Gender Segregation,Size of Workplace and the Public Sector

Gender segregation is considered to be a key structuring factor in the labour market, and is central to explanations of phenomena as diverse as the everyday experience of men’s and women’s employment to the underachievement of women and the limited impact of equal pay legislation. Studies of occupational segregation by gender tend to be polarized between qualitative and quantitative extremes. At the quantitative end, a primary focus of research has been to quantify segregation to a single index, permitting simple comparisons between countries and over time. However, detailed case studies of particular occupations have often hinted at ways in which breakdowns in occupational segregation have been replaced by other forms of gender segregation. This paper will present data showing that even within occupational categories there is still significant gender segregation and concentration by public/private sector and by size of workplace. For instance, female pharmacists are very over-represented, and female gardeners very under-represented, in the public sector. And the general tendency for women to work in smaller workplaces is severe for some occupations (e.g. office managers) and reversed in other occupations (e.g. production fitters). These analyses question the usefulness of single indices which take account only of segregation or concentration by occupation and therefore underestimate the gendering of job opportunities even within mixed occupations.     

Parents’ Workplace Situation and Fathers’ Parental Leave Use

This study examines how the workplace situation of both parents affects fathers’ parental leave use. We used parental leave‐taking register data from Statistics Sweden for dual‐earner couples who resided in Stockholm and had children in 1997 (n= 3,755). The results indicate that fathers shorten their parental leave if their workplaces are such that one can expect leave to be associated with high costs and that fathers appear to be influenced by the leave use of other fathers in the workplace. Mothers’ workplace situation appears to be less important for fathers’ leave use. The results point to the importance of actors other than parents (such as employers) for understanding the gender‐based division of child care.     

Illuminating gendered organization assumptions

One key to why organizations have been less successful at integrating a work–family agenda into their organizational cultures is that workplaces have failed to consider how gender assumptions influence workplace practices, policies and cultures. This paper presents a theoretical framework for considering how gender role assumptions have prevented organizational attempts to become family friendly. Further, this paper uses an organizational case study to illustrate this point. Specifically, a theory of gendered organizations is used to frame an analysis of 30 employee interviews. Data suggest that gendered organizational assumptions inherent to several workplace policies and practices contribute to employee strain associated with negotiating the demands of life on and off the job. Further, the findings show that these gendered organizational assumptions prevent organizations from developing workplace cultures responsive to employees' work, family and personal needs. A brief review of the interdisciplinary work–family field is presented, followed by a discussion of gendered organizations. Then, using interview data collected from management and ‘front‐line’ female and male workers employed at a municipal government, this paper examines how workplace practices, presumably gender neutral, affect employees and the organizational culture in which they work.     

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.     

Organizational Commitment over the Gendered Life Course at a Mexican Company

Mexican workplaces have changed significantly in response to the global marketplace by restructuring, downsizing, and implementing new production and administrative processes. This case study analyzes organizational commitment at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation within the context of workplace transformation. Based on in‐depth interviews with 83 women and men, I identify two sources of commitment—family‐friendly and career‐friendly employment practices. Using the framework of the gendered life course, I show commitment fluctuated given the employees' stage in the life course. This study builds on the gender and work research by exploring how individual attributes of gender and parental status contribute to organizational commitment, but are underscored by the complexity of workplace context.     

What's love got to do with it? Passion and inequality in white‐collar work

Emotion has become an increasingly important aspect of work in the 21st century. In this article, we take stock of the extant literature delineating the role of emotions, especially passion as a cultural schema, in white‐collar workplaces. Scholars have covered extensive ground on emotions at work, but the role of passion remains an underexplored yet significant area. Drawing from recent developments in research on white‐collar work, we argue that the passion schema has become a critical marker in the labor market for sorting individuals into occupations, hiring and promotion within organizations, and assigning value to people's labor. Emergent research suggests that because the expression and perception of passion remain ambiguously defined in the workplace and varies by context, it is pivotal in reproducing social inequalities. In this review, we focus on how privileging passion in the workplace and interpreting it as a measure of aptitude impacts social inequalities by race, gender, and social class. We close by setting an agenda for further research on this topic.     

Perceptions of Relational Practices in the Workplace

We examined the intersection of gender and work through an investigation of relationally motivated behaviour in the workplace. Using Fletcher's ethnography of women's relational practices in a masculine work environment as a springboard, we examined Fletcher's typology of relational practice, participants' perceptions of employees who perform these forms of behaviour and whether these perceptions were related to gender. Working adults (N = 128) completed online surveys containing workplace scenarios and rated how effective and submissive they perceived the behaviour to be. Overall, participants rated relational practices as ineffective and submissive, regardless of whether a man or a woman had performed them. However, they reported that they would behave the same way as the target and they offered relationally oriented reasons for their choice. Relational practices remain paradoxical in the workplace, both necessary and devalued.     

