What’s in a name?—The Controversy Over “Manholes”

Occupational gender segregation matters and can be attributed to a number of factors.  But, a significant factor is cultural.  Jobs are gendered.  Often not in any necessarily straight-forward way, but jobs acquire gendered attributes and meanings.  In fact, occupational gender segregation probably plays a key role in producing our understandings of what is “masculine” or “feminine” in the first place.  As Joan Acker famously argued, the “abstract worker” is imagined to be a man (here).  This idea is perpetuated in a variety of ways—through formal and informal workplace policies, through curricular gender segregation as areas of study acquire “gendered” meaning, through the ways we frame the work itself as demanding a “masculine” or “feminine” strengths and/or sensibilities, and often, through things as simple as job titles.

The feminist movement fought long and hard to have firemen referred to as firefighters, policemen as police officers, etc.  The lack of gender-neutral language was a subtle, but symbolic, way through which women were culturally excluded from certain occupations (even in cases where no laws or formal policies necessarily precluded women’s entry).  This is a shift that is–to put it mildly–incomplete.  For instance, many high schools, colleges and universities still refer to incoming cohorts of students as “freshmen,” while others have opted for the more gender-neutral language of “first-years” (though not without the occasional backlash).

Language is important.  It’s a small part of a larger system of power and inequality that helps to organize our lives.  Legal feminist scholars have asked that we rid ourselves of language in laws that reflect gender bias.  I know what you’re thinking, but it’s more complicated that clicking Command+F and either replacing “men” with “people” or “men and women” and adding “/she” to the “he’s” or replacing them with “them/their” instead.  The tricky part has been when we literally lack gender-neutral language for something.  As one journalist put it, “Some gender-specific words just aren’t that easy to replace” (here).  While firefighter, police officer, and first-year might have been interpreted as easy changes, more difficulty surrounded words and positions like: ombudsman, penmanship, servicemen.

And this brings us to the “manhole.”

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.”

“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.

On Masculinity and Home Improvement

— Cross-posted at Femme-O-Nomics

Home improvement stores are gendered spaces.  I know next to nothing about home improvement.  I come from an elite enough background that when something in our home needed improving, we didn’t (for the most part) do the work ourselves.  We hired others (always men) to come in, assess the situation, make a recommendation, and do the work involved.  This weekend, I thought I was faced with having to improve my own home, but thankfully, I found someone to do it for me at Lowe’s–someone who, as it turns out, was a woman.

My family and I got back from a morning outing only to realize that we neglected to bring our house keys.  [We have so many keys at our new house that we keep them on separate sets, though we had a garage key made for our car keys as a result.]  So, we pulled up to our garage, and realized that we had no way of entering our house.  We left a window unlocked, but had to tear a screen to get into the house.  So… short story long, we had to repair a screen—something we know absolutely nothing about.  I brought the whole screen with me thinking I would just get a new one that size.

When we got to Lowe’s, a woman–Carla*–confronted us as we entered asking what we were looking for.  Holding up the screen, I smiled (with a bit of embarrassment) and said, “Screens and keys.”  She said, “I can take care of both of those for you.”  She brought us over to the screen section.  I didn’t even realize we were there.  She asked what kind of screen we wanted.  I considered trying to act knowledgeable, but said, “We want to make this,” gesturing to the broken screen, “look like new for as cheap as possible.”

“Have you ever done a screen?” she asked.  I laughed—but not as hard as she laughed at me after I laughed.  If it’s far beyond hammering something or turning a screw, I’m a bit out of my league.  So, I asked, “Is there any way you could help me with this?”  Excitedly, she said, “Yeah!  I’ve changed tons of these.  I just did my whole house last year.”  I was struck in many ways because I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say this about a residence I’ve lived in.  I’ve never “done” anything to my whole house.

Was Masculinity to Blame for the Space Shuttle Challenger?

Most of my knowledge about NASA, astronauts, and outer-space comes from movies.  When I think of the abstract astronaut in my mind, I picture Tom Hanks in Apollo 13.  I was actually only 4 years old when the Challenger disaster happened, but I remember learning about it in high school.  Thanks to the Challenger, we all know – or think we know – something about “O-rings” and how important they are for space travel.

For the uninitiated, here are the facts:

On January 28, 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger for the last time.  One minute and 13 seconds into the flight the shuttle broke apart, and the pieces of the shuttle spread out over the Atlantic Ocean.  Where the crew of the shuttle were was eventually recovered from the bottom of the ocean, but all seven crew members were killed in the crash.  What happened was the subject of intense debate, legal action, and investigation.  What is known is that the O-rings failed.  At a very basic level, O-rings are a part of the shuttle designed to seal the shuttle from the outside.  They have to be flexible and able to withstand intense temperature changes.  It is now known that the O-rings failed to seal the Challenger Shuttle and as a result, pressurized hot gas reached the external fuel tanks and led to the explosion.

James Messerschmidt – a criminologist and scholar of masculinity – investigated this debate and wrote a fascinating article on NASA as a workplace.  Much of the literature on gender in the workplace focuses on relations between men and women.  Joan Acker famously argued that it was not only workers that were gendered, but that the workplace itself and the jobs they were claiming were gendered before they got there.  Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Christine Williams, Patricia Yancey Martin, and more have discussed gender in the workplace.  But the typical conversation addresses relations between men and women.

Are gay-friendly workplaces gay-friendly?

Building on Arlie Hochschild‘s now famous conceptualization of “emotional labor” (which documents the gendered care work that is required but not requested in many occupations), a new literature in the sociology of work deals with what scholars are calling “aesthetic labor.”  Aesthetic labor refers to the embodied performances subtly (and not so subtly) required at work.

So, just as Hochschild studied the ways that the job of flight attendants went beyond providing refreshments and safety information, scholars are now discussing the ways that certain aesthetic performances of self are required at work as well.

Increasingly, the questions “What does a [insert your occupation here] look like?” or “How does a [insert your occupation here] act?”  matter as we consider how to behave, what to wear, and how to look in the workplace.