Divergent female part-time employment in Britain and Denmark and the implications for gender equity

This paper examines women's employment in Britain and Denmark, societies characterised similarly by high proportions of female employees working part‐time but by rather different gender arrangements. Part‐time working is associated with female‐carer workers; women who have reduced their hours in the labour market to bring up children and are able to do this because of the presence of an alternative source of income—usually a male breadwinner. Yet Denmark has been conceptualised as having more of ‘dual‐breadwinner’ gender arrangement than Britain. It would seem then, that part‐time working is distinctly different in these two societies. Examining this question, the paper concludes that extensive part‐time working for women, and not men, does indeed tend to reinforce a traditional male‐breadwinner model. However, the strength of this reinforcement varies, depending on the relative conditions of the part‐time labour market. These conditions vary substantially cross‐nationally and can also change rapidly within one society over time. As a result, the typical ‘role’ a part‐time job plays for women can also vary cross‐nationally and can change over time.     

Making the Best of a Bad Job? Female Part‐Timers’ Orientations and Attitudes to Work

This article uses data from 50 qualitative interviews with female part‐time workers in low‐level jobs in Britain to illustrate their attitudes, orientations and aspirations towards paid work. The research reports two main findings. Firstly, even female part‐time workers at the bottom end of the occupational structure are not a homogeneous group of workers. Secondly, they are not all highly satisfied with their jobs. The article argues that many women (especially those in working‐class households) still do not have a genuine choice between ‘family work’ and ‘market work’. It concludes by presenting a theoretical model of orientations to work.     

More or Less Unequal? Evidence on the Pay of Men and Women from the British Birth Cohort Studies

Gender pay differences are not merely a problem for women returning to work and part‐time employees, but also for those in full‐time, continuous careers. In data from cohort studies, the gender wage gap for full‐time workers in their early thirties fell between 1978 and 2000. This equalization reflects improvements in women’s education and experience rather more than a move towards equal treatment. Indeed, had the typical woman full‐timer in 2000 been paid at men’s rates she would have actually received higher pay than the typical man. Within one cohort, passing from age 33 to 42, gender inequality increased. This was partly due to differences in the qualifications and experience of the women in employment at those points, but unequal treatment also rose among women employed full time at both ages.     

Women's Studies

In this article I consider recent policies on care provision in Japan, including the employment of immigrant workers. My discussion is framed by Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’: a mode of governmentality focused on the management of populations. In the current age of economic globalization, however, biopolitics also crosses national boundaries. Raewyn Connell has described a ‘global gender order’ whereby gender relations are shaped by power structures which transcend the level of the nation-state. This involves the connections between different local gender orders and gender orders which transcend the scale of the nation-state. The migration of care workers involves gendered structures in both sending and receiving countries, in interaction with other dimensions of difference, including class, caste, ethnicity and racialized positioning. In order to understand the relationships between the providers and receivers of care, it is necessary to bring together the insights of the nation-focused concept of biopolitics and the multileveled perspective of the ‘global order of inequality’ and the ‘global order of difference’. Between the local and the global, there are also regional orders of inequality and regional orders of difference; care work involves relationships which are put into practice at local, intimate, interpersonal and embodied levels.     

Restructuring Flexibility: Case Studies of Part‐Time Female Workers in Six Workplaces

The article is based on six workplace case studies within a local economy and investigates the reasons behind the different utilization of part‐time workers within these workplaces. The research examines the content and nature of part‐time work in these organizations and the experiences of the part‐time workforce. The findings suggest that we need to distinguish between three types of part‐time workers; core, peak and ancillary. It is argued that such distinctions capture the variegated utilization of part‐time workers and contribute to the debate concerning the integration or marginalization of part‐time staff within workplaces. Furthermore, workplace cultures are an important arena for contextualizing these discussions. It is contended that the different uses of part‐time workers can be explained by different sectoral and organizational contexts but that the nature of part‐time work is also influenced by existing social relations within the workplace, notably with respect to gender, class and age.     