‘You Can Stand on Your Head and Still End Up with Lower Pay’: Gliding Segregation and Gendered Work Practices in Danish ‘Family‐friendly’ Workplaces

This article explores the process of gliding segregation in two Danish workplaces. We address the questions of how and why women and men at the same workplace, with the same levels of education, often end up doing different work tasks. Drawing on a gendered organization perspective and sense of entitlement theory we illustrate the processes whereby structural and cultural expectations place women in predictable and routine work, and men in more developmental work. We also show that the level of education makes a difference to women's sense of entitlement to developmental work, but that the discourse of family friendliness disadvantages women in the allocation of interesting and valued work tasks. The findings illustrate the resilience of gendered work practices and the importance of focusing on workplace interactions to explain this.     

The Social Dynamics Channelling Latina College Graduates into the Teaching Profession

Sociologists examine the persistence of occupational sex segregation in two primary ways, vertically (within occupations) and horizontally (across occupations). Feminist scholars analysing gender and race inequality within work organizations have used ‘glass escalator’ and ‘glass barriers’ to document men's experiences in occupations where women concentrate, falling under the vertical epistemology. These race and gender theories are crucial to our understanding of workplace inequities, but they only address privilege or discrimination once women have entered or try climbing the work organization. Based on interviews with 40 Latina teachers in Southern California, this paper examines the point of occupational entry, and explains why college‐educated Latinas, the daughters of working‐class Latino immigrants, are disproportionately entering the teaching profession in the United States. We suggest that Latinas are socially channelled into the teaching occupation, and show how collective family considerations inform agency and occupational decision‐making for these women, resulting in a type of glass ceiling shaped by family and social class. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of collective‐informed agency for future studies of upwardly mobile Latinas in the professions.     

Job insecurity and coworker support among U.S. Workers

Abstract

The negative outcomes associated with job insecurity have been well established in the literature. Yet, scholars know very little about how job insecurity is related to coworker relationships in the workplace. Informed by the life stress perspective, this study examines the relationship between job insecurity and coworker support among U.S. workers. It also considers whether relationships diverge by gender. We use data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. workers (N?=?2,822) to examine these relationships. The results showed that job insecurity was negatively related to coworker support among both men and women, with no evidence of gender disparities. Altogether, the findings suggest job insecurity is damaging to the workplace environment, creating barriers to supportive coworker relationships among both men and women.     

DISCRIMINATION, WOMEN, AND WORK: Processes and Variations by Race and Class

Research on gender and workplace stratification has made clear that persistent employment, wage, and mobility gaps exist, and that discrimination at organizational and interactional levels is playing a role. Few studies, however, have been able to directly capture processes involved. In this article, we draw on unique qualitative and quantitative data pertaining to verified cases of workplace sex and race discrimination (1988 to 2003), and analyze the discriminatory experiences of African-American and white women across various occupational statuses. Notable are high levels of discriminatory firing for both groups, but higher instances of race-based promotional discrimination for black women—a pattern partially linked to their disparate concentration in sex-segregated workplaces and in positions of lower occupational prestige. Our qualitative immersion into case materials reveals influential mechanisms and employer justifications, unique manifestations of differential treatment on the job, and the use of "soft skill" criteria in gatekeeper decision making. We conclude by discussing important dimensions of workplace discrimination for women, variations by social class and race status, and how complexities of status matter for what women experience and gatekeeper behavior.     

Additively Decomposable Segregation Indexes. The Case of Gender Segregation by Occupations and Human Capital Levels in Spain

Building upon the ideas first exposed by Theil and Finizza (1971) and Fuchs (1975), this paper presents an additively decomposable segregation index based on the entropy concept used in information theory. For any pair of classification variables in a given year, the index is decomposed into a between-group and a within-group term. To analyze intertemporal changes in gender segregation for a given partition, the index is decomposed into two terms that capture, respectively, gender composition effects, and changes in the groups' demographic importance. These decompositions are illustrated with Spanish data on occupations and human capital levels for 1977 and 1992. It is found that, in both years, the higher the educational level, the smaller is gender segregation for most age groups. Moreover, gender segregation decreases with age in all educational categories. However, most gender segregation takes place within, rather than between, age/education categories. Lastly, changes in gender composition across occupations, nearly offset by occupational mix changes, account for a decline of 2% in total gender segregation over this period.     

Social Monitoring as Social Control: The Case of Drug Testing in a Medical Workplace

While workplace drug testing has received considerable public and scholarly attention, little of this discussion has focused on the social context within which testing is likely to occur. This paper conceptualizes drug testing as social monitoring and examines testing within a framework suggested by Donald Black's theory of social control. The central idea is that the formality of social monitoring within a group is a function of its members' social status and the social distance among them. The paper evaluates this argument in one empirical setting. Analysis of data from U.S. departments of anesthesiology indicates that drug testing, an example of formal monitoring, most often emerges in a context marked by low normative respectability and a lack of intimate relationships. The paper concludes by suggesting how variations in monitoring procedures like drug testing may affect ensuing processes of social control.     

