SOCI 210 Columbia College Gender Stereotypes Question Pick an occupation that interests you. Find information about the occupation on the Bureau of Labor S

SOCI 210 Columbia College Gender Stereotypes Question Pick an occupation that interests you. Find information about the occupation on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf).

In your analysis, present the gender wage gap and gender segregation within the given occupation. Using the information from the book, explain why the occupation has the profile that it has (i.e. integrate our course material, including concepts and theories!). How does this information relate to what we’ve studied in this class? Explain.

**Notice that the information on the site is very specific. You can choose to combine the information into fields. (This assignment is listed at the end of Chapter 9). Due Saturday.

Cite all sources in text APA. Min 2 Pages,

Also please be sure to use chapter 9 as a sourse as well.

APA Citation: Ryle, R. Questioning Gender. [Columbia College]. Retrieved from https://ccis.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781506325484… APA Citation: Ryle, R. Questioning Gender. [Columbia College]. Retrieved
from https://ccis.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781506325484/
9 How Does Gender Affect the Type of Work We Do and
the Rewards We Receive for Our Work? The Gender
of Work
What did you want to be when you grew up? Do you think your answer to that question or the way people reacted to
your answer was connected to your gender? Did anyone ever tell you that you couldn’t be what you wanted because
of your gender? How do certain jobs get defined in more or less gendered ways? Are men more invested in a highpaying job, and why would that be?
What are the differences in what women and men are paid? How have those differences changed over time, and how
do we explain those differences? Does gender influence the types of jobs for which we think men or women are
better suited? How does gender impact how well people do in the jobs they have, including their likelihood of being
promoted or getting a raise? Does gender have an impact on who gets hired for a job? What would a workplace
without gender look like?
These are the questions we’ll be exploring in this chapter on gender and the world of work, another important
institution where gender is enacted and that helps to create and reinforce our ideas about what gender is. As the
preceding questions reveal, determining exactly what we’re talking about with a focus on work is not an easy task.
In the last chapter, we discussed the important historical development within Anglo-European societies of the
separation of spheres. The separation of spheres is important to our consideration of both family and work because it
sets up a fundamental division between these two realms of social life, and this has important gendered implications
for the world of work. The separation of spheres affected families by removing some aspects of productive work
from within the house. The doctrine of separate spheres affected work in Anglo-European societies by creating a
whole new sphere that largely did not exist before: the workplace as separate and distinct from the home. In this
way, the separation of spheres forever changed the way many people in the world thought about work. Work
became something done largely by men, outside the house, for pay. What happened to all the many other tasks that
are done by women, inside the home, or for no pay?
What Is Work?
Take the example of Haruko, a wife and mother in Bessho, a rural farming community in Japan
(Conway-Turner & Cherrin, 1998). Haruko described herself as “just a housewife” who had a lot
of free time, but anthropologist Gail Lee Bernstein observed Haruko, like many other women in
her village, laboring side by side with men in the rice paddies weeding, transplanting, and
harvesting (Bernstein, 1993). Haruko called this work “helping her husband” rather than “work”
because Haruko was not paid for her labor in the field. As far as the abundance of free time
Haruko had, Bernstein (1993) described the daily worklife of this Japanese housewife as follows:
Haruko’s daily round of chores began at six o’clock. Every morning she prepared a breakfast
of mososhira, boiled rice, and green tea. After sending the children off to school at eight o’clock
in a flurry of last-minute searches for clothing and books and hastily delivered instruction,
Haruko ran a load of wash in the washing machine and hung it out to dry. As the woman of the
house, Haruko also had several community obligations that were impossible to shirk.
In addition to being a homemaker, Haruko was the family’s chief farm worker. Haruko also
worked with her mother-in-law and husband on a neighborhood team husking rice. One of
Haruko’s principal farm chores was feeding pigs. Twice a day, once in the morning and once at
night, the couple fed the ninety pigs and cleaned the pigsty.
