Gender Differences and the American Worker

America is considered to be the land of opportunity, though exactly what kinds of opportunity are afforded to its vast array of citizens has always depended on factors such as age, race, and gender. For women in America, the working world has always been, at the very least, mildly inaccessible; a daunting place, sometimes necessary to attend, where they make less money than men and get discriminated against and harassed simply due to their gender. By looking at three factors – the cultural stereotypes regarding the role of women in society, the fight for women to work jobs traditionally handled by men, and the lack of gender equality in treatment from unions vis a vis job security – we are able to better comprehend why the differences in work for men and women in America have been so strongly emphasized from the early 20th century to today.

From the dawn of time, society has made sure that there are distinct differences in gender roles, leading to the development of various cultural stereotypes men and women are expected to adhere to. In his essay “The Playboy and Miss America,” Harvey Cox depicts these differences as integral in the creation of the “spurious sexual models conjured up for our anxious society by the sorcerers of the mass media and the advertising guild.”1 Indeed, sexuality appears to be the most obvious and important differentiation between society’s portrayal of men and women; a universal factor that is played up for greater revenue that also, unfortunately, furthers potentially dangerous stereotypes. Cox asserts that men are fed the idea that they deserve to live a life of leisure, with the freedom to drive fancy sports cars, drink well-made cocktails or bourbon the same age as they are, and have a doting, sexy woman at their side night and day, ready to adhere to their every whim. Men are expected to have a casually cool air about them that feeds into some degree of detachment about their daily doings, but this detachment also feeds into the societal treatment of women as an accessory in a man’s life instead of as a real human being. As portrayed by magazines such as Playboy, women should find this casualness enjoyable, even liberating, and those who want something serious out of their casually disaffected man don’t deserve that prize. Cox continues: “sex must be contained, at all costs, within the entertainment-recreation area.”

The ideal man’s life as depicted by Playboy plays on the fear of involvement with women, emphasizing casual sex with whichever eligible, up-for-some-fun woman happens to arrive in his life first. This is a psychological misfire, as it waters down “authentic sexuality…by keeping it at a safe distance”3 and tries to make the incorrect point that all a woman is good for is a fling in the sheets. Women, on the other hand, are expected to be chameleons, simultaneously sexual and virginal, shifting roles as they need to in order to sell products or services to the hungry masses. To be a woman of any value, you’re expected to be stylized, made-up, and impeccably dressed: an ideal of beauty that is furthered by media and advertising than by any feminist creed or code. A woman’s identity is only as important as her ability to fit the ideal, and the girls who try to emulate this glamorized portrayal of women end up despondent and depressed, having had to “torture themselves with starvation diets and beauty-parlor ordeals”4 and appear endlessly young, unable to protect themselves from “the human pangs of rejection and loneliness.”4 Men can age gracefully and carry a younger woman in their hip pocket, while women are not afforded a similar luxury.

When factories began to have the ability to replace their workers with machines, corporations started shifting their labor forces to places where they could hire cheaply, which was pretty much anywhere but in the United States. In certain factories, where women had been working since World War II in order to maintain the integrity of the home front, this shift in responsibility had negative consequences, with many lighter factory jobs traditionally considered women’s work being outsourced. Jefferson Cowie’s book Capital Moves details one such instance of this occurrence, at an RCA television manufacturing plant in Bloomington, Indiana. At that factory, women went from making up 80% of the workforce to just over half of it by the mid-1970s, a shift precipitated by the historical definition of working women “as cheap and dispensable,” easily replaced by machines operated by the unskilled at RCA’s new Mexico factory.5 This led to a fight on the behalf of the women working at the Bloomington factory for the right to begin working the jobs considered to be men’s work, assisted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Since the duties women had kept up within Bloomington were re-assigned to the factory in Juárez, if they wanted to keep their jobs, they needed to have the freedom to do the heavy lifting they had been practically banned from doing in the past. The commission decreed:

“An employer cannot justify the refusal to hire women on the basis of…stereotype characterizations of the sexes…[a] seniority system or line of progression which distinguishes between ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ jobs constitutes an unlawful employment practice if it operates as a disguised form of classification by sex. However, this victory would ultimately and unfortunately prove to be empty, as the conditions at Bloomington further declined for all workers due to the lack of job security RCA created for its employees by opening up its Juárez plant. Strikes were out of the question, so workers became stubborn and unruly. Management responded by decreasing the number of job classifications on the work floor and eliminating breaks. Women wanted the opportunity to work different jobs than they had before, and they got it – though they were at the mercy of their supervisor. Senior employees weren’t exempt from these changes, with many of them “frequently forced to do the most backbreaking work at the plant,”7 such as unloading boxcars filled with parts. Although female employees were able to achieve similar job security to their male co-workers, RCA’s ultimate treatment of everyone involved led to a sense of dismay amongst the workers that lingered at the Bloomington plant for decades.

Women have also experienced difficulty in obtaining similar protection from unions as men, especially at the turn of the 20th century. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle describes the plight of Marija, a Lithuanian immigrant who found work in Chicago painting cans of meat products. She was happy and well-paid, but the plant she worked for shutting down after three months, citing that they no longer needed the employees as often after the holiday rush and that, even after the mandatory month the workers were forbidden to work at the factory, they might not ever be able to return to the same hours they kept before.8 Furthermore, she did not receive the correct amount of payment for the work she did, having been cheated out of her pay for 300 cans.9 This explanation did not sit well with Marija, who angrily demanded an explanation from her union but unfortunately received none. She was thankfully able to turn her outrage into motivation to find another job but received similarly poor consideration from unions during the rest of her time working in the meatpacking industry. This comes at stark contrast to her cousin Jurgis, a man, who also had qualms with the way he was treated but was actually listened to at the union meetings. Women, unable to have a proper voice, had no choice but to turn to men in order to gain any sort of ground in obtaining better treatment at the factories they were employed at.

In the present day, women continue to be over-sexualized and expected to live up to an almost-impossible ideal. New movements presenting overt sexuality as a kind of liberation have taken hold of the public consciousness, with wildly different reactions from all sides. Some women have embraced the evolving image that the media holds up for them, daring society to call them out on what were once seen as indiscretions unbecoming of a lady, while their detractors find ways to both attack the aforementioned image but uphold its more wholesome characteristics as qualities to be strived for by the next generation. While society has still not figured out how to fairly treat women, the workplace has. Women now have a much more equal, fair experience at work, more comparable to their male co-workers than in the past. Concerns women had been unable to address in the past, such as sexual harassment, gender discrimination in hiring and promotion, and receiving proper health care for female-specific problems through employer-provided health insurance plans, such as access to contraception, are finally being heard by a greater share of the American worker due to the increased emphasis on equality in the workplace. Ultimately, there are still steps that need to be taken in order to achieve an even greater sense of equality on a societal level, but America has clearly learned from its past indiscretions and is actively working to rehabilitate its image. Perhaps, in the future, society will catch up to the progressive ideals that have spread throughout America’s offices and factories.

Bibliography

Cowie, Jefferson. Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Cox, Harvey. “The Playboy and Miss America.” In Working in America: A Humanities Reader, edited by Robert Sessions and Jack Wortman, 383-389. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. 1906. Reprint, Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001.