How gender equality and counting women's work will contribute to the level of economic development?

In two paragraphs.

Some pictures of the chapter on Gendered Economic Geography. Two video links below.

CHAPTER 1:5 GENDERED ECONOMIES Does gender shape economic lives? Goals of this chapter c To show how certain kinds of work are excluded in conventional economic analyses 0 To demonstrate the gendered nature of the workforce and of workplaces c To reveal the geographical connections between workplaces and homes 0 To examine how gender shapes livelihoods and entrepreneurship in diverse contexts c To discuss the possibility of a feminist economic geography 13.1 Introduction In 2011, just one major high-tech company in the United States was headed by a woman. The company, Xerox, is well known as the maker of copying and printing machines, but has also expanded into other forms of information processing such as claims reimbursement, electronic toll transactions, and call centers. Leading Xerox and its 136,000 employees in 160 countries was Ursula Burns, the company's CEO and chairwoman. Burns' story is one of remarkable upward mobility. Born in 1958, she was raised by her single mother in a low-income New York City housing project. Having studied engineering at Columbia University, she joined Xerox in 1980 as a summer intern. Over the next 30 years she worked her way through various departments in the company, becoming CEO in 2009 and chairwoman of the board in 2010. In 2011, Burns was one of just 14 women to head a Fortune 500 company (the largest companies listed on the U.S. stock market). Burns' ascent m the top of the corporate ladder is inspiring in many ways, especially given the challenges faced by many others with a Similar background. But her success does misc a number of important questions. First, we might pause to ask what we actually mean, not just by \"success\" but also by \"work\" in general. When we look at an individual such as Ursula Burns, it is easy to say that her success is reflected in the job title that she holds. But paid employment is not the only kind of work that we do. In media interviews, Burns herself has frequently emphasized the central role played by her mother in laying the foundation for her success. No one would doubt that raising a daughter as a single parent in a low-income neighborhood was hard work, but it is a type of work that is not always acknowledged or valued. Furthermore, it is a type of work that often falls disproportionately to women. The rst set of questions to ask, then, is what do we mean by work and what falls outside of conventional denitions? A particularly important geographical question concerns where such unpaid work is performed, and how it connects across space with forms of paid work. In particu- lar, we will ask how unpaid work in the home, often done by women far more than men, is linked to opportunities to engage in paid employment outside the home. A second question we might ask is why women are so underrepresented in the high-tech sector. Ursula Burns' position as the only head of a major high- tech company in the United States reected a much wider pattern across the workforce. In 2010, only 7.2% of electrical and electronics engineers and 10.3% of computer hardware engineers in the United States were women. At the same time, women accounted for 91.1% of registered nurses and 96.1% of secretaries and administrative assistants. Similar patterns, with some variation, are repeated all over the world. Clearly, then, the labor market is sorted according to gender in important ways. But what gives different jobs a certain gender \"coding\"? How are the places in which work is done given masculine or feminine meanings? Why might the fast-paced and competitive world of high-tech rms be less inviting for women? And how does the gendering of work vary across different places around the world? A third set of questions prompted by Ursula Burns' experience is why the vast majority of t0p corporate jobs in different sectors seem to be dominated by men. Despite accounting for almost half of the workforce in each context, women comprise just 14.4% of senior corporate ofcers and executives in the United States, 17.7% in Canada, and 8.0% in Australia (www.catalyst.org, accessed October 15, 2011). If we look inside academic institutions a similar pattern exists. In Canadian universities in 2009, for example, just 19% of university presidents and 22% of full professors were women, but women represented 47% of assistant professors and 54% of temporary lecturers. Does a glass ceiling still exist that hinders women's upward mobility in the workforce? Why is this so? Finally, the most singular feature of Ursula Burns' story is that .she is the rst and only African-American to lead a US. business giant. We Will address the HU" ILUI LL. iuuuu--. . .. economic aspects of ethno-racial identity in the next chapter, but there is an important point to note here. A person's identity is multifaceted. Everyone comes with a gender, sexuality, ethnic origin, race, immigration status, language group, regional origin, and so on. All of these facets combine together to shape their experiences in the labor force. It is impossible to say whether an African-American woman from a working class family in New York is any one of these identities rst and foremost. All of them shape the economic life of an individual such as Ursula Burns, so the intersection of gender with other dimensions of identity will be an important point to remember. A related point is that the effects of gender on economic experiences will be uneven across space, as gender itself has a varied and uneven geography. Femininity and masculinity, as the norms of behavior conventionally associated with women and men, are culturally constructed in different ways in different places. This chapter addresses these questions in ve main sections. The rst section asks how gender is usually understood in relation to economic life and how this perspective might be rethought using a geographical approach (Section 13.2). We then start our geographical analysis by examining what kinds of unpaid work are done in domestic spaces, who does such work, and how this varies across the world (Section 13.3). The following Section (13.4) then explores how gender is played out in the waged labor market, determining the type of work available to women, and how it is performed in the workplace. A recurring pattern is the devaluation of the work done by women, and the association of women's work with domestic work and \"soft skills.\" Building on these ideas, we then consider how women in the workforce tend to nd their professional lives in tension with their domestic responsibilities, and we explain the fundamentally geographical nature of this homework linkage (Section 13.5). The next section moves away from the issue of gender and paid work to consider how gender shapes entrepreneurship and livelihoods in diverse contexts (Section 13.6). Most of this chapter involves expanding our idea of the spaces in which economic activity is conducted (e.g., bringing the \"home\" and the \"body\" scales into View; see Figure 1.4), and exploring how gender differences are fundamental to understanding how the productive economy is linked to the supposedly noneconomic sphere. In concluding, however, we consider how a feminist economic geography might go further than simply taking notice of a gender-differentiated economic world, and might actually see that world differently (Section 13.7). 