Broadening the Intersectional Path: Revealing Organizational Practices through ‘Working Mothers’ Narratives about Time

This article is concerned with the complex inequality experienced by mothers in employment, and applies ‘strong intersectionality’ to women's narratives about time to reveal the intersecting inequalities women experience and gendered organizational practices. Drawing on empirical research with 30 Irish ‘working mothers’, this article explores the way time is ordered and managed to create gendered inequalities for women at the intersection of maternity with paid work. By conceptualizing gender, maternity and class as simultaneous processes of identity practice, institutional practice and social practice, following Holvino, women's narratives reveal that organizations manage and order time to fit with notions of ‘ideal workers’, which perpetrate older hierarchies and gendered inequalities, and which create regimes of inequality for women at the intersection of maternity with paid work.     

From evidence to action: Applying gender mainstreaming to pay gaps in the Welsh public sector

Progress on reducing gender disparities remains painfully slow, despite efforts to identify the determinants of gender pay gaps and specify size and shape. Recent studies highlight the need for a more nuanced account of the way that public policy shapes organizational responses and insights into the types of organizational practices that diminish pay disparities. In response, this research reports on an action research intervention in three large Welsh public organizations, subject to a unique statutory equality duty. Data demonstrate how an evidence‐based gender mainstreaming approach facilitated the development of a ‘no blame’ strategy, which legitimized organizational proactivity through collaborative and empowering change management processes. The research contributes to the study of gender pay gaps by demonstrating that gender mainstreaming, with facilitative local conditions and supportive public policy, shapes action on gender segregation, with particular success in women's low‐paid employment. Conclusions highlight theoretical and policy implications arising from the research.     

The Intersections of Gender with Age and Ethnicity in Hotel Careers: Still the Same Old Privileges?

This article explains the value of an intersectional approach in sectoral research, using this lens to examine privilege and penalty in the female‐dominated hotel sector of New Zealand. Memory‐work and semi‐structured interviews explored the career experiences of long‐term hotel workers, highlighting the extent to which gender, intersecting with age, ethnicity and class, shape individual career choices. The key contribution of this article is to suggest that in hotels, as in other employment sectors, the apparent ‘level playing field’ at career‐entry point, where merit is presumed to regulate promotional opportunities, soon disappears as the workings of power and influence within the organizational context take hold: privileges and penalties intersect.     

Visualising Gender Wage Differences in the European Union

The purpose of this article is to illustrate differences in the gender wage gap in 13 EU member states, using figures taken from the Household Panel for 2000. The methodology is based primarily on the kernel density functions of men's and women's wages. A range of situations can be observed from the Mediterranean countries (with a smaller gender pay gap) to the very specific cases of Austria and the UK and to northern European countries where the gender pay gap is chiefly the result of a larger proportion of men at higher‐paid levels. We also offer conclusions on the relevance of public employment, part‐time employment and short‐term hiring to explain the gender wage gap in each of the countries studied.     

Mind the gap: financial London and the regional class pay gap

The hidden barriers, or ‘gender pay gap’, preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class‐origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey (N = 7,534) to stage a more spatially sensitive analysis that examines regional variation in the class pay gap. We find that this ‘class ceiling’ is not evenly spatially distributed. Instead it is particularly marked in Central London, where those in high‐status occupations who are from working‐class backgrounds earn, on average, £10,660 less per year than those whose parents were in higher professional and managerial employment. Finally, we inspect the Capital further to reveal that the class pay gap is largest within Central London's banking and finance sector. Challenging policy conceptions of London as the ‘engine room’ of social mobility, these findings suggest that class disadvantage within high‐status occupations is particularly acute in the Capital. The findings also underline the value of investigating regional differences in social mobility, and demonstrate how such analysis can unravel important and previously unrecognized spatial dimensions of class inequality.     

How Women Engineers Do and Undo Gender: Consequences for Gender Equality

The image of engineering as a masculine profession has reproduced the perception that engineering is unsuitable for women. While various strategies have been used to try to increase the number of women entering engineering education and employment, their success has been limited. At the same time it has been argued that the way gender is ‘done’ in work can help diminish or increase inequality between the sexes. Using empirical research exploring women engineering students’ workplace experiences, this article considers how gender performance explains their behaviour and attitudes. Butler implied that doing gender can result in our being ‘undone’. This was specifically found to be the case for the women students in this study, who performed their gender in a particular way in order to gain male acceptance. In doing this they utilized certain coping strategies: acting like one of the boys, accepting gender discrimination, achieving a reputation, seeing the advantages over the disadvantages and adopting an ‘anti‐woman’ approach. These strategies are part of women's enculturation and professionalization in engineering, yet they also fail to value femaleness. In ‘doing’ engineering, women often ‘undo’ their gender. Such gender performance does nothing to challenge the gendered culture of engineering, and in many ways contributes to maintaining an environment that is hostile to women.     

