Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!usc!ucla-cs!uci-ics!rshapiro@bbn.com
From: rshapiro@bbn.com
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: capitalism and gender
Message-ID: <18351@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 21 Jun 89 00:58:54 GMT
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The naive faith in that capitalism will cure the pay differentials
between men and women is kind of charming, but hardly realistic. The
process is more "dialectic" (if you'll pardon the expression) than
that. As a particular kind of job becomes defined as a "woman's" job,
it's status and pay decrease, which lessens expectations and self
esteem of women entering the workforce, which lessens the likelihood
that wage demands will be made. Thus jobs which become identified as
women's jobs can safely pay less and offer less in the way of status
etc. The reason all of this can work so smoothly is that we still, as
a society, imagine that women don't really need to be in the
workforce, that they could, if they wanted, be doing (unpaid)
wife&mother work. Our tax structure favors this and the whole
motherhood ideology very strongly pushes in this direction.  So what's
the upshot of all of this? Wages can be kept lower, the female
workforce can be kept quiescent and yet the so-called women's work,
paid and unpaid, still gets done efficiently.

So much for the magic of the marketplace.