Gender Role at Work - Essay Example

Multiple roles with unique responsibilities at both home and work are seen to be beneficial to women if domestic responsibilities are shared with the spouse.  The numbers of women in the workforce are increasing steadily, and may soon be equal in proportion to men. (p.271). Gender relations are more prone to conflict in today’s stressed lives. One reason is the following of traditional concepts of inequality of the sexes.

The concept of imposing one’s will appears both in gender relations and war. Why is that?  In gender relationships, the stronger or more dominant partner is perceived as the one who is superior physically, financially, or by education.  The term status is linked with power and refers to an individual’s position in the structure of social relationships with respect to other individuals. Status is dependent on the set of values attached by the culture concerned, to attributes like abilities, education, wealth, etc. Watts (1991) is of the opinion that power is exercised on the basis of higher status. The term ‘dominance’ is often connected to interruptive behavior. In terms of the hierarchy of status relationships, dominance is an explicit expression of power over others. Latent or overt conflict is interruptive behavior between two persons. Watts quotes Weber and Durkheim: “Power is the opportunity of imposing one’s will on another.”  Power also forms part of the content of the network links of each individual. (pp. 55-56). Dominance and power give rise to control, which results in conflict. Conflicts in gender relationships, where the ‘weaker’ partner refuses to submit to the will of the dominant partner arise from perceptions about gender, and an individual’s sense of personal worth.

     The same definitions of power and conflict can be applied to the larger picture of the war between two nations. According to Clausewitz and Rapoport, (1982) “war is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale”, and “war is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will”. Physical force is our means, and compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object. (p.101). Hostile intentions predominate, resulting in the use of force to subjugate the other nation to fulfill one’s will. (p.102).

     Codevilla and Seabury (2006) are of the view that the only thing that gave any meaning to war was aiming at victory. “Imposing one’s will on another was a necessary condition of war” and formed the basis of the conflict between the two nations. (p.70). They felt that the fog of war was thickest for those least willing to impose their will on events, and it was most transparent for those willing to affect their own conditions by action. (p.62). Conflict situations, whether among gender relationships or in war, have basic similarities of domination and control of one party over the other.

Gender at work: According to social scientists, work is a critical subject of study, because it “involves the shaping, apportionment, control, and value of behaviors and thoughts as commodities”. The value of diversity in the workplace, the need to establish secular views of gender roles and sexual orientation in the workplace, and addressing the barriers and ignorance preventing success in the workplace, were considered vital issues by Diamant, Lee, (Eds.), 2003, p.271. To conclude, power relations between men and women are a direct outcome of the social organization of their activities in their homes and in the economy. (Fishman, 1978, p.397). Notions of hierarchy and power are related to socially constructed attitudes and viewpoints, and these concepts are gradually changing, in an increasingly egalitarian world.