Routes to Part‐Time Management in UK Service Sector Organizations: Implications for Women’s Skills,Flexibility and Progression

This article examines the implications of part‐time working for mothers, particularly with regards to their occupational mobility and acquisition of skills, in UK service sector organizations following the implementation of the Part‐time Workers’ Directive in 2000. Through qualitative interviews with women and their managers in five hospitality workplaces, this article explores whether part‐time workers are potentially the ‘losers’ in the ‘winner‐takes‐all’ approach to career development. Discussions focus upon the extent to which part‐time workers can access career paths or, alternatively, whether part‐time management positions are the reserve of highly skilled women who are able to negotiate reduced hours after obtaining a management position full time. In conclusion, this article distinguishes between two forms of working‐time flexibility, which are named optimal and restrictive. The implications of these alternative types of flexibility, in terms of access to skill acquisition and occupational mobility, are then addressed.     

Beyond ‘Gender Differences’: A Canadian Study of Women's and Men's Careers in Engineering

This article explores the relationship between gender and career paths for a group of women and men who graduated as engineers during a period of labour market turbulence in western Canada during the 1980s. Using a model adapted from Brown (1982 ), the article uses ‘career path’ as a device to organize data drawn primarily from telephone and face‐to‐face interviews with 317 graduates. Three career paths provide the focus for the study: the ‘organizational’, characterized by stable employment with one employer; the ‘occupational’, characterized by mobility between employers; and the entrepreneurial, characterized by self‐employment. The use of the career path framework moves the study beyond global comparisons (of the dichotomized ‘gender differences’ kind) between ‘the women’ and ‘the men’. As well as allowing for comparison between the paths, it allows more refined and contextualized comparisons within each path. Such comparisons produce patterns of similarity and difference that sometimes transcend gender.     

Gender‐Related Opportunities and Turnover: The Case of Medical Sector Employees

This study examined the relationships between gender, objective and perceived work‐related opportunities, and turnover behavior. This was achieved using an interdisciplinary approach that combined the macro‐level perspective on opportunities in internal and external labor markets, with the micro‐level perspective of individual perceptions of opportunities. The results revealed that the opportunities–turnover linkage is gender‐specific rather than gender‐neutral. Women's turnover behavior was affected by their ‘perception’ of employment opportunities in the organizational and local labor markets. By contrast, men's turnover behavior was affected by ‘objective’, organizational and local labor market conditions. These findings indicate that the objective opportunities of the work market may be compatible with men’s, but not women’s, work needs and hence question existing assumptions of a ‘gender‐neutral’ effect of opportunities on turnover decisions.     

Doing gender in segregated and assimilative organizations: Ultra‐Orthodox Jewish women in the Israeli high‐tech labour market

Ultra‐Orthodox Jewish (haredi) women in Israel, who are traditionally expected to be both mothers and breadwinners so as to allow their husbands to immerse themselves in religious studies, are recently entering the high‐tech labour market in both segregated and assimilate organizations. This segmented labour market allows the constructed and intersectional character of doing gender in organizations to be examined, which in turn may also effect the ways in which such labour segmentation continues to develop. In 2014–2015, we administered a questionnaire to 119 haredi women working as computer programmers in assimilative and segregated organizations, and interviewed 42 of them as well as 16 of their managers. We describe the emergence of a dual pattern of employment with its benefits and disadvantages regarding pay, satisfaction, commitment and burnout. Findings are presented concerning the balancing of work and family as well as the professional/social conflict that is accentuated by working in an assimilative organization. Our findings show how the intersection of work, religiosity, class and gender is central to women's labour trajectories and identities, highlighting both the boundaries of gendered arrangements and their negotiability. We conclude by discussing how specific strategies of doing gender in segmented labour markets play out in/against ‘global’ norms of work and professionalism.     

