Negotiating Gender Relations: Muslim Women and Formal Employment in Pakistan's Rural Development Sector

Drawing on evidence from qualitative field research, this article explores how Pakistani female development practitioners experience their work situations as they are shaped both by local sociocultural norms and globalized development agendas. In this context, policies at global and national levels demand that more female development practitioners work in remote rural places in Pakistan, thus creating new employment opportunities for some Pakistani women. This article argues that, in this work environment, these women are exposed to different expectations about their gender behaviour and that they therefore develop physical strategies on the one hand and discursive strategies on the other in order to negotiate gender relations in a way that allows them to engage in formal employment. This article adds to under‐researched debates on gender and work in Muslim countries as well as to debates in critical development and gender studies.     

Preferences,constraints or schemas of devotion? Exploring Norwegian mothers' withdrawals from high‐commitment careers1

Despite decades of focus on gender equality and work–family balance, parenthood still affects mothers' and fathers' careers differently. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Norwegian mothers who are relinquishing high‐commitment careers of law and consultancy, this paper questions the adequacy of established explanations emphasizing constraints vs. individual preferences. Our sample of female professionals living in a well‐developed welfare state is particularly apt to explore the processes and mechanisms upholding the statistically gendered pattern of women reducing their work commitment after childbirth. These doubly privileged mothers might be considered to have the best odds for combining career and work commitment with motherhood. Thus, we argue that the approach emphasizing practical constraints does not sufficiently account for the withdrawal from high‐commitment careers among these female professionals. Nevertheless, we are not content with the claim of Preference Theory that this shift in commitment is merely a matter of ‘not‐so‐dedicated’ women discovering their ‘genuine’ preferences. Rather, in order to understand why and how this shift occurs, we explore the culturally constructed rationalities and schemas of both work and family devotions. We specifically examine the circumstances, mechanisms and steps in a seemingly individual process of making the shift in commitment from a promising career to a family‐friendly job. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how generous parental leave arrangements designed to enhance gender equality and work–family balance by simply reducing practical constraints may have limited – or even counterproductive – impact within high‐commitment occupations where the ‘irreplaceability’ of workers is taken for granted. Our findings indicate that unless the culturally (re)produced discourses, demands and expectations of both work and family are exposed and challenged, even intentionally gender neutral work–family policies will continue to facilitate mothers' career withdrawals, expressed as modified individual preferences.     

Violence Against Women in the Workplace

Although Employee Assistance Programs often incorporate workplace violence prevention and debriefings into their array of services, rarely has any attention been paid to the risks for workplace violence that female employees face. The prevalence in society of violence against women and the increase in violence at the work site could create a swific risk for women at work. An exploration of this risk was undertaken, using three apparent categories of workulace violence: random criminal (perpetrator unknown to victim). worker (perpetrator works at the same company as victim), and relationship or domestic (perpetrator is a family member or significant other of victim) violence. An analysis of the results of the 1991 Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries indicated that of all women who die on the job, 39% were the victims of assault, whereas only 18% of all male fatalities were murdered at work. Of the female homicides, over three-fourths were acts of random criminal violence. Worker violence and its potential for affecting female employees is discussed. Lastly, the effects of relationship violence entering the workplace are explored through the use of a case study. Information on assessment and prevention techniques useful to the EAP professional is included     

Gender and income in pharmacy: human capital and gender stratification theories revisited

This is a case study of gender and earnings in pharmacy--a profession characterized by its rapid recruitment of female practitioners. We try to account for disparities in earnings between male and female pharmacists in Ontario with the aid of human capital theory and gender stratification theory. Data is drawn from a random sample of 463 Ontario pharmacists. We find a consistent sex gap in earnings regardless of occupational level of practitioners (i.e. owner, manager or employee) and net of such factors as hours worked, commitment to work, hours devoted to childcare, absences from the labour market, and years since graduation. Instead, the main reason why women in pharmacy earn less than males is because they remain employees throughout their careers. However, we are less successful at identifying the additional factors responsible for the depressed earnings of female practitioners. We discuss our findings in light of the claims of gender stratification and human capital theory.     