By early November, Haruko usually looked for part-time wage-paying jobs. Haruko was taken
on as a dokata, or construction worker (literally a “mud person”), and she worked on a team with
two other women and three men. In most other wage-paying jobs women and men worked apart,
at distinct kinds of work, but on the construction teams they worked side by side. The
female dokata’s work was physically demanding: women hauled heavy boulders, climbed down
into trenches to lay irrigation pipes, constructed bridges over irrigation ditches, and shoveled
snow from steep mountain slopes. (pp. 226–229)
Some of the things Haruko did may seem somewhat foreign to women outside her particular
cultural context. If you asked most people in the United States to guess the gender of a
construction worker (which is essentially what a dokata is), their safest bet would probably be
male. In fact, some people in the United States might tell you that construction work is a job that
men are inherently better suited for based on their belief in men’s greater overall strength. Yet
Haruko, and many women like her around the world, move boulders, lay irrigation pipes, and
shovel snow—largely without the aid of the modern implements that reduce the amount of
physical strength necessary for these tasks in places like the United States. The case of Haruko
begins to reveal the ways in which our sense of how certain jobs are gendered may be a product
of our own cultural biases.
The labor for which Haruko is not paid may sound more familiar to the experiences of those
from Anglo-European societies. Certainly, many women prepare breakfast and do laundry, even
if fewer women (and people in general) are responsible for many of the farm tasks included in
Haruko’s round of daily chores. Are doing the laundry, making sure children are prepared to go
to school, feeding pigs, or husking rice somehow less important than the work Haruko’s husband
does in the paid labor force? Why is Haruko’s work not really considered work, even by Haruko
herself, who describes herself as just a housewife? Her story is typical of women around the
world, not necessarily in the specific tasks she performs (not everyone has pigs to feed), but in
the amount of work she does, in the many different work roles she occupies, and in the
devaluation of all her tasks as not really work (Conway-Turner & Cherrin, 1998). We begin with
Haruko’s case to make an important point in our ongoing examination of work. Many ways of
accounting for work and discussing work within the social sciences have historically ignored the
lives of people like Haruko. If we want to examine the relationships between gender and work,
we must first make sure that we become aware of the gender biases that are already there as soon
as we use the word work.
Can you think of other examples of hidden work that is performed by women and not usually perceived as work?
Measuring the World’s Work
The difficulty in deciding exactly what constitutes work makes it hard to do very simple things
like measure who works around the world and exactly how much work they do. On a global
level, organizations like the United Nations and the International Labour Organization are
interested in measuring the amount and kinds of work done by people in different countries, and
the statistics they produce can have important implications for decisions about who receives
much-needed international aid. Some evidence indicates that there is an important link between
the economic growth of a country or region and the employment rates of women, and this makes
measuring the amount of work done by women an important task (International Labour Office,
2008).
Initially, many of the statistics collected by international organizations like the United Nations
and the International Monetary Fund simply excluded the work women did outside the paid labor
market. This meant that most of the work Haruko did on a daily basis was not accounted for in
these numbers. If her construction work had included some kind of legal contract, an hourly
wage or salary, or some kind of paycheck from which taxes were taken (meaning that the income
was reported to the government), then this would be formal paid labor. But much of the labor
that takes place around the world is informal labor, which means that there is no legal contract
for the work, that there is not necessarily a set hourly wage or salary, and that none of the income
is reported to the government by the employer or employee. Women are far more likely
worldwide to be employed in the informal labor market than are men, so there’s a strong chance
that Haruko’s part-time position as a construction worker still did not include her in the official
statistics once collected by the United Nations.
