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.

WOMEN'S WORK IN THE INFORMATION ECONOMY: The case of telephone call centres

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the work experiences and career opportunities of women employed in technology-intensive offices known as telephone 'call centres'. Call centres have grown rapidly across Europe in recent years, creating a significant number of new jobs and receiving considerable attention within the media, business and academic communities. However, despite the fact that the majority of call centre jobs have been taken by women, researchers have so far paid little attention to their position in this new 'industry'. The article addresses this research gap. In particular, it is concerned with the question of whether call centre work is offering women new opportunities for skill development and career progression, or whether a more familiar trend is taking place in which women are being drawn into a highly routinized, 'de-skilled' and de-valued area of work. The paper also uses the specific example of call centre work in order to reflect on broader issues about the changing nature of women's work...

Undoing Shame: Tourism and Women's Work in Turkey

Abstract: This paper discusses processes of tourism and socio-cultural change in a Turkish village context by exploring how gender identities and gendered spaces are being reconstituted through tourism-related work. As tourism has developed in the region surrounding the World Heritage Site of Goreme in central Turkey, men have become tourism entrepreneurs and gained tourism employment whilst women have remained largely excluded from tourism work. This is because in Goreme society tourism work is considered a man's activity as it is inappropriate for women to work in the ‘public’ sphere. During the past five years, however, there has been a marked increase both in women's paid employment in local tourism small businesses and in women's micro-scale entrepreneurial activity associated with tourism. Based on long term anthropological fieldwork, this paper considers the processes through which this example of tourism and social change has taken place. It considers some of the broader influential aspects of social change...

The locus of reproduction: women's labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927-1953

Abstract: An important advance in the study of southern African labour history in the last decade has been the recognition that capital has historically sought to relieve itself of the costs of social reproduction. The argument suggests that South African mining capital, in order to reduce the cost of wages paid to its African employees thus increasing the level of surplus value it could extract sought to localise social reproduction in the rural areas. By encouraging a system of migrant labour, companies avoided responsibility both for the maintenance of workers' families at the mine during their period of employment and for the maintenance of the workers themselves at the end of their working lives. I This paper, primarily a study of the causes, structure, and implications of women's involvement in the Zambian (Northern Rhodesian) copper mining industry, questions both the conceptual and spatial dimensions accorded social reproduction in this paradigm. Social reproduction, it suggests, involves not only the generational reproduction of the working class as a whole, but also the daily reproduction of labour power, that is, the daily maintenance of the worker. The Northern Rhodesian mining companies saw it in their interest to localise this second aspect of women's reproductive labour not in the rural areas, as the standard paradigm would predict, but under company domain and on company property. Women's unpaid labour, performed in the mining compounds, reproduced labour power on a daily basis and increased its productivity in the long term more effectively and cheaply than could the companies directly. Thus, contrary to Wolpe's South African model, the ability of capital in Northern Rhodesia to extract greater surplus value depended on its success in relocating women's reproductive labour to the urban areas. Moreover, although this calculation was initially based on a short-term assessment of the potential reduction of wage costs, some elements of management came to suspect by the second

Women’s Work Pathways Across the Life Course

Abstract: Despite numerous changes in women's employment in the latter half of the twentieth century, women's employment continues to be uneven and stalled. Drawing from data on women's weekly work hours in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we identify significant inequality in women's labor force experiences across adulthood. We find two pathways of stable full-time work for women, three pathways of part-time employment, and a pathway of unpaid labor. A majority of women follow one of the two full-time work pathways, while fewer than 10% follow a pathway of unpaid labor. Our findings provide evidence of the lasting influence of work-family conflict and early socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages on women's work pathways. Indeed, race, poverty, educational attainment, and early family characteristics significantly shaped women's work careers. Work-family opportunities and constraints also were related to women's work hours, as were a woman's gendered beliefs and expectations. We conclude that women's employment pathways are a product of both their resources and changing social environment as well as individual agency. Significantly, we point to social stratification, gender ideologies, and work-family constraints, all working in concert, as key explanations for how women are "tracked" onto work pathways from an early age.