A fellow waitress once said to me "waitressing is the quintessential female job, revealing the deeply gender-based expectations in the world of work and it upholds the idea of sex-segregation." I was a young server at the time she said this to me and had never really thought about my job as being sex-segregated before, but it really got to me and so I wrote it down on a napkin, put it in my scrapbook and have reflected on it a lot in the past few years.
             At one point males were the ones who filled the positions of serving at restaurants, but this started to change after the Second World War. Women remained in the workplace more and this ultimately started a feminization of some jobs. Unfortunately the jobs available to them were less agreeable, in contrast, to the positions available to males. It was thought that women, in the job force, divided their loyalties between their job and domestic responsibilities. But this was in the old days, right?
             Stockyard's Restaurant and 1889 Bar held true to this old school way of thought. I worked as a waitress and I was a "lunch lovely". My hair was to be pulled into a ponytail, I was to always wear make-up; my uniform was a polo shirt that said lunch lovely with a jean skirt, above the knees, that was straight out of the 1980's. I was hired only to work the lunch shifts serving items like Reuben sandwiches, prime rib, and burgers. The men on the other hand worked the evenings, wore a server tux and served filet mignon, NY strip steak and ritzy bottles of wine. The differences between these shifts are obvious. It is common for women to be paid less than their male counterparts and in this case the tips that are generated in the dinner shifts are far more than one could make during lunch.
             Are employers influenced by social norms? My employers were old-fashioned cowboys and the decision for this style of hiring was simply because they felt the p...