Women in Business

Theory and Cases

Martha Reeves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138949249
• eBook ISBN: 9781317363316
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

This book combines theory, empirical research, and practical, international case studies to provide students with a comprehensive resource that demonstrates theories on gender alongside their operation in everyday workplace situations.

Reeves's new edition provides a thorough review of issues important to women in the workplace, including gender discrimination and the legal framework for equity at work. The book uses case studies to illustrate key themes and introduces several new features, including:

• Updated statistics on women's participation in the workforce
• Updated examples of resources for women in business
• Two new chapters covering negotiation and influencing skills and women in STEM fields
• New case studies, featuring comparisons between the position of women in the United States and in other countries
• An instructor's manual with advice, suggested answers to the end-of-chapter questions, and additional resources

This is a one-stop resource for any student interested in gender theory and issues that affect women in the workplace.

Part I

An Introduction to Gender Equality

1
An Introduction to Women in the Workplace

Learning Objectives

After completing this chapter, the reader will:

• understand women’s workforce participation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
• understand the major thrusts of first-, second-, third-, and fourth-wave feminist movements in the US.

This book has three primary goals. The first objective is to provide a thorough review of issues important to women in the workplace. The second is to provide one text that covers theories about gender discrimination, case studies to illustrate key themes, and the legal framework for equity at work. In addition to legal frameworks, this text introduces some of the significant legal cases related to workplace discrimination. A third objective is to introduce some comparisons between the position of women in the United States and in other countries. Although this text cannot provide an exhaustive description of the position of women everywhere, it does include several examples of work-related issues for women in other countries, especially European nations.

Why Should These Topics Be Important to College Students and Others?

Economists project labor shortages in the coming years as baby boomers retire and as birth rates continue to decline in the US and Europe. Although unskilled workers may find it difficult to find work as automation and new technologies push them out of the labor force, there will be shortages as older, skilled workers retire. To handle these labor shortages, we will need to harness the talents of all of our people, and part of this effort will be encouraging highly qualified women to enter and stay in the workforce. Whether you are a male or female college student, understanding the contributions of women at work and the obstacles that women still navigate will be important for your success. The latest statistics of the US labor force report that about 58 percent of women are in the labor force, a decline from 2000 when 60 percent of all adult women in the US were in the workforce (US Bureau of Labor Standards, 2014). The number of women in the workforce has increased dramatically since the 1950s, and today much of the work in corporations is done in teams of both men and women. If men understand the challenges that women face, they will be better equipped to work with them. If women understand the potential challenges that they may face, they will be better able to successfully respond to these challenges.

In addition to the smooth internal functioning of a firm, women’s contributions are important to the firm’s external performance. As more and more customers and clients are women and minorities, and as these groups have more financial clout, the successful marketing of products is more likely with a diverse workforce. Business people are learning that female consumers have come to expect products that specifically address their needs; arguably, these products are conceived, produced, marketed, and sold by employees who understand their needs—other women.

The successful participation of women in the workplace should be important to all of us, from students to human resource professionals to marketing professionals and to CEOs and senior managers who hire employees and set workplace policies. Moreover, the effective deployment of women in the workforce should be as important to men as it is to women. If men own businesses or work as senior managers in them, they will need to use all available talent, not just the talents of men. Their businesses will be more successful if they pursue an agenda of equality, rather than one of special privilege for some. If women feel short-changed compared to men, their motivation to put in their best effort will be compromised, which will ultimately lead to less than optimal performance for the firm. So we can see that not taking advantage of half of the available talent (women) and not treating women fairly in the workplace will have a detrimental effect on a company’s profits. Moreover, effectively deploying the talent of all employees is essential for companies in the competitive, global environment of the twenty-first century.

Overview of Women’s Workforce Participation

To better understand the position of women in the workforce, we begin with an overview of women’s workforce participation and various factors that resulted in the rate change in women’s workforce participation over the last century. This overview shows that there are multiple reasons for women’s increased labor force participation, and for the changes in the legal and political status of women in the US. An increase in women’s civil rights and a demand for women’s labor opened doors for women in the workplace. The interaction among changes in women’s legal rights, the volatility of the economy, and changing social attitudes all played a role in the profound change in women’s labor force participation through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The following section identifies the various factors responsible for the growth of women in the labor market and explains the interplay among these factors.

