Showing papers on "Women's work published in 2011"

For the Family?: How Class and Gender Shape Women's Work

Abstract: CHAPTER 1: Women's Work Trajectories: Need, Choice and Women's Strategies PART I: EXPECTATIONS ABOUT WORK CHAPTER 2: The Shape of Women's Work Pathways CHAPTER 3: A Major Career Woman? How Women Develop Early Expectations about Work PART II: WORK PATHWAYS CHAPTER 4: Staying Steady: Good Work and Family Support Across Classes CHAPTER 5: Pulling Back: Divergent Routes to Similar Pathways CHAPTER 6: A Life Interrupted PART III: NEGOTIATING EXPECTATIONS CHAPTER 7: For the Family: How Women Account for Work Decisions CHAPTER 8: Having it All? Egalitarian Dreams Deferred Appendix Notes References Index

Understanding Women's Work Using Time-Use Statistics: The Case of India

Abstract: Labor force surveys have undergone several changes over the years in order to better estimate the size and understand the characteristics of the work and labor forces. It is frequently argued, however, that these surveys still tend to underestimate the workforce, particularly women and certain productive activities that they perform. By comparing the findings of the National Sample Survey Organisation's 1999–2000 employment–unemployment survey in India with the findings of the 1998–9 pilot Indian Time Use Survey, this study shows that the latter survey has some built-in advantages that lead to improved estimates and understanding of the workforce. The case of India illustrates how a time-use survey can provide improved estimates of and better information on the workforce in a developing country, particularly capturing women's participation in informal employment, including subsistence production. Documenting this work is important, since it is increasingly common as developing and developed econo...

War and Women’s Work Evidence from the Conflict in Nepal

Abstract: This paper examines how Nepal's 1996-2006 civil conflict affected women's decisions to engage in employment Using three waves of the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, the authors employ a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of war on women's employment decisions The results indicate that as a result of the Maoist-led insurgency, women's employment probabilities were substantially higher in 2001 and 2006 relative to the outbreak of war in 1996 These employment results also hold for self-employment decisions, and they hold for smaller sub-samples that condition on husband's migration status and women's status as widows or household heads Numerous robustness checks of the difference-in-difference estimates based on alternative empirical methods provide compelling evidence that women's likelihood of employment increased as a consequence of the conflict

Gender dimensions: employment trends in India, 1993-94 to 2009-10

Abstract: "This paper examines some of the explicit as well as not so explicit trends in relation to women’s employment in India from 1993-94 till 2009-10 and argues that they indicate a grave and continuing crisis in women’s employment under liberalization led growth. Trends in the distribution of male and female workers by employment status and broad industry for the same period are also outlined. The paper shows how specific attention to unpaid work in the NSS data can overturn standard assumptions regarding women’s employment, and indeed has relevance for more general discussions on employment growth in India. It argues that the time has come to constantly and explicitly make a clearer distinction between income earning/paid employment and unpaid work in the analysis of employment trends."

The "CEO" of women's work lives: how Big Five Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Openness predict 50 years of work experiences in a changing sociocultural context.

Abstract: Few long-term longitudinal studies have examined how dimensions of personality are related to work lives, especially in women. We propose a life-course framework for studying work over time, from preparatory activities (in the 20s) to descending work involvement (after age 60), using 50 years of life data from the women in the Mills Longitudinal Study. We hypothesized differential work effects for Extraversion (work as pursuit of rewards), Openness (work as self-actualization), and Conscientiousness (work as duty) and measured these 3 traits as predictor variables when the women were still in college. In a prospective longitudinal design, we then studied how these traits predicted the women's subsequent work lives from young adulthood to age 70 and how these effects depended on the changing sociocultural context. Specifically, the young adulthood of the Mills women in the mid-1960s was rigidly gender typed and family oriented; neither work nor education variables at that time were predicted from earlier personality traits. However, as women's roles changed, later work variables became related to all 3 traits, as expected from current Big Five theory and research. For example, early personality traits predicted the timing of involvement in work, the kinds of jobs chosen, and the status and satisfaction achieved, as well as continued work participation and financial security in late adulthood. Early traits were also linked to specific cultural influences, such as the traditional feminine role, the women's movement, and graduate education for careers.

