Gender as a Verb

Gender Segregation at Work

Annette Fitzsimons

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138729827
• eBook ISBN: 9781351742993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

This title was first published in 2002. Aiming to contribute to feminist theory in the area of paid employment, this volume demonstrates how the meanings attached to gender can form part of the explanation for the persistence of gender segregation at work. The author applies the Foucaultian concept of discourse to occupational segregation to offer a new approach to the study of gender segregation. An analysis is provided of gender in relation to computer programming.

Chapter 1

Conceptualising Gender: Introductory Remarks

Beginning

In 1984 I completed a MA in Political Sociology at the University of Leeds. There were twelve other students on the course – all men – and the lecturing staff were men. The majority of the students, including myself, were all involved in left wing organisations and the differences between us led to some very lively and stimulating discussions. The fact that I was the only feminist in the group meant that I had to develop a very distinct and articulate defence of my theoretical position, which at this time I defined as Marxist-feminist and I found this extremely difficult to do. I began to realise that I had adopted the position without properly understanding the complexities of either term. This led me to scrutinise feminist theory and the writings of Marxist-feminists. From this study I began to develop a critique, in the first instance of the theory of patriarchy and then the concept of patriarchy, especially in relation to the conceptualisation of gender that flows from the concept. I also began to develop an understanding of the limitations of Marxist analysis of gender, ‘race’ and class. The work began with the idea that it was possible to construct a materialist explanation of women’s oppression that would overcome the theoretical problems I had found in my survey of Marxist-feminism. Much of this literature was centred on issues relating to women’s labour, both paid and unpaid, and by the early 1980s the debates had become sterile and unproductive. I wanted to explore the possibility of constructing a new approach to these issues that would help to revitalise the Marxist-feminist perspective. Thus the main aim was to contribute to feminist theorising in the area of women’s paid employment by developing a theoretical framework for analysing gender at work. I wanted to overcome both the limits of feminist theorising of the 1980s that relied heavily on a theory of patriarchy, and the inadequacies of Marxist-feminist theorising of the same period. The work that I want this theoretical framework to do is to clarify the relationship between the gender division of labour and the capitalist labour process in order to explain the reproduction of a gender ideology which legitimised women’s subordination and oppression both in work and in the home, and which took account of male power and dominance. All of this now seems ridiculously ambitious.

I began by constructing a critique of both patriarchy and Marxist-feminism. Originally, I intended that the work would be purely theoretical, for a number of reasons. It was a constant struggle as an undergraduate to understand ‘theory’. Theory was both an intellectual challenge and a way of ‘proving’ to myself that I could be considered an intellectual and therefore an academic. I also believed that ‘theory’ was the only way to understand and therefore change the world. The eleventh theses from Feuerbach had long been a slogan I was fond of repeating in my attempts to explain to others my insistence on ‘theory’, and, of course, it had to be grand theory: a theory which would explain the world. I wanted to construct a totalising explanation of women’s oppression, a meta-narrative. It was not that I necessarily thought that I would ever achieve this ambition, rather I believed that this way of approaching an understanding of women’s oppression was the correct one – the one true path to obtain the necessary knowledge needed to overcome oppression. The essence of feminism seemed to be just that – a movement that struggled to understand and explain, in order to overcome the subordination of women worldwide. It never struck me that I was being overly ambitious.

The sociological perspective that constituted my theoretical framework was Marxism. Marxism represented both a method and an analysis. The method was dialectical historical materialism and provided me with a way of looking at and understanding the world, not only as it is organised now but also historically: how it had developed and changed. The Marxist analysis of capitalism helped me to understand how the system operates and provided a theory of how it can be overcome. However I was aware of the limitations of this analysis, especially in relation to differences between people. The abstractness of the Marxist analysis of capitalist social relations meant that it tended to objectify human beings in relation to labour as a commodity which neglected their subject position and how these positions are shaped by gender and ‘race’. Marxism ignored the role of gender in similar ways to mainstream sociology. Therefore Marxist-feminists had to establish ‘women’ as a gendered category for Marxism as well as for conventional sociology.

