Showing papers on "Women's work published in 2017"

Saudi women’s work challenges and barriers to career advancement

Abstract: Purpose Few studies have explored the work challenges and career barriers faced by women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Drawing on Institutional Theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of employed Saudi women through in-depth interviews. Design/methodology/approach The paper employs a phenomenological qualitative approach drawing on 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Saudi women. Findings The findings reveal a significant number of prominent societal and organizational structural and attitudinal barriers to the advancement of Saudi women in paid employment. Among others, these barriers include a lack of mobility; the salience of gender stereotypes; gender discrimination in the workplace; limited opportunities for growth, development, and career advancement; excessive workload caused by a lack of family-work balance; and gender-based challenges related to dealing with pregnancy. Research limitations/implications Despite the contributions of this study, it also has limitations, particularly the convenience sampling approach and the focus on the KSA. The small sample size means that the findings cannot be generalized to all women employed in Saudi Arabia and should be generalized within Saudi Arabia and other Arab societies only with caution. Originality/value The paper contributes to the understanding of work challenges and barriers of Saudi women in the workforce. It provides fresh insights to the issues surrounding women in Saudi Arabia and the need to address them in order to provide support for their career advancement.

Fashioning the feminine self in “prosumer capitalism”: Women's work and the transnational reselling of Western luxury online

Abstract: Through ethnography and interviews, this article examines the social media–based transnational reselling of Western luxury by Chinese women through the lens of gendered transnational prosumption. Linking prosumption to debates on the feminization of labor, it analyzes the paradoxical implications that neoliberal global capitalism's demand for more agentive and participatory prosuming female subjects have for international feminist politics. Disrupting the boundaries between the commercial or public and personal, virtual and physical, and work and consumption, transnational mobile middle-class Chinese women have “reinvented” prosumption as a cultural, technological, and economic solution to the contradictions that inhere in competing demands of different gender regimes. In their hands, prosumption becomes a gendered response to the tensions inherent to China's Post-Socialist modernity, allowing some women more choices, autonomy, flexibility, and mobility through the strategic performance of gendered identi...

Does Women’s Labor Force Participation Reduce Domestic Violence? Evidence from Jordan

Abstract: Enhancing women’s labor force participation is seen as a way to promote their empowerment and improve their well-being and that of their children. The empirical literature on the relationship betwe...

Mothering through Precarity: Women's Work and Digital Media

Abstract: In Mothering through Precarity Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim explore how working- and middle-class mothers negotiate the difficulties of twenty-first-century mothering through their everyday engagement with digital media. From Facebook and Pinterest to couponing, health, and parenting websites, the women Wilson and Yochim study rely upon online resources and communities for material and emotional support. Feeling responsible for their family's economic security, these women often become "mamapreneurs," running side businesses out of their homes. They also feel the need to provide for their family's happiness, making successful mothering dependent upon economic and emotional labor. Questioning these standards of motherhood, Wilson and Yochim demonstrate that mothers' work is inseparable from digital media as it provides them the means for sustaining their families through such difficulties as health scares, underfunded schools, a weakening social safety net, and job losses.

Women's Work, Gender Roles, and Intimate Partner Violence in Nigeria.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to determine the contribution of women's labor force participation to the risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization in the past 12 months, using data for 20,635 currently married women aged 15-49 years from the 2013 nationally representative Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. Multilevel logistic regression models of sexual and physical IPV, with interactions between women's work and social norms regarding traditional gender roles, were developed. Approximately 23% of women aged 15-49 years reported IPV victimization in the past 12 months. Results revealed that non-cash work relative to unemployment was positively associated with both forms of IPV victimization, after controlling for other factors. Women's engagement in cash work was positively correlated with sexual IPV. The positive association between cash work and physical IPV victimization was significantly larger for women who resided in localities with greater male approval of wife beating. In localities where husband-dominated decision making was more common, a spousal education gap that favored husbands was more positively associated with sexual IPV. The findings call for integrated IPV prevention and economic empowerment programs that consider gender norms and gender-role beliefs and are adapted to the locality setting, in order to promote social environments in which women can reap the full benefits of their economic empowerment.

