WOMEN AND WORK

...The woman teaching in the academy can do much of her work evenings and weekends, her presence at school not being required except for meetings and scheduled classes...

...The woman who is a physician, for instance, can decide to practice for only part of the day, or to have office hours at night and some indeed do...

...On the contrary, such measures would lead to complete segregation—as Janet Giele has put it— between "the preserve of the discriminators and the ghetto of the powerless...

...Still, despite the efforts of the women's movement—and much general lip service—women do not get the same wages as men for the same work, nor are significant numbers of women to be found in positions of power and prestige compared to the number of men...

...If it be objected that interns and residents often 53 "cover" for one another, this is precisely my point...

...Or both...

...It's rather that women are not expected to make commitments to the kind of work that demands individual initiative and control...

...To illustrate point (1): let us take the salaries of deans in universities and colleges as indicative of the field's prestige value...

...These researchers found that the salaries of women averaged about $3,500 a year less than those of men...

...As long as women get paid less than men for the same work and are denied positions of power and prestige, they find themselves in the situation of an underprivileged class...

...This, in sociological parlance, is "a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...In nursing, where women constitute 95 percent of the graduates, the average dean's salary in 1971-72 was $22,417...

...In 1976, 60 percent of most working women—up from 52 percent in 1962—were segregated into just four occupations: clerks, saleswomen, waitresses, and hairdressers (according to "Women in the Economy: Preferential Mistreatment," Report to the 1977 Working Women's Conference...

...nobody expects that pupils will learn much while "their" teacher is off the job...

...2) the more women in a field, the more they are discriminated against...

...And to the extent that women are steered into "female occupations" and "female shops," they have hardly any opportunity to interact with men in the workplace— a condition that is similar to caste segregation...

...Retail sales clerks (a female-intensive occupation), with an average education of almost 13 years, earn $6,470, which is 67 percent of the $9,640 earned yearly by truck drivers, with 9 years of education...

...In 1969, 51 one-half of all female workers in America could be found in 21 occupations and one-half of all male workers in 65 occupations...

...Those who care for equality would do well to focus on this issue...

...Changes in the Division of Labor DIVISION OF LABOR by sex in the past could be made to seem functional as long as there were clear gender differences in specialization...

...The place of work depends less and less on specificity of skills...

...The fight against job and professional segregation must be conducted at the same time as the fight for equal pay...

...Women in engineering receive 75 percent, women in economics 74 percent, and women in architecture 81 percent of the salaries of men in their professions—even though education is fairly similar and, among young people, women tend to be better educated than men...

...This, parenthetically, is how the occupational system and the family system remain normatively integrated...

...Everyone knows, however, that substitute teaching is a poor substitute for teaching...

...Women would be in positions in which, in addition to technical skills, they would have to exercise much "tension management"—a task that some sociologists assign to the mother-wife...

...Employers like to keep women in easily replaceable positions, because it is anticipated that family commitments will cause disruptions...

...Still more insidious than these manifest inequities are the latent inequities resulting from "the dual labor market"—that is, the segregated occupational structure...

...Men react with status anxiety, and this both feeds, and feeds on, discrimination...

...The fields in which deans' salaries are $29,000 and over—engineering, veterinary medicine, dentistry, and medicine—have a percentage of women doctorates between 1.6 and 9.4 percent (according to the Scientific Manpower Commission, 1973, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23,1978...

...In general, he reported, in Poland women make about 70 percent of what men earn...

...What matters here is not so much the technical fact of task requirements as the social fact of normative requirements...

...The house staff is supposed to learn the importance of commitment, and this legitimizes the disproportionate demands made on the trainees' time and energy...

...In a society where labor has become so mechanized that women can operate overhead cranes, the household economy has become so simplified that men can open frozen-food packages...

...As Everett Hughes pointed out, colleagues are associated, as it were, in a brotherhood—like members of the same family (and it is no accident that the reference is to male siblings...

...the traditional priest who forgoes the comfort of a family to save souls...

...Yet, what seems to be important in elementary schools is to prevent not intellectual but physical disruption, the sort that would occur if pupils were left unattended or if the already overloaded classrooms were required to "double up...

...And would women not indeed be attracted to occupations in which they can arrange their schedule...

...She cites the work of economist Isabel Sawhill, who calculated that even if all women were single they still would only receive about 57 percent of the earnings of men...

...Unions know that admitting a new, large group of workers to membership may cause wages to drop...

...Therefore, adding a sizable number of women to a field will depress its prestige value...

...This, in turn, will cause more resistance on the part of men to what they perceive as a threat to their domination of a field...

...An occupation requiring commitment demands the kind of absorption of the mind that the family claims for mothers and wives...

...This observation may seem to contradict my earlier statement that sex distribution in the work world is rationalized as a means to minimize the disruptions that result from women's competing family commitments...