It was suggested that I should conduct empirical research in order to ‘test’ out some of the theoretical problems. Reluctantly, I dragged myself away from the ‘masters’, and put together a project that involved interviewing women and men who were involved in computers. I chose the field of computers for a number of reasons. Before my entry into higher education, I had worked as a computer operator. I had always wanted to become a programmer but at the age of twenty-three had been considered ‘too old’ to learn the ‘new’ world of computers. I worked for nearly 10 years in a number of organisations as a computer operator and so it was an environment in which I felt very comfortable and secure. If there was one thing I had some confidence in, it was the world of work, especially in the computing industry. I also wanted to ask questions of men as well as women at work. Most of the literature from Marxist-feminists had produced accounts of women’s work in order to explain the segregation of work in terms of gender and there is a tendency in these accounts to explain the specificity of women’s work as a consequence of male dominance. I wanted to put this type of explanation to one side by exploring an area of work that was to some extent gender-neutral.

Feminist writings on technology and science had begun to appear in the 1980s and a small number of these were concerned with computer programmers. Some of these argued that since computing was a ‘new’ industry, women had more opportunities for equality at work. There is also a status to the industry that is linked with the idea that people involved with computers were very intelligent and very clever. This association of cleverness and intelligence with computer technology is a legacy of the way science and technology is linked. The feminist literature tended to put the critique of science and technology together, as though there is no distinction. However from my experiences as a worker in the industry I did not remember this association being made and I was curious to discover if this recollection was accurate and if there were any implications to be drawn from the connection of technology with science.

The interviews I conducted with computer programmers turned out to be one of the most challenging experiences of my career. The impact on my research was such that I became interested in the study of masculinity. I realised that despite my critique of patriarchy and the way men were positioned by the theory of patriarchy, I had incorporated the radical feminist critique of men as the enemy into my view of men. Just as my conclusion on feminist theorising was that it was no longer possible to discuss women as a unitary category, I realised that I was still carrying around in my head the view of men as a unitary category, and the view of men as ‘the enemy’. Men were constructed in many of the works I had examined as patriarchal – meaning dominant, powerful, dangerous for women to know. However, I was now discovering that the men I interviewed could not be understood with this type of explanatory framework. The operation of gender at the workplace was much more contradictory and complex. I turned then to the literature on organisations, in order to determine the extent to which the structure of organisations shaped the antagonisms and sharpened the gender differences between men and women. If it was no longer possible to ‘blame men’ as it were, for all the problems facing women at work, then perhaps the solution lay in the way work was structured in capitalist social relations. This was familiar ground. Was I though, in danger of forgetting my feminism and simply reproducing a simple Marxist explanation of the labour process? How could I hold on to the fact that women are oppressed by men?

Two concepts help me to interpret the complexity and contradictions I had discovered as a consequence of the empirical research: namely the concept of gender and the concept of discourse. The discussion of my research data is framed by a very specific theorisation of gender that developed from a number of sources. Through the literature on men and masculinities and the essay by Teresa de Lauretis (1987) on The Technology of Gender’, I began to adopt an approach to gender which viewed it as being continually reproduced in different sites in society: at work, through the media, the education system, and the political system, including the state and governmental legislation. In this formulation gender is not static and fixed but rather fluid and shifting.

To clarify the theoretical approach which I am taking I need to say some more both about my conceptualisation of gender and of discourse. However before I do this I would like to provide a brief account of the theoretical approach that is adopted in the book. My theoretical approach is dictated by an attempt to understand gender in relation to difference, contradiction and change whilst recognising the fluid and shifting processes and practices of its production. The term that now sums up my thinking is the precariousness of theoretical understandings of the world. So rather than looking for certainty or correct interpretations of women’s oppression my approach seeks to interpret the instability of gender, identity, subjectivity, truth and knowledge. I realise now that I had expected theory to provide sure knowledge about the world, and that despite my critique of Marxism and feminism, I still retained a Marxist epistemology in relation to knowledge and truth. In other words, the approach to gender and my use of the concept of discourse shifted my theoretical approach from Marxism to postmodernism. But what kind of postmodernism? I am unable to begin to answer this question now as this would be the subject of another book, however I am aware that I have ‘borrowed’ concepts from the postmodernism oeuvre which fundamentally challenges the whole notion of theory.

