Blanche+Kwan

=**Canadian Women's Inequality in The Workplace**=

  Women surely have not suffered from a lack of education in this century. Many researches are analyzing women’s work in this country – Canada and overseas. They are mainly concentrated on women’s participation in the paid work force, and more particularly on the jobs women are prevented from doing there. Work that falls outside the official meaning of the “labour force” has been ignored or treated as a segregated aspect of women’s role, not as work. Nowadays, there is men’s work and women’s work in Canada. Women are set apart into the domestic unit where they work on the household tasks. Within the industrial unit, women are concentrated into a limited number of occupations, into jobs that are according to sex. In Canada, most women still work primarily in the home and even those women work with paid outside the home are still responsible for most household chores. Those women who have married to men with high incomes usually have low participation rates in the work force. However, most women can still spend at least some time in the labour force each year. The 1978 survey of annual work patterns from Statistics Canada found that, for fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, the proportions in the labour force at some point during the year “were 85.3% and 76.1% for men and women respectively, while in the over 25 age category, the figures were 83.9% and 50.6%” (Armstrong, P.20). Also, although some women have always worked outside the home, the demands of the home have been much more responsive than to the industrial unit. “The segregation of women in specific industries and occupations characterized by low pay, low skill requirements, low productivity, and low prospects for advancement has shown remarkable stability throughout this century” (Armstrong, P.22). Women are only able to participate in men’s occupations when the labour supply is in shortage. Women only allow working in a limited number of female-dominated occupations which their earnings are always lower than their male counterparts. “Based on the 1981 censuses, it has been reported that the twenty-seven leading female occupations represented almost two-thirds of the entire female labour force…twenty-one leading male occupations which account for only one-quarter of the total male work force” (Nakhaie, P. 164). In additional, the movement of women into secretarial jobs provides a particularly good example of the response of women to the labour market demand. Women always are being his employer, the owner and manager of the firm. “Over one-third of all women are employed in this general occupational category and the rapid growth in the numbers of women in these jobs has coincided with the remarkable growth in paper work, in efforts devoted to planning, scheduling, accounting, corresponding, billing, copying, and filing” (Armstrong, P. 32). “It seemed apparent that young women were particularly suited to office occupations. They were less expensive than men. Their more or less temporary attachment to the job made most of them less interested in advancement, which office positions usually lacked” (Baker, P.215). The labour force is just divided into women’s work and men’s work unequally. Women’s workplace always in the home “A Vancouver study concluded that ‘most married women do the regular, necessary, and most time-consuming work in the household every day.’ research on the other coast also indicates that women take most of the responsibility for the domestic work” (Armstrong, P. 66). Women always do the majority of household and child care tasks while the men work outside of the domestic unit. Even though “when the husbands do “help”, they tend to participate in the more creative and interesting aspects of work in the home, rather than the more boring and monotonous tasks, such as ironing and cleaning” (Armstrong, P. 66).“For most women who do housework, there are no wages, no paid or guaranteed holidays, no fringe benefits, no pensions, no unemployment insurance, and no sick leave” (Armstrong, P. 75). The quality of their work is not related to any monetary reward. A broader explanation about women’s inequality in the work force is because genders’ roles and capabilities are biological determined (Gazso, 2004). Women the feminine have their own primary roles as a “traditional” role. Their primary responsibility is to take care of the domestic place while men should be the one working outside. If women have free time they would work in a low pay while men spend most of his free time with his friends after the day shift work ( McMullin, P.41). The "doing" of gender in everyday workplace activity are already advanced as explanations for women's inequality experiences in the workplace (Gazso, 2004). There is an earning gap between the two genders: “In 1987, women made only 67 cents for every dollar earned by men. The gender gap in earnings closed by about twelve percentage points between 1987 and 2000” (Yap, P.5). Even though the gender earnings ratio has rose but the trends of the female/male earnings are still showing that the wages do continue to remain lower for women. Race and class dimensions are also the reasons that women need to suffer from gender inequality in the workplace. Women who consider as racial minorities and of low economic class are more likely to suffer these non-standard work conditions (Gazso, 2004). “The average income earned by women and men who worked full-time full-year in 2001 was $35,258 for women and $49,250 for men. Among all other earners (i.e., part-time, temporary, casual) the wage gap ($24,688 and $38,431, respectively) continues to exist for women and men. Of all adult workers earning less than eight dollars an hour in 2000, 69% were women” (Gazso, 2004). Women do the segregated work in the labour force. Their work is usually unskilled or semi-skilled. Therefore they are easily trained in their work. Since it is such an easy work, they would only get a low wage. In addition, although there is a dramatic increase in female labour force participation but this has not freed women from being concentrated in a limited number of sex-typed jobs, jobs which usually parallel to those they perform in the home. Finally, in spite the proportion of married woman in the labour force is growing, most Canadian women dedicate at least part of their lives to work in the home. And for those women who do enter the labour force, domestic work continues of the most part to be their responsibility.

=**References**= Armstrong, Pat, and Hugh Armstrong. **__ The Double Ghetto: Canadian Women and Their Segregated Work __****. **Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984. Baker, Elizabeth Faulkner. __Technology and Women’s Work__. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Breton, Raymond. **__ Women in the Canadian Social Structure __****. **Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. Clark, Gracia. **__ Gender at Work in Economic Life __****. **Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2003. Gazso, Amber. __Women’s Inequality in the Workplace as Framed in News Discourse: Refracting from Gender Ideology__. //The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology//. Nov, 2004. < [|http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2771/is_4_41/ai_n29146572?tag=content;col1] > McMullin, Julie Ann. **__ Understanding social inequality: intersections of class, age, gender, ethnicity, and race in __****__ Canada __****. **Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2004. Nakhaie, Mahmoud Reza. **__ Debates on social inequality: class, gender, and ethnicity in __****__ Canada __****. **Toronto: Harcourt Brace & Company Canada, 1999. Yap, Margaret. **__ Gender and Racial Differentials in Compensation, Promotions and Separations in __** **__ Canada __****. Nov, 2004. < ** [|http://proquest.umi.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/pqdlink?did=766029881&Fmt=7&clientId=12520&RQT=309&VName=PQD>]