Flashcards
5. Equal Opportunity
Flashcards do conjunto (12)
- 1List: Two viewpoints for equal opportunityHuman capital theory
Human / social justice perspective - 2Explain: Human capital theory Human capital theory: There’s a worry among human capital theories about where opportunities for some workers are artificially blocked, i.e. where a suboptimal use of resources is employed
• From an economical perspective, it makes sense to fix this issue, i.e. if there is talent it should be utilised. The argument here is that “firms that don’t respond, will lose market share”
• Feminisation thesis: Women are not guilty of risk-taking and selfishly wanting to earn money, i.e. would the recession not have happened if women were at the top? - 3Explain: The human / social justice perspective Human / social justice perspective: Promoting equal opportunities is less about performance but more about doing the right thing. It’s a social duty, whether it aids the company or not.
• In other words, it’s about doing the right thing.
Social justice tends to deliver a more serious commitment, whereas the human capital theory tends to be shallow and opportunistic / fickle. This leads to tension between opportunistic notion and social responsibility. - 4List: Evidence on gender inequalityEarning differentials
Horizontal segregation
Vertigal segregation - 5Explain: Earning differentialsThere are problems with comparing female earning and male earning, since it is questionable how to account for experience, overtime, etc.
• Earnings differentials are big in Britain, currently at around 13% for full time workers and 23% for recent graduates - 6Explain: Horizontal segregationWomen dominate education, nursing, hairdressing etc. whereas men dominate science, construction, management, etc.
• However, the landscape has been shifting as there is a move away from manual labour (male-dominated work), which has (ironically) been positive for women until the 2008 recession which hit education, nursing and other similar sectors. - 7Explain: Vertical segregation and the glass ceiling• Nursing is a female-dominated area of work. However, men are almost exclusively found as directors / managers within the field.
• The glass cliff (different from the glass ceiling) refers to the idea that women who get to management positions actually find the experience traumatic and difficult to cope with.
• Anne-Marie Slotter was the first female to hold a senior-level appointment during the Clinton era, leading many to say that the glass ceiling had been shattered. However, she gave up the position due to emotional turmoil, i.e. effects which are described by the glass cliff. - 8List: How we can explain these inequalitiesWomen's "outlooks" at work
Structures and ideologies at work
Patriarchal notions and economic relations - 9Explain: Women's "outlooks" at work Inequalities are sometimes explained by women’s “outlooks” at work, as in “they just have other things to think about”.
• However, it is wrong to blame women for the inequalities they are suffering. The argument that women are choosing to take the easier roles rather than making the commitment to the long hours of surgeons is faulty.
• Firstly, all women are not the same in terms of their attitudes to work and their choices about work. There is no reason to assume that work is therefore any less important for women than it is for men. However, this is the easy explanation for inequality and although faulty, it may be true that decisions about employment are not necessarily without constraints for women. - 10Explain: Structures and ideologies at work Structures and ideologies at work: The situation of (especially married) women has changed. However, women are still expected to take most of (if not all) responsibility for children.
• Especially feminists narrow this down to the patriarchy (aka male domination) in the household, i.e. power relationships are exercised through patterns of socialisation. This is a social science dilemma, displaying a structure / agency conflict
• The lecturer does not believe that it is just the patriarchy though! It goes deeper than that. - 11Explain: Patriarchal notions and economic relations We have to look at how patriarchal notions intersect with economic relations, i.e. how cultural values connect with economic forces. In other words, the economy seems to perpetuate a lot of what is going on.
• For example, women are concentrated in some sectors of employment (e.g. hairdressing) not because they are women but because they are “cheap” and the cheapness of women reinforces this type of employment.
• This is even clearer in clerical work. During Victorian times, clerical work was almost exclusively male. Toward the middle / late 19th century there were not enough men for the expansion of work (due to wars). The source of labour instead became middle class women. Thus, arguments needed to be formed in order to create a category of work to redefine this type of labour as women’s work. Work is thereby feminised to support the capitalistic intentions of the employers.
• The same goes for “chauvinising” work, which we hear for medicine (a supposed “pink” profession) - 12Discuss: What is to be done? Equality is about more than just making laws, it is about positive / affirmative action (not to be confused with positive discrimination – quotas). Positive actions involve:
1) An equal opportunity officer
2) Positive action programs, e.g. accelerated development groups for women
3) Awareness training for men
• However, a lot of this does not work. Noon and Oak even go as far as to say that positive action programs are “empty shells”
• Sally Hacker discusses how AT&T was found to be one of the most discriminative programs in the US during the 1980s. Combatting this actually had the opposite effect, since they were training women to do now-obsolete jobs.
Is what we need now positive discrimination?
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- Innovation and Participation at Work FlashCards sobre 5. Equal Opportunity, criado por Nina Olsson em 24-04-2019.
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- Nina Olsson
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