Gender and Power in the Workplace

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.