Presentation
Melissa Gregg, “Normalisation of flexible female labour in the information economy”
I found the article to be a little bit odd. It seemed to me like it should have been 2 separate articles. On the one hand, the author was talking about so-called flexibility in the workforce from a feminist perspective and on the other hand she was talking about how the increase in flexibility for Western workers is having a negative effect on those working in manual labour in developing countries. These seem to be to be 2 issues deserving of their own attention and time.
All of the ads showing women working in creative and information jobs got me thinking about how middle-class people of our generation go about choosing a job in a very different way to people in the past and people in lower classes. These days the Middle-class choose a job based on what they want to do; something that they think they will enjoy. I think a lot of us think we are entitled to do so. But this never used to be the case – people chose a job because there was work available in that field and/or it paid enough to support them and their family. And many people today still choose their job based on these things. They don’t look at their job as something they should enjoy, but rather something to pay the bills.
Are we starting to try and incorporate our work into our leisure time? Rather than having time where we work and time where we enjoy ourselves (leisure time) we’re trying to make our work a time where we enjoy ourselves too.
All of the ads focusing on women working with “flexibility” still promote the long-held belief that women are naturally the primary care-giver. In fact, this is the main reason why women want flexibility in their work.
Working from home is an interesting concept when applied to men and women. My understanding of women working from home is that they are still expected to do the housework, and childcare if there are children involved. Would this be the same for men?
Questions
1. Are technologies such as blackberries good in terms of promoting greater flexibility or do they simply cause work to encroach on leisure time because it means you are always contactable even when you’re not at work?
2. Do advertisements showing successful business-women juggling career and a family put pressure on women to have it all?
3. Do these advertisements reinforce the attitude of the “Welfare to Work” campaign that to be an adequate citizen women can no longer settle for motherhood alone but must also contribute their labour to the market economy? Does this attitude devalue motherhood?
My answer to the second question is definitely YES! Women today are indeed pressured to have it all. Years before, women are expected to be the nurturers in the family. They take care of the household, the children, and the husband. They are not expected to work or earn money because it is not their role. The man of the house is suppose to be the one bringing home the bacon. Today however most families have both parents working. But society's expectations of the woman as the nurturer hasn't change. Now women are not only expected to take care of the family but also to earn enough to keep the family finances afloat. I think this is really unfair.
ReplyDeleteThere was a TV ad I've seen recently that I found really irritating. It's an ad for an instant chicken meal (I forgot the brand). So the mother just came in from work and she bought this instant chicken meal for dinner. So she's at the kitchen preparing the meal and her husband and the kids just wait for dinner to be served. All the while she's like preparing the meal with a big smile on her face. I found the ad irritating because it implies (to me at least)that to be considered a successful woman, you have to be an exceptional mother, an exceptional wife, an exceptional housekeeper, an exceptional careerwoman, and the list goes on and on.
I think I know the advertisement you are referring to Guia, it's for a chicken product called 'Stuffits' but I can't find it anywhere online. Irritating indeed.
ReplyDeleteBuilding on what you are saying, I think there is room in this progression for some Haraway. One likely outcome of these types of ideals is that women will be time-pressed in their work places or will work part-time. This is definitely a trend that I think is happening already, this article from The Age sums it up pretty well (link below, can't hyperlink in comment).
One outcome of this is that women will be under utilised in their workplaces, The Age article noting, "A State Government report released this week reveals that part-time workers tend to be devalued, overlooked for promotion or forced to work erratic hours in casual jobs. Almost one-third of Victorians, mostly women, work part-time. Reversing their plight would require a shift in the culture of work".
So educated, middle-class women might ironically become undervalued and marginalised in their workplaces as a result of ideals which purport to modernise the woman's role. These women might be the richer, better off counterparts for the supressed factory workers we saw in the lecture, waiting to get married so they could quit the factory and go 'wash his socks every night'. Cue Women in the Integrated Circuit ...
http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Mothers-struggle-to-juggle-career-and-family/2005/05/13/1115843370164.html
2. Do advertisements showing successful business-women juggling career and a family put pressure on women to have it all?
ReplyDeleteThese advertisements definitely put pressure on women to be good at every aspect in their lives. Women have already been stereotyped as the caregiver of a couple's children, especially in Asian cultures. Most people in Chinese culture would blame the mother if a child did something wrong. In other words, the child's upbringing is almost fully the mother's responsibility.
Furthermore, in a modern society, a woman is expected to work and be good at it too. Some people even consider this gender equality, that they do not expect women to perform worse than men in the workplace. They usually forget to factor in childcare and mothering in the equation, however.
I once read a piece of news about women in Africa being persuaded to feed their children baby formula instead of breastmilk, spending their precious money on a product that is not necessarily better than what they already have. Even worse, many of them used contaminated water and poisoned their children instead. Advertisements were able to pressurise these women into buying the baby formula because they were influenced by the happy, successful mothers in the advertisements. Advertisements can definitely pressure a woman to "have it all".