Conceptualising Gender

Gender is conceptualised in two distinct ways in the analysis of the labour market. There are those who use gender as simply a sociological variable, like other categories of stratification, and those who view gender as much more than simply another category of analysis. So for example, Siltanen (1994) analyses gender as a sociological category, like class, age, ‘race’, whereas Cockburn (1991) uses gender as a relational concept. The variation in use is not always clearly visible. Rather the conceptualisation of gender has a tendency to be vague, ill defined and indistinct. This has meant that there is an almost imperceptible shift that has emerged in the analysis of gender in sociological studies of employment. A crucial point here is that whichever way gender is analysed there is a tendency to formulate gender as stable and fixed categories, framed by the concept of patriarchy.

There are a number of explanations for the source of these two theoretical approaches to the study of gender, and for the lack of clarity in relation to way the concept is analysed. Firstly, the change from women’s studies to gender studies in the study of women’s paid employment produced a blurring of the focus of the analysis of gendered work. Secondly, and relatedly, the way that some aspects of feminist analysis of women’s employment have become incorporated into mainstream sociology has reproduced the conceptualisation of gender as a category rather than as a process.

Before the emergence of second wave feminism, sociological studies of work did not use either women or gender as an analytical category and did not view gender and gender relationships as important dimensions of either the structuring of the labour market or the social relations of production and reproduction. From the 1970s feminist sociologists have struggled to establish women as significant in sociology. However, what happened is that gender became instituted as a category in mainstream sociological analysis. A clear example of this can be demonstrated by the debates in sociology on class and stratification (see Crompton and Mann 1986). In order for women to be discussed in sociological debates, the point of entry that proved less threatening to mainstream sociologists was that gender, like class, as a concept was rendered apolitical. Treating gender as simply another sociological variable detracts from the political thrust of feminist analysis of male power and women’s oppression and subordination. This shift was not very difficult to achieve, given that there is no one ‘feminist’ position, nor an established feminist position on gender. Rather there are a number of feminist perspectives each of which uses a particular vocabulary and proffers a particular strategy in relation to women’s equality and emancipation. The lack of a firm theoretical basis for feminism alongside the theoretical problems produced by the concept of patriarchy in the attempt to analyse gender at the workplace, provide the means by which gender as a sociological variable developed as an approach to the issues. As my theoretical position was formed by Marxist-feminism rather than mainstream sociology, this means that I do not treat either ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as sociological variables. The relational approach to the concept of gender that informs my work can be likened to the Marxist concept of class. The analysis of class is a critical aspect of the social relations of production, reproduction and the distribution of power, wealth, authority and status in capitalist societies. So too is gender. The concept of gender that informs my work is that gender is embedded in the organisation of capitalism in just the same way that class is. The distinction between this position and the Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s is that, for me, class is gendered.

Problems within Feminist Sociology

These shifts and challenges are evident in the literature on women and paid employment, and two distinct feminist approaches can be detected. The distinctiveness of a specific feminist contribution to the study of women and work has becomes increasingly blurred because of the success experienced by some feminist sociologists of incorporating feminist analysis into mainstream sociology. However, the way that gender is now an acceptable and respectable area of study in sociology has meant that it is treated as a sociological variable or category in the manner described above. The acceptability of gender studies has meant that the political thrust of analysing gender has become ambiguous. The distinctiveness of feminist work as opposed to sociological work has become obscured. This is, in part, due to the fact that anyone who chooses can call themselves a feminist. Gender when viewed as a sociological variable – an approach more in keeping with mainstream sociology – therefore presents a particular political as well as theoretical approach to the topic.

The alternative approach to the study of women’s work is the one influenced by Marxian sociology (see Cockburn and Ormrod 1993; Cockburn 1991; 1985; 1983; Beechey 1983; 1979; 1978; 1977; Barrett 1984; Pollert 1981; Westwood 1984). This position is embedded in the political project of feminism, it is not simply an intellectual or an academic project. The writers in this tradition were and are concerned with constructing theory in order to aid social change and gender equality. It is an approach to the subject area of sociology that is informed by a critique of capitalism and capitalist societies rather than industrialism and post-industrial social formations. This means that the central concern of this approach is not only the liberation of women from gender inequalities and sexual oppression but also for the liberation of all those who are oppressed by the system of production and reproduction which dominates capitalist societies. There are a number of key concepts that signify this theoretical position. These are the concept of ideology; the concept of class consciousness; the concept of capitalist social relations; the concept of power; and, of course, the concept of patriarchy. Therefore these two approaches, although different in relation to the political thrust of the analysis, are linked. They both conceptualise gender as fixed, stable and static and this approach dominates the analysis of gendered work. The notion of patriarchy though political in so far as it engages with differentials of power, reproduces the notion of social roles and sexual categories which make it difficult to explain the persistence and stability of occupational segregation in terms other than male power and control. This approach is unable to account for the contradictions, pleasures and choices women exercise at work. Cynthia Cockburn (1988) divulged the ‘embarrassing fact’ of feminist explanations of occupational segregation that revealed that women were deliberately choosing their positions in the labour market rather than being coerced or controlled by men.

