Gender issues in Employment

INTRODUCTION

It is true that gender issues in employment are evident in different contexts and have frequent components. A related measure is the distribution by gender across occupational lines and the average relative salaries of jobs that tend to be occupied by workers of one gender. Thus, statistics show that men earn significantly more than women as it is true no matter what year the figures whether they are weighted such as age, labor status and if financial compensation for work is an indicator, women are worth significantly less than men in the UK.  Thus, women are not worth as much as men in the labor market because notions of traditional gender roles continue to result in the prescriptive assignment of responsibility for children and home to women even if it may be true that more women than men would prefer to care for home and family, even in the absence of cultural pressure, not all women desire such a role. It is equally true that not all men would eschew primary caretaking roles. Although it is currently possible for an individual to rise above cultural pressures and claim a role different from that encouraged for their gender, the mere fact that a hurdle can be cleared does not justify its existence. The strong influence of prescriptive gender roles is an unnecessary hurdle barring individual choice and a major factor in gender inequities in employment.

 

 

 

MAIN BODY

Gender issues in employment seems to be a controversial issue as of today’s workplace and that men are considered to exercise higher status over women in terms of handling business firms and organizations and that because of gender inequality it is true that more women do not achieve senior management positions in the hospitality industry because of the fact that the emphasis on the individual women employee disguises the fact that many women in business ownership are in partnership with others with men to differential patterns of kinship with the respondent; the allocation and perception of specialist roles within the business; and the fact that women are less likely to be associated with the nature of the business implying that management is not for women within the gender perspective. True, women managers are rare in a wide field of men bit startups have swelled their number so that now the woman who heads a company is no longer the exception as the capable woman, business is a sensible choice, devoid of conflict between her professional and working life. (Carter & Cannon, 1991; Brush, 1988; Birley, Moss, & Saunders, 1987; Cromie & Hayes, 1988).

 

 

 

 

The social conditions that reinforce gender inequalities may impinge on her business and personal life at several levels (Hamilton, Rosa, & Carter, 1992). These may well be manifest in the types of relationships she has with others in both the business and domestic domains. (Hamilton, 1990). Modernization of the gender regime has restructured the inequalities in gender relations and created new political constituencies that support social democratic policies within the impact of changes on policies at gender equity in the workplace in the UK and that the power of global economic markets reduces the political capacity of nation states (Crouch and Streeck, 1997; Ohmae, 1995) because of increasing competition between states to deliver environments of lower state expenditure in order to attract business (Cerny, 1996; Hay, 1997; Wickham-Jones, 1995) which leads to the degradation of employment (Standing, 1999) with the ways in which the state can impact on women’s employment, restricting primarily to issues of care and rejecting (Ostner and Lewis, 1995) the significance of the state in the constitution of gender relations in its role in labor market. Thus, underlying these gender issues of the theorization as women is not treated fairly at work and has been effectively reduced to a reflection of gender relations in the family and needs to invoke not only the family and care, but also at least the state and the labor market (Walby, 2003).

 

 

 

Gender inequality in the workplace is most obvious in the case of pay. In the UK, women who work full time earn 82 percent of men’s hourly pay, whereas those who work part time earn only 61 percent (New Earnings Survey, 2000). Women are less likely than men to receive fringe benefits such as occupational pensions, are less likely to be in jobs that have security and often are in a restricted range of occupations (Labor Market Trends, 2001; Walby, 1997) as the gaps were varied such as fewer educational and vocational qualifications, lesser labor market experience, interruptions to labor force career, occupational segregation, and discrimination (Dolton et al., 1996; Harkness, 1996; Jones and Makepeace, 1996; Joshi and Paci, 1998; Wright and Ermisch, 1991). In recent years, younger women have closed the gap in educational qualifications with young men, a gendered education and training gap remains among people from their middle years onward. Gender differences in education and training remain an important element in the gender wage gap (Harkness, 1996). Women have less labor market experience than men as related to women’s work although the role of does not always reduces labor market experience. The impact of being a caretaker on employment depends on the level of wages and on social policy, both of which affect the possibility of finding substitutes for women’s care work. Women who are more educated and in higher socioeconomic groups are much more likely than poorly qualified women in lower socioeconomic groups to have near continuous employment even if they have children.

 

Furthermore, women who re-enter the labor market after a period of childcare in the UK often do so part-time and at a lower occupational level than what they had before childbirth (Blackwell, 2001). When women re-enter the labor market after unemployment, they take a job that pays on average 16% less than their former job (Gregg, 1998). Occupational segregation, in which women are to be found in a different and narrower range of occupations than men, is a marked feature of UK labor markets (Hakim, 1992; Siltanen, 1990) and is a further source of unequal pay. Occupational segregation is at least partly a result of historical practices of discrimination that have become sedimented into institutional structures (Walby, 1986, 1997). Discrimination is a significant element in gender issues and inequity in the workplace. There is a continuing stream of legal cases through the Employment Tribunal system in the UK, complaints about illegal and discriminatory dismissal on pregnancy constitute the largest part of the complaints with which the Equal Opportunities Commission is asked to assist (Wild, 2001).

 

 

 

 

 

Work-life Balance Initiatives

There has to be such polices for gender issues in the workplace that implies to education and training eliminating the work gap between men and women as the disadvantaged position of women in lieu to education has ended. There has to be gender policy challenge concerning education and training today relates to women beyond the typical age of school and college. In particular, women are more likely to provide training for full-time employees than part-time employees (Rix et al., 1999) and the most valuable employer-provided training that leading to a formal vocational qualification as it is to be given to men rather than women (Blundell et al., 1996). There have been a series of initiatives (PIU, 2001), including Learn-Direct and Individual Learning Accounts (Owens, 2001) at developing the market in substantially financing such education. For example, mature women seeking to go to University face serious financial barriers (Callender et al., 2000). The UK developed a set of active labor market policies known as the “New Deal,” which includes access to training and advice to help the unemployed return to work. These programs have been tailored for the young, the over-50s, for lone parents, and disabled people and have generally been regarded as successful (HM Treasury, 2001; Riley and Young, 2000).

