Women, Inequality and Media Work investigates how women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries. Examining women’s place in the production of media is vital to understanding the broader and related question of how women are (mis)represented in media content. This book goes behind the camera to explore the world of women working in media industries and unpacks the systemic gender inequality that they experience at work. It argues that women internalize their experience of gender inequality by adopting various beliefs: whether it is that gender does not matter in the workplace; that the workplace is now post-feminist; or by adopting a sense of self as liminal, neither fully included nor excluded from the industry. Drawing on detailed academic research and empirical investigation, Women, Inequality and Media Work is an important and timely book for students, researchers and those working in media industries.
Ruth Milkman's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality presents four decades of Milkman's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. Milkman's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: her interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on her pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. In the book's second half, Milkman turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers. A first-of-its-kind collection, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality is an indispensable text by one of the world's top scholars of gender, equality, and work.
This book presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality. Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, the authors demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labor outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions.--[book jacket].
This book offers a systematic analysis of the impact of work organization on the social stratification of individuals in urban China. It explains why economic and labor market segmentation is possible and necessary in state socialism at a certain stage of its development, as in market capitalism, and how important one's work unit or danwei is to the life of socialist workers in Chinese cities. Based on survey data, personal interviews, and official statistics, the author shows that structural allocation, status inheritance, educational achievement, political virtue, and interpersonal connections (guanxi) interplay in determining an individual's opportunities for entering and moving into a desirable place to work, for obtaining Communist party membership and an elite class status, and for receiving material compensation such as wages, bonuses, fringe benefits, housing, and home locations.
This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.
"By analyzing the process of work in both the electrical and the automobile industries, the supplies of male and female labor available to each, the varying degrees of labor-intensive work, the proportion of labor costs to total costs, and the extent of male resistance to female entry into the industry before, during, and after the war, Milkman offers a historically grounded and detailed examination of the evolution, function, and reproduction of job segregation by sex." -- Journal of American History "Analytic sophistication is coupled with a powerfully rendered narrative: the reader strides briskly along, enjoying one provocative insight after another while simultaneously absorbed by the drama of the events." -- Women's Review of Books
In the vein of #Girlboss and Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, discover how to thrive at work from the head of the Global Innovation Coalition for Change at UN Women with this “passionate, practical roadmap for addressing inequality and finally making our workplaces work for women” (Arianna Huffington). For years, we’ve been telling women that in order to succeed at work, they have to change themselves first—lean in, negotiate like a man, don’t act too nice or you’ll never get the corner office. But after sixteen years working with major Fortune 500 companies as a gender equality expert, Michelle King has realized one simple truth—the tired advice of fixing women doesn’t fix anything. The truth is that workplaces are gendered; they were designed by men for men. Because of this, most organizations unconsciously carry the idea of an “ideal worker,” typically a straight, white man who doesn’t have to juggle work and family commitments. Based on King’s research and exclusive interviews with major companies and thought leaders, The Fix reveals why denying the fact that women are held back just because they are women—what she calls gender denial—is the biggest obstacle holding women back at work and outlines the hidden sexism and invisible barriers women encounter at work every day. Women who speak up are seen as pushy. Women who ask for a raise are seen as difficult. Women who spend hours networking don’t get the same career benefits as men do. Because women don’t look like the ideal worker and can’t behave like the ideal worker, they are passed over for promotions, paid less, and pushed out of the workforce, not because they aren’t good enough, but because they aren’t men. In this fascinating and empowering book, King outlines the invisible barriers that hold women back at all stages of their careers, and provides readers with a clear set of takeaways to thrive despite the sexist workplace, as they fight for change from within. Gender equality is not about women, and it is not about men—it is about making workplaces work for everyone. Together, we can fix work, not women.
Comprises 14 papers on earnings inequality between men and women, earnings among women managers, career processes and trends, and occupational resegregation. Includes papers on women's increasing presence in academic sociology, computer work and public school teaching.
Gender equality has been one of the defining projects of European welfarestates. It has proven an elusive goal, not just because of political opposition but also due to a lack of clarity in how to best frame equality and take account of family-related considerations. This wide-ranging book assembles the most pertinent literature and evidence to provide a critical understanding of how contemporary state policies engage with gender inequalities.
The in-depth analyses presented in this book have a dual focus: (1) Social mechanisms through which the gender wage gap, gender inequality in the attainment of managerial positions, and gender segregation of occupations are generated in Japan; and (2) Assessments of the effects of firms’ gender-egalitarian personnel policies and work–life balance promotion policies on the gender wage gap and the firms’ productivity. In addition, this work reviews and discusses various economic and sociological theories of gender inequality and gender discrimination and considers their consistencies and inconsistencies with the results of the analysis of Japanese data. Furthermore, the book critically reviews and discusses the historical development of the Japanese employment system by juxtaposing rational and cultural explanations. This book is an English translation by the author of a book he first published in Japanese in 2017. The original Japanese-language edition received two major book awards in Japan. One was The Nikkei Economic Book Culture Award, which is given every year by the Nikkei Newspaper Company and the Japan Economic Research Center to a few best books on economy and society. The other was The Showa University’s Women’s Culture Research Award, which is bestowed annually on a single book of research that promotes gender equality. Kazuo Yamaguchi is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