Correlates of Voluntary vs. Involuntary Part‐time Employment among US Women

This article presents a study of the extent to which type and duration of labour force attachment add to the explanatory power of psychological, demographic, and family household characteristics to predict voluntary (n=166) vs. involuntary part‐time (n=160) employment of women in the United States. We use the terms ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ to reflect the woman's choice in accepting to work in paid part‐time employment. In this context, voluntary part‐time work is not meant to be construed as charitable, non‐paid activities, but rather is construed as individuals who are working part‐time but who would prefer to be working full‐time, if a suitable job were available. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience (NLSLME), we found that labour market attachment characteristics added little to predict part‐time employment status (involuntary vs. voluntary) and had virtually no effect on the odds of any other correlates on employment status. The major exception was number of years of unemployment. The longer working women were previously unemployed, the greater the likelihood they were involuntarily employed in part‐time jobs. In addition, we found that marriage and private sector employment decreased the likelihood of involuntary part‐time employment. Findings suggest that involuntarily part‐time employed women appear to be ‘settling’ for what they can get, namely, part‐time rather than full‐time jobs and that unmarried part‐timers may be viewed as a stigmatized or marginal group more likely to be employed in the public rather than private sector. Policy implications and future research are discussed.     

Social Relationships to the Means and Ends of Protest in South Africa's Ongoing Rebellion of the Poor: The Balfour Insurrections

Since 2004, South Africa has experienced thousands of local protests, many of them popular insurrections, which, taken together, represent a rebellion of the poor. Lack of service delivery has been the main issue, but protesting communities have also demanded the removal of corrupt officials, re-demarcation of political boundaries and employment. In terms of endurance and geographical spread, the movement is unprecedented. The article presents findings from a case study undertaken in Balfour, a small town outside Johannesburg. It argues for bridging studies of social class and social movements, justifies the concept ‘rebellion of the poor’ and proposes that the divide between employed workers and ‘the poor’ is best understood in terms of different relationships to the means and ends of protest.     

Intersections of regulation,space and gender: retail banking in an Australian Regional Town

This paper analyses the intersections of employment regulation, gender and space in the working lives of employees in three banks in an Australian Regional Town, contributing to a socio-spatial analysis of the impact of different levels of regulation. Illustrating our analysis through a dispute around Saturday working at one of these banks, we argue that ‘place’ and ‘space’, in the location and organisation of these banking worksites and in the social organisation of family and market work, create a distinct and gendered pattern of opportunities and constraints for banking employees. The lived experiences of the workers negotiating, accommodating and resisting inadequate staffing and the unilateral imposition of new working time arrangements, highlight the dynamic and contradictory practice of employment regulation, both formal and informal, at the local and individual levels and the ways it intersects with space and gender to shape working lives.     

Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina

Abstract

Sex work has been identified as an important dimension of the ‘survival circuits’ which have developed in the majority world in the context of neo-liberalisation, as a response to the deepening misery of the Global South. Yet while much research has explored the role of sex work in contexts of ‘neo-liberal’ regimes of capital accumulation, few have paid sustained attention to sex work in regimes which are not purely ‘neo-liberal’. Drawing on data with sex workers across 10 cities in Argentina gathered between 2007 and 2014, this article examines multiple spaces of sex workers' lives, including the workplace, the home, and the state in a context of what has been dubbed ‘neo-developmentalism’. It argues that sex work contributes multiple forms of value and subsidies for the state and capital. First, sex work provides a subsidy in the form of the provision of ‘employment’; second, female sex workers provide unwaged reproductive labour in the family; and third, in the labour movement. Yet despite these three contributions to the reproduction of the working class and therefore of capital, the state undermines sex workers' capacities through violence and sustained repression. The article concludes that the neo-developmentalism has led to ‘uneven divestment of the state’ in the reproduction of particular sections of the working class, namely those outside the formal and ‘productive’ sectors.     

Foreign Labour Migration in Sarawak,East Malaysia

Foreign labour force participation in Sarawak is thirteen per cent (about 138,027) workers from Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar, China and India, among others. This article attempts to describe the management of foreign labour employment in Sarawak. It also attempts to identify challenges and issues that current migration regulations have generated and which have impacted the society. Using the Filipino migrant workers as informants, a two-year period of fieldwork observation was conducted, using personal interviews and observations following the ‘mobile ethnography approach’. While Sarawak maintains its immigration control as part of the State safety net, the interplay between state and federal laws engenders contradictions that may be detrimental to the people and to society. This article argues that the claimed autonomous position of Sarawak in regard to immigration is not equated to better labour migration management in relation to the federal government’s approach to labour migration in Malaysia.