The Business Case of Gender Equality in Swedish Forestry and Mining ‐ Restricting or Enabling Organizational Change

Forestry and mining constitutes an important part of Swedish basic industry. These industries are heavily male‐dominated and are expressing an ambition to become more gender equal and less gender‐segregated, arguing that this could strengthen their competitiveness in a number of areas. In this article we explore how company representatives construct gender equality as a business case and discuss how these constructions restrict and/or enable gender equality in these organizations. Departing from a social constructivist understanding of how language (re)produces gendered power relations in the workplace, the empirical basis of this paper consists of eight interviews with respondents who possess special insights into, and being of strategic importance to, gender equality issues in forestry and mining companies. In our analysis we found three dominant dimensions of the business case of gender equality Marketing (as) gender equality, Uncovering the male norm and Gender equality as a depoliticized value. We conclude that the business case framing facilitates for the companies to engage in issues of gender equality. However, issues concerning conflicting interests and power relations seem to be difficult to address within the business case discourse. This we argue affects and shapes the terms for gender equality in these organizations.     

Racialized Tokens: Latina Teachers Negotiating,Surviving and Thriving in a White Woman’s Profession

Previous scholarship on tokenism in professional occupations analyzes the ways white men exclude white women in male-dominated jobs. This study provides a glimpse of one organization, elementary schools, where white women exclude Latina women in a feminized occupation. Drawing on multiple methodologies, this paper analyzes Latina teachers’ workplace experiences in Santa Ana, a Southern California Mexican immigrant city. The article compares the experiences of Latina teachers working at one school where over 70% of teachers are of Latina origin and three schools where 20% of teachers are Latinas. The author coins the term ‘racialized tokens’ to illustrate how the inextricable link of race, gender and class combine to shape the workplace experiences of Latina teachers who work as numerical minorities among a majority of white colleagues. Since Latina teachers are ‘racialized tokens’ in these spaces, the author argues that in the presumably post-racial era of diversity and multiculturalism in the U.S., Latina teachers do not long for racial integration with white women in their workplaces, rather, they choose to self-segregate because of the comfort and safety self-segregation provides.     

From Organizational Sexuality to Queer Organizations: Research on Homosexuality and the Workplace

Organization scholars historically ignored the crucial importance of sexuality in the workplace. But in the last 20 years, scholars influenced by the ‘sexuality in organizations’ perspective have documented the ways that the management and deployment of workers’ sexuality are key elements in organizational life. While most of these studies have documented persistent privileging of heterosexuality in work organizations, a recent trend is to investigate a new organizational form: the gay‐friendly workplace. We review legal and policy changes in US workplaces that have made them more accepting of gay and lesbian employees. Then we examine ethnographic studies of gay‐friendly organizations. Although they are certainly an advance over previous homophobic workplaces, the literature suggests that they may reproduce inequalities of race, class, and gender. Few studies have investigated ‘queer organizations’, which we identify as a rich area for future scholarship.     

Men doing women's dirty work: Desegregation,immigrants and employer preferences in the cleaning industry in Norway

The literature on gender desegregation has documented the gendered nature of employment hierarchies and opportunities, but less work has examined how the influx of immigrants in the labour market might affect employment hierarchies and gender segregation. This study examines employers' perceptions of ‘the suitable cleaner' — a traditionally female‐dominated occupation that has received a substantial number of male immigrant workers. Departing from the notion that men in female‐dominated occupations are advantaged by a ‘glass escalator' effect, we analyse how employer preferences position different categories of workers as hireable. Building on interviews with employers in the Norwegian cleaning industry, the study demonstrates how three different but intertwined logics define employer preferences: effectivity demands, professionalization and devaluation. While the first logic favours men as workers and the second devalues ‘female' competence, opening the occupation for men, the third logic favours immigrants, combined positioning immigrant men on top of the hierarchy of suitability.     

Gender Stratification and Publication in American Science: Turning the Tools of Science Inward

Gender stratification continues to pervade the American workplace, and academic science as a vocation is hardly exempt. In this article, I review prior work on why and how gender inequality affects scientific careers. I focus specifically on scientific publication, an important determinant of scientific success. The research indicates that processes of gender stratification operate through formal and informal relationships contributing to the inequality we continue to find in academic science. Following Bourdieu (2004) , I argue that sociology's unique reflexivity – that is, our ability to turn the tools of science inward – offers an important vantage point and contribution to our understanding of stratification in science specifically, in workplaces more generally, and in society at large.     

THE EFFECTS OF OCCUPATIONAL GENDER SEGREGATION ACROSS RACE

The general relationship between occupational gender segregation and earnings inequality is well documented, although few studies have examined the relationship separately by race/ethnicity. This article investigates occupational gender segregation effects across whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. In addition, we explore two ways in which segregation may affect earnings: (1) by lowering the earnings of workers in female-dominated occupations and (2) by lowering the earnings of all workers in highly segregated labor markets. Our central findings are that both segregation effects contribute to earnings inequality and that the effects are observed quite broadly across racial/ethnic groups, although they particularly impact the earnings of African American women.