Extract from an academic article that was also published in "Entropia, issue 12 " https://entropia.syspirosiatakton.org/
Gender at work1
Gregoris Ioannou
Gender often impacts on the division of
labor, fragments
the workforce and assigns
gendered characteristics in specific sectors and occupations. These processes
are nominally informal, yet as they are operationalized in the labor process,
they may become formalized or interact positively as well as negatively with
other formal divisions (Dyer, McDowell, and
Batnitzky 2010; Johnston and Lee 2012).
Women are underrepresented in middle and higher-ranking positions—as
well as trade unions and trade union committees—and are, correspondingly,
generally speaking, paid less and overrepresented in low-waged positions
(Ioakimoglou and Soumeli 2008).
Despite all the legislation,
technocratic policy suggestions and public rhetoric about (the need of) gender
equality, there are still exclusively masculine and exclusively feminine jobs
and primarily masculine and primarily feminine jobs coexisting with gender
neutral jobs in all the industries of the Cypriot economy.2 This is
a result of the maintenance and reproduction of patriarchal structures of
thought and action and gendered conceptions of the social reality, in which
occupational sex segregation prevails and women’s work is socially and
institutionally under valued (Perales 2013). Notions of the “proper” or
“suitable” occupations for men and women are taken more or less for granted and
are thus sustained and reproduced from generation to generation (Ness 2012).
Work sex segregation is immensely entrenched, as beyond the social conventions
about what jobs women should do or what occupations they can do, gender roles
may even become the product of worker agency (Huppatz and Goodwin 2013), or
attain the form of a subjective career choice reinforced by self-expression
ideals (Cech 2013).
Gender inequality, gender roles and
gendered ideological frames are subject to historical change and in fact
throughout the 20th century and especially in its second half gender
relations in Cyprus underwent significant transformation. There has been an obvious
improvement of the social position of women facilitated through their mass
entry into the labor market (Christodoulou 1992), the increasing international
influences and most specifically the path toward entry in the EU, which has
brought legislative and institutional changes and the changing mentalities and
lifestyles prevailing by the last quarter of the 20th century.
However, traditional values and social conservatism remain strong and so does
one of the basic axioms of the patriarchal mode of thinking—sex work
segregation.
The gendering of specific occupations in
most industries is a “taken for granted” phenomenon. My informants were
puzzled, probably thinking that there was something wrong with me, when I asked
them why there are no men cleaners or secretaries and why there are no women
builders or technicians. These questions seemed kind of strange or even
childish. Employers, managers and trade unionists responded by pointing out the
lack of women applicants for such “men’s jobs” and vice versa and when asked
why they thought this was so, they resorted to various social stereotypes about
the abilities and qualities of the genders.
Men do not clean well.3
Customers
do not like to have men cleaning their rooms.4
Women
cannot endure the physical burden required in construction.5
The explanations given for the
segregation of the genders at work were not restricted to biological
attributes, but also included social and sexual explanations.
Women have to take care of their family and do not have time
or ambition for
careers.6
If
women were employed in construction they would sexually distract the men
workers
who would be staring at their legs and breasts.7
The segregation of the genders at work
is only the first step in the gendering process. Once it is established that a
specific occupation or work position belongs to men or women, the next step is
to attribute male or female characteristics to the job itself.
Get a lady to clean here.8
When
there is a technical problem in a room I call Mr X [head of maintenance
department]
to send me one of his men upstairs to fix it.9
I
have no problem with my girls. They are conscientious and hard-working.10
Since it is women who do and have
always done the cleaning, it becomes customary to refer to the hotels’ or the
banks’ cleaners as “the women”.11 “It was the women that started the
1999 strike. They were the stronger card of the trade unions”.12 The
division into masculine and feminine jobs is also rationalized and internalized
by the women themselves. Many women, for example, referred to biological
factors to explain the division into “masculine” and “feminine” jobs. At the
same time they said that full equality between the genders has not been
achieved although significant progress has been made. Some considered masculine
jobs more challenging, but complained that men think of feminine jobs as
pointless and boring.13 Thus, occupational sex segregation segments
the labor market assigning women to lower wage and lower status jobs, but this
also can impact negatively on particular groups of men as well who tend to
avoid jobs that are classified as “feminine” reducing the range of their
employment opportunities (Moskos 2012).
Discrimination
on the basis of gender with respect to upward mobility is present and visible
to most workers and this applies to both unionized and nonunionized workplaces.
There is discrimination. They don’t
give money to women. They say, she has
a man so they do not promote her. .
. . I started work here at the same time
with some men colleagues. They have
become chef de partie, I have remained
a cook B.14
Beyond the classic explanation of male
bread-winning ideology and the lack of interest of women in careers, there is
also a reflexive stance trying to put the women themselves in the equation.
We, older women are more submissive. The younger women are
more
demanding. Of course there is
discrimination. Why are there not women sous
chefs?15
In the Cooperative Central Bank, one
middle-aged female employee explained the “war” she and her colleagues waged in
the past for their rights, provoking the intervention of the trade union.Things
have improved in the last decade, she admitted:
... but not to the extent we want. Patriarchy is still here
and the struggle must
continue.It is up to us the women,
to a certain extent.We must not tolerate the
establishment and must seek with our
qualifications and our argumentations to
rectify the injustice we suffer.16
Gender however, is not only a factor of discrimination and division
in the work place. It is simultaneously a factor allowing and facilitating the creation of work
collectivities based on common experiences and common work life circumstances.
Gender is
in other words not only fragmenting the labor force in the interests of
exploitation and oppression, but can also constitute a resource of uniting individual workers,
promoting notions of collective identity and commonality of interests based on
the real commonality of working conditions and the idea of a shared fate. Women
workers who are working together in say the housekeeping or the restaurants
department of a hotel sometimes find their gender identity to be a significant
element both in their communication and interaction at work and in their
construction of social relations of solidarity and coping strategies.17
1.
This text constitute part of the chapter 'Gender, Ethnicity, and Age at Work'
of the article ''Labour force Fragmantation in Contemporary Cyprus'', which was
published in Working USA, The Journal of Labour and Society in 2015.
2. The
state and the social partners recognized with considerable delay the
seriousness of the problem of the pay gap between men and women (Labor
Relations Department 2007), but little was done and with limited success, as it
remained as high as 24% in 2010 (Kambouridou 2010; Lambraki 2010; Soumeli 2010)
when the Labor Relations Department began a more active attempt to deal with
it. However, although it has more recently fallen to 16.4%, it remains one of
the highest ones among EU states (Sigmalive 3/11/2014).
3.
Case study 2, housekeeper.
4.
Case study 3, gousekeeper.
5.
Case study 6, foreman. The same explanation was used by trade unionists.
6.
This argument was used by both men and women workers in case studies 3, 4, and
5.
7.
Case study 7, foreman. The sexual distraction argument was used by some men workers
as well.
8.
Case study 1, food and beverage manager.
9.
Case study 3, housekeeper.
10.
Case study 2, housekeeper.
11.
Case studies 1, 2, 3, and 4—interviews with housekeepers.
12.
Case study 1, head barman.
13.
Case study 6, secretary and sales person.
14. Case study 3, woman cook B.
15. Case study 3, woman cook A.
16. Case study 5, middle-aged woman,
departmental manager A.
17. Case study 3.
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