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Article
Publication date: 1 February 2006

Santosh Nandal

A vast majority of India's labour force is in unorganized sector. In the absence of economic opportunities in their own states, many workers migrate across the other states of…

Abstract

A vast majority of India's labour force is in unorganized sector. In the absence of economic opportunities in their own states, many workers migrate across the other states of India to seek employment. Construction industry depends almost entirely on migrant workers, majority of which are women. The main object of this paper is to shed light on the socio‐economic problems being faced by a section of the women workers in construction industry. These women workers have a very tough life. In spite of being actively involved in economic activities for survival, bearing and rearing of children remain their prime responsibility, and thus they end up with playing roles in both production and reproduction.

Details

International Journal of Development Issues, vol. 5 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1446-8956

Article
Publication date: 1 April 1988

Meena Gupta

The article examines the trends in the employment of women in the industries and service sectors in India, their conditions of work and their problems.

Abstract

The article examines the trends in the employment of women in the industries and service sectors in India, their conditions of work and their problems.

Details

Equal Opportunities International, vol. 7 no. 4/5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0261-0159

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 23 February 2024

Inbar Livnat and Michal Almog-Bar

This article asks how gender, ethnicity and other identities intersect and shape the employment experiences of social workers. During recent decades, governments have contracted…

Abstract

Purpose

This article asks how gender, ethnicity and other identities intersect and shape the employment experiences of social workers. During recent decades, governments have contracted social care to for-profit and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) globally as a part of the adaption of the neoliberal approach. Most employees in these organizations are women. However, there is a lack of knowledge about women working in social service NPOs and their unique working environments.

Design/methodology/approach

This article explores the experiences of women employed as social workers in social care NPOs in Israel regarding intersectionality. 27 in-depth interviews were conducted with women social workers working in social service NPOs. Participants reflected diversity in ethnicity, religion and full-time and part-time jobs. Thematic analysis was used.

Findings

The findings shed light on: (1) the contradiction social workers experienced between the stated values of the social care NPO and those values’ conduct, (2) intersectional discrimination among social workers from vulnerable populations and (3) the lack of gender-aware policies.

Social implications

The need to raise awareness of the social care sector and governments to those contradictions and to promote diversity through gender-aware policies and practices.

Originality/value

The article suggests a conceptualization describing gender employment contradictions in social care NPOs, discusses how the angle of intersectionality expands the understanding of the complexities and pressures exerted on social workers from minority groups and emphasizes the need for social care NPOs to acknowledge and deal with these contradictions.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 October 2022

Dalila Mahdawi and Jodi Evans

Women transport workers are a proud part of the workforce, central to the global economy linking supply chains and keeping the world moving. But the transport industry is highly

Abstract

Women transport workers are a proud part of the workforce, central to the global economy linking supply chains and keeping the world moving. But the transport industry is highly gendered. Women transport workers are overrepresented in precarious informal work and non-standard forms of employment without social protections, they are underrepresented in leadership and decision-making, and are facing endemic gender-based violence, and sanitation indignity. Women’s jobs in transport are more likely to be vulnerable to the impacts of automation and digitalisation. Responses to the challenges arising from the COVID-19 crisis have the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities.

This chapter argues that it is imperative that the transport industry – including employers, governments, investors, and unions – put into action a gender-responsive approach to ensure that inequalities are not reproduced, perpetuated or intensified, and that there is a ‘gender equal new normal’. Strengthening women’s employment in transport needs to address more than just recruitment, and failure to also address the reality of gender-based violence and other aspects related to decent work risks undermining any interventions to increase women in transport. The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) continues to prioritise work to improve the status and working lives of women in transport. Through policy and innovative action programmes – including union organising, campaigning, collective bargaining, developing women’s activism and leadership, and building strategic alliances – the chapter shows how the ITF is supporting women transport workers, through their trade unions, to address their most significant industrial and workplace issues, to shape, and lead the struggle for equality.

