Abstract
This challenging book re-frames the issue of gender inequalities in organizations by focusing on the core problem that work performed by women often lacks social value and status. Two strands are interwoven and revisited throughout: the socio-economic processes that have influenced the way we value different skills and occupations, and the taken-for-grantedness of the full-time working week.
An introductory chapter identifies various forms of gender inequality, and cautions against simple explanations of each one. This is followed by a review of some theoretical approaches to the study of gender inequalities, all of which, in Dick’s analysis, give insufficient attention to the processes by which social value is produced. Rather, consistent with Foucauldian social constructionism, she argues that inequalities arise through social processes and conditions that can be experienced by anyone, regardless of their gender or social category – and are always, in the end, the experience of relative social and economic disadvantage. Women are disadvantaged because they tend to do differently valued occupations, using differently valued skills, and do more domestic and caring work than men, which often means working part-time in a world where the dominant, taken-for-granted structure of work is the full-time job.
Dick refutes the idea that the essential ‘nature’ of jobs or occupations determines their value. Instead, she notes (p. 155) that what counts as ‘real’ work in a capitalist economy contains two elements: ‘the economic or moral value of the outputs of that work, coupled with the value of the inputs (particularly skills and qualifications) seen to be necessary for its execution’. The way we value outputs is embedded in the ‘productive citizen discourse’, which values work that generates financial profit, corporate growth and returns for shareholders. Visibility has become central to how we value work: in the absence of the easily measurable outputs of the industrial age, the performance of the modern worker doing immaterial (knowledge or service) work is measured by proxies such as working full-time or extended hours and capturing the attention of those who have power in the organization. This ‘moral ordering’ is transgressed by part-time workers who resist these norms by valuing other life activities: in the empirical chapters, which revisit her previously published work, Dick argues that part-time female police officers could be seen to be resisting (albeit subconsciously) the moral order of the full-time job.
Turning to the second element of ‘real’ work, the (socially constructed) value we place on the inputs into work, Dick argues that skills typically attributed to women (caring, communicating, building relationships, emotional labour) are seen as ‘natural’ and so not worthy of high status, unlike ‘acquired’ skills that require learning, credentials, or development, such as high-status maths and science.
As someone who has spent more than 20 years working not only in academic research but also with organizations grappling with the practicalities of part-time working, I find Professor Dick’s analysis makes for a convincing explanation of the reasons for gender inequalities and the slow progress in remedying them. The book might have benefited from consideration of the socio-economic constraints on part-time working experienced by men (e.g. Ewald and Hogg, 2020) and the implications for gender inequality of the shorter working week (Chung, 2022), with its potential for a shift in the power balance between employers and workers and a broader definition of a life well lived.
But is this analysis also encouraging about the possibility of change? The purpose of the book is not to offer prescriptions, but Dick’s analysis contains the seeds of alternative constructions of both the ‘normal’ working week and the valuation of female-gendered skills and occupations.
However, these constructions are incompatible with the ‘bottom-line ideology’ inherent to global capitalism. Employers and managers confronted daily with the reality of that bottom line might pursue the classic ‘business case’ for part-time working promulgated by organizational consultants and flexible working campaigners, based on recruitment and retention of staff – but that business case is context-specific and by no means universal. Dick’s analysis rightly goes much deeper, but its logical conclusion is that reducing gender inequalities in organizations will require a much more radical approach both to an alternative economics and to what it means to live a valuable life, fields that have their own burgeoning literatures, not addressed here (e.g. Hickel, 2021; Skidelsky and Skidelsky, 2012). We may be waiting quite a while.