Gender and Power in the Workplace
This paper is an analysis of contemporary issues associated with gender and power in the workplace; which will specifically include a discussion of gender relations, stereotyping, women's identity, the structuring of formal and informal power, sources of inequality, and sexual harassment. The concept of gender in relation to the division of labor in the workplace, and in relation to issues of power and control is an unfortunate, groundless stereotype. Suzanne Tallichet notes that the gendered division of workplace labor is rooted in erroneous ideology of innate sex differences in traits and abilities, and operates through various control mechanisms. (Tallichet 1995: 698) These control mechanisms are primarily exercised by men over women and serve to exaggerate differences between the sexes, especially surrounding women's presumed incapability for doing male identified work. Tallichet notes that most forms of workplace control take the form of harassment, sexual bribery, and gender based jokes and comments, and profanity, which passively but succinctly make gender differences a salient aspect of work relations. (Tallichet 1995: 698-699) Jan Grant and Paige Porter
Monica Boyd (1997: 64) proposes that power inequality in the workplace between genders has been maintained through occupational segregation, because it is the occupations themselves which differ in the capacity that incumbents have to impose their will upon others. Boyd is able to back her claims by noting that Canadian women are employed in positions with fewer decision making powers; women are more likely to supervise other women only; and although women have increased their presence in the workforce, this presence is mostly in the service industry only, and that this increase in presence has not converted into a presence of power. The organizational model suggests that the structural aspects of organizations promote power inequalities between individuals and set the stage for sexual harassment; while sociocultural models reflect a feminist perspective, conceptualizing sexual harassment as an outcome of patriarchal systems that enable men to exercise sexual power to assert and maintain male dominance. " Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology. "Gendered Relations in the Mines and the Division of Labor Underground. Perhaps a strategy then for the exploited female subordinate class could be to develop an autonomous informal power structure to balance against the patriarchal dominance of their supervisors. Perhaps the most common and widely accepted form of inequality in the workplace is the hiring and treatment of part-time workers. These traditional roles and consequently women's identities have been formed and maintained by the workplace, therefore understanding any gendered differences in labor requires an examination in this light.
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