...As Marya Mannes rightly says, "No woman with any heart can compose a paragraph when her child is in trouble or her husband ill: forever they take precedence over the companions of her mind...

...In industry, the dual labor market fosters in turn a difference in on-the-job training...

...Such lack of communication would be exacerbated in many working-class families where a mode of segregation between wives' and husbands' activities already exists...

...In contrast, 56 percent of the men, but only 15 percent of the women, earn more than 3,000 zlotys...

...The physicians' commitment must be to their work, first and at all times, day or night—or so the ethos has it...

...In all economic sectors in which women's presence is above average, their monthly earnings are below average...

...In elementary schools, there is an institutionalized mechanism for allowing absenteeism...

...With few rewards to lose, it is easy to quit...

...Here replacement is not part of a system of rules and regulations...

...Women would be channeled into "light," men into "heavy" work...

...That is, the more occupations are sex-segregated, the more stigma is likely to be attached to those sextyped as feminine...

...covering" is an informal agreement between colleagues...

...Giele further reports that male/ female pay differentials stem only partly from women's family obligations...

...Men and women would live in different occupational cultures and not communicate with each other...

...Janet Giele, in Women and the Future (Free Press, 1978), reports the research of Teresa Levitin and her colleagues, which compares the salaries of women and men who had the same attitudes toward achievement and the same tenure on the job, worked the same number of hours, and had the same degree of supervisory responsibilities...

...This type of inequality can be made to seem legitimate because of women's cultural mandate, and can by perpetuated even if equal pay were to become a reality...

...Thus women have a smaller range of choice and therefore of mobility...

...Highstatus positions are said to require the kind of commitment that leads to a sustained exercise of individual judgment...

...Take the Soviet Union...

...Although grade-school teaching or nursing could be defined as needing much personal involvement, the premise of the cultural mandate depresses the commitment value of these occupations...

...As the office has grown faster than the factory, proportionately more people are working with people than with things...

...Surely, if we examine the nature of teaching, we recognize that the grade-school teacher is as much in intellectual control of the class as a college teacher and should therefore be as irreplaceable...

...A corollary of the principle of replaceability is that a profession or occupation in which women predominate will be defined as requiring less commitment, whether or not performance could profit from such commitment...

...This demands nonspecialized social skills...

...Would it not follow from 52 what I have said so far that women would be less likely to cause disruption in types of work not so rigidly dependent on their regular daily presence...

...Women are not given the same amount of training as men...

...For the conflict is between two "activity systems" that make conflicting demands on their allegiance...

...The picture does not look much different in other industrial societies...

...But what is cause here, and what effect...

...A Cultural Mandate A WOMAN HAS the cultural mandate—or so it has been understood—to be committed to her family...

...It can only serve the function of keeping women in "their place," of preventing them from sharing positions of authority and decision-making...

...Female-intensive occupations earn lower salaries than male-intensive occupations, regardless of level of education...

...Women's occupational segregation also has gotten worse...

...Or women would be channeled into professions or subprofessions in which their work could be seen as an extension of their family roles, such as teaching young children, pediatrics, or nursing...

...If they did, they would be subverting the cultural mandate, that is, it would be said that they are disrupting the family system or disrupting the organization of work...

...One example: at the December 1978 Conference on the Changing Family, in Warsaw, the Polish sociologist Malanowski showed that in Poland 36 percent of the women, but only 9.2 percent of the men, earn as little as 2,000 zlotys a month...

...As I have suggested elsewhere with Gerald Rokoff (in Social Problems, Spring 1971), the conflict of priorities regarding families and work is structural not only because it stems from contradictory demands...

...This is simply restating the familiar fact that women in language departments in colleges and universities suffer more discrimination than women in departments of mathematics or physics (once they have overcome the hurdles of getting there...

...it is structural also because women anticipate that under certain conditions this conflict is likely to create some disruption in at least one realm of their activities...

...Although residents and interns working on the same hospital service usually know one another's patients, and although there is hardly anything in the nature of their work on the wards that would prevent one another's replacement, there is no formal arrangement for substitution...

...This may be due to the employers' experience that length of service on the job is twice as great for males as for females (4.8 years on the average compared to 2.4 years...

...It's not that our society doesn't expect women to work of course, it does...

...This is seen as a source of disruption on the job because it is anticipated that her occasional absence will disturb her associates, if not also lower the rate of productivity...

...Since there is a general consensus that women should be committed to the family first and a job only second, employers protect their organization from disruption by assigning women to routine positions and investing little in their training...

...Notoriously, students are hostile to substitutes, and their hostility is patterned— that is, it is expected to be tolerated by adults and acted out by peers...

...This in turn leads either to further resistance to admitting women for fear of further devaluation, or to complete abandonment of the field by men...

...Consequently, professions that are sex-typed as feminine are accorded less prestige...

...This is the kind of commitment women are expected to make to their family...