In the wake of the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women held by the United
Nations, the United Nations and other international organizations began to reconsider their
methods for measuring work and employment. Currently, much of women’s work in the
informal economy is classified as self-employment under the categories of own-account worker
and contributing family worker. Own-account workers are those who are self-employed with
no employees working for them. Cottage industry work is often an example of own-account
work, and it involves individuals making or producing some product in their home to sell for
cash. If Haruko grows her own pigs to eventually sell on the market, she is an own-account
worker and is counted as self-employed. Contributing family workers are a kind of ownaccount worker who work without pay in an establishment operated by a related person living in
the same household. If Haruko’s husband is the one who gets the money from raising and selling
the pigs while Haruko receives no pay in return for her part of the labor, she becomes a
contributing family worker. Both categories help account for much of the work done by women
and children that is outside the formal labor market but still important to the economic
functioning of families as well as nations as a whole.
In 2015, women remain overrepresented relative to men in the categories of own-account
workers and contributing family workers, though there has been some progress. Between 1995
and 2015, the gender gap between women and men in the category of contributing family
workers decreased from 19.5 percentage points to 10.6 percentage points (International Labour
Organization, 2016). This change is uneven across the globe. In sub-Saharan Africa, women
account for 34.9% of contributing family workers and 42.5% of own-account workers, while in
Southern Asia, women make up 31.8% of contributing family workers and 47.7% of ownaccount workers.
Expanding the ways in which we define work to include a wide range of activities is important in
that it begins to dismantle our gendered notions of work as something that is primarily done by
adult men. In fact, much of the world would come to a grinding halt if we tried to survive solely
on the labor of adult men. But on a global scale, there are important differences in the kinds of
economic activity in which women and men are engaged. The types of economic activity women
are more likely to be engaged in are less secure and often increase women’s vulnerability. Of the
world’s 53 million domestic workers, 83% are women. The number of domestic workers is
increasing in developing countries. Working behind closed doors, almost 30% of women doing
domestic work are deprived of labor rights, while more than half of them are not entitled to earn
the minimum wage. This domestic work includes the work Haruko does to help her husband in
the rice fields and to care for the family pigs. Worldwide, women working in the informal sector
include women like Cherifa, a woman in Tunisia who began selling pastries to friends and family
members when her husband squandered her family inheritance (El Amouri Institute, 1993).
Cherifa makes the pastries out of her own home, and although one of her sons has set up a shop
selling the same pastries and paying taxes, Cherifa neither counts her money nor reports income
from what is her own business. In Colombia, women like Auntie Donkor and Madam Faustina
participate in the informal economy and support their families by illegally selling foodstuffs like
fish and produce at a market in the city (Okine, 1993). They cannot afford the taxes and fees
required to sell food legally at the market, so they sell after 4 P.M., when the police are less
likely to see them, and establish a network of customers who know where to find them. Like
Cherifa, both of these women support their families through the income they gain from informal
activities.
The activities of these women are considered vulnerable employment for several reasons,
including the very basic fact that these jobs are lower paid overall relative to jobs in the formal
economy. One household member working a job in the informal economy will find it difficult to
raise his or her family out of poverty on that one income, and this is an especially troubling fact
in much of the developing world, where fully 50% to 80% of nonagricultural employment is in
the informal sector (United Nations Development Fund for Women, 2005). When most jobs are
in the low-paying informal economy, moving vast numbers of families out of poverty in the
global South becomes a nearly impossible task. These types of employment make women and
their families vulnerable to falling into or remaining in poverty.
But because they are in the informal economy, they also make women vulnerable in other ways.
Those working in the informal economy are less likely to have access to basic social services
while being more likely to be fall prey to illness, property loss, disability, and death. Because
they are not officially employed in the informal economy, workers in the informal economy are
not eligible for or cannot afford the very things that help to buffer the effects of these life events,
like health insurance, home insurance, life insurance, and disability insurance.
Not surprisingly then, those in the informal economy have lower levels of health, education, and
longevity relative to their counterparts in the formal economy. They experience fewer of the
rights and benefits that come with employment and are therefore often cut out of the very
decision-making processes in government or marketing institutions that might help to improve
their situation. For example, organizing a union in the world of the informal labor market is
difficult, and this leaves these workers with limited options for improving their working
conditions or pay. Within the government, informal workers are not acknowledged as officially
employed, and this affects their status relative to government institutions.
