Shaping Women's Work

Gender, Employment and Information Technology

Juliet Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A new book offering a broad overview of the debates about technologies and gender relations at work in a range of occupational areas. Innovative in its approach it deals with gender relations in terms of the ways in which they influence the design and development of technologies, and how gender relations are themselves shaped by technologies. The book will draw heavily on the theoretical perspective looking at the ways in which sexual divisions of labour and gender relations in the workplace profoundly affect the direction and pace of technological change, and tracks the development of certain technologies showing how, through their evolution, they embody these social relations.

CHAPTER 1

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The terrain of this book

When I trained and then went to work as a secretary in the late 1970s, the technologies of office work were entirely electrical, mechanical or manual. Electric typewriters, addressographs, roneo stencils and shorthand pads were the most advanced technologies I encountered; these were the typical paraphernalia of my job in an office. But even as I was training and learning to use these devices, the world was on the brink of a period of widespread technological change. Information and communication technologies were being ushered in and the face of the workplace was changing profoundly. Word processors, personal computers, electronic photocopiers, fax machines, and computer-based systems of many other kinds are the tools with which we now all work today, not only in offices but throughout the entire economy.

This book represents my assessment of the changes which have taken place in the workplaces of women since these technologies were developed and given application, and of women's place in their development and application. Although my early working life was lived as a secretary, my subsequent employment has been as a researcher and teacher concerned with the social relations and dynamics of information and communications technologies. In one way or another, then, these technologies have been at the centre of my own existence as a woman for some years now. They have been at the centre of many other working women's existences, too. My own experiences, as well as the research of others, inevitably therefore inform and appear in this book.

In the social study of technologies to which I am now a contributor, there has been widespread debate about the social relations and social implications of information and communication technologies, and about the interplay between technical and social changes. The nature of work in computerised society, and the prospects for people's employment, skills and performance of work, number among the central concerns of social scientists, and there is now a huge body of work discussing such issues. Much of this work is the outcome of feminist research, asserting the importance of analysing changes in women's, as well as in men's, work, and changes in the gender relations of the workplace. This is my own agenda; from a fascination with developments in the office which related to my personal experiences of office work I have become increasingly concerned with the nature of women's work in other spheres of employment, and in particular with their experiences of information technologies at work. Feminist research now has much to say about these issues, and it is with the contribution made by such research to our understanding of the contemporary dynamics of women's paid work and of their relationship to information technologies that this book is concerned.

This book, then, is primarily about women and technology at work, and about the ways in which they are mutually constitutive. And here some clarification needs to be made concerning the precise terrain of the book. Many feminist thinkers, particularly those working in a post-structuralist or post-modernist tradition, might argue for a wider focus on ‘gender’ as opposed to one simply on ‘women’, in order to introduce an understanding of the shaping of people's (men's and women's) gender identities, experiences and subjectivities into the analysis. This, indeed, is the dominant emphasis of contemporary feminist research. However, this is not my concern here. I am concerned specifically with women and their relationship to workplace technologies, rather than with gender and technology in the broader sense. Some would argue that the shift in feminist thinking to a focus on gender rather than on women runs the risk of implying that men and women are equally important subjects of study, whose identities and experiences – as gendered identities and experiences – are of equivalent intellectual interest. This shift in approach carries with it the danger of making ‘gender’ a very individualistic and apolitical concept, obscuring the power relations which create the differences between the lives of men and women (Richardson and Robinson, 1994; Stabile, 1994). I have chosen not to take this approach, but to focus primarily on women and their relationship to technologies. By focussing on ‘women’ as opposed to ‘gender’ in the broad sense of the concept, I am choosing not to focus on men and masculinity. I am less interested in the gender relations of work and technology and their implications for men and masculinity than I am in the gender relations of women's work. Sexual divisions in the labour force are for me so central to its constitution that I have chosen not to engage in analysis of the conditions and relations of work for both sexes. This derives from a view of gender relations as involving not simply difference but inequality and power – male domination and female subordination. In that sense, my view of gender differs somewhat from that of some contemporary feminist accounts in which masculinities and femininities are mutually constitutive and equally interesting. In my view, the position of women in society, and in this case, in employment and in technology, remains one of pressing concern for feminist political analysis, and by no means an issue which has been superseded by gender analysis. For me, it is still the disadvantage which attaches to the position of working women – still confined at the bottom of hierarchies, in restricted sectors of the economy and often doing terrible jobs – which is the problematic requiring our attention.

This is not to say that gender relations do not enter into the discussion in this book at all. They are indeed a vital part of the picture, but only in so far as they shape or constrain women's positions in, and experiences of, work and new technologies. They are not the central focus of analysis in their own right. Thus, for example, the book addresses gendered divisions of labour, but it addresses them in terms of how these serve to allocate women to, and usually to segregate them in, particular occupational areas. It is the women who occupy these positions who are of central interest to me here. Similarly, I discuss the gendering of jobs, but in order to show how women come to perform tasks which carry the imprint of their socially constructed roles in the family and in the workplace, in other words, tasks which come to be sex-typed. The gendering of technologies themselves, a discussion of which forms part of this book (in Chapter 3), of course includes the role of men and masculinity. Men, male-dominated institutions, values and culture are central to the shaping of technologies, and thus to the relationship which women have to those technologies. But, again, it is women's relationship to technologies with which I want to deal, and I focus on the masculinity of technology only insofar as it illuminates this relationship, and not in its own right.