A Macro-National Level Analysis of Arab Women's Work Engagement

Abstract: This paper reviews the macro-national level factors that influence women's work engagement in Arab countries First, it offers an overview of the notions of work engagement and gendered work engagement Next, the macro-national context is investigated where economic, socio-cultural, and legal factors are analyzed that may explain differences in workplace engagement between men and women Lastly, the discussion, implications for future research and practice, and conclusion are offered

The Changing Role of Elite Southern Women in the Lower South (1830-1900)

Abstract: The topic of the American Civil War is one that has long been studied by historians. This thesis looks to the often forgotten home front and explores the dynamic changes the elite women of the Lower South faced from the antebellum to the post bellum era. Through the exploration of diaries, journals, memoirs, and newspapers from the mid to late nineteenth century, the changing roles and responsibilities of the elite women during this time period are further explored. The stories of the elite women add to the overall history of the nineteenth century Lower South and allow the reader to understand these women through a different lens. While considered wealthy and unaffected by the Civil War, the primary accounts of these women illustrate just how much their lives were changed because of the war and how they continued to change once the war was over. INDEX WORDS: American Civil War, Nineteenth century, Elite Southern women, Women, Ladies Memorial Association, Women’s work THE CHANGING ROLE OF ELITE SOUTHERN WOMEN IN THE LOWER SOUTH

Reconsidering women's work in rural India: analysis of NSSO data, 2004–05 and 2011–12

Abstract: The most recent data gathered by the National Sample Survey Office on work participation for women in India reveal a sharp decline, primarily due to the NSSO's conventional measures not accounting for economic activities undertaken by women for the benefit of households. Alternative definitional approaches to the production boundary, such as the Indian System of National Accounts and the United Nations System of National Accounts, somewhat better account for unpaid work by women for households' own consumption. An analysis of data from the part of the NSSO schedule on employment and unemployment (for 2004–05 and 2011–12) that enquires about various activities undertaken by individuals who report performing household activities as their principal activity, reveals a less dramatic decline than that presented by the more conventional measure of work participation. This finding contributes to a significant rethinking of how rural women's contributions to economic activities for their own households can be better recognised through data.

Mistress or maid : The structure of women’s work in Sweden, 1550–1800

Abstract: Based on the verb-oriented method and a unique collection of observations from court records, this article shows that both men and women did almost all categories of work in early modern Sweden. On the level of concrete tasks, however, there was both difference and similarity between the genders. Marital status exerted a strong influence on women's sustenance activities, creating a clear distinction between unmarried and ever-married women. These patterns were probably the effect of a labour legislation that forced young people without independent means to offer their bodies and time to masters and mistresses.

Why is Women’s Work Low-Paid? Establishing a framework for understanding the causes of low pay among professions traditionally dominated by women

Abstract: This discussion paper was commissioned by Oxfam’s UK Programme to understand why certain occupations in the UK labour market, traditionally dominated by women, are low-paid. The paper argues that jobs associated with traditional and outdated notions of ‘women’s role in the home’ extends into the jobs market. This affects attitudes towards remuneration in professions such as cleaning and caring. The paper sets out a framework for understanding the risks of low pay and to explore the issue of the undervaluing of low-paid jobs with respect primarily to women. The author calls these the five ‘V’s: visibility, valuation, vocation, value-added and variance, and sets out a possible series of policy responses.

Women’s work–life preferences: reconceptualization and cross-country description over time

Abstract: According to Hakim’s preference theory, women can be divided into three groups based on their work–family preferences: home-centered, adaptive and work-centered. Here it is argued that Hakim’s conceptualization of the adaptive women is unsatisfactory, as it does not take into consideration how the adaptive women want to combine work and family. The paper offers a reconceptualization of the adaptive group. Based on when women want to return to employment after childbirth, and how many hours they would like to work, three types of adaptive women are distinguished: the home-oriented adaptive women, the truly adaptive women and the work-oriented adaptive women. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of the reconceptualization, a cross-sectional descriptive study of women’s preferences over time is conducted by employing data from International Social Survey Programme.