Comparing Offers and Take‐ups of Employee Health Insurance across Race,Gender, and Decade*

How often do U.S. employees receive health insurance offers from employers? When offered, how often do they take up their employer‐based health insurance? This article uses the 1992 and 2002 waves of the National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) to investigate changes in access to (offers) and employees electing to accept, take, or purchase their employers’ health insurance plans (take‐ups) among wage and salaried workers. Although much research has studied employee health benefits, little has examined the intersection of gender and race regarding both offers and take‐ups of such benefits. Logistic regression results indicate that offers and take‐ups of personal health benefits declined from 1992 to 2002, net of salient controls. Further analyses demonstrate that these declines did not affect all workers identically. Offers declined somewhat for both women and men among whites and African Americans, but declined more among Hispanic women and men. Among other ethnoracial groups, offers declined the most among men, but increased among comparable women. Take‐ups declined among white men and Hispanic workers. However, white and African American women's take‐ups did not change and among African American men take‐ups increased. We discuss the need to examine gender and race simultaneously and urge researchers to more closely examine changes in health benefit offers and take‐ups.     

Balancing Work–family Life in Academia: The Power of Time

In the article we analyse the structuring of time among academic employees in Iceland, how they organize and reconcile their work and family life and whether gender is a defining factor in this context. Our analysis shows clear gender differences in time use. Although flexible working hours help academic parents to organize their working day and fulfil the ever‐changing needs of family members, the women, rather than men interviewed, seem to be stuck with the responsibility of domestic and caring issues because of this very same flexibility. It seems to remove, for more women than for men, the possibility of going home early or not being on call. The flexibility and the gendered time use seem thus to reproduce traditional power relations between women and men and the gender segregated division in the homes.     

Hijab Micropractices: The Strategic and Situational Use of Clothing by Qatari Women

The hijab, the headscarf and cloak worn by some Muslim women, is often viewed through a lens of constraint, but in this article I emphasize its flexible use by women in Qatar, a wealthy, conservative Arabian Gulf nation. As part of a neoliberal agenda, the Qatari government frequently depicts female citizens using an “empowered woman” narrative that touts increased college enrollment, workforce participation, and sports involvement as evidence of a progressive gender milieu. Yet Qatar continues to be steeped in patriarchy and institutional gender discrimination. This domination finds its most visible expression in the scrutiny and regulation of women's clothing. In this article, I describe how Qatari women strategically modify, adjust, reimagine, and remove their hijabs to suit changing circumstances. These hijab micropractices—women's strategic and situational use of traditional Muslim clothing—are at times so infinitesimal they are easy to overlook. Yet they are significant because they enable Qatari women to exercise agency within the confines of clothing that is believed to signify Islamic patriarchy and female oppression. I argue that hijab micropractices are a means by which Qatari women resist these conditions, while maintaining a religious identity and commitment to family.     

GENDER, WORK, AND STRESS: The Potential Impact of Role-Identity Salience And Commitment

In a period when most women and men combine work and family roles, the relationship between these roles and stress is of particular importance. Using an identity theory perspective, this study focuses primarily on gender differences in the sources and levels of stress associated with these roles. An identity-based perspective provides a more parsimonious way to address this issue than the frequently employed gender specific models. Based on differences in the meaning and salience of and commitment to work and family role identities, this study predicts gender differences in identity-linked sources of stress, and relates these to the results of prior stress research. Despite reliance on general norms to infer the salience and commitment of men and women to their work and family roles, and identity perspective demonstrates considerable promise.     

An intersectional perspective on Muslim women's issues and experiences in employment

Drawing on a qualitative study of second‐generation Pakistani heritage Muslim women in employment in the UK, this article uses and develops an intersectional perspective to explain the interconnected and overlapping factors, such as gender, ethnicity and religion that affect these women at work. It also considers individual strategies and resources these women use to address any obstacles in the way of their employment and careers. The article uses the notions of inequality regimes and intersectionality to explain inequality in the workplace and the complex challenges facing Muslim female employees. The results show that these women continue to face a myriad of challenges in the UK workplace, and that a unilateral focus on gender does not sufficiently explain the work‐related experiences of second‐generation Muslim women in the UK. Therefore, it is important to take into account gender's intersection with ethnicity and religion.     

EMPLOYEE AWARENESS OF FAMILY LEAVE BENEFITS: The Effects of Family, Work, and Gender

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was intended to help employees meet short-term family demands, such as caring for children and elderly parents, without losing their jobs. However, recent evidence suggests that few women and even fewer men employees avail themselves of family leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. This paper examines the organizational, worker status, and salience/need factors associated with knowledge of family leave benefits. We study employees covered by the FMLA using the 1996 panel of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to ascertain what work and family factors influence knowledge of leave benefits. Overall, 91 percent of employed FMLA-eligible women report they have access to unpaid family leave, compared to 72 percent of men. Logistic regression analyses demonstrate that work situations more than family situations affect knowledge of family leave benefits and that gender shapes the impact of some work and family factors on awareness. Furthermore, work and family situations do not explain away the considerable gender difference in knowledge of family leave.     