Details

Women, Work and Transport
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-670-4

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 9 June 2011

Esther Ngan-ling Chow and Yuchun Zou

Purpose – Integrating a gender perspective with a world-system theory, we examine how the recent global economic crisis in China has differential impact on female and male migrant…

Abstract

Purpose – Integrating a gender perspective with a world-system theory, we examine how the recent global economic crisis in China has differential impact on female and male migrant workers. We analyzes how this gendered impact is compounded by intersectionality that results in multiple inequalities shaping their work, identity, power relationship, agency, and family lives.

Method – Our analyses were primarily drawn from 14 surveys of major provinces with higher migration rates, and were supplemented by personal narratives and interviews of migrant workers.

Findings – The political-economic analysis of the world-system demonstrates how the intricate linkages among declines in trade, finance, and production led to the economic crisis in China, with more detrimental effects on women migrant workers than their male counterparts. The intersectionality of gender, class, age/generation, and regional differences has played out in the state-regulated process of migration, configuring and reconfiguring the organization of capital, labor, and production and determining unequal gender relations, class dynamics, citizenship, employment, and family life. Conditioned by complex inequalities, some affected migrant workers, far from being victimized, have demonstrated agency, resilience, and a spirit of resistance.

Research and practical implications – More disaggregated data by gender are needed to understand the full range of differential crisis effects on diverse women and men workers.

Originality/value of the study – This study suggests the importance of considering gender-sensitive policies and a gender mainstreaming approach to addressing gender inequality and improving migrant workers’ lives for their empowerment.

Details

Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-743-8

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 10 December 2018

Rina Agarwala and Jennifer Jihye Chun

Gender is a defining feature of informal/precarious work in the twenty-first century, yet studies rarely adopt a gendered lens when examining collective efforts to challenge…

Abstract

Gender is a defining feature of informal/precarious work in the twenty-first century, yet studies rarely adopt a gendered lens when examining collective efforts to challenge informality and precarity. This chapter foregrounds the gendered dimensions of informal/precarious workers’ struggles as a crucial starting point for re-theorizing the future of global labor movements. Drawing upon the findings of the volume’s six chapters spanning five countries (the United States, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and India) and two gender-typed sectors (domestic work and construction), this chapter explores how gender is intertwined into informal/precarious workers’ movements, why gender is addressed, and to what end. Across countries and sectors, informal/precarious worker organizations are on the front lines of challenging the multiple forms of gendered inequalities that shape contemporary practices of accumulation and labor regulation. They expose the forgotten reality that class structures not only represent classification struggles around work, but also around social identities, such as gender, race, and migration status. However, these organizing efforts are not fighting to transform the gendered division of labor or embarking on revolutionary struggles to overturn private ownership and liberalized markets. Nonetheless, these struggles are making major transformations in terms of increasing women’s leadership and membership in labor movements and exposing how gender interacts with other ascriptive identities to shape work. They are also radicalizing hegemonic scripts of capitalist accumulation, development, and even gender to attain recognition for female-dominated occupations and reproductive needs for the first time ever. These outcomes are crucial as sources of emancipatory transformations at a time when state and public support for labor and social protection is facing a deep assault stemming from the pressures of transnational production and globalizing markets.

Details

Gendering Struggles against Informal and Precarious Work
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-368-5

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 11 April 2005

Nancy Plankey Videla

Organizational literatures stress the empowering effects of worker participation programs. The case of a Mexican garment factory is used to examine the contradictory location of…

Abstract

Organizational literatures stress the empowering effects of worker participation programs. The case of a Mexican garment factory is used to examine the contradictory location of women in self-managed teams. While self-managed teams require independent and assertive workers, women workers are hired specifically for their docility. I argue that managers provide the tools and mechanisms for workers to be autonomous decision-makers, while at the same time they gender teams in ways that assure continued female disadvantage. Placed in this contradictory location, women workers both reproduce and resist gender subordination by carving out spaces of independent action, using the language of traditional womanhood.

Details

Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-202-3

Book part
Publication date: 14 February 2022

Eric R. Kushins and Myriam Quispe-Agnoli

This chapter explores various structural, socio-cultural and economic factors that have precipitated the significant change in the supply of free family firm workers, specifically…

Abstract

This chapter explores various structural, socio-cultural and economic factors that have precipitated the significant change in the supply of free family firm workers, specifically women’s unpaid labor. To investigate these concerns, we use longitudinal data from the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We provide a general overview of critical social, cultural and economic factors impacting women’s opportunities since 1948, with an emphasis on recent historical changes between 1994 and 2020.

