Women and Work, The Age of Post Feminism?

Citation

Danieli, A. (2001), "Women and Work, The Age of Post Feminism?", Employee Relations, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 290-302. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2001.23.3.290.4

This edited collection of papers is a welcome addition to the stock of publications on women and work. The book contains eight papers, sandwiched between an introduction by one of the editors, Liz Sperling, and a concluding chapter by the other editor, Mairead Owen. The text has a lot of positive aspects to recommend it including the drawing together of a wide range of issues and comparative information on the position and experiences of women working in an increasingly flexible, but rather non‐woman‐friendly labour market. However, although the editors draw attention to changes in the global labour market, there is an over‐representation of research on the UK, France and Spain, to make this a truly global collection of papers.

The book originated from the conference: “Women and Equality: Rhetoric and Reality” held at Liverpool John Moores University, in 1996. As with many edited books that germinate from a set of conference papers, this can generate the problem of establishing a central focus or set of questions for the contributors. In trying to set a unifying theme for the papers, the editors elected to position the book as an opportunity to question the extent to which women at work can be seen to conform to an age of post‐feminism. This is an admirable aim and one which drew me to the book, especially given the backlash we have witnessed over the recent past toward group‐based equal opportunities and calls for individually‐based diversity management policies. However, the discussion of a “post‐feminist age” is disappointing and only directly addressed by the editors in their chapters. The individual contributors do not discuss it, because as Sperling points out, the authors were not required to write to this framework (p. 13). This does then beg the question of why the editors chose to frame the book as questioning of the age of post‐feminism when the contributors were writing to the rhetoric and reality theme of the conference. One might speculate that, unlike the questioning of post‐feminism, the “rhetoric and reality” theme does not suggest a new angle; after all, the rhetoric of gender equality and the reality of gender inequality, has been exposed by countless researchers before.

Irrespective of the editor’s focus for the book, it is the conference theme that is the focus of a large proportion number of the papers. For example, Joanne Cook, using the framework of gendered citizenship, examines “the gap between formal employment rights and their realisation in practice” (p. 15). Cook describes the difficulties that numerically flexible home‐workers and part‐time workers encounter in achieving substantive employment rights, not only within the formal rights provided by EU and UK legislation, but also in relation to their lack of grass‐roots representation and so their ability to affect the policy‐making process. Cook therefore brings into sharp relief both structure and agency in explaining the implementation gap between policy and practice.

In Chapter three, Hilary Rollin and Jean Burrell, develop the theme of rhetoric and reality by discussing the difficulties women encounter in taking advantage of the legal provisions theoretically available in France and Spain and conclude that “women in France and Spain today suffer from greater insecurity and marginalisation than two decades ago” (p. 51). France and the UK provide the empirical site for Catherine Fletcher’s comparative analysis of men and women’s access to training opportunities. In contrasting the voluntary system of training in the UK with the formal state‐regulated policies on training applicable in organisations employing more than 50 people in France, Fletcher shows that in both systems women are disadvantaged in terms of overall share of training. However, she points out that “… the level of awareness of existing discrimination seems to be lower amongst employees and training managers in France than in Britain …” (p. 70), suggesting that more formalised systems are not necessarily the answer and may in practice divert attention away from gender discrimination.

Andrea Lee provides an excellent and fascinating example of the rhetoric and reality of equal opportunities policies in the Northshire Fire Service. She shows how gender‐related values shaped the understandings of equal opportunities held by fire officers and how gender bias was mobilised to define women as the problem. Although Lee’s respondents deny race and gender bias, Lee explores how these were maintained by a range of processes within the fire service that ultimately produced and reproduced the fabric of institutionalised racism and sexism.

The intersection of race and gender is a central aspect of Nicola Piper’s paper that details the plight of migrant female workers, mainly Thai and Filipino women in Japan. In search of employment opportunities, these women enter Japan under the only category allowed by Japanese immigration laws, i.e. as entertainers. Once in Japan, they are constrained to work as sex workers, a category of worker unrecognised by immigration laws. This effectively denies them the status of workers and renders them subject to violations of Japanese labour laws.

Each of the above papers are useful for demonstrating the implementation gap, the stark differences between rhetoric and reality, between theory and practice. The remaining three papers are, however, more difficult to place in terms of the central focus of the book.

The paper by Linda Walsh and Liz James, is explicitly concerned with questioning the extent to which women choose to work part‐time and/or in low‐status, low‐waged jobs. They therefore revisit economic and labour market theories and Hakim’s (1995; 1996a; 1996b) argument that women have a primary orientation to the family rather than to paid full‐time work and therefore rationally choose forms of employment which enable them to accommodate such preferences. The chapter covers a great deal of material in illustrating the multifaceted nature of employment “choice” and is an excellent paper to recommend to students who are unfamiliar with these debates.

Gillian A. Dunne’s paper looks at how lesbian families choose to allocate time to paid and domestic work including child‐care. She shows that the hierarchical gender roles adopted in heterosexual families are not evident in lesbian families and so questions the necessity or inevitability of individuals having to choose between work and family life. This paper and the previous one are thus clearly concerned with choice. Whether they help to address the extent to which we are in a post‐feminist age or even the rhetoric and reality of women and work is less clear.

Lesley Twomey’s paper is in two parts – the first details the legal and social changes in Spain during the 1970s and 1980s, that impacted on women and their work and is very informative. The second part contains an analysis of a Spanish novel – Amado Amo, by Rosa Montero, which Twomey claims can “be termed a study of subversion” and that it presents “women’s struggle to be heard” (p. 146). However, while the analysis might be a very insightful one, if the reader is not familiar with the novel, it becomes difficult to either follow Twomey’s argument or to evaluate her analysis, given that as Twomey herself points out, “This novel requires careful reading” (p. 146). Apart from these difficulties with this paper, the rationale for its place in this collection of papers, given the central focus of the conference and/or the book, was not clear.

Overall the book provides yet more empirical studies that demonstrate the implementation gap between theory and practice, between formal and informal practices and so by inference suggests that to speak of a post‐feminist age is rather optimistic and premature. As such it is a useful source for combating the complacency sometimes evident among students who have uncritically accepted the post‐feminist hype in the popular media.