Demands and Devotion: Cultural Meanings of Work and Overload Among Women Researchers and Professionals in Science and Technology Industries

How do cultural meanings influence how people experience work‐life demands? Much research, especially quantitative research, on the effects of structural work and family conditions does not account for employees’ cultural beliefs about the meaning of work in their lives. This article uses unique survey data to investigate the effects of employee embrace of elements of the “work devotion schema”—a cultural model that valorizes intense career commitment and organizational dedication—on their sense of “overload,” an experience that includes feeling exhausted and overloaded by all one's roles, net of actual hours on the paid job and family responsibilities. We argue that by cognitively, morally, and emotionally framing work as a valued end, the work devotion schema reduces feelings of overload. Using a case of senior women researchers and professional service providers in science and technology industries, we find that those who embrace work devotion feel less overloaded than those who reject it, net of work and family conditions. However, this effect is curtailed for mothers of young and school‐aged children. We end by discussing implications for flexibility stigma and gender inequality.     

Poking a sleeping bear: the challenge of organizational recruitment for controversial topics

ABSTRACT

Researchers often approach employers to investigate employees’ work and family experiences. Organizational willingness to grant access to employees can vary, especially when the research topic is seen as controversial or contentious for the employer. This paper explores this methodological challenge using a research example from Manitoba, Canada, which explored the use of parental leave by male employees and the impact of managerial attitudes and corporate culture on usage. Sixty large employers were recruited with only seven of those organizations agreeing to participate. In this paper, the reasons organizations gave for declining to participate and the implications of their decisions for the research are examined. Although the final sample included 905 managers and employees, participating organizations tended to be employee-focused and family-friendly employers. Organizations declined participation for a variety of reasons: avoiding raising the issue with unions, awareness that their policies unfairly benefited female leave takers, and simply not seeing the relevance of a topic relating to men’s work–family experiences. A dialogue often absent from the literature, it is important to understand how employers can limit researchers’ access to employees on controversial topics. The existence of such barriers suggests alternative avenues to recruit participants directly when topics are contentious for employers.     

Gendered Meanings of Commitment from High Technology Engineering Managers in the United Kingdom and Sweden

This article considers why women managers are often perceived to be ‘less committed’ at work than men, through an exploration of male and female managers' meanings of ‘commitment’, to see whether their meanings are shared. Despite a large body of literature on the concept of commitment, managers' own meanings of commitment have not been reported. In general, engineers reported that they used the term ‘committed’ without defining what it meant. Their meanings were a broad composite of organizational and career commitment, focused on very strong affective commitment with almost no emphasis on continuance commitment, in contrast to the traditional (1979) definitions of commitment (Mowday et al. 1979). Results from this interview study of engineering managers and senior technologists (20 males, 17 females, 17 British, and 20 Swedish graduate engineers, from vice‐president to senior technologist) show that there are differences in male and female engineers' unprompted meanings of commitment at work, as well as differences in meaning between the three levels of management sampled. Females responded more often with less visible ‘commitment’ meanings such as involvement, being people‐concerned, and availability. More males (and top managers) used the term commitment to mean task delivery, being proactive, being innovative, adding value, and being ready for challenge. The gender differences identified in reported meanings could impact on the assessment of women's commitment, when evaluated for promotion, career development and professional chartered status by the mostly male engineering managers.     

Gender,Occupation, and Promotion to Management in the Nonprofit Sector

Although one can assume the work values within nonprofit organizations promote gender equality in promotion decisions, there is preliminary evidence that in the nonprofit sector women are underrepresented in higher management positions. Whereas the mechanisms resulting in underrepresentation of women in management have been studied extensively in for‐profit organizations, little is known about these mechanisms in nonprofit organizations. Is gender in nonprofit organizations—even given the underlying values of these organizations—an impediment to attaining a management position? This article presents a case study of employment patterns within the Dutch section of the humanitarian INGO Médecins Sans Frontières and focuses particularly on the effects of gender and occupation on transitions to management. The case study organization represents a “critical case” because the nature of this organization's work environment can be expected to result in a relatively high percentage of women in management. Employee records (N = 2,247) were analyzed using event history models. We found that women made the transition to management less rapidly than men, even when controlling for factors like age, previous work experience, and nationality. However, gender differences were completely explained by occupation. Those employees in female‐dominated occupations (in this case, medical personnel such as nurses) had a lower promotion‐to‐management rate than those in male‐dominated occupations (in this case, nonmedical personnel such as financial officers), irrespective of their gender. This case study highlights the importance to nonprofit management research of studying the effects of occupational sex segregation on promotion.     