13.2 Seeing Gender in the Economy The role of gender in economic life is often brushed aside as reecting fundamental differences between men and women. When asked to explain why men and women tend to hold different kinds of jobs, for example, the usual explanation will start with physical differences between the sexes. The argument would be that men are more. l:.kely :0 vi ork in construction, mining, and warehousing, for example, .-- .'wnlUMlts 405 because of superior physical strength. To a limited extent there is some truth in this idea, but it hardly explains why men dominate among electricians and drivers, while nurses and elementary school teachers are overwhelmingly female. The conventional explanation might then move on to suggest that there are certain aptitudes associated with gender women are supposedly good at detailed and painstaking work, while men have a better grasp of how to use advanced technological apparatus. But here too the argument collapses when specic examples are considered. The intricate work of watch repair and tailoring a suit, for example, are conventionally male domains, and yet they utilize what might be seen as female traits in other sectors or contexts. And although elementary school teachers or nurses are overwhelmingly female, there are enough men doing those jobs to demonstrate that their sex is perfectly capable of performing such work. Explanations of why women are less represented in the upper echelons of the workforce, and are often paid less than men, can also be unpacked. A common rationale would be that women tend to curtail their ambitions, or pull out of the workforce entirely, when they decide to have children. This in turn affects their ability to work their way up the career ladder. But this argument is also rather unsatisfactory. If workplaces and employment relations were more commonly structured in such a way that family commitments could be combined with career development, then there would be no need to make such a choice. The idea that women make the choice to curtail their own careers is therefore ignoring the circumstances in which those choices are made. These circumstances can indeed be changed, for example through generous parental leave allowances, workplace daycares, and so on. We need, then, to look elsewhere to nd explanations of why gender might play such a profound role in economic life. In this chapter, we emphasize the geographical processes that underpin a more nuanced explanation. Some key points will form a basis for the arguments presented: a The space of the home, where the work of cooking, cleaning, and child- care takes place, is almost universally construed as a feminine domain. But this is clearly a cultural understanding rather than something \"natural\" or fundamental. o The greater responsibility shouldered by women within domestic spaces means that the relationship between home and work for women is often necessarily closer than for men, and this relationship in turn shapes various aspects of engagement with the waged labor market. 0 The association of women with certain kinds of domestically-related work means that certain jobs and places of work become associated with femininity, while others become masculine domains. o Finally, since gender, femininity, and masculinity are concepts that we dene culturally, there are inevitably differences in the way gender affects economic life in different cultures around the world; and even within the same culture, their meanings may vary with age, generation, race, or region. We started this chapter with an example of a woman Wm, - .....,, IHome, well-paid, and powerful job. But we also noted that hard work happens in other settings too, for example in raising a child, maintaining a household, 0.- volunteering at a charity. And yet, we seldom count such work as economically important. In this section we ask why unpaid work tends to get negIeCted and what the consequences might be. As we saw in Chapter 2, economic activity is generally measured using a system of national and international accounts. One of the most important measures is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which represents the total monetary value of goods and services produced in a country. It is much more than a technical accounting tool; it also gives the general public a sense of economic trends and their collective material well-being. We also learned in Chapter 2 that GDP leaves a lot out of the picture. In short, those aspects of our lives that came: be counted, do not count. Work that involves cleaning our homes, or renovating them, maintaining a car, raising children, caring for the elderly, preparing meals, and so on simply does not count unless money changes hands. The rst question we might ask is how much work is carried out on everyday tasks that do not get counted as economic output? Recent studies, based on large- scale surveys, suggest that a signicant portion of our lives is spent on unpaid labor. On average, across the world's largest and wealthiest countries, around 43% of working minutes everyday are spent on unpaid tasks (OECD, 2011). Interesringly, there are signicant differences around the world. For example, people in Japan work some of the longest hours in total, but carry out unpaid work for one of the shortest proportions of those hours, at around 30% of their total working time. In Germany, on the other hand, total working hours are shorter, and at almost 48%, a much higher proportion of them is spent on unpaid tasks. In both Turkey and Australia, just over 50% of work time is spent on unpaid activities. This tells us something about varied cultural patterns of life and work in different settings. The general pattern, however, is that a great deal of work is being done that does not get counted as productive economic activity. What kinds of tasks and functions are being carried out by people doing unpaid work? Figure 13.1 shows the breakdown of unpaid labor tasks in various countries. Here again we see some intriguing differences, which again reect how unpaid work might vary with different cultural contexts. A great deal of time is spent caring for household members in Ireland, for example, while a higher than average amount of volunteer work is done in New Zealand and Turkey. If, in some cases, around half of all work time is being spent on unpaid activities, what is all of this work potentially worth? One way of calculating such a gure is through a \"replacement cost\" approach, using a nation's average hourly wage for unregistered informal activities such as a house cleaner or babysitter. Cm for non-household members 250 " Cm fothouuhold mambm Bhopplng I I150 ! i I m 60:I I Ii iiI I I I 600:5\" q (15" db 59$ 96' M'Rouns housework 6' ('9 GR: \\Q" \\('Q'cp \"Q, I i ....llli I \\(:''