Women's work

Abstract: This essay raises the possibility that participation in convergence culture may not enhance women's recreational pleasures, much less prepare them for public forms of political activity. Taking the Dr. Phil multimedia self-help franchise as a case study, we argue that women's ‘interactivity’ can be mobilized as a gendered requirement of neoliberal citizenship, that is, an ongoing, mundane regimen of self-empowerment that does not intensify the pleasure of the text as much as it intensifies and extends a ‘second shift’ of familial and affective labour historically performed by women in the home. The gendered labour of actively participating in the Dr. Phil television show, website, books and workbooks prohibits the fleeting pleasures and temporary distractions associated with earlier phases of domestic labour, such as soap operas and romance novels.

The relationship between women’s work histories and incomes in later life in the UK, US and West Germany

Abstract: Using data from several large scale longitudinal surveys, this paper investigates the relationship between older women’s personal incomes and their work histories in the UK, US and West Germany. By comparing three countries with very different welfare regimes, we seek to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the life course, pension system and women’s incomes in later life. The association between older women’s incomes and work histories is strongest in West Germany and weakest in the UK, where there is evidence of a pensions’ poverty trap and where only predominantly full-time employment is associated with significantly higher incomes in later life, after controlling for other socio-economic characteristics. Work history matters less for widows (in all three countries) and more for younger birth cohorts and more educated women (UK only). We conclude with a brief discussion of the ‘women-friendliness’ of different pension regimes in the light of our analysis.

The Disappearing Gender Gap: The Impact of Divorce, Wages, and Preferences on Education Choices and Women's Work. NBER Working Paper No. 17508.

Abstract: Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married women's LFP averaged 70% over the same ages. In order to evaluate the quantitative contributions of the many significant changes in the economic environment, family structure, and social norms that occurred over this period, this paper develops a dynamic life-cycle model calibrated to data relevant to the 1935 cohort. We find that the higher probability of divorce and the changes in wage structure faced by the 1955 cohort are each able to explain, in isolation, a large proportion (about 60%) of the observed changes in female LFP. After combining all economic and family structure changes, we find that a simple change in preferences towards work can account for the remaining change in LFP. To eliminate the education gender gap requires, on the other hand, for the psychic cost of obtaining higher education to change asymmetrically for women versus men.

Family ties: women’s work and family histories and their association with incomes in later life in the UK

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between the family and work histories of older women and their personal incomes in later life, using retrospective data from the first 15 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. The association between women's family histories and their incomes later in life are relatively weak, explaining only a small proportion of the overall variation in older women's incomes. Divorce, early widowhood and re-marriage are not associated with any significant differences in older women's incomes, while motherhood is only associated with a small reduction in incomes later in life. While there are significant differences in the work histories of older women with different family histories, this translates into relatively small differences in their personal incomes, because the types of employment career pursued by most women are not associated with significantly higher retirement incomes and because public transfers dampen work history-related differentials, especially for widows. On the one hand, this could be seen as a positive finding in that the ‘pension penalty’ associated with life-course events such as motherhood and divorce is not as severe as often anticipated. On the other hand, the main reason for this is that the pension returns to working longer are relatively low, particularly for women with few qualifications. The analysis suggests that women retiring over the next two decades are unlikely to benefit significantly from the additional years they have spent in employment, because most of this increase has been in part-time employment. The article highlights the tensions between two objectives: rewarding work, and protecting the most vulnerable, such as carers, long-term disabled and unemployed. Resolving this dilemma involves moving away from a close association between pension entitlements and work history and towards universal entitlement based on a citizen's pension.

Attitudes towards Women's Work Roles and Women Managers in a Sports Organization: The Case of Turkey

Abstract: In recent years the need to apply gender equality principles to all sectors of Turkish society has been widely acknowledged and has become an increasingly important issue because of the modernization and recent Europeanization project of Turkey. However, even as this has been acknowledged, attempts to apply gender equality in employment in sports organizations have been mostly ignored. This article reports on the attitudes towards women's work roles and women managers of 83 women and 138 men who work in the General Directorate of Youth and Sport (GDYS) which is the biggest national governing body for sport in Turkey. The findings of this study indicate that both female and male workers in the GDYS scored lower on their attitudes towards women's work roles and held more negative attitudes towards women managers. Although male workers scored higher on attitudes towards women's work roles than female workers they held more negative attitudes towards women managers. In addition, femininity scores were found to be the only predictor of attitudes towards women's career advancement. Finally, we discussed these findings regarding previous studies and the sociocultural context of Turkey.