Given these disadvantages of working in the informal economy and women’s concentration
worldwide within these jobs, it’s safe to say that many women are at a distinct disadvantage
when it comes to the work they do. On top of that, add the fact that no country keeps track of the
“housework” that women do in their calculations of economic activity. When you hear figures
about the gross domestic product (GDP) or gross national product (GNP) of a country, this does
not include the hours and hours of work necessary for caring for children and maintaining a
household done by family members, unless that activity generates income for the family. Does
changing dirty diapers generate income for a family? Not according to national statistics, but it is
a task that has to be done to reproduce a new generation of children—and if there were not
someone in the family doing this task for no pay, someone would have to be paid to do it.
Almost all the tasks that fall under the umbrella term of housework are tasks that can be, and
often are, outsourced to someone outside the family. Even what we think of as the highly
emotional and intimate job of raising children has historically and sometimes continues to be
done by employees who are not related to the children at all: nannies, babysitters, and au pairs. A
person who does all these jobs for free within the family is saving the household a great deal of
money and so contributing to the family’s income. In the United States, the annual cost of child
care for a four-year-old ranges from $3,016 to $9,628, while for infants, the cost can be as high
as $13,840 annually (Matthews, 2006). For many poor, single working mothers, more than half
of their cash income goes toward the costs of child care. Why are these activities, then, treated as
if they exist outside the real economy when they are done by family members?
The simplest answer is that work has become a deeply gendered institution. Just as the world of
the family is presumed to be a feminine domain, work is considered to be the territory of men.
This ideology is so strong that it makes the work that women do around the world largely
invisible. Their work is not counted in official statistics gathered by international and national
organizations (Bonvilliain, 2007). The role of women in determining the distribution of
economic resources within families is often ignored and subsumed under the larger unit of the
household, without analyzing the complex gender dynamics that take place within any given
household. As we’ve discussed with women like Haruko, women themselves often do not
consider what they do work but merely as helping their husband or being a housewife and
mother.
What would happen if women (and other people) around the world demanded to be paid for the labor they currently
do for free? What would a world in which whoever does the child care and housework in your family had to be paid
for that labor look like? How would the ways in which we think about work be different?
Given all these realities, it is important at the beginning of this chapter to point to the ways in
which much of the world’s work currently is and always has been done by women. The story we
will explore later in this chapter about the increasing labor force participation among women in
many Anglo-European cultures is just one particular narrative about women’s relationship to
work. This story suggests that women working is a relatively new and novel phenomenon, but to
tell the story in that way ignores the many other kinds of work women have always done and
continue to do around the world.
Theory Alert! Institutional Approach
A Man’s Job: Masculinity and Work
Although much of the work that women do is ignored or made invisible, work becomes for men
an unspoken expectation that is often perceived as defining the very core of a man’s identity. In
almost any industrialized society, adult men are expected to have jobs, and any deviation from
this expected course of events is viewed as not just a personal failing on the part of the man but
also as a failure of his masculinity. A man who is successful in the world of work is perceived as
successful at the all-important task of being a man. Thus, in places like the United States, we
follow the dictum, the “bigger the paycheck,” the “bigger the man” (Gould, 1974, p. 99). This
lines up with the dictum of contemporary manhood we discussed in the last chapter: that men
should “Be a Big Wheel.”
To demonstrate the particular power that work has in men’s lives, we need only look at what
happens to men who do not work or men whose work does not provide the kind of status derived
from having a big paycheck. A wealth of sociological research demonstrates what happens to
men with work lives characterized by various kinds of failure, whether that means actual
unemployment or working-class jobs that do not provide the kind of status associated with highpaying, high-status careers (Liebow, 1967; Rubin, 1976, 1994). These failures in their work lives
affect other relationships, souring friendships, placing a strain on relations between husbands and
wives, and altering patterns of fatherhood. As one unemployed machinist in Lillian Rubin’s
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