Book review: Jacqueline Goodman (Ed.),Global Perspectives on Gender and Work Readings and Interpretations

This book is a voluminous collection of 39 essays/articles/papers published between 1975 and 2005 in various journals, books and newspapers. This book with its interdisciplinary outlook is organised under nine sections. Each section begins with a preface on its thematic context by the editor followed by reflections on the chapters (Jacqueline Goodman calls them readings) contained within. These sections broadly cover origin, historical and economic transformations with respect to women’s work; wage disparities among women and minorities and class differentials; intersectional job segregation; sexual harassment faced by women and men at workplace and the last section is devoted to initiatives that have transformed the lives of many women/minorities and their families.

Goodman has collected some classic papers that lay the conceptual and theoretical foundations of discourse on gender and work; other chapters draw attention towards the gendered nature of workplace in non-traditional work domains while a few others have been instrumental in policy formulations.

This book begins with a section on the origin of gender division of labour where the nature/nurture debate is addressed by questioning biological determinism and social construction of gender. This section has two seminal papers, namely, ‘The problem with sex/gender and nature/nurture’ by Anne Fausto-Sterling (2003) who has addresses the drawbacks of biological determinism of sex differences and argues that there are multiple influences in the development of gender differences. Judith Lorber (1994) proposes a development system theory that describes how life processes for both men and women constitute social construction of gender. She advocates that gender as a social institution comprises gender status/ideology/imagery and gendered division of labour/kinship/sexual scripts/personalities and social control while gender at the individual level relates to sex category/gender identity/belief/display and gendered sexual orientation/personality and processes. The last reading of the section by Heidi Hartman (1976) highlights the ‘importance of a sex-ordered division of labour’ which is instrumental in maintaining the capitalist ideal of superiority of men over women. She further argues that this interlocking of two oppressing systems (patriarchy and capitalism) has entrapped women in a vicious circle.

Part II of this book entitled, ‘Gender and Work in History’ traces the historical evolution of work from pre-industrial society where women were working partners in family enterprises as exigencies of agrarian life which meant that both men and women have to work together to undertake life-sustaining chores. Thus work performed by women is in the interest of a family ecosystem and thus valued. Industrialisation transforms the nature and location of work that destabilises a home-based family economy. Four essays in this section discuss women’s work scenarios in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in context of the family in Europe and the USA; gendered work and its implications for women of colour and families under slavery; gendered values towards work and the role of the state.

In her essay, ‘The Paradox of Motherhood: Night-work Restrictions in the United States,’ Alice Kessler-Harris (1995) presents the trajectory of labour legislation in the USA that till 1993 there was no national legislation protecting women’s jobs before and after childbirth. She further discusses how motherhood is valued by the state but the rights of women are not.

In Parts III, ‘Gender, Wages and Inequality) IV, ‘Gender, Management and the Professions’ and V, ‘Gender and Low-waged Work’ of this book, Goodman puts together articles that raise intersectional discourses on gender and wage differentials, gender-based segregation of jobs/professions and critiques work circumstances against the backdrop of the global economy. She argues that wage disparity is based on ‘statistical discrimination’ (individual employee is discriminated based on real or imaginary group traits) against women and ‘pin money’ (money needed by women for fashion frills) unlike men who earn the family wage. Additionally, employers have an unfavourable image of specific groups of people who are treated as inferior (taste for discrimination) by offering them low wages, no promotion or hostile work conditions or not hiring them for high-level jobs.

Goodman in her introduction to Part IV elaborates how though American women continue to hit the glass ceiling (invisible barriers restricting upward mobility of an employee to a certain level of organisational hierarchy) at the workplace, they also face ‘glass walls’ (invisible barriers that concentrate women in specific sectors). She further argues how these invisible barriers adversely affect women and minority groups and lead to occupational, sex and race segregation in management positions and adoption of professions. On the other hand, men experience a ‘glass escalator’ effect when they take up female-oriented occupations such as nursing, librarianship, grade school teaching and social work, as highlighted in Christine L. William’s article, ‘The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in “Female” Professions’.

Goodman relates glass ceilings/walls to the theoretical assumptions of theories of discrimination; human capital and organisational structure. Discrimination theorist’s recounts on use of statistical discrimination by the employers especially while hiring women as their reproductive roles overshadow their potential productivity. Whereas, organisational structure theorists believe that both men and women employees’ behaviour and reaction to workplace are not governed by gender as asserted by Rosabeth Moss Kantar in her paper, ‘The Impact of Hierarchical Structures on the Work Behaviour of Women and Men’, a study of two American law firms.

Human capital theory (that disadvantageous position is chosen by women based on their free choice) is countered by Sharon M. Collins in her paper, ‘Black Mobility in White Corporations: Up the Corporate Ladder but out on a Limb’, who argues that race tokenism within an organisation effects job mobility of professional African Americans in primarily white corporations as they are side-lined into dead-end jobs, stunting their skill development thus rendering them ineligible for top corporate positions.