Ideal versus reality? The domesticity ideal and household labour relations in Dutch industrializing regions, circa 1890

Abstract: For long, international comparisons of female labour force participation (FLFP) have been based on aggregate source material, most notably censuses. However, the lion’s share of today’s historians agree that censuses have systematically underreported women’s work activities. Consequently, scholars relying on this source have found a nineteenth-century Dutch male breadwinner society while others have found that the Dutch female labour force was quite extensive. This discrepancy in the historiography is in need of closer scrutiny. The current study shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, in industrial regions married women indeed withdrew from the registered labour market but instead engaged in other types of labour relations that could easily be combined with homemaking duties and that remained invisible in the census. Furthermore, this article argues that the fact that married women provided an income did not necessarily contradict the growing ideal of domesticity. The alternative types o...

Innovation, women’s work and the documentary impulse: pioneering moments and stalled opportunities in public service broadcasting in Australia and Britain:

Abstract: This article explores the roles of some of the key women producers, broadcasters and writers who were able to work within the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Australian Broadcasting Corp...

'Her body [was] like a hard-worked machine': Women's work and disability in coalfields literature, 1880-1950.

Abstract: This essay considers the representation of women's work and disability in British coalfields literature in the period 1880-1950. Industrial settings are a rich source for literature concerned with bodily health, injury and disability and offer insights into the gendering of the working body whether male or female. Situating this largely realist body of novels, stories and plays in its historical context, this article will focus on intersections between work, class and gender. It shows how the vital, but unpaid, work of women in domestic labour was depicted as an extension of the industrial machine, which had clear consequences in terms of high mortality and morbidity rates amongst women.

Producing Meaningful Work: An in-depth Study of Domestic Workers and Stratified Reproduction

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to deepen the understanding of how domestic workers are able to find resistance within their work place. Using eleven in-depth interviews with women working as domestic workers in New York City, this project contributes to the extant literature regarding domestic workers and stratified reproduction. I examine how domestic work is shaped by the intersections of race, class, gender, and citizenship status. These factors contribute to the conception of domestic work as low-skilled labor as well as the denigration and poor treatment of workers on the job. Though workers often have to sustain poor treatment due to their economic vulnerability, my research illuminates the various ways in which workers find resistance within their sites of employment. These interviews reveal the way in which the domestic workers interviewed produced meaning and restructured their work as important, meaningful labor. From my findings, I deepen the theory of stratified reproduction by asserting the importance of worker’s methods of resistance.

Women s work, gender ideology and domestic division of labour: where do men stand

Abstract: This research investigates the domestic division of labour patterns in the Turkish households and how women’s employment is affected by the gendered share of domestic chores as well as by men’s gender ideology at home. The separation of roles in the private sphere in relation to women’s work trajectories is elaborated by addressing housework undertaken by women predominantly, and it is argued that the overwhelming nature of traditionally female housework (that is among the major barriers for women to be particularly in high-end jobs) and the lack of men’s support at home affect women’s continuity in the labour market negatively. Using Family Structure Survey data (TurkStat, 2006), results demonstrate that time availability and resource bargaining perspectives do not create the anticipated impact on women’s involvement in the female housework, yet due to different coping mechanisms for childcare, there is a dramatic change in women’s share in caring for children when they work and have higher earnings. As men are found to be supportive of female employment in theory, they are not involved in female-dominated chores at home in practice. The findings show that men’s status at home needs to be reinforced as much as women’s paid work is supported and alongside with tangible support, mentality towards conventional gender roles needs to be changed.

Re-envisioning the Dignity of Women’s Work

Abstract: The concept of dignity of work presumes universally that work is good for you. In this worldview work is an enabler that provides material well-being and intrinsic satisfaction. Dignified work provides a status to those who undertake it, accords them respect as contributing citizens and promotes cohesion in society. This conception regards the right to work as uplifting.

