Gender in Organizations - Essay Example

As a result, women remain different from men in that they put in more time and effort at the workplace and do more unpaid housework than their male partners. This is the main point raised by Ilene Philipson (2002) and David Schweingruber (2007), whose papers were selected as the two centerpieces of research for this essay because they capture the essence of the topic we want to discuss: that is, gender equality as it unfolds at work and at home today remains meaningless for the most part because of what both Philipson and Schweingruber call the "second shift," with Phillipson adding another factor called "familism.

" The first part of the main body discusses the dynamics of these two factors as to how they effectively distort the meaning of gender equality in the workplace. To illustrate the point, the last part of the essay's body looks into an actual case study of a married woman doing second shift work, tying this up to conditions in New Zealand, which is currently headed by a woman president and where the women's movement is going great guns. . Second Shift & Familism The dramatic increase in the labor force participation of women gave rise to the perception that we have finally entered an era that puts men and women on equal footing and makes no distinction between their sex and interests (Philipson, 2002).

Women now hold jobs previously confined to men, such that there are now women police and soldiers, pilots, miners and even steel mill workers. Research since the 1960s shows that women's time spent on housework has been cut by nearly half while men doubled their time (Mickelson, et al., 2006). However, a closer look reveals that married women continue to suffer from gender inequality in the amount of work they do both at the workplace and at the house. In households with two wage earners, the women who enter the labor force continue to do more housework than men (Schweingruber, 2007).

Women suffer from the same disadvantage at their paid job outside the home largely because of the mothering instinct that they bring to the workplace and creates special problems for their claim to gender equality (Fletcher, 2002). Even as a wage gap between working women and men persists, there is also a "leisure gap" between them at home (Bartley, et al., 2005). This crack in the otherwise greatly improved gender relations is traced to the "second shift" phenomenon, which is described by Philipson (2002) as the two work shifts of women: their unpaid job at home and paid job outside.

Schweingruber (2007) defines the condition in more or less the same terms, relating it to the load of housework that married women perform on top of their shift of work outside the home. An important aspect of the second shift phenomenon is the way women develop an emotional attachment to their jobs and