"women's work" ranting
Patricia Hewitt, Minister for Trade and Industry, and also, as a pin-money job, Minister for Women:
"[W]omen are still more often found in low-status, low-paid jobs with little opportunity for career development and can find it harder to get promotion than men."
The solution?
"It is in all our interests to make it possible for women to pursue a fulfilling career within better-paid and higher-status jobs while at the same time balancing domestic responsibilities."
But surely the gap is: who the fuck is going to do the cleaning and the child-care and the nursing when women are in "senior management"? Well, since Hewitt's just endorsed and failed to question the status of those jobs as "low", we can be very sure New Labour won't be encouraging men into them.
So, another step towards the shiny new world where everyone works for commercial enterprises in desk jobs. The answer to getting promotion for women is apparently to work with "the business community", never mind that women in fact work disproportionately in the public and voluntary sectors. In fact, people who don't work for profit-making companies are basically invisible in political rhetoric about jobs, anyway: why else do we allow the CBI to be referred to as "the employers' organisation" rather than "the organisation of some large commercial employers"?
Look, what I'm trying to say is that we will always have a circular definition of women's work as low-prestige, and low-prestige work as poorly paid, and hence jobs only women will take, unless we take a more radical attitude. Why shouldn't women stay in childcare work, but be paid and esteemed as much as a company pen-pusher?
Well, I guess because if that happened, men would swoop in and take all the childcare jobs.
"[W]omen are still more often found in low-status, low-paid jobs with little opportunity for career development and can find it harder to get promotion than men."
The solution?
"It is in all our interests to make it possible for women to pursue a fulfilling career within better-paid and higher-status jobs while at the same time balancing domestic responsibilities."
But surely the gap is: who the fuck is going to do the cleaning and the child-care and the nursing when women are in "senior management"? Well, since Hewitt's just endorsed and failed to question the status of those jobs as "low", we can be very sure New Labour won't be encouraging men into them.
So, another step towards the shiny new world where everyone works for commercial enterprises in desk jobs. The answer to getting promotion for women is apparently to work with "the business community", never mind that women in fact work disproportionately in the public and voluntary sectors. In fact, people who don't work for profit-making companies are basically invisible in political rhetoric about jobs, anyway: why else do we allow the CBI to be referred to as "the employers' organisation" rather than "the organisation of some large commercial employers"?
Look, what I'm trying to say is that we will always have a circular definition of women's work as low-prestige, and low-prestige work as poorly paid, and hence jobs only women will take, unless we take a more radical attitude. Why shouldn't women stay in childcare work, but be paid and esteemed as much as a company pen-pusher?
Well, I guess because if that happened, men would swoop in and take all the childcare jobs.