Women in the workforce

I was thinking of a topic to talk about for my second blog and thought about the Women Global leaders that we discussed in chapter 5 a few weeks ago. I find this topic very interesting because in the 1800s compared to today how wrong people were thinking for so long. Today I still find it hard to understand how the world must have been for women when a woman was prone to illness and would automatically be considered unfit for job positions especially in the political world of careers Gottfried (2013). What were some of the precedents that led to gender-stereotypical images of women? I believe up until the major changes made for women in the 1900s it was an entire buildup of precedents for women, who were barely given an education unless you were a upper-class woman, women did not have hardly any rights at all at the time, even a middle-class man that married a rich woman would become a rich man from all of her inheritance that was hers would become his.

According to Griselda Pollock (2014) “Women became a renewed topic for art and history, giving rise to gender analysis of both artistic production and art historical discourse. Gender is to be understood as a system of power, named initially patriarchal and also theorized as a phallocentric symbolic order”. I can only imagine what women must have felt like in the 1800s to be married and not have any say at what happens in your family. To not be able to say anything of your child’s punishment for doing something wrong, where your child may go to college, who your daughter may marry, these typical things a woman had no say over what happened the final decision was made by the husband and father.

Every country has standards that have a spot where a woman is set to be at power, some countries that spot is at the highest of positions and some countries it is believed that there is only a certain amount of power that a woman can reach and that is it.  In most Arab countries most women do not work according to Moran and Abramson (2014) “The proportion of women relative to men, both working in employed positions, varies globally, and ranges from 20 percent in Arab countries like Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, to 50 percent in countries like Cambodia, Ghana, and Latvia, to much higher in the United States, Canada, and many European countries” (pg.141).

In the United States today women represent more than 50 percent of the workforce, but it has not always been this way. Some of the triggers that caused a higher demand for women in the workforce in America were the Industrial Revolution where companies were building huge plants for making thousands of different items for sale. The demand was for cheap labor, and this caused the need for more workers which lead to more women in the workforce and also children that should have been in school, but families needed the money to survive. The second trigger that caused more women into the workforce was the World War II demand of millions of women workers. Because almost all the men were overseas fighting in the war, which caused all of these women to become workers making tanks, ships, planes, any possible item that could be used in the war women were in factories making these items. After the war, some women were married and had children and families and never entered the workforce, but a large part stayed in the workforce which also kept it on the rise to today’s large amount that provides our large amount of women in the workforce.

The future for women in the workforce I believe will only continue to rise and with the internet and technology today it may make it easier for a woman to work from home or only have to work in an office a few days a week, which would make it easier for a woman to raise children or any other household work. According to Moran and Abramson (2014) “Careful observation reveals a rapidly increasing number of countries and companies moving away, for the first time, from their historical men-only pattern of senior leadership. The question is no longer “is the pattern changing?” but rather “ which companies will take advantage of the trend, and which will fall behind?” which companies and countries will lead in recognizing and understanding the talents that women bring to leadership, and which will limit their potential by clinging to historic men-only patterns…” (pg.165).

 

Gottfried, H. (2013). Gender, Work, and Economy: Unpacking the Global Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2018). Managing Cultural Differences (9thth ed., pp. 140-169). N.p.: Routledge.

Pollock, Griselda. (2014). Women, Art, and Art History: Gender and Feminist Analyses. Retrieved February 23, 2019 (http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199920105/obo-9780199920105-0034.xml