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.

Too Many Hours - Too Little Pay: The Impact of Market and Household Hours on Women's Work Lives

Abstract: Work has many components. For many women, the great divide is the number of hours spent in the paid labor force relative to the number of hours working in the household. As the number of hours women commit to the labor market expands, there is a potential for a nurturance gap [Stanfield and Stanfield 1997] as the family unit finds itself underserved. On the other hand, if women choose to emphasize household work, they do not accumulate useable human capital necessary to protect their long-term economic well-being. The result is that many women in families, participating fully in both home and market, work too many hours for too little pay. This paper adds to the research in the economics of household labor through an analysis of the current work effort required of women in different types of families. How many hours does it take to maintain the household? Just how many hours do women in households work each week? What are the actual hourly earnings for that labor? And what are the benefits associated with this work effort?

The Gender Regime of 'Women's Work': A View From Tanzanian Internet Cafés

Abstract: International organization policies pertaining to gender and information technology address gender in terms of the relations between men and women as defined by sociocultural norms. In doing so, they do not account for how technology is itself gendered, or how people use technology in ways that call up and reproduce gendered relations in society. Certain assumptions that underpin these policies-that argue that there exists an imminent danger of losing women because of a lack of technological skills-even serve to reproduce gender relations in the realm of information technology. In this article, I deal with three questions. First, how are issues of gender and information technology conceptualized in the international educational policy literature? Second, what are some limitations of this policy conceptualization that surface in Internet cafe settings in northern Tanzania? The two issues I specifically investigate are the extent to which policy focuses on women's access to technology and the role that policy plays in the positioning of women as knowledge-and technology-poor. Third, how can we discuss these issues without either relying on an ethnocentric discourse and theory of gender relations that privileges white, Euro-American perspectives, or by reducing gender power relations to a faulty cultural logic in which sociocultural norms are blamed for imbalances of power? In order to address these questions, I offer a conceptual language for thinking about gender and information technology through invoking the concept of "gendered social regimes." Crediting Foucault (1977, 1978), cultural anthropologists and gender theorists (Connell 2002; Escobar 1995; Ong, 1999) have used the concept of power and knowledge "regimes" to address ways that gendered structures of power and knowledge are normalized. A "regime" is a "structure of relations" that "defines possibilities and consequences" (Connell 2002, 55). I argue that there exists a gender regime of technology, which in concrete terms manifests itself in the sexual division of labor in the realm of information technology. While I show that this regime is composed of gendered arrangements that draw on both global and local relationships and discourses, I also highlight how these arrangements are shaped in part through policy discourse that reproduces ideas about Third World women as knowledge- and technology-poor. Method This article concerns itself most directly with the language and direction of international education policy dealing with issues of gender and information technology. I ground it in an extensive conceptual and discursive analysis of two information technology policy documents (UNCSTD Gender Working Group 1995; Hafkin and Taggart 2001) that I have selected as representative of the themes and language of a broader sample. I locate these policy documents in the research and policy debates, which they both reflect and shape, and then offer a critique informed by recent anthropological analyses of the conceptualization of technology and by interpretations of several gendered dynamics of Internet cafes that point to the problematic nature of policy objectives, strategies, and outcomes. My understanding of Internet cafes as gendered spaces derives mainly from conversations with Internet cafe owners, managers, staff, customers, and other townspeople during a two-month period I spent in northern Tanzania conducting anthropological research on a separate project. Although this article draws on my daily experiences in at least seven cafe, I highlight one in particular, the Safari Internet Cafe (a pseudonym), located in a medium-sized city in northern Tanzania where as many as ten Internet cafes have opened in the last five years. I offer my thoughts on these gendered dynamics not as evidence derived from a systematic long-term study, but rather as vignettes in which I highlight issues and raise questions regarding the direction of international policy in information technology. …

A New Women’s Work: Digital Interactions, Gender, and Social Network Sites

Abstract: This research explores social network site interaction through digital and gendered labor. Due to enhanced interaction possibilities as well as mining and analytic techniques, all digital interaction is labor, at both the social and institutional level. Responses to a survey ( N = 455) suggest that digital labor varies depending on the most-used social network site. In addition, women test higher in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, and contribute statistically more emotional labor online through liking and commenting. Women describe intricate processes of deciding whether they can or should socially interact, often fearing interpersonal conflict or being told they are stupid. Men, on the other hand, view social network sites as places for entertainment and base their emotional labor on some judged entertainment value. As such, this study illuminates how social network sites function as extensions of the home. Instead of being invited to contribute new cultural products, women are frequently led to support only those that already exist, arguably creating data that contain less use value and even more exchange and surplus value than other forms of digital labor.

Was women's work bad for babies? A view from the 1911 census of England and Wales

Abstract: Comments penned in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras leave few doubts that many contemporaries believed that womens work (in the sense of paid employment) particularly that of married women was bad for babies With theseissues in mind the opportunity was taken to include in the 1911 census [of England and Wales] a set of questions above and beyond those previously asked Re-examining individual level responses to the 1911 "Fertility" census the author concludes that "`womens work in itself does not emerge as bad for babies but having a mother who was employed in industry increased a childs likelihood of being born into an area which would hold increased perils for infant life" (EXCERPT)

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.