...Nurses' earnings are 59 percent ($8,090) of those of wholesale representatives ($13,690) and 48 percent of the earnings of managers and administrators in the nonfinancial fields ($16,770...

...2) the social definition of individual control over patients in a hospital by the predominantly male staff of physicians...

...Now to point (2): the more women in a field, the more they are discriminated against...

...But changes in aspects of the productive process as well as changes in the household economy have made it easier to overcome the social definitions of such sex differences...

...Should it not stand to reason that occupations allowing for flexible schedules will absorb the shocks of disruption more easily than those that depend on rigid time-keeping...

...Not only are jobs replaceable on the lowerskill levels...

...When we move from the "feminine" fields to fine arts, where the percentage of women doctorates is just over 50 percent, the dean's average salary goes up to $26,429...

...On the average, women employed full-time are paid less than 59 cents for every dollar earned by men in comparable jobs—a decline from 20 years ago when that ratio stood at 64 cents...

...In such positions people are supposed to be in charge of defining their work so that hardly anyone else can do it for them (a classical vision of unalienated labor...

...By predicting that women will have a high turnover, employers help create conditions in which changing jobs is likely behavior...

...Now that daily tasks at home can be accomplished with the help of goods produced outside the home, specialization of function within the family tends to be obsolete as well...

...If left alone, the trend is toward more and more segregation—toward more and more inequality approaching that of a caste system...

...As Rokoff and I argue, the commitment expected of the professional implies devotion to a calling that brings to mind a nostalgic picture of the traditional country physician who forgoes sleep to ride through the night in order to save lives...

...Yet, women are more likely to be found in occupations that demand rigorous workdays and allow little flexibility for schedule manipulation...

...Both the replaceability on jobs where women are readily admitted and the kinds of commitment to work in jobs where women feel unwelcome are socially defined rather than inherent in the nature of the work...

...This picture is much the same in all industrial societies, whether capitalist or not...

...This salary goes up to $24,333 for the dean of home economics, where the number of female graduates is 79 percent...

...If the type of employment held by women is related to their family commitments, it seems curious that women are fairly well represented among manual laborers and in such professions as nursing and elementary-school teaching occupations where the workday is long and hours are rigidly controlled while they are not well represented in the prestige professions where they could more readily arrange their time...

...By contrast, consider the highest-status professions, which allegedly value personal service to the client...

...The trend feeds upon itself by devaluing the work women do...

...A division of labor based on social skills tends to blur the division of labor based on gender...

...the scientist who forgoes monetary gains for love of his work...

...Consequently, division of labor on the job by sex no longer serves any instrumental function...

...The prediction of a high rate of absenteeism among teachers—who are predominantly women—has led to the now institutionalized practice of substitute teaching...

...In the country at large, if divided into 8 geographic regions, women's faculty salaries are on the average above 90 percent of those of men in 3 out of the 4 regions where there are relatively fewer women (i.e., where they constitute less than 18 percent of the faculty...

...Mechanics, with 10.5 years of education, make $9,070, and delivery men, with less than 12 years of education, make $9,060, in contrast to women bookkeepers with almost 14 years of education, who average earnings from $6,070 to $6,540...

...in contrast, women's monthly earnings are 54 above average in four of the six sectors in which women's participation is below average (see Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, Berkely: University of California Press, 1978...

...But the point is that women predominate where workers are replaceable on the job...

...As Giele put it, "there remains a 43 percent differential between men and women who are similar with respect to age, education, race, region, hours and weeks worked, and time spent in the labor force...

...Moving from there to social welfare, where the percentage of women doctorates is about 30 percent, the dean's salary goes up to $27,875...

...This can be shown by two examples: (I) the social definition of replaceability in elementaryschool teaching, which is mainly done by women...

...In contrast, women's salaries are on the average below 90 percent of those of men in 3 out of those 4 regions where the proportion of women is higher (18 percent or more...

...Thus allegiances are sex-typed: a man owes to his profession what a woman owes to her family...

...It follows, of course, and is important to employers, that employees on those lower levels are easy to replace, too...

...A fear of loss of prestige is, of course, not the only reason for occupational discrimination against women...

...And do the employers take into consideration that people trained at a lower level don't have as much investment in the job...

...This, it seems to me, is not a remedy...

...Substitute teaching does not serve to replace the performance of the classroom teacher or to assure intellectual continuity as much as it serves to avoid mere physical disruption...

...prepared by Women Employed, 37 South Wabash, Chicago...

...We all know that a good department chairperson (like any administrator) is one who makes compromises, gives in to the needs of others, and lowers expectations for the sake of harmony and cooperation, in other words, is a "tension manager...

...The Vicious Circle THERE ARE TWO related consequences: (1) the more women there are in a field the less prestige it has...

...Professionals know that if more women enter their field, rewards will tend to decline, be they in cash or in kind...

...Under these conditions, equal pay for equal work would mean that all truck drivers would get equal pay and all nurses equal pay...