Sexing Jobs

Fed up with my hectic job, it has been my daily routine to go through the newspapers for the job advertisements.  I come across many ads of attractive jobs. But to my dismay, many of them are with a label attached—female only. It compels me to ponder on this gendering of jobs.
And I also ponder if it is contributing to women empowerment and also if there is an inherent relation between a job and gender.

Gendering of job is so endemic these days. You go through the job advertisements and you will come across several instances. Most of the jobs in clothing and textile industries, telephone communication, health services, and local education are separated for women.  It is a positive thing that women are also getting job outside their homes, but the job assigned to them is still tainted by gender discrimination.

Though the men and women are different by their birth in terms of sex which is biological and natural, gender differences are just a social construct, an arbitrarily constructed cultural artifact. Assigning the job of receptionist, primary teacher, personal secretary, and many other minor and ‘riskless’ job are as arbitrary and unwarranted as pink for girls and blue for boys. And it is a new ploy by the society to construct women as subordinate to men and thus to justify inequality. (Why should a man need an unmarried young personal secretary? Haven’t we heard many cases of sexploitations?)

Many people point to the differences in abilities between men and women. But a question comes, are the differences biologically based or they are due to cultural differences? Many anthropological researches have shown that in the stone-age, matriarchal societies existed where there was no distinction between male and female in terms of gender. Later gradually society began to construct gender differences. An instance of this is Aristotle’s definition of woman as “incomplete man”

Knowing whether an individual is female or male reveals little about that person’s intellectual abilities. Many women have challenged the role assigned by society. Kalpna Chawala and Suneeta Williams have been to Space. Pasang Lhmahu and Jinko Tabei have conquered Mt. Everest. There are a number of women tempo drivers. They attempted to show how the differences on the basis of gender are merely the social fabrications.

It seems, then, jobs and occupations themselves are constructed so as to embody the socially legitimatized but variable characteristics of masculinity and femininity. The heroic struggle and camaraderie involved in male heavy manual labor compared with the characteristics of feminized occupations such as secretarial work. And the gendering of jobs and workers has been taken for granted.

It’s high time that women themselves became conscious on this issue and also challenged the gendering of job. They also need to understand that the assignment of a job on the basis of sex can be a means of exploitation too. I, a man, have a dream to see our society based on egalitarianism without any gender biases.