Home is where the heart is? Organizing women’s work and domesticity at Christmas

Abstract: This article critically discusses domestication and women’s work in household organization at Christmas, a case of meta-organizing which fuels commercialization. Located in the growing body of work on contesting femininity that challenges traditional notions of femininity, we problematize the binary divide between women’s work at home and commercial organizations. By considering Christmas as a set of ritualistic activities replete with myths of femininity, we explore how the home—a major site of festival activity—constructs gender through the public/private divide. This division has been central to critical interpretations of women’s subordination in work and leisure spaces where the concept of home has attracted feminist attention through its association with exile or retreat into domesticity. Home is, however, a culturally and politically contested space, and this article argues that home-work is a productive retreat from commercial-work. Home relates to domesticity and rituals in paradoxical ways and a...

Community work as women's work? The gendering of English neighbourhood partnerships

Abstract: This article contributes to debates about regeneration policy by developing a gendered perspective on neighbourhood partnerships. It explores the gendered nature of partnership working within regeneration policy in England by using a case study of a New Deal for Communities Partnership. Empirical data is used to explore the experiences of women working as unpaid community activists and paid community professionals. The article seeks to place women‟s perspectives and their everyday lives at the heart of debates about regeneration policy and partnerships.

Women's Work, Men's Cultures: Overcoming Resistance and Changing Organizational Cultures

Abstract: Context Introduction Women in Society Belonging - Meanings of Organizational Culture The Gender Agenda Part I - Equal Opportunities, Diversity, Inclusion - What's in a Word? Part II - The Business Case - Refocused, Renewed, Repeated? Part III - Gender Awareness in Organizations Style Matters The public/private divide Are you going home already? - The Long Hours Culture Let's have a drink! - Informal networking and socialising Sex in the office Leaders and Men On the Road to Change

The Disappearing Gender Gap: The Impact of Divorce, Wages, and Preferences on Education Choices and Women's Work

Abstract: Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married women's LFP averaged 70% over the same ages. In order to evaluate the quantitative contributions of the many significant changes in the economic environment, family structure, and social norms that occurred over this period, this paper develops a dynamic life-cycle model calibrated to data relevant to the 1935 cohort. We find that the higher probability of divorce and the changes in wage structure faced by the 1955 cohort are each able to explain, in isolation, a large proportion (about 60%) of the observed changes in female LFP. After combining all economic and family structure changes, we find that a simple change in preferences towards work can account for the remaining change in LFP. To eliminate the education gender gap requires, on the other hand, for the psychic cost of obtaining higher education to change asymmetrically for women versus men.

Film Criticism as ‘Women's Work’: the Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain, 1945–65

Abstract: Film criticism occupies a liminal space in film history. As a practice and body of work, it is secondary to the film itself; an ancillary form that is entirely dependent on the continued release of...

War and Women's Work: Evidence from the Conflict in Nepal

Abstract: This paper examines how Nepal’s 1996-2006 civil conflict affected women’s decisions to engage in employment. Using three waves of Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, we employ a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of war on women’s employment decisions. Results indicate that as a result of the Maoist-led insurgency, women’s employment probabilities were substantially higher in 2001 and 2006 relative to the outbreak of war in 1996. These employment results also hold for self-employment decisions, and they hold for smaller sub-samples that condition on husband’s migration status and women’s status as widows or household heads. Numerous robustness checks of the main results provide compelling evidence that women’s likelihood of employment increased as a consequence of the conflict.

Harvesting feminist knowledge for public policy : rebuilding progress

Abstract: Foreword - Navi Pillay Preface - Winnie Byanyima and Rawwida Baksh Acknowledgments Introduction - Devaki Jain and Diane Elson Economics for a Post-crisis World: Putting Social Justice First - Diane Elson "Rebooting" is Not an Option: Toward Equitable Social and Economic Development - Stephanie Seguino Questioning Economic Success through the Lens of Hunger - Devaki Jain Globalization, Labor, and Women's Work: Critical Challenges for a Post-Neoliberal World - Lourdes Beneria Removing the Cloak of Invisibility: Integrating Unpaid Household Services in the Philippines' Economic Accounts - Solita Collas-Monsod Poor Women Organizing for Economic Justice - Renana Jhabvala Gender Dimensions of the World of Work in a Globalized Economy? ? - Naoko Otobe Gender, Global Crises, and Climate Change - Itza Castaneda and Sarah Gammage The Cost of the Commoditization of Food and Water for Women - Yassine Fall Modernity, Technology, and the Progress of Women in Japan: Problems and Prospects - Hiroko Hara Equity in Post-crisis China: A Feminist Political Economy Perspective - Lanyan Chen Cuban Development Alternatives to Market-driven Economies: A Gendered Case Study on Women's Employment - Marta Nunez Sarmiento Challenges for African Feminism in the Contemporary Moment - Patricia McFadden "Progressive Masculinities": Oxymoron or Achievable? - Jael Silliman Index