Sociology of Women and Paid Work

Before the emergence of second wave feminism, sociological studies of work did not use gender as an analytical category and did not see gender and gender relationships as important dimensions of both the way in which employment is structured and the way in which work is experienced (see Brown 1976; Beechey 1983; 1979; 1978; 1977). In comparison with the early 1970s, by the beginning of the 1990s, there is now a vast literature on both women and work and gender at work.

In the 1980s, feminist debates on women’s paid employment focused on the inequalities experienced by women in the workplace and . demonstrated the type of work women did, both historically and present day. In some senses, for feminist sociologists, this task was made easier than for feminists working in other disciplines by the dramatic increase in the numbers of women, especially married women, who had entered the workplace from the 1960s. The two theoretical frameworks which various feminists drew on in order to comprehend women’s place in the labour market is indicative of two dominant strands in sociological analysis: Marxist sociology and mainstream or bourgeois sociology. However both of these frameworks used the concept of patriarchy and this hindered the attempt to theorise women’s position in the labour market in a number of ways. Kate Purcell (1989) explains how the concept of patriarchy has encouraged forms of explanation that focus on ‘women’s’ jobs rather than the process by which jobs get labelled in this way. The conceptual framework that was adopted by early feminist explorations of women’s work assumed that women’s work identity was already established by their roles within the family. By the late 1980s, it became clear that the problem with ‘patriarchy’ was that the gendered experience of domesticity and employment relations, and the practices and processes by which these experiences structure women’s and men’s lives, is both contradictory and conflictual. Neither the theory nor the concept was able to explain what feminists had uncovered by the studies of gender at work in the past ten years.

These accounts of women and work were reporting on the diversity and differences between women, and the complexity of women’s experiences and attitudes to their paid employment. By the early 1990s it was clear that a new approach was needed in order to understand the persistence, despite equal opportunities legislation and the expansiveness of women in the labour market, of occupational segregation. A study at the end of the 1980s concluded that,

The unequivocal evidence of the twelve years following the enactment of equal opportunities legislation is that the provision of formal equality of opportunity in training and employment makes an impact on, but does not radically alter, gender segregation and occupational inequalities. A clearer understanding is required of the links between gender stereotyping, group behaviour and the dynamics of organizations – particularly the significance of sexuality, which can have a major stabilising or destabilising influence on work relationships. (Purcell 1989, p. 179)

But Marxist-feminism was not equal to this task. A large number of writers from this tradition had attempted to explain occupational segregation by using concepts drawn from Marxist analysis of capitalism (see Seecombe 1974; Gardiner 1975; Coulson, Magas and Wainwright 1975; Smith 1978; Delphy 1984). The emphasis in these writings was on the contribution of domestic labour and women’s position in the labour market to both capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of the system. These debates became paralysed by problems of Marxist economics, and this effectively sidetracked any real progress in the feminist analysis of women’s paid employment. It also weakened the popularity of this theoretical and intellectual position. A further weakness with this tradition is that within the Marxist analysis of capitalism labour is only analysed with reference to its use as a commodity. Therefore the subjectivity of labour is not a factor in this account. However, the relationship between human beings as both subject and object in capitalist social relations m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Conceptualising Gender: Introductory Remarks
• 2 Gender Segregation at Work
• 3 Women and Work
• 4 Programming Sexism
• 5 Factors Shaping Segregation
• 6 Masculinity at Work
• 7 Discourses of Science and Technology
• 8 Discourses of Femininity
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix: Research Methodology
• Bibliography
• Index