This article aims to contribute to current debates about international migration and the restructuring of the Welfare state in Europe, by highlighting the specificities of the French context. It draws on ethnographic research about the training of unemployed migrant women as domestic workers in Paris to address the ambiguities that underlie the enterprise of professionalizing domestic service. The qualitative data presented in the article show how essentialist ideologies operate within training practices of domestic workers. They reveal that the training practices (...) challenge the association of the job with domesticity, but fail to acknowledge the racist organization of domestic service. Hence, they endorse essentialist constructions of cultural difference. Training practices are also consistent with current neoliberal policies and discourses on unemployment and ‘employability’, as they are framed by the normative reference to an entrepreneurial model of society. Finally, the data suggest that migrant women's experience of domestic service as a prospective job and their scepticism about the enterprise of professionalizing radically differ from the instructors’ views. (shrink)

Comparable worth is a limited remedy for occupational segregation and the wage gap: It is compatible with meritocratic values, argued for in conventional labor market terms, and may increase tensions among men and women workers. But, while it relies on liberal political discourse, it has also improved the wages of women workers, broadened public thinking about discrimination, and stimulated cross gender wage comparisons unthinkable even a few years ago. This comment explains the limitations of comparable worth, not in terms of (...) the discourse proponents relied upon, but in relation to a specific political agenda and to a historical and political struggle over the control of the debate over comparable worth. As social science advocates for a more radical political agenda, it is our obligation to think more realistically about how we build a radical politics to accompany our discourse. (shrink)

To reduce sex differences in employment outcomes, we must examine them in the context of the sex-gender hierarchy. The conventional explanation for wage gap—job segregation—is incorrect because it ignores men's incentive to preserve their advantages and their ability to do so by establishing the rules that distribute rewards. The primary method through which all dominant groups maintain their hegemony is by differentiating the subordinate group and defining it as inferior and hence meriting inferior treatment. My argument implies that neither sex-integrating (...) jobs nor implementing comparable worth will markedly improve women's employment status because men can subvert these mechanisms or even change the rules by which rewards are allocated. As evidence, I show that occupational integration has failed to advance women appreciably, and I argue that comparable worth is not likely to be much more effective. Instead, we must seek political analyses and political solutions. (shrink)

There have, by now, been a number of thorough-going critiques of what has variously been called the ‘equality’, ‘equity’ or ‘liberal’ approach to understanding ‘the woman problem in technology’ by those who would prefer to focus on ‘the technology question in feminism’. Most of these critiques adopt deconstructivist techniques to expose the limitations of equality approaches, including, most centrally, their assumptions about the neutrality of technology and the limited nature of equality programmes designed simply to increase access for women to (...) that technology. However, the critiques themselves have so far failed to come up with convincing alternative interventionist strategies, either because the universalizing tendency of their theoretical perspective gives rise to interventions that fail to deal with the diverse and fragmented nature of women's experiences and needs, or because recognition of this diversity and fragmentation leaves very little common ground on which to build successful intervention strategies. This article addresses this dilemma in the context of computing and IT education and draws on empirical research on women's experiences of computing and IT in two different educational settings where issues of gender difference and equality were managed in very contrasting ways. It then offers some suggestions for how both a critical and constructivist discourse on technology might be made to coexist in educational programmes designed to promote gender equality. (shrink)

This article discusses the hitherto little-studied question of women workers’ empowerment through access to labor rights in the east African export horticultural sector. It is based on the work carried out by Women Working Worldwide and its east African partners, drawing on primary research on cut-flower farms in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. The focus in discussions of women’s empowerment has tended to be on individual actors rather than collective strategies. We argue that strategies such as action research, education, organization and (...) advocacy focusing on labor rights are effective in gendered empowerment and can bring positive change to women’s working lives on African farms, and beyond. (shrink)