We find that, among other factors, the deinstitutionalization of marriage, changing rates of educational attainment, fluctuating labor force participation, economic recessions and women’s rights movements have led to a steep decline in unpaid female family workers. We further assess the distribution of unpaid family workers by industry and by age of worker to build a more nuanced picture of this trend. We sought to determine where these unpaid female workers went --to industry jobs, government work or self-­employment.

Given that complex national-level factors will continue to impact women’s life choices, family firms should consider the short- and long-term impact of the changing social value of women and their roles in family firms. We suggest family firms: ensure appropriate financial compensation for talented women, provide a range of supportive options for work-family balance to increase retention, and consider differential work opportunities for women at the start of their professional lives and those who may be interested in contributing to their families’ business in the later years of their careers.

Article
Publication date: 15 September 2023

Poonam Barhoi and Surbhi Dayal

The tea plantation industry is characterized by the large-scale deployment of cheap women laborers and gender-blind practices that make the social positions of women workers

Abstract

Purpose

The tea plantation industry is characterized by the large-scale deployment of cheap women laborers and gender-blind practices that make the social positions of women workers vulnerable. This paper considers women temporary workers in tea gardens to study the exacerbated impact of Covid-19 on their lives. The impact of the pandemic on marginal tea garden women laborers has not received enough attention from researchers; hence, the authors have studied the gendered implications of the pandemic on Adivasi temporary women workers in tea gardens in India. “Adivasi” is an umbrella term to refer to all indigenous tribes in India.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a qualitative study with 26 in-depth interviews with women temporary workers who identify themselves as Adivasis. For the discussion, the authors have mainly borrowed from intersectionality and subalternity literature.

Findings

The analysis explored the intersectional experiences of the women temporary workers (1) as members of Tea Tribes who are compelled to continue working at tea gardens as wage laborers, (2) job insecurities at work due to their temporary worker status, (3) disadvantages faced by women workers for their gender identity and (4) the gendered impact of the pandemic on their lives.

Originality/value

This study has explored the gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of temporary women workers who belong to ethnic minority groups in the global south. The exploitation of labor rights in the tea industry during the pandemic has not been discussed enough by researchers earlier.

Details

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, vol. 43 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2040-7149

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 27 September 2022

Gustavo A. García, Diego René Gonzales-Miranda, Óscar Gallo and Juan Pablo Roman Calderon

This study aims to measure the gender wage gap among millennial workers in Colombia and determine if there is a marked wage difference between millennial women and men…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to measure the gender wage gap among millennial workers in Colombia and determine if there is a marked wage difference between millennial women and men. Furthermore, this study analyzes whether millennial women face a glass ceiling, that is, whether there is a larger gender wage gap among workers earning relatively high wages.

Design/methodology/approach

The study data included a sample of 2,144 millennial workers employed in 11 organizations located in the five main cities of Colombia. Oaxaca–Blinder econometric methods of wage decomposition were used to calculate both raw and adjusted gender wage gaps. The latter results in estimating the gender wage gap while controlling for observable characteristics related to individual, family, and labor. In addition, wage decompositions by education levels were carried out to approximate the extent of the glass ceiling among young workers.

Findings

The results show that millennial workers in Colombia face gender inequality in the labor market and that professional millennial women experience a distinct glass ceiling. The adjusted gender wage gap is 9.5%, and this gap increases with education level, increasing to nearly 14% among college-educated workers.

Research limitations/implications

The empirical results are supported by a self-report survey of millennial workers. An important limitation is that the data include millennial workers employed in the formal sector and exclude the informal sector (activities not regulated or protected by the state), which represents an important part of the economy in developing countries.

Originality/value

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on gender wage inequality for younger workers. This paper is original in reviewing the gender pay gap in Colombia using a primary dataset. Most of the work in this area has been done in developed countries and this research adds to the findings that have had focused on those nations.

Details

Employee Relations: The International Journal, vol. 45 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0142-5455

Keywords

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