This, then, suggests an approach to gender which places structural inequalities between men and women at work and in their relationships to technology, rather than the representational or the individual, at the heart of the analysis. I would concur with Kate Figes when she argues that

We have become preoccupied with the social and cultural manifestations of feminism, with representations of women in the media, with language, with sexuality and with the so-called war between the sexes. Fascinating though these issues can be, they are not the heart of the matter. They are reflections, consequences of the basic economic and political imbalance between the sexes.

(Figes, 1994: 4)

Harding (1986) has proposed three aspects of gender: individual gender, symbolic gender and the division of labour by gender, and it is with the third of these aspects of gender that I am principally concerned in this book. A similar conceptualisation has come from a Swedish historian, Yvonne Hirdman, who has developed the concept of a gender system to denote the consistent segregation, disadvantaging and devaluing of women in all areas of social life (Hirdman, 1988, in Swedish, but quoted in English by Salminen-Karlsson, 1995; Sundin, 1995). The gender system operates in different ways at different social levels and Hirdman distinguishes three such levels: the cultural level (meanings of male and female), the institutional level (conceptions of gender in societal institutions of various kinds), and the individual level (conceptions which regulate interaction between individuals). It is expressed through artefacts, language, work, symbols, and so on, and in this book, I am concerned with its structural expression in artefacts and work and therefore principally with its expression at the cultural and institutional levels. Again, this is not to dismiss the importance of understanding individual women's experiences in the workplace, or the way in which their identities as women, in relation to technology, are formed. Nor is it to reject the idea that technological (and scientific) activities have become symbolised as overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) masculine in important ways which have a profound impact on women's access to skills, to technologies and to technological work. But it is to focus on the systemic nature of sexual divisions in occupations and technologies.

An emphasis on the gender structure, or the gender system at work, in the sexual division of labour, need not involve a reductionist or a static view of women's work with technology. As Cockburn and Ormrod (1993) have argued, women are not mere bearers of structures which are immutable. Sexual divisions of labour do not stand still, but are constantly being constructed and reconstructed, dismantled and ‘remanded’ through individual and collective action (1993: 6). Indeed, the central concern of this book is with the ‘remantling’ of women's employment through changes in the location, organisation and automation of jobs. Women have not stood passively by as computer-based technologies have been applied to all spheres of their work; women have engaged in various forms of resistance and other forms of industrial protest. Others have worked on projects of reconstruction, not only of the technologies themselves, but also of the masculinity of technological work, women's relationship to technologies, and the interface between computer systems and the design of their jobs.

Technologies and the gender structures which contribute to the shaping of women's work, then, are mutually constitutive (Cockburn, 1983; Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993). Neither are autonomous, immutable or determinate. Both are the outcomes of social arrangements, both with their roots in past human practice. Just as unequal power in the workplace and in society (including power and control over technologies) creates gender structures in which women are predominantly in subordinate employment positions, so too technologies are created out of social processes (including gender structures, relations and meanings) which are negotiated and struggled over between men and women, employers and workers.

For this reason, I also adopt the ‘social shaping of technology’ perspective, and I discuss the utility of this approach to a feminist perspective on the relationship between women and technology in the next chapter. The ‘social shaping’ approach defines technology as a social product, but it has a broader conception than technology simply being represented by physical artefacts (although these are important constituents and must not be ignored). Technology also comprises human activities and know-how:

An object such as a car or a vacuum cleaner is only a technology, rather than an arbitrary lump of matter, because it forms part of a set of human activities. A computer without programs and programmers is simply a useless collection of bits of metal, plastic and silicon. So ‘technology’ refers to human activities, as well as to objects … … technology refers to what people know as well as what they do. Technology is knowledge … Technological ‘things’ are meaningless without the ‘know-how’ to use them, repair them, design them and make them.

(MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985: 3)

Because I regard technological systems and modes of work organisation as intimately interconnected, in this book human activities and know-how are as much a focus of the analysis as are the artefacts of technology. In the sphere of employment, the activities of men and women, management and labour, which are associated with putting technologies to work are those concerned with the division of labour (social and sexual), the organisation of work by management and the design of jobs and tasks, the wielding of power and control at work, and the allocation of skill labels, skilled status, prestige and rewards. Employees also play a part in shaping the development and application of technologies through their practices in the workplace, by organising in trade unions, by resisting managerial incursions into their control over their own work, and by excluding other groups of employees from access to ‘skilled’ positions. In these various aspects of work organisation, gender divisions and struggles are central, for example, in allocating men and women to particular jobs, in creating sex-typed work, in restricting access to technological expertise, and in allocating value to men's and women's respective activities. The exercise of power by men over women, as well as by capital over labour, and the allocation of value at the expense of women, are both imphcated in technology. In the words of Game and Pringle, then, technology is ultimately the outcome of these ‘social processes … designed in the interest of particular social groups, and against the interests of others’ (1984: 17). This book is concerned with all these aspects of human activity which contribute to ‘technology’. It is concerned with how computer-based systems in the workplace form part of, and become embedded within, these human arrangements and with the ways in which men's and women's work activities and work relations themselves are reshaped and reconstituted in the process.