Factors Affecting Women in the Workforce in the Twentieth Century

In the early 1900s, increasing numbers of women in Western countries began demanding the legal and political rights that democracies had denied them throughout the nineteenth century: the right to vote and stand for office, the right to hold property and secure access in terms of equality to public institutions. The most formidable and militant of these early feminists were the suffragettes of prewar Great Britain. By 1919 women had secured the vote in the UK, and in 1920 in the US. (By contrast, women were not allowed to vote in Switzerland as late as 1970.) This early feminist movement has been called first-wave feminism. During this time, the demands for women’s equality did not extend to the workplace. Most women did not work, and those few who did were restricted to a narrow range of jobs and professions: primary school teaching and nursing, for example. Women lawyers and doctors were few in number, and often had entered these professions to continue a family tradition in the absence of brothers. They were tolerated as eccentrics. Beyond school teachers and nurses, only telephone operators and bank tellers were predominantly female. Although many women did not work, single women dominated the female labor force from 1870 to 1920 (Casper & Bianchi, 2002; Goldin, 2006; Leibowitz & Klerman, 1995; Rosenfeld, 1996; Smith & Ward, 1985).

The demands of World War II dramatically increased women’s participation in the workforce, but only temporarily. Between 1940 and 1945, women found themselves in almost all occupations, including aircraft pilots and other noncombat military jobs. From 1940 to 1944, women’s participation increased by almost 50 percent, mainly in war-related manufacturing such as aircraft and munitions factories. An American war campaign stressed, “If you’ve used an electric mixer in your kitchen, you can learn to run a drill press” (Goodwin, 1995, p. 414). Women also increased their participation in nursing, teaching, clothing manufacturing, and telephone operations (Marshall & Paulin, 1987). Black women made significant gains during World War II by moving into war-related industries and out of agricultural work and domestic service. But with the end of the war and the return of millions of soldiers, men received priority in hiring and women left factory jobs, many without protest. The prevailing attitude of the time was that government and business had an obligation to provide every man who could be employed with a job, and women with employment only if they needed a job to support a family in the absence of a male breadwinner.

In addition to workforce demands, an important part of first-wave feminism was the struggle for reproductive rights. In the nineteenth century, it was illegal for doctors to provide contraceptive devices. Women could not control their work lives unless they could control when they had their children and the number they desired. Margaret Sanger, an early feminist, was charged in New York State with disseminating contraceptive information. In 1873, the Comstock Act was passed making it illegal to send “lewd” materials through the mail, including contraceptive devices. Although the struggle for reproductive rights began during the first wave, it was not recognized widely as an important part of the struggle for equality until the second wave.

Second-wave feminism began as a movement among women to demand equal access to professions and positions of responsibility in the workplace. In the 1950s, middle-class, married women were content to remain at home; the economy was stable and one earner was enough for many family units to live comfortably. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, many families felt the pinch of harder economic times; stagflation, the term coined for a combination of inflation and a lack of economic growth, burdened the American economy. Women were eager to move into the workforce to supplement the family’s income, and many women had begun to acquire educational credentials that qualified them for the same jobs that men had.

In addition to the economic needs of women and families, the second wave was influenced by a change in consciousness of women. The movement was inspired by works like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which argued that men dominated women and were therefore the “first” sex, while women as the “second sex” were exploited by the standards set by men. Second-wave feminists rejected the notion that women were either specially suited for homemaking or that they were unsuited to work in all areas of the modern economy, including jobs as police officers and firefighters that no one had ever thought before as suitable for women. A second book, The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan, grew out of her interviews with her Smith College graduating class. The book uncovered her former classmates’ lack of fulfillment as suburban housewives because their identities were bound solely to their husbands and children. Friedan’s work became a voice for women who felt trapped by their domestic roles and who wanted to find fulfilling jobs in the paid workforce.

Two separate but interrelated movements during the second wave influenced women’s participation in the workforce and gave them more power. The first was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Women saw similarities between their own subordinate position and that of black Americans, and they were inspired by the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, they learned techniques; the organization, leadership, and protests of the Civil Rights Movement became a blueprint for second-wave feminists. In 1966, the National Organization of Women (NOW), with Betty Friedan as its leader, held its first meeting. The group pushed for fair employment, especially in hiring and promotion decisions, access to education, and equal pay. As part of the push for civil rights for women, in 1961 the Kennedy administration initiated the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, which outlined changes in hiring practices and recommended maternity leave and affordable childcare. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act was passed, making it illegal to pay women and men differently for performing the same work. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act followed in 1964. It banned discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or national origin.

In addition to these efforts to provide women with civil rights, the second movement pushed for equal sexual rights and was marked by the introduction of the birth control pill. The pill was finally made available to women in 1961, although it was not until the 1970s that its use became widespread in the US. Birth control made it possible for women to plan their pregnancies, which in turn made it possible for them to plan their careers and postpone motherhood, should they choose to.

