationales was the reformers' aim of discouraging women's labor-force participation.

‘Women’s work’ and the transition to retirement

Abstract: The origins of this chapter lie in an exploration of the ways in which women may be helped in their transition to retirement through preretirement education (PRE). The research began by identifying the distinctive aspects of women’s employment in their later working lives. This led to a focus on women whose paid work typifies what may be described as ‘women’s work’. A taken-for-granted feature of British employment patterns, ‘women’s work’ involves its participants in restricted working hours, low pay, poor prospects and lowered status. They perform work of a feminine nature in a narrow range of occupations such as clerk, cleaner, caterer and carer. Looking to the literature on older women’s lives, it is also clear that low lifetime earnings, and the consequent inability to make adequate financial preparation, has a profound impact on their future options and wellbeing. Furthermore, little is known of specifically female aspects of the transition to retirement. We therefore obtained the views of almost 100 women aged over 45 who were in part-time employment by asking them to discuss the relevance of their employment to their self-identity, their attitudes towards retirement and their views on PRE.

Women's Work: Integrating Women's Studies into a Community College Curriculum

Abstract: Queensborough Community College, a two-year institution within the City University of New York, might not, at first glance, seem like the most hospitable site for teaching and research in Women's Studies. Twice, over the past few decades, Queensborough's faculty carefully considered, and ultimately rejected, the implementation of a formal women's studies concentration. This essay will nevertheless argue that their decision was informed by feminist concerns for student welfare. The study of women was, moreover, promoted with better success at Queensborough because the faculty resisted treating Women's Studies as a discrete discipline.

Welfare state and women's work: the professional projects of nurses and occupational therapists in Sweden

Abstract: Welfare State and Women´s Work - The Professional Projects of Nurses and Occupational Therapists in Sweden

‘Gustav got the winery and Sophie got the soup tureen’: The contribution of women to the Barossa Valley wine industry, 1836–2003

Abstract: This paper explores the participation of women in grape growing and wine making in the Barossa Valley, and their contribution to the establishment of the wine industry in this important centre of wine production in South Australia. It also addresses the social and cultural factors that have influenced women’s work in the wine industry, such as the ideology underpinning the allocation of male and female work spaces. Most wine writers have consistently ignored the significant part that women have taken in the South Australian wine industry. An examination of primary sources provides evidence of the long and continued participation of women in wine making. Interviews with women who currently work in vineyards and wineries complete the picture of their involvement in the wine industry, revealing the long and unacknowledged history of women in the wine industry of the Barossa Valley. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Introduction: Women's Work, a Cultural History

Abstract: Introduction to multi-authored volume describing state of the art research into women and work from the perspective of cultural history