In Parts VI, ‘Gender and the Global Division of Labour, VII, ‘Gendered Discrimination at Work’ and in VIII, ‘Family, Gender and Work’ of this book, Goodman compiles papers on the global division of labour, discrimination at work and the interface of family and gender with work. Chapters in Section VI elaborate on the critique of globalisation and how globalisation has promoted women-centric chains of production, leading to class and gender-stratified division of labour, thereby increasing women workers’ economic vulnerability.

The chapter, ‘New World Domestic Order’ by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001) highlights racialisation of paid domestic work in Los Angles and how globalisation has promoted a large number of women immigrants who are absorbed in this grey economy provoking new debates among feminist scholars.

Michele Ruth Gamburd’s (2000) paper, ‘Breadwinners no More: Masculinity in Flux’ is a study of married women in Sri Lanka who migrate to the Middle East to work, resulting in the restructuring of male-gender roles and power relations, thereby devaluing their competence as breadwinners. Kevin Bales (1999) in her paper ‘Thailand: Because she Looks like a Child’ writes how it is culturally accepted in Thailand like ‘rice in the field, fish in the river’, that daughters ought to be in brothels. She describes a pathetic case study of a 15-year-old girl, who looks like a ten, twelve year-old, and is the preferred sex service provider in a brothel.

Susan Eisenberg (1998) in her paper, ‘Marking Gender Boundaries: Porn, Piss, Power Tools’ discusses how gender boundaries are constructed in largely male occupations. For example, women apprentices working as carpenters, iron workers, painters, electricians and plumbers face harassment, stressful work environment or physical injuries and suffer from long/short-term economic costs.

Margaret Talbot in her article, ‘Man Behaving Badly,’ published in the New York Times magazine in 2002, examines incidents and reasons of same sex sexual harassment at the workplace in select cities of USA where men behave badly with other men co-workers. The article also highlights the legislatives inadequacy in the USA to protect the rights of men complainants.

Arlie Russel Hochschild (1997) in her study, ‘The Administrative Mother’ asserts that wage labour does not accommodate family needs. She demonstrates this by using a case study which shows how women in administrative positions make the workplace more amenable for other employees but feel inadequate in devoting enough time to their children, face gender stereotypes and have to depend on unrelated sources of childcare.

Similarly, Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers (2004) in their paper entitled, ‘More Alike than Different: Revisiting Long-term Prospects for Developing “European-style” Work/Family Policies in the United States’ highlight how the state values motherhood but American work policies overlook concerns and familial responsibilities of women employees. Here Goodman, in her preface to this section, provides a glimpse of pro-family policies adopted by EU countries, especially the Nordic countries and also by New Zealand which may be a roadmap for family policymakers in the USA.

Goodman starts the last section on policy alternatives by discussing individualist perspectives that propound transformation of inequality by changing individual behaviour through the mechanism of reward and punishment in public policy which is what happened in the case of micro-lending to poor women in Bangladesh as showcased in the article, ‘The Stool-makers of Jorba Village’ by Muhammad Yunus (2007). On the other hand, a structural perspective focusses on the eradication of inequality by bringing about change in ‘broader economic, social and political institutions’ as advocated by Martha C. Nussbaum (2004) in her paper, ‘Women’s Education: A Global Challenge’ by examining the situation in the rural precincts of a district in Bihar, India. Nussbaum proposes intervention by non-state actors, especially civil society, to combat financial and moral corruption; and work to end social evils such as the practice of child marriage and institution of dowry which are found to be the roadblocks to education of girls in India. In the same vein, Shannon Harper and Barbara Reskin’s (2005) article on ‘Affirmative Action at School and on the Job’ also focusses on an American programme of affirmative action leading to the integration of racial, gender and ethnic groups in higher education and employment. Although the anthology heavily draws on American literature, it has also incorporated European contexts. But studies from other parts of the world such as China, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are seen only sporadically.

On the whole, this book is an eclectic collection of readings on a wide array of themes and issues, providing insights into the gendered nature of the workplace in a variety of settings which one generally does not come across. Also, although some papers included in this book were published a long time ago (1975/1976) they still set the tone and tenor of the discourse on women’s work that continues to be relevant even today.

A voluminous work such as this is likely to have some glitches like Leslie Salzinger’s (1989) essay on ‘Trope chasing: Making a local labour market’ based on the Maquila’s programme established in 1965 which may have changed its course over such a long period of time. This chapter and another one by Dorothy Sue Cobble (2004) ‘When feminism had class’ that discusses how a woman in 1937 led a sit-down strike in Detroit and later in the 1960s mobilised and staged a resistance in different parts of the USA would have been more suitable for Section II that dwells on the historical context of women’s work. And most importantly an anthology on gender and work will remain incomplete if Joan Acker’s (1992) article on gendered institutions is not included.

However, in the end, Jacqueline Goodman needs to be complimented for putting together so many readings from different perspectives, contexts and settings, on gender and work in one comprehensive volume.