 

 

 

Several policies address the equalization of the length of men and women’s labor market experience and the reduction of interruptions that occur for women as a consequence of their care for children and others. One involves access to quality affordable convenient childcare, because many women break their employment to care for children. This is true for poorer women, because women in higher socioeconomic groups with high levels of education already take significantly fewer and shorter breaks from employment than  in lower socioeconomic groups. In 1990s, the UK underwent a very significant change in policy toward publicly funded childcare, moving from a minimal one to the goal of ensuring that parents have access to quality affordable, convenient childcare. The strategy involves the expansion of for-profit childcare, although additional resources are available to set up facilities in neighborhoods of great deprivations. The UK has abandoned the notion that childcare is a private matter. It did not adopt the social democratic pattern established in the Nordic countries of publicly provided childcare that is either subsidized for the citizens (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Sainsbury, 1996). Most of the assistance is highly targeted to child poverty and the working poor of the tax system in the UK. The financial support for childcare is aimed at supporting parents’ employment and is not available to support women looking after children at home, as has developed in some European countries (Hobson, 2000). The new childcare policies are part of an employment-led strategy of reduction of poverty and gender redistribution as a by product.

 There has been pressure across the Western world to introduce legislation to provide equal treatment for women at work, the implementation of which often depends on worker and other organizations (Rees, 1998; European Commission, 1999; European Parliament, 1994; Hantrais, 1995; Pillinger, 1992). There should be process for the implementation of such initiatives in forms of union action, in support of women’s functions at work in the UK than many other member states (European Commission, 1994) as there is representation of women and their interests in business activities (Pascual and Behning, 2000). Moreover, gender is a set of socially constructed relationships which are produced and reproduced through people’s actions of the women’s movement and to offer considerations for management positions that might be conceptualized with gender providing possible organizing frameworks. Thus, by using gender as a potential analytic framework does not imply only the study of women but offers a way to understand the behavior of females as well as males along with an examination of the behavior of individuals within particular contexts. These perspectives begin with the premise that ideas emerge from particular social setting and that social structural context shapes, interpretations of reality (Andersen, 1993). Feminism provides the world view with equality to understand than it is now and overlapping theoretical, philosophical, political and pragmatic assumptions (Henderson & Bialeschki, 1992).

 

 

The breadth and depth of feminism and its goals, along with the multiplicity of perspectives that can be taken about the construction of gender in society offer an opportunity despite the contradictions and the lack of agreement for examining the meaning and construction of gender pertaining to behavior (Deaux & Major, 1990). The sense of gender identity is acquired early in life and is one of the most central identities. Identity can differ greatly over the lifetime and among individuals. Being a man or a woman socially is not a natural or inevitable outgrowth of biological features but an “achievement of situational conduct” (Ferree, 1990, p. 869). In some situations, it may be normal for females to act in a certain way, but in other cases this behavior may not be normative. Just as a poem may have many meanings depending on who reads it, gender may also have many meanings depending upon its context. Further, the context of gender is not just a women’s problem but also an issue for males to consider. The world of women is part of a world of men and vice versa. In considering the context of gender, our interpretations need to show how some women’s experiences and men’s experiences lead individuals to make choices contingent on contexts and relationships, not just because they are biologically female or male.

 

 

 

 

The growing field of study concerning men and masculinity is also addressing gender issues (Lynch, 1991). The use of gender as an analytic framework will have to take into account the situation and context in which it is uncovered and described. For example, it may be useful to examine the power and privilege associated with leisure for some men and some women as well as the oppression and resistance experienced by some women and some men. Theories will be helpful but the nature of gender should not become universalized without considering particular contexts and changing situations for both females and males. The construction of differences is central to racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression (Rothenberg, 1990). The key is in determining how much differences matter. Differences can divide people, but the diversity created by differences can also enrich life. Differences are not going to go away, but the way may change as gender is used as a possible analytic framework and within sex differences, poses problems of understanding gender issues and the importance that may have been attached to them (Rhode, 1990). Arguing that no differences exist draws attention away from actual differences in power and resources between men and women. Ignoring gender differences does not challenge the existing structure and assumes that women have no special needs affirming the similarity between women and men may validate norms of the dominant social groups, norms which often have not addressed women’s experiences and perspectives (Rhode, 1990).

 

CONCLUSION

Therefore, the most important initiative relating to gender issues in the British workplace centered on the childcare strategy, which contains targeted assistance for poor working women, the regulation of equal opportunities and the minimum wage which has been important in the participation of women in employment. British government in 2002 is oriented toward full employment for all. Work/life balance is assumed to include better employment. The regulation of working time, support for childcare and the minimum wage are policies that are intended to ensure the issue. Thus, conceptualizations of the gender regime need to be broader than a focus on “male breadwinners’” and need to include gender relations in employment  including the civil society. The global context does not reduce the likelihood of socially just policies for working women of restructuring the balance between capital and labor in women workers with one that involves full employment for women and regulation of labor markets so as to provide equal opportunities. It is in this context that certain policies for women in employment are facilitated. Furthermore, the modernization of the gender regime is creating a new political constituency of working women who are vocalizing perceived interests in policies to assist combining home and work.

 

 

 

 

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