Women's work

About: Women's work is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1625 publications have been published within this topic receiving 33754 citations. The topic is also known as: woman's work.

Export-oriented policies, women’s work burden and human development in Mauritius.

Abstract: This article attempts to understand how the feminisation of the labour force triggered by export-oriented policies has affected women's work burden in Mauritius. The article explores factors influencing women's labour supply (measured as hours worked in the productive economy) and women's hours of housework, and it further analyses how work burden experiences vary between women of different social backgrounds. The analysis is based on the use of mixed methods consisting of a quantitative survey in the industrial sector and a qualitative survey in the industrial and services sectors. The results show, among other things, that women and the social reproductive process are not only affected differently depending on women's socio-economic background, but also depending on a complex mixture of different socio-economic processes.

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.

Economic Growth, Peasant Marginalization, and the Sexual Division of Labor in Early Twentieth-Century China: Women's Work in Nantong County

Abstract: In recent decades economic development theory has increasingly focused on the question of women and work. At the same time, development agencies and planners have attempted to integrate programs for improvement of the economic and social position of women into larger strategies aimed at increasing agricultural and industrial growth in the Third World. Two implicit assumptions have formed the basis for many of these programs and the theory from which they arise: first, that processes of economic growth and development associated with market expansion are "benevolent"; and second, that the primary problem for Third World women has been insufficient participation in these processes. Although these assumptions continue to undergird development planning, they have not gone unchallenged. Indeed, in the two decades since Ester Boserup's (1970) pioneering work first documented that both planned and unplanned market expansion often resulted in more work but no improvement-or even decline-in the condition of rural

"The Intervention of a Friendly Power": The Transnational Migration of Women's Work and 1898 Imperial Imagination

Abstract: Scholars cannot fully explicate the meaning of the female form in U.S. imperial discourse without a more finely honed understanding of women's labor history. In 1898 popular rhetoric and representation fashioned a relationship between three very different border crossings: the transnational migration of a German model of nursing, which thrived in the ethnic neighborhoods of urban North America; the transplantation of one such institution from New York to Havana as part of the American Red Cross's relief program; and U.S. military intervention into the Cuban War of Independence. Politicians and the press constructed the Red Cross sister as a symbol of national purpose by appropriating a strategy that women perfected in the provision of neighborhood nursing charity, an affirmation of respectability that denied the economic nature of their work. Evocations of the Red Cross sister as the antithesis of imperial avarice expressed the period's pervasive anxiety over female wage earning.

A Qualitative Exploration of Women's Work—Life Balance Over the Life Course: A Case Study of Retail Managers

Abstract: This study examined women's work—life balance (WLB) over the life course in retail management. Ten women (mean age =25) who worked in the centre management of a shopping mall were interviewed. Thematic analysis revealed that they perceived their WLB to be influences by five aspects: (a) the integration of work and life roles (b) the career as a learning process which is personally meaningful, (c) the retail industry and people dynamics (d) the value of time and (f) perceived autonomy among options for work and life development. The findings suggest that WLB within retail is perceived as a subjective, continuous experience which changes over time.