Notes on Gender and Work-Related Death

Occupational sex segregation is really nothing new. As more and more women entered the workforce, they were often headed into different spaces from the men (sometimes entirely different physical locations, and sometimes only subtly differentiated spaces). This might mean different buildings, but even within buildings, occupations can be sex segregated. So, women and men are both working. But this simple statement disguises the fact that they’re not necessarily doing the same work–not precisely. In fact, it’s a smaller proportion of people than you might think who work alongside someone doing the same work, with the same occupational title, on the same shift. Approximately 1 in 10 workers in the U.S. labor force fit this description of a gender-integrated occupation. So, if you’re one of them, take a moment to count yourself lucky and consider just how truly odd you are.

Roughly one third of the 66,000,000 women in the workforce in the early 2000’s could be accounted for by only 10 (of the 503) occupations listed on the U.S. Census. That’s occupational segregation! The “occupational ghettos” that have been feminized are often “rewarded” with more care work, less pay, and lower levels of cultural status and prestige. These are the jobs we sometimes refer to as “pink-collar work.” Some of men’s occupational preserves are rewarded with higher status, more money, and a great deal of power. But this is not true of all of men’s jobs.

Blue-collar work has been in sharp decline in the U.S. for some time. We may “put things together,” but by and large, we don’t build things from the ground up like we used to in the U.S. That said, blue-collar work has not completely disappeared. And blue-collar work is sometimes “rewarded” by ranking among the most life-threatening occupations.

NPR’s “Planet Money” blog just ran a story on the jobs with the highest rates of work-related deaths–the “deadliest jobs”. Collecting data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2011, they produced the graph here (right) to illustrate those jobs with some of the highest (and lowest) rates of on-the-job deaths compared with the national average of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 full-time (or equivalent) employed persons.

It’s an interesting image. But in the short post, I was struck that gender was not mentioned once. Looking down the list of jobs with the highest work-related deaths listed, gender seemed to jump out of the figure at me (fishermen, loggers, pilots, farmers and ranchers, police officers, construction workers). These are all jobs that most Americans probably picture a man “doing.”

On the Social Construction of Childhood: Making Space for Babies

The planning of modern homes takes babies, children, and safety into consideration a bit more (mildly put) than did earlier architectural design. In some early colonial homes, small items (pictured to the right) have been found, often located somewhere on the floor of the main room. Initially it was thought to be something to house firewood, though it didn’t seem capable of holding much, and the slat that sits perpendicular to the box on the inside wall made little sense. It took observers a while to realize that this contraption was a device for holding children—a “baby tender.”

Baby tenders existed for two reasons: to give parents time without the infant and to ensure the baby’s safety whilst the parents were away. The most dangerous part of a colonial home was the open hearth. Necessary for both warmth and the “one-pot meals” that characterized early American family eating, the open hearth was an essential, yet simultaneously lethal, aspect of early American homes. Children were routinely injured, and sometimes died as a result of burns.

But the reason that we didn’t initially guess that the crate above was for babies had nothing to do with the dimensions of the crate or a misunderstanding of the dangers of fire. Rather, it had to do with a fundamentally different understanding of children. Today, we simply “see” children differently than they did in colonial America. If you’re anything like me, feeling as though anyone could look at an infant and feel anything other than love, affection, and a strange desire to nuzzle those chubby little cheeks seems almost impossible. Yet, these feelings and desires are actually part of a larger ideological shift in cultural conceptualizations of childhood. And this shift had architectural implications–ones that were slower to come about.

“Dear Abby”–A Space for Political Protest?

Pauline Philips, the original “Dear Abby” columnist, recently died.  She wrote under the pen name Abigail Van Buren and captivated her readership.  Her column has been a mainstay in newspapers ever since it first appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 1956.  Today, “Dear Abby” is written by Phillips’ daughter and remains the most widely syndicated column on the face of the earth.

“Dear Abby” offers a space to complain, to seek advice or counsel, and to discuss something you might not voice in the company of someone other than Abby.  “Dear Abby” offered an anonymous space for people to share their fears, dreads, ideas, dilemmas, and more, ostensibly testing them out on Abby before committing to a solution.

While “Dear Abby” is likely read by many with a similar level of interest to reading the comics, the column was and is a political platform of sorts.  “Dear Abby” often supported gender equality, challenged men for writing in with patriarchal demands of their wives or daughters, and subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) teased those whose dilemmas she thought had less to do with the dilemma and more to do with an understanding of the world rooted in systems of power and inequality.

Mary McIntosh–Toward a Sociology of Sexuality

Mary McIntosh recently passed, and it allowed me to reflect on the significance of her work.  Her work is part of a small body of scholarship that quite literally created a sociology of sexuality.  It’s hard for scholars of my generation to fully appreciate the power of Mary McIntosh’s (1968) opening sentence in the abstract of her article, “The Homosexual Role.”

The current conceptualization of homosexuality as a condition is a false one, resulting from ethnocentric bias. (McIntosh 1968: 182)

Like many of the early attempts by both gender and sexuality scholars recognizing problems with a structural-functionalist approach, McIntosh operates inside of functionalist theory.  McIntosh wrote this essay during a time in which if homosexuality was taught at all in sociology courses, it appeared in courses on deviance.  McIntosh’s work was a small—but pivotal—example of the kinds of work that have helped to question it’s categorization as “deviant” in the first place.  Today, students are just as likely to deal with questions of same-sex desire and identity in sociology of families, courses on race and ethnicity, gender, identity, and inequalities more generally.  Sexuality is a topic that appears in introductory textbooks as well.

A Brief History of the Masculinization of the Garage

In the U.S., garages did not really become a part of the “typical” American home (if we can say such a thing) until the start of the 20th century.  Certainly garages existed; but they weren’t seen as a necessity.  Two things you’d probably guess drove garage production initially: the increasing presence of cars owned by individual families and suburbanization.  But, suburbanization was also accompanied by a renewed interest in a sort of “do-it-yourself” lifestyle, and garages played a role in this history.  There’s some disagreement concerning whether a “do-it-yourself” zeitgeist prompted suburban retreat or the other way around.  But, the important bit is that they are related.

Industrialization and suburbanization brought about fantastic transformations in family life and gender relations.  Men and women began to rely upon one another in new and unprecedented ways.  Divisions between work and leisure became more pronounced for men and this same boundary was probably blurred more than ever before for women.  The same forces that led Lasch to call the family “a haven in a heartless world” were inequitably distributed between family members.  This fact is reverberated in our design and use of home architecture.

If you have a home built in the early 20^th century that hasn’t been remodeled, it’s likely that you have a fairly closed-off, small kitchen and probably only one centrally-located bathroom.  These are just two examples but they’re a powerful illustration of an important issue to do with gender and space.  Small kitchens, structurally isolated in homes are a remnant of a particular set of gender relations in families.  When architects were designing homes for my grandparent’s generation, kitchens were small and segregated because few people were thought to have reason to inhabit them.  Multiple bathrooms seemed a waste of space until the hustle and bustle of dual-earning couples’ morning routines became a national norm.

Garages, basements, and more, have historically served as spaces to which men retreat to work on projects around the house, hobbies, to read, watch television, or “to tinker” as my grandmother-in-law says of her husband.