Blog Post #34

Joan Williams explains that she wrote her book Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It, because the course of her career was being directed by gender and women’s issues. She explains that women have made great strides in the workplace since the 1960s but it is still fewer changes than we had hoped for thirty years ago. The book Gender on Trial, by Holly English discusses many of the ways things have not changed. Williams also explains that instead of working toward androgyny to fix the gender gap we have just expanded what is socially expectable for both males and female, but we have ended up still leaving the stereotypical differences between the two genders intact. These are the reasons why she called her book Unbending Gender. She discusses that many times people do, what she calls market work, and family work, but some women can only do one. She also touches on the fact that all mothers are marginalized whether they are stay-at-home moms, part-time workers, or full-time workers. The stay-at-home moms are not taken very seriously as they are seen as “just housewives,” so their family work is devalued by society. The women who do work are considered to be on the “mommy track” that assumes all women will get pregnant and leave. This assumption leads them to giving women less pay, fewer benefits, and not as high quality assignments. The part-time working mothers are considered not to be serious workers as English discusses, and the mothers who work full-time are questioned on their parenting. Williams discussed that women make choices to work or to not work based on the choices available to them, not based on what should be available to them. Often, corporations make it very hard for women to work part-time like discussed in Gender on Trial, so that is really not an option to them. This leaves them with having to make a decision between how important their family life is and how important their work life is to them. Williams main concern is that the ideal worker is based on a man (a person who cannot bear children) who can work for 40 years and have a family that is taken care of by his spouse, and women simply cannot live up to this model of an ideal worker. She wants us to change government benefits so that the entire workforce is covered (including part-time workers) and so that Social Security is offered for those doing important family care work.