From the early 1960s to 1980, the movements for sexual and civil rights and women’s income needs led to a dramatic increase in their workforce participation; women’s participation went from 38 percent to 52 percent, with black women having on average a greater participation rate than white women (Cleveland, Stockdale, & Murphy, 2000). Unlike during World War II when women had been temporary workers to fill a demand for factory work, women entered the workforce as permanent participants. Married women began contributing to the household income; by 1985, men were the sole breadwinners in less than 15 percent of US households (Cleveland et al., 2000). This was a major shift from the prewar period when married women participated in the workforce at much lower levels than single and divorced women. At the turn of the twentieth century, only 6 percent of married women were in the labor force compared to 40 percent of single women over the age of ten (Folbre, 1991). Scholars attribute the post-World War II rise in female labor supply to real wage growth for women as well as their increased levels of education and decreased fertility (Leibowitz & Klerman, 1995; Smith & Ward, 1985).

In her discussion of the changing economic role of married women in the US, Goldin (2006) identifies two sources of married women’s shift into the paid labor force. First, the demand for more workers pulled married women into the workforce. Second, as female cohorts moved through time and increasingly acquired the educational and other necessarily prerequisites for paid employment, they were better able to respond to the labor demands over time periods. In addition, the declining real wages of men were a major economic force pulling women into the workforce in the latter decades of the twentieth century (Vallas, Finlay, & Wharton, 2009). As men’s real wages decreased, married women entered the labor force to contribute to the family wage. Another factor in the increase in women’s participation was an increase in divorce rates between 1960 and 1980, making it economically necessary for newly divorced women to work.

In this second wave, the agenda of feminism moved from securing basic political rights to demanding a level playing field in the pursuit of economic opportunities. Women demanded access to jobs up and down the employment ladder, and access to the education and training that would qualify them for these jobs. They rejected arguments against equal treatment of women in the economy that were based on women’s traditional roles in child-rearing. Second-wave feminists combined their general demands for equality in the workplace with specific attacks on the unequal standards imposed on those few professions and jobs in which women predominated. For example, in the airline industry, women cabin attendants, called “stewardesses” (the men were called “pursers”), had been forced to quit once they were married or pregnant. Weight and age restrictions were imposed on them, and they were required to wear high heels and, on some of the airlines, revealing uniforms such as “hot pants.” Stewardesses began to resist these demands. Toward the end of the second wave, women and their male allies sought successfully to open the traditionally male institutions that prepared only men for the most responsible and influential positions in the public and private sectors. In the US, Harvard and Yale, which had formerly been all-male institutions, opened their doors to women, while several women’s colleges became coeducational. The movement was also active in Western European countries; like the Ivy League, most of Oxford and Cambridge’s all-male colleges began to admit women.

Box 1.1 Sex versus Gender

In part because women were increasingly seen to be equally capable as men in many hitherto all-male occupations, and in order to undermine claims that some jobs just couldn’t be accomplished by women, second-wave feminism undertook to show that traditional distinctions between men and women were not based on biological differences, but in fact reflected cultural differences. These cultural differences were manifest in values, tastes, prejudices, and socially constructed institutions, as opposed to genetics or the physiology of men and women.

In the second wave, feminists and other social scientists began to distinguish sex and gender: the former was held to be biological and the latter was largely a matter of convention, social attitudes, or the politics of women’s subordination. “Sex” refers to male and female biology, while “gender” connotes how our biological sex is understood by others and by ourselves. One’s sex is determined by biological differences in male versus female genetic endowment, in particular XY sex chromosomes for males and XX for females, which determine genitalia. Even secondary sexual traits distinguish males from females: a lower voice in men, larger breasts in women, and a smaller musculature in women. Gender, on the other hand, reflects the meanings that people ascribe to the male or female sex. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have studied gender identity and how it affects individuals and societies; for example, gender identity may determine which careers people find suitable for themselves or the domestic roles societies prescribe for women versus men. In the 1950s, psychologists referred to gender identity as anything a person does or says that marks him or her as male or female (Money, 1955). Later, feminists wrote about gender as the societal and cultural processes that led people to identify themselves as having typically feminine or masculine behaviors (Unger, 1979). Since the 1970s and 1980s, the word “gender” has been thought of by many social scientists as largely a social construction—a construction that can be altered with a change in attitudes or behaviors. Gender role expectations are built into the very fabric of our institutions—the family, the state, culture, religion, and law (Lorber, 2005). For example, consider how some religious ceremonies command a woman to love, honor, and “obey” her husband, or how high schools in the 1960s had shop (industrial arts) classes for boys and home economics classes for girls. Even clothing manufacturers create distinctions between the sexes by the color of clothing suggested as appropriate for baby girls (pink) versus baby boys (blue). Once we separate the sexes and emphasize their differences rather...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Part I An Introduction to Gender Equality
• Part II Women in the Workplace
• Part III Gender Issues: Looking Ahead
• Bibliography
• Index