Because technology is the outcome of social processes, including changing gender structures and human activities, it is continually shifting and changing. This is perhaps particularly true of information technologies, which have developed at an increasingly rapid pace over the past twenty years. It is also an important point for an understanding of the relationship between technological change and women's work. Technology is all too often conceptualised in terms of men (Wajcman, 1991). However, seeing technological change as a process, rather than concentrating on the finished artefact, restores an awareness of the centrality of women in technology; they are no longer passive recipients of technologies, as users, but important actors in the process of their development (Berg, 1994: 96). This allows for a feminist conceptualisation, in which the process of development of technologies continues through from design and into the sphere of use, and in which users (who are very often women) play a critical role in shaping technologies, an insight which is central to the social shaping of technology perspective (Fleck, 1988), as we shall see in Chapter 2.

The focus of this book is on computer-based technologies, and specifically those which have been introduced and applied in the workplace. Despite the technologies and social settings which this focus precludes, this is still an all-embracing category. Computer-based technologies have undergone considerable evolution since the first word processors were introduced into offices in the late 1970s. Computers have moved from monolithic mainframe systems administered by centralised data processing departments, to personal computers, to distributed systems linked together in networks. Tijdens (1994) has suggested that such changes in the configuration of systems are potentially very significant for women workers: they may signal the breaking of the stranglehold by data processing personnel over computing facilities, and an increasing ability by end users without any technical background to use their own systems to a certain extent in their own ways. On the other hand, however, it could be argued that a new era of centralised control over computing facilities is being ushered in with the development of computer networks, in which the data processing manager of old has been replaced by a new breed of controller, the network manager. Whether these differences imply substantial change in women's access to, and control over, their computing facilities, is uncertain.

The phrase ‘new technology’, convenient though it is, now seems inappropriate to describe a series of innovations which have been in use for two decades, and which actually include ‘information technologies’, ‘communications technologies’, and a whole range of devices in the office, in the shop and on the factory floor, and often all three areas connected together. In this book, I still sometimes use the term ‘new technology’ for its convenience, and I also refer to ‘computer-based technologies’, particularly in relation to manufacturing work, and ‘information technologies’, particularly in relation to office work. In fact, information technology has been defined as the ‘interconnection of technical and organisational innovations in electronic computers, software engineering, control systems, integrated circuits and telecommunications, which makes it possible to collect, generate, analyse and diffuse large quantities of information at low cost’ (EC, cited in Rees, 1992: 137), a definition which seems to include manufacturing applications. However, I have tried to distinguish these applications from office applications in the text, because in my view there is an important distinction between office applications in which information is the commodity being worked upon by women, and manufacturing or retailing applications, in which products and goods are the commodities they labour on. Nor am I concerned in this book with communications technologies such as the Internet or the so-called ‘Information Superhighway’. There is certainly a growing body of feminist research which examines the use of such network technologies by women and by men, and gendered patterns of communication which are taking place over ‘The Net’. Here, however, I am interested in new technologies and their interaction with women's work processes rather than with their patterns of communication outside the workplace, so I confine my discussion of network technologies to those which link workplaces or relocate women's work.

I have to acknowledge, too, that restricting the discussion in this book to one of paid work and of workplace technologies only has some attendant difficulties, of which I am only too aware. For a start, there is an increasingly blurred dividing line between the technologies in use in the workplace and those in use in the home. The telephone and the personal computer are obvious examples of technologies which have a role in domestic and leisure activities as well as in paid work, the constitution (including the gendering) of which is therefore informed by the social and gender relations of the domestic as well as those of the employment sphere (Moyal, 1992; Haddon, 1988). Others, such as the fax machine, indicate a move towards the home as the site of paid work itself, for particular types of employees. Indeed, the workplace, for a number of women, is the home, and this is in part a result of teleworking made possible by the capabilities of both information and communications technologies. Teleworking also signals a potentially increasingly intimate relationship between paid employment and the domestic sphere, certainly so far as women are concerned, given their difficulties in ‘compartmentalising’ their paid work from the demands of their families.

But there is also the more fundamental point that the position of women within the sexual division of labour, and their continuing confinement within a few...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Longman Sociology Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The terrain of this book
• 2 Perspectives on women's work and technology
• 3 Gender relations in the shaping of technologies
• 4 Information and communication technologies and the shaping of women's employment
• 5 Secretaries and seamstresses, clerks and cashiers – information technologies and women's labour processes
• 6 Women in systems design – values, methods and artefacts
• 7 The lessons of feminist research on women's work and IT
• References
• Index