Wee Women’s Work

Abstract: Donahoe argues that women were at the forefront of this community development because it was driven by care work or soft “bread and butter” issues. As a new field, community development provided an ungendered space for public engagement. Women’s organizations are important actors in their communities because of the range of services that they provide. Women can engage across the interfaces of Northern Ireland, growing networks, sharing lessons learned, and building the capacities of their local communities in a positive sum game that does not threaten the status quo but contributes to slow peace. Where men were actively engaged in the politics of violence, community development was seen as “wee women’s work.”

The Myth of Self-Sacrifice for the Good[s] of Mankind: Contingency and Women’s Work

Abstract: The myth of self-sacrifice is a belief in the value of caring and serving, regardless of personal cost, which characterizes attitudes toward women’s work in general and contingent faculty work in p...

Entangled Histories : Unraveling the Impact of Colonial Connections on both Javanese and Dutch Women’s Work and Household Labour Relations, ca. 1830-1940

Abstract: In this article I investigate changing household labour relations and women’s work in the Dutch empire. I question how colonial connections affected the division of work between men, women, and children, not only in the colony ‐ the Dutch East Indies (i.c. Java), but also in the metropolis ‐ the Netherlands. Entanglements can be found in the influences of colonial economic policies on both colony and metropolis, as well as in the more indirect effects of colonial exploitation and taxation, and, finally in the sphere of sociopolitics and ideologies. I will analyse the entanglements between the Netherlands and Java in these domains, comparing similarities and differences, but also paying attention to the connections and transfers between both parts of the Dutch empire. Although some of the conditions and developments were highly specific to the Dutch empire, I aim to show that the method of comparing and establishing direct and indirect connections between different parts of an empire can lead to new insights that can also be applied to other parts of the world and different time periods.

EnGendering the State: Women's Work and Peru's 2012 Agrarian Census

Abstract: This paper analyzes rural women's work in the 2012 agrarian census in Ayacucho, Peru to demonstrate the effects of gendered labor on political subjectivities and processes of statecraft. Census work is an example of the temporary, low-income jobs increasingly the mainstay of poor and landless women in semirural areas. Alongside short-term jobs for NGOs or municipalities, however, such work provided its employees—in this case, low-income, mestiza women—with channels for limited influence over local politics and development. At the same time, census work highlighted gendered attitudes toward the state and tensions over shifting patterns of gendered labor and political engagement. As both formal and illicit economies expand in Ayacucho, along with government interest in controlling the region, an analysis of the intersection of gendered labor trends and political attitudes provides a unique understanding of sovereignty and alterity that foregrounds local influence. Using the example of the census, I examine how women enacted governmental procedures through the limited, precarious work available to them, demonstrating both that the production of data used in policy is a negotiated process and that gendered relationships with the state reflect and are affected by local divisions of labor.

Challenges to increase female labor force participation: Gender inequality in Cost Rica

Abstract: Costa Rica is at the end of the demographic transition with an insufficient educational profile to meet the demands of the market. The benefits of the first demographic dividend were not realized due to the lack of public policies, that did not incentivize better skills for the new generations that will have to support an aging population. In this context, a potential opportunity arises. Low female labor force participation poses a scope for accelerating economic growth through greater incorporation of women into the market. This opportunity known as gender dividend, will only materialize if public policies reduce the barriers that limit a greater female participation. Despite the rapid growth of the participation rate of women in the market, in the last five years a stagnation of this indicator is observed, which suggests that factors such as care and unpaid work limit the participation of women in the market.

The Price of Prejudice: Women's Work and Labour Force Discrimination in Australian History

Abstract: This article examines changes in women’s participation in the workforce and female wage rates in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia, focusing on the period of boom, depression and recovery from 1890 to 1910. Instead of explaining the trends in terms of family income or labour market segmentation, it is argued that the changes observed can be explained on the basis of sex-based discrimination in the labour market. Evidence from Victorian manufacturing during this period supports the discrimination hypothesis. Statistics for manufacturing industry in Brisbane during this period also give support to the discrimination hypothesis. As the economy slipped into depression and the general level of incomes fell, people were less willing to pay the price of prejudice against women workers. Both employment discrimination and wage discrimination against women were temporarily alleviated. Consequently there was the concurrence of rising employment of women relative to men and rising women’s wages relative to men’s wages.