Women and Unemployment Gender Identity Is an Essay

Women and Unemployment

Gender identity is an individual's way of experiencing and defining their own gender. There are, of course, various ways this can be defined; the obvious physical, but then psychological, social, and cultural. Within each of these subcategories the "idea" of gender roles often changes due to culture, the time period, and social mores and pressures. For instance, the idea of being a "female" during certain stages of history was to forage for food close to the camp, raise the children, look after the livestock, and be the solidifier of the community while the "male" hunted for food. Similarly, the idea of gender and its societal and cultural definition and actualization has evolved in the modern workplace (Baron, 2003; Unger, 2004).

Recently, scholars have focused on the study of gender roles in numerous aspects of contemporary society. Some of this research has concentrated on the way gender roles in leadership and management have changed, some to confirm the social evolution of women in society, and others to try to define the amount of alienation some experience within male dominated hierarchically structures. The very idea, it seems, of intrinsic gender roles are so ingrained in modern culture that individuals are not always aware of their sense of gender-structure, and that this lack of awareness manifests in the pervasiveness, elusiveness, and ambiguity of a pattern of thinking. Certainly, over the past five decades, women's roles have evolved drastically -- substantial increases in employment, responsibility, and power; the reduction in fertility and traditional family roles (Percheski, 2008). Additional, underlying sociological forces are also present, particularly in the business setting: the innate sense of masculine brotherhood and bonding and gender expectations thereof, and the unspoken but expected idea of male-mentoring that provides a comfortable succession plan for many male managers (Collinson and Hearn, 1994, 13, 15).

The "glass ceiling" clearly remains a powerful force within the workplace. Qualified women are blocked from upper-level managerial positions, but their absence at the very top skews the curve when they are clustered in the middle. It seems that it takes about 30% penetration of women managers to begin to more rapidly move the distribution effect, suggesting that now; women remain concentrated in workplace settings with lower wages -- in almost every industry. In fact, most of the research on the mobility of women actually focuses on high educated women in professional and managerial occupations. "Because professional and managerial occupations confer prestige, social influence, and economic rewards, women's successes in these fields may be particularly important for gender equality" (Percheski, p. 498).

In fact, research asks us to consider if there is a difference in the way local and national industries utilize women managers? Can women even bridge the managerial gap or does gender inequality vary so widely amongst demographic areas that research between them is not comparable? Using studies from 2003 and 2004, the authors found that indeed, gender inequality varies systematically across larger markets, although now that there are more women in the workplace, statistical analysis…