Insubstantial pageants: Women's work and the (im)material culture of the early modern stage

Abstract: The excavations of the sites of the Rose and Globe playhouses have uncovered thousands of small objects that early moderns wore about their persons, holding together parts of their clothing and headwear and adding lustre to them. The labour of manufacturing and applying such objects was mainly female, in contrast to that of the professional playing companies, which was exclusively male. The drama itself is recurrently concerned with the status of such female labour, which can be read in the context of wider anxieties about women's freedom, sexual behaviour, and appearance. This article explores these anxieties using the data recoverable from documentary and archaeological evidence to reflect upon the stagecraft of the commercial theatre as it was influenced by increasingly elaborate and spectacular court masques. The greater the demand for spectacularly decorated bodies, the greater the reliance upon women's labour and anxiety concerning its products and social effects.

Women's community work challenges market citizenship

Abstract: This article examines the connection between women's community provisioning work and their participation in citizenship activities that seek to alter an inequitable distribution of rights and resources. As neo-liberal policy regimes restructure the collective work of women, we explore whether women's community work has become a substitute for public resources or whether it serves as a fundamental challenge to an individualization of citizenship by reconnecting citizenship and social rights. We draw on interview and focus group data from a multi-year year investigation of what supports and what limits the provisioning work women perform in six community organizations in Canada serving vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Three connections between citizenship activities and community provisioning are discussed: how women challenge notions of the worthy citizen; how they bring privatized need back into the public arena; and how they move from solidarity to advocacy.

Medical Mission to Moscow: Women's Work, Day Care, and Early Cold War Politics in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract: On August 15, 1946, Emily Hartshorne Mudd (1898–1998), a key pioneer in the history of marriage and family counseling in modern America, boarded a Swedish plane at New York City’s La Guardia airport for a month-long visit to the Soviet Union. Accompanying her were Robert Leslie, business manager of the American-Soviet Medical Society (ASMS), and her husband, University of Pennsylvania microbiologist and ASMS president Stuart Mudd. Th e trip, ostensibly a fact-fi nding mission designed to acquaint Leslie and the Mudds with Soviet science and medicine, was the last such visit of Americans to the USSR during the brief era (1943–47) of offi cially friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States over the sharing of biomedical knowledge. Th e trip soon plunged all three into the heated arena of early Cold War politics and ultimately scuttled Emily Mudd’s eff orts to convince Americans to adopt Soviet policies toward women, children, and health care in general. Aft er visiting schools, libraries, hospitals, orphanages, kindergartens, and day-care centers, and aft er meeting dozens of Russian scientifi c and medical dignitaries in Moscow, Leningrad, and Georgia, Leslie and the Mudds returned to the United States. Th ey and their ASMS colleagues dubbed the trip the “Medical Mission to Moscow,” a clear allusion to the 1941 pro-Soviet

Women’s work is never done: a sociological exploration of gender into the household division of labour and mothering roles and its contemporary implications for women in performing the “second shift”

Abstract: This thesis will examine why women are still expected to perform the “second shift” of both housework and childcare within contemporary society To discuss this, an exploration of gender and feminist literature will explain the way men and women become associated with different gender traits and roles which occur through the socialisation process In addition, a contemporary perspective will examine the changes that have occurred for women within the public areas of work and the implications for women in combining both their work and family obligations This thesis will demonstrate that while feminine roles have been analysed by gender theory, further work needs to be done to challenge men’s roles within the home which has reinforced women’s continued association with their familial responsibilities

Minimum wages and women's work

Abstract: Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.

The Disappearing Gender Gap: The Impact of Divorce, Wages, and Preferences on Education Choices and Women's Work

Abstract: Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married women's LFP averaged 70% over the same ages. In order to evaluate the quantitative contributions of the many significant changes in the economic environment, family structure, and social norms that occurred over this period, this paper develops a dynamic life-cycle model calibrated to data relevant to the 1935 cohort. We find that the higher probability of divorce and the changes in wage structure faced by the 1955 cohort are each able to explain, in isolation, a large proportion (about 60%) of the observed changes in female LFP. After combining all economic and family structure changes, we find that a simple change in preferences towards work can account for the remaining change in LFP. To eliminate the education gender gap requires, on the other hand, for the psychic cost of obtaining higher education to change asymmetrically for women versus men.