ADOLESCENT WORK AND BOYS' AND GIRLS' ORIENTATIONS TO THE FUTURE

This study compares adolescent boys' and girls' aspirations and plans concerning achievement, family, and other adult life spheres, and examines the effects of adolescent work experience on these future orientations. The data were obtained from 1001 students, chosen randomly from a list of enrolled ninth graders in a large Midwestern city. Girls were not found to have lower achievement orientations than boys. Examination of the interrelations of achievement and family plans suggests that boys see their future educational, work, and family roles as more closely integrated than do girls. Just as work and family roles are mutually supportive for adult men but in conflict for adult women, so too do employed adolescent boys appear to be developing traditional family orientations, while employed girls, especially those much exposed to formal work, expect less involvement in marriage and family life. The analyses indicate that paid work is traditionalizing for boys, promoting optimism about, and commitment to, numerous adult life domains; but for girls, formal work lessens interest in traditional female gender roles.     

Part-Time Work and Women’s Careers: a Decomposition of the Gender Promotion Gap

This paper studies the effect of working hours on vertical sex segregation using Belgian micro-data on promotions. Using Yun decompositions we find that more than 40% of the promotion gaps between men and women can be explained by gender differences in contract hours, overtime hours and occasional late work. The fact that women often work in sectors that offer less promotion possibilities is another important factor. The presence of children strongly affects the promotion chances of female employees, but not those of the male employees in our sample. This evidence supports theories that relate the availability of part-time work to the degree of vertical segregation in countries.     

Having It All? Women in High Commitment Careers and Work–Life Balance in Norway

The question if, or how, women can 'have it all' — high commitment career, partner and children — is regularly debated in popular media internationally. Drawing on qualitative research, this article examines work–life balance (WLB) for women in high commitment careers as politicians and non‐executive directors on corporate boards in Norway. Norway is lauded as one of the most gender equal countries in the world and in theory at least it is therefore a highly enabling environment for women to combine career and family. The article considers the WLB challenges women politicians and directors encounter and what types of WLB support — national, workplace and household level — are important for them in order to mitigate the potential strain caused by work–family conflict. This article's contribution is in highlighting the competing and sometimes contradictory policies, practices and discourses at multiple levels that surround WLB and the gendered social expectations of women in Norway who apparently 'have it all'.     

Feeling Northern: ‘heroic women’ in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC One, 2014—)

This article analyses a recent television drama written by Sally Wainwright in order to explore notions of Northernness, gender and class. I consider to what extent Wainwright is expanding and revising current perceptions of the North, and more specifically of Northern women, through an analysis of her recent television programme, Happy Valley. Wainwright’s work shares characteristics of the British social realist television drama from the late 50s, early 60s: they have themes of escape, they use location to say something about their characters and they take viewers on an emotional journey that is related to the social conditions they inhabit. And yet, she is also putting women, who were often on the periphery of social drama, in the centre. Wainwright takes her viewers on a journey that begins with the anger and injustice resonant with the male protagonists of social realism, but as women, this anger and injustice is worked through in terms of the family and eventually leads to a greater sense of commitment to community and the place she comes from, which, in Wainwright’s work, is the North. In so doing, she expands the genre and gives it a female voice. She offers us a sense of what ‘feeling’ Northern is to women, as well as men. Additionally, she is a screenwriter who is speaking from the position of the working-class North; she is intimate to these communities, not a ‘detached observer.’ And yet, despite these inroads, her work has only recently received praise from the British television Industry.     

The Third Shift? Gender and Empowerment in a Women’s Ecotourism Cooperative

Ecotourism is lauded as a path toward sustainable development and women’s empowerment in rural areas around the world, but little is known about how gendered expectations shape its processes and outcomes. This paper employs an in-depth qualitative case study of a female-only ecotourism cooperative in rural Mexico to investigate how local gender dynamics influence women’s opportunities to benefit from ecotourism development. Findings show that women’s family and work commitments prevent their ability to devote the resources and energy necessary to make the cooperative successful. In this context, women are first expected to be wives and mothers, and to fulfill the substantial daily expectations associated with those roles. In addition, most women work outside the home. This leaves little time or energy for a “third shift” as ecotourism entrepreneurs running their own cooperative. Women put their own interests and goals on the back burner, because of the demands of the first two shifts. If ecotourism is to empower women, localized gender structures must be understood and addressed. Overlooking these challenges can mean that ecotourism projects, even those specifically aimed at empowering women, may only further burden women and reinforce gender models that perpetuate inequality.