Getting Women Work that Isn't Women's Work: Challenging Gender Biases in the Workplace Under Title VII
21 Pages Posted: 15 Aug 2012 Last revised: 25 Sep 2012
Date Written: January 1, 1988
Abstract
Attempts to rid the work place of intentional discrimination have allowed women to make considerable progress toward equality, yet women's current confinement to the 'pink collar' sphere of the labor market does not result solely from intentional discrimination by employers. Instead, job descriptions and structures that have been adapted to male incumbents continue to bar women from those sectors of the labor market from which they were once historically excluded by intentional discrimination. Demands of physical strength beyond that which most women possess, scheduling that conforms to typically male life patterns, job descriptions calling for stereotypically masculine traits, and myriad other requirements modeled on male characteristics perpetuate women's exclusion from traditionally male jobs. These employment standards assume men to be the norm and relegate women who diverge from this norm to second class status in the labor market. If sexual equality is to be achieved, women's exclusion from traditionally male jobs must be recognized for what it is -- not the natural product of women's differences from men, but the product of the social (de)valuation of women that isolates these differences and thereby ensures that women remain economically subordinated. As a growing literature of feminist jurisprudence argues, achieving sexual equality requires recognition that standards that disadvantage women are neither necessary nor unbiased, but are, in fact, discriminatory in a society composed of both men and women.
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