lesson 7: work and the economy introduction to women’s studies robert wonser

Lesson 7: Work and the Economy

Introduction to Women’s StudiesRobert Wonser

Lesson 7: Work and ther Economy 2


The Ideal Worker

Who is the ideal worker? Unencumbered by familial duties, never

leaves work early for the sick child, driven and committed to the job, unlikely to leave work to bear and raise children

In short, he is not a mother.


Equal Pay

Despite the large and growing numbers of employed women around the world, a large pay gap between men and women remains

White men are significantly better paid than minority men and all women.

Within racial ethnic categories, men earn more than women in each category.

In the U.S. in the 1970s women earned $0.59 on the dollar compared to men.


Today women earn about $0.75 for every dollar a man earns.

Part of this improvement is due to men’s falling wages rather than women’s gains.

The 25% gap between women and men underestimates the real gap.

Women tend to work part time and intermittently over their lives.

If we calculate lifetime employment, women make only about 38% of men’s earnings.

Worldwide, women are paid less than men.


Male and Female Median Earnings, 1959–2008


Median Lifetime Earnings by Educational Attainment, 2009 dollars

All people, not broken down by gender or race


Educational Pay Gap by Gender, Median Lifetime Earnings


Gender Gap with Typical Timeout


The Glass Ceiling

Besides having different pay, women and men have different ranks in corporate and government jobs.

The higher you go, the fewer women and minorities you will see.

This “glass ceiling” confronting women and racial ethnic workers is a global phenomenon.

On the other hand, men in women-dominated professions often “ride the glass escalator” (get preferential treatment) as tokens


Sex, Gender, and Life Chances This has led to a situation called the

feminization of poverty, which is the economic trend showing that women are more likely than men to live in poverty, due in part to: the gendered gap in wages, the higher proportion of single mothers compared

to single fathers, and the increasing cost of childcare.


Emotional Labor

Women’s and men’s work differs in the emotional labor involved in their jobs.

In this largely invisible aspect of many jobs (flight attendant, wait-staff, secretary, teacher, sales clerk, and health care worker), employees must show such feelings as attentiveness and caring and suppress feelings such as boredom or irritation.

Approximately one-third of U.S. workers, most of them women, work in jobs that require them to smile, nod, greet, pay attention to, and thank customers.


Emotional Labor

Men’s emotion work demands different types of emotions. Police officers are supposed to exhibit strength and toughness.

Men and women in the same job may have different expectations about the emotional work they should do. Customers, employers, and coworkers may expect women to be

nicer and friendlier and to smile more. Women college professors are often evaluated more highly if they

are friendly, while men professors are not judged in this way. Emotional labor makes work harder.

It can cause psychological problems for workers who must perform in ways inconsistent with their inner feelings.

Constantly having to suppress one’s own emotions can cause burnout.


Motherhood Penalty Generally, motherhood has a negative effect on women’s

wages two recent studies find that employed mothers in the United

States suffer a per-child wage penalty of approximately 5%, on average

after controlling for the usual human capital and occupational factors that affect wages (Budig and England 2001; Anderson, Binder, and Krause 2003)

According to Correll et. al, mothers are penalized on: perceived competence recommended starting salary.

Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent.

The study showed that actual employers discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.


The researchers sent out fake resumes for a childless woman and a mom, both equally qualified. The

parent-resumes listed “Parent-Teacher Association coordinator” under the heading “other relevant activities,” as a way to flag that the candidates were parents.

They found that the moms were viewed less favorably than the non-moms and were substantially less likely to be hired.

What’s more, mothers were offered $11,000 a year less in compensation, on average, than a childless job candidate with the same qualifications.

The study’s authors also sent fake resumes to more than 600 jobs over an 18-month span.

The women with no kids received more than twice as many interview requests than moms with equal skills. Fathers and childless men, meanwhile, received the same

amount of callbacks.


Differences in Disadvantage: Variation in the Motherhood Penalty across White Women’s Earnings Distribution Budig and Hodges sought to understand “whether

motherhood penalizes all women equally, and whether the mechanisms generating the penalty operate in the same way for all women.”

Conclusion #1: “There is a penalty for motherhood across the earnings distribution that persists after inclusion of all variables.”

Conclusion #2: “Women with the least to lose are proportionately losing the most – the motherhood penalty is significantly larger among women in the lowest .05 and .10 quantiles of the earnings distribution.”


Conclusion #3: “Reduced hours and weeks of employment among the lowest earners account for a significant portion of this penalty.”

Conclusion #4: “Lost experience accounts for almost half or more of the penalty among women in the upper 50 percent of the wage distribution.”

Conclusion #5: “Job characteristics account for more than 30 percent of the motherhood penalties at the lowest two quantiles but do little to explain the penalty for the majority of earners.”


Breastfeeding

Experts (and some feminists) agree: Breast was ‘best’ for babies.

Poor, less educated and nonprofessional working women are less likely to breastfeed compared to non-poor, more educated, professional or non-employed women. Why might this be?

Literature shows consensus: working negatively related to breastfeeding duration, although working has less of an impact on whether a woman initiates breastfeeding.


More on Breastfeeding

Until passage of the “reasonable break time” provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, there were no federal legal protections for mothers to breastfeed at work.

Even still, mothers who do often face: Unsupportive co-workers, lack of a private

place to express milk, or no place to store expressed milk


Breastfeeding Mothers

Research indicates that: Mothers find it difficult to breastfeed while engaging in

paid work Women feel pressure to breastfeed Many women who face work-family conflicts opt out of

work when they have the financial ability to do so Short-term breast-feeders and formula-feeders face

similar earning penalties Long-term breast-feeders (those who comply with

guidelines) experience a steeper income decline over the first 5 years of their children’s lives.

Breastfeeding, in short, is not free


Occupational Sex Segregation


Gender Discrimination at Wal-Mart


Wal-Mart


Unpaid Work Through the Life Cycle Women do more housework than men even when

comparing employed women to non-employed men. In the household, men and women do different kinds of

tasks. Women are more likely to do cooking, washing dishes, indoor cleanup, laundry, shopping, and childcare.

Men are more likely to do repairs and maintenance, gardening, and pet care.

The unpaid work of women is estimated be worth about $138,095 a year for stay-at-home mothers and $85,876 annually for employed women.

Despite the obvious importance of this unpaid work, it is often invisible.


Children and Housework

There are gender differences in the distribution of housework between boys and girls in families

Girls are much more likely to do the dishes and the laundry, and boys are much more likely to do yard work and take out the trash.

Teen-age daughters, especially in low income families, are responsible for significant amounts of chores and childcare, and they also do a lot of emotion work by helping their parents.


What’s Behind the Way People Divide up Housework? Three theories try to explain the division of

labor in housework:

(1) Socialization theorists say boys and girls learn lessons about what they should feel and do when faced with a dirty kitchen. From this point of view the solution is to teach

boys and girls the skills they will need to take care of households and the people in them.


What’s Behind the Way People Divide up Housework?

(2) Rational choice theorists argue that women and men rationally divide the housework based on which partner knows how to do the work and which partner brings home a larger paycheck.


What’s Behind the Way People Divide up Housework? (3) Feminists point out, however, that the way

housework is divided cannot represent two people of equal status negotiating rationally because women do not have as much power as men. Housework is a “gender factory”. When women do more housework and when women

and men do different kinds of housework, they are reproducing gender.

Feminists also assert that we need to pay attention to the connection between paid work and unpaid work.

lesson 7: work and the economy introduction to women’s studies robert wonser

Documents

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