Women’s or Workers’ Orientations to Work?

Abstract

The idea that women have stable orientations to work has a long history in popular opinion. Women’s orientations to work have been viewed on the whole in a negative way, through a number of stereotypes, and in summary form they have implied that women are more interested in being housewives and having children. The stereotypes about women’s approach to paid employment have included a variety of sometimes conflicting opinions; for example, that women only work for pin-money, that they only work in order to meet a husband, that women do not mind boring work and may even prefer it since they have no intrinsic interest in working, and so on (Dex, 1985). The tradition of studying women’s subjective experiences of work has, until recently, been largely dominated by this view of women as marginal workers. In particular, women’s orientations to work have been seen as attached to their gender. Little, if any, effort has been expended to see the extent to which women’s orientations to work are either the same as men’s, or are worker’s orientations for particular jobs, conditions of work, family circumstances, etc., that is to say, they are gender-independent. The net effect of seeing women as marginal workers within the discipline of industrial sociology has been that relatively few studies of women’s experiences have been undertaken.