Females In The Canadian Workplace

2673 Words6 Pages

Running Head: WORKPLACE ROLES OF MEN AND WOMEN COMPARED IN TODAY’S SOCIETY

Work Place Roles Of Men and Women Compared in Today’s Society

Submitted by: Steven Kopac

Submitted to: Pierro

Student #: 2321040

Seminar Time: Tuesday @ 11:30-12:30

Course: Sociology 1F90

Brock University

Date: Thursday February 8, 2001 Work Place Roles Of Men and Women Compared in Today’s Society
“Rosy cheeked and bright eyed, she would know how to darn a stocking and mend her own dress...command a regiment of pots and kettles and be a lady when required.”
This statement raises an interesting view on how women have been socially constructed with regard to their place in the work force. Does this also mean that men have been constructed toward a different position in the workplace? Although women have progressed, as far as occupational status is concerned, patriarchy still persists in our modern society. The subject area that will be focussed upon in this paper is the social construction of gender. The purpose of my paper is to explore how the social construction of gender has produced inequalities among men and women at work. The direction this paper will take is to discuss the differences of status, wealth and power between men and women in the work place. The sociological theory that I will apply is gender as a sociological construction. The key element of this theory is sex dimorphism where traits are conceptualized as typically male and typically female normative patterns and these as cultural norms (Hale, 1995).
Reskin (1993) stated that employers’ preferences for male workers, economic pressures, size of labour supply, gender-role socialization and workers’ values were some of the reasons why women and men are segregated in the workplace. Reskin concluded that there are many social and economic forces that increase and decrease sex segregation in the work force (Reskin,1993). The only way to decrease, better yet, to vanquish sex segregation in the workplace is for society to become “gender blind”. If society became “gender blind” differences in the workplace such a...

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