Women’s Work and Pensions: What is Good, What is Best?: Designing Gender-Sensitive Arrangements

Abstract: In The New Jim Crow, civil rights lawyer and Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander examines the legal and social framework that supports the regime of mass incarceration of black men in the United States. As Alexander carefully recounts, beginning in the early 1980s with President Reagan’s declaration of a ‘‘War on Drugs,’’ a number of policy initiatives, Supreme Court decisions, and vested interests, aided and abetted by political divisiveness and public apathy, coalesced to create the social, legal, and political environment that has supported mass incarceration ever since. Alexander’s analysis reveals disturbing parallels between the racial caste systems of slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s mass incarceration of black men in our country. In the end, however, Alexander shies away from proposing a potentially successful strategy for redressing the dilemma she so carefully depicts. Rather, she ‘‘punts,’’ or ‘‘cops out,’’ as we would have said in earlier eras. Alexander begins her analysis with a brief history of the several hundred years of variously oppressive race relations between whites and blacks in the United States. Quite correctly, Alexander observes that this history may be fruitfully understood as a sequence of renascent forms of social control refashioned to the new tenor of the times. Thus, Alexander traces the history of American political rhetoric in the latter half of the twentieth century where ‘‘law and order’’ comes to constitute code for ‘‘the race problem’’ and a policy of malign neglect toward African Americans is transmuted into an active political strategy devised to develop Republican political dominance in the southern states. Ultimately, as we know, the twin themes of crime and welfare propelled Ronald Reagan into the presidency. Searching for a follow-up initiative to define his early presidency, Reagan settled on increased attention to street crime, especially drug law enforcement. In short, the War on Drugs was not some disembodied social agenda, nor was it driven by public demand, as only two percent of Americans believed crime was an important issue at the time. Rather, as Alexander shows, the War on Drugs was a direct outgrowth of race-based politics and therefore the fact that it has had a disproportionate impact on young black men should come as no surprise. Alexander next turns her attention to the interwoven details of the social, legal, and political fabric that wrap the War on Drugs in supportive garb. As Alexander recites, the War on Drugs is the cornerstone on which the current regime of race-based mass incarceration rests because: (a) convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates since 1980, and (b) black Americans are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and subjected to lengthy sentences for drug offenses when compared to white Americans, even though drug use rates among white Americans have been consistently shown to be higher than for black Americans. Thus, any practices or policies that support the execution of the War on Drugs support the continuation of our movement toward mass incarceration of an entire category of Americans. Among the many developments Alexander reviews, one may note: changes in Supreme Court doctrine with respect to police stops, warrantless searches, consent searches, and suspicionless police sweeps for drug activity; federal initiatives to offer grants to support narcotics task forces; the development and expansion of modern drug forfeiture laws which permitted state and local law enforcement agencies to keep the vast majority of seized cash and assets in drug raids; and the legislative enactment of mandatory minimum and ‘‘three strikes’’ sentencing schemes, and their ready

Jewish Ethics and Women's Work in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Arab-Islamic World

Abstract: In this article, Moses Maimonides’ interpretation of Jewish law on women and work – as reflected in his Mishneh Torah – is contrasted with the daily lives of Jewish working women as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza. Later rabbinic writings and European travel accounts are analysed to show how Jewish ethics of women and work were translated into social practice in the late medieval and early modern Arab-Islamic world, where Islamic law and the existence of separate worlds for men and women rather than the contrast between public and private spheres seem to have informed general ideas about women and work.

Voluntary participation and poor women's work: a critical examination of a community health improvement initiative in a Kolkata slum

Abstract: Voluntary participation is a development practice that incorporates and ‘empowers’ marginalized populations by recruiting them as volunteers in community improvement programs in the global south. In India, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) commonly recruit female volunteers in urban slums to ‘participate’ in the improvement of reproductive and child health care needs in the community. In the volunteering literature, the practice is examined as one which uses the unpaid labor of women and legitimizes it within discourses of citizenship and solidarity in declining welfare states in the global north. The dynamics of female volunteering in countries such as India has received little attention in this literature. With a focus on a reproductive and child health care program run by Hope, an Indian NGO, my article undertakes the following. First, I argue that in the Indian context, volunteering needs to be situated within a broader project of decentralizing the traditional authority of the development expert ...