The Gendering of Inequalities

Women, Men and Work

Jane Jenson, Jacqueline Laufer, Margaret Maruani, Helen Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138704183
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351786157
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This was first published in 2000: This work is founded on the premise that many analyses of economic restructuring and of gender relations fail to recognize two things. First, the situation facing women is different from that of the 1960s when the conceptual apparatuses for analyzing "women and work" were created. Labour markets are dominated by flexible, non-standard work, precarious contractual relations and income disparities. Therefore, it is difficult to structure political claims or analysis around the notion that there is a single labour market, that the primary problem is discrimination or inappropriate training, and that political strategies should focus on discrimination and non-traditional employment. Rather, new challenges require new solutions. The second point of departure is that is is impossible to understand either contemporary labour markets, or the roots of employment and other public policies without locating them vis a vis patterns of gender inequalities generated by and in these labour markets. The labour force has been feminized to such an extent that new, and often unequal gender relations are crucial to their very functioning.

Part III
Women's Relationship to Labour Markets: More and More Precarious?

CHANTAL ROGERAT
AND
RACHEL SILVERA
CO-ORDINATORS

Introduction to Part III
(Wo)man-Handled by the Labour Market

CHANTAL ROGERAT

Somewhere between sociology and economics, knowledge about women's employment and non-employment, is pursuing its long march. Little has been done in the way of actual research on women's unemployment, and on putting women and men's unemployment into perspective. But the most surprising fact resides elsewhere. Gender differentials in employment, and in its correlate, unemployment, are still masked by a male-centred culture. We may include some women researchers (Majnoni d'Intignano, 1998) in this group that turns its back to the fact that "gender and work" has been under investigation for over 30 years now. Studies range from the first early research on women's employment (Guilbert, 1966) to the theoretical formulation of the gender division of waged and domestic work (Kergoat, 1982; Chabaud-Rychter and Fougeyrollas-Schwebel, 1985) and the assertion of the existence of a sociology of employment (Maruani and Reynaud, 1993)

A Century-Long Paradox

A paradox exists. While studies began to document the irreversable rise m women's labour force participation (Bouillaguet-Bernard et al., 1981) and their conquest of highly qualified managerial jobs (Laufer, 1982) already underway in the 1980s, the legitimacy of women engaging in paid work nonetheless continued to be problematic. This was despite widespread acknowledgement that a job was the basis of their financial autonomy (Fraisse, 1992).

Such ambiguity is eloquent, and calls for the multiplication of studies on the social construction of employment and unemployment. With the rise of under-employment, flexibility of job status and pay have produced greater social inequality and poverty. But how is under-employment distributed? How does long-term unemployment set in? In our opinion, the extent and diversity of the phenomenon cannot be measured properly if we do not reason in terms of gender.

The analysis developed in this Part by Teresa Toms via her study of the Spanish example raises the issue of the current organisation of the social and economic system. She views it as dependent on women's unemployment, but without any recognition of this fact. She identifies the inadequacy of the notion of social exclusion where women are concerned. What is the object of their supposed exclusion, inasmuch as society assigns them to the domestic sphere?

Another striking example is supplied by the many difficulties encountered by the enforcement of the precept of equality at work in France and throughout Europe. There is also the over-representation of women in unemployment, a fact insufficiently brought out by statistics. The status of wage-earner is disintegrating for everyone, in the face of increased flexibility of working time and wages. The status of domestic labour as well as domestic service jobs provides another important challenge. The state of the labour market is not a sufficient explanation of all these changes. We must understand how the categories of joblessness and unemployment are constructed and modulated, as well as the modalities of the increasing complexity of job statuses in the current context of economic transformation.

Unemployment: A Social Construct

The teachings of history are essential here. The appearance on the scene of the "jobless" is relatively recent. The regularly employed but temporarily unemployed individual and classified as jobless (Topalov, 1994) did not exist until the end of the 19th century, when that category was distinguished from the poor and the non-working. Except in the case of great poverty, women were still viewed as being supported by the head of the family, and therefore not "jobless."

Their status as workers has been so uncertain that recherchees who analysed women's employment in the 1960s and 1970s viewed the decision by a laid-off woman to register with the unemployment agency as an indicator of "attachment" to doing paid work. Yet women have been present on the French labour market since the early 19th century and their presence has increased spectacularly since the 1960s. The paradox is a century-long one, in other words.

The value of studies such as the one presented here by Annie Gauvin must be assessed in this context. They give us the measure both of the extent of women's employment in today's economy, its impact, and also the ways in which it is used. When statistics show consistently higher unemployment rates for women than for men and durable unemployment rates even in those sectors that have been increasingly employing women over the last 30 years, it is clear that a gendered vision of the structural dimensions of unemployment is needed. By approaching the position of women on the margins of employment and labour force participation, then, we may reveal new patterns in gestation and raise new questions about work, as it has been defined until recently.

The situation in Great Britain, as described by Ariane Hegewisch, is revealing of the different postulates that underlie possible analyses of unemployment. In Great Britain as in France access to a job is viewed as the ultimate solution to all of society's ills. Nonetheless in the first country the emphasis is on reforming the Welfare State as a way of helping people trapped in poverty to escape from it. Policies "encourage" individuals to take a job, including by stigmatising social benefits such as the entitlements of lone mothers and despite the fact that motherhood is a definite handicap in getting a job.

Studies of employment and unemployment in France rest on a postulate that should also be deciphered in terms of gender. Indeed, what is defined in scholarly as well as institutional discourse as the most normal form of employment -- the permanent, full-time contract -- is implicitly assumed to be the way to escape the "unemployment society." Yet the jobs that are being created are contingent and partial (Freyssinet, 1997). They tend to be a mixture of forced part-time work and of a salaried status with income levels increasingly sliding toward the poverty line (3,200 francs, according to the French National Institute of Statistics), to the point where the issue of poverty seems to override the issue of unemployment.

How can we account for this tremendous gap? It cannot be an accident that a non-negligible proportion of these new jobs are occupied by women (Rogerat and Senotier, 1994). All this is difficult to measure, and even more difficult to put into precise figures, since there is no clear-cut way of determining the extent to which the category "youth" is composed of young women, no way of characterising the work of immigrant women and those of foreign descent, nor any adequate accounting system available for this complex statistical category.

Acknowledgement of this situation supports Teresa Torns' discussion of the Spanish unemployment scene, and contributes to controversy in France over the distribution of work, the restructuring of that distribution, and the sharing of work (Hirata, 1997). Can it be said, then, that it is only for men that unemployment leads to the loss of the social bond that creates citizenship? This refers us to women's difficulty in gaining access to citizenship, discussed in Part Four of this book.

Questioning Flexibility

In analysing women's and men's unemployment, there is a definite need to draw a distinction between the new management and evaluation practices as they are presently applied to the labour force and what they might be, if firms were capable of developing organisational models for enhancing qualifications and improving skills. But what we have instead is "flexibility," with its muddled definition, applied in a multitude of ways. What are its implicati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• INTRODUCTION
• PARTI CATEGORICAL MESSAGES: THINKING AND RETHINKING GENDER RELATIONS
• PART II BE PREPARED: EDUCATION, TRAINING, AND SKILLING
• PART III WOMEN'S RELATIONSHIP TO LABOUR MARKETS: MORE AND MORE PRECARIOUS?
• PART IV PUBLIC POLICY: PROMOTING EQUALITY OR ENGENDERING NEW INEQUALITIES?
• CONCLUSION