Attention now turns to American Sociologist Erik Olin Wright and his ‘Marxist model’ six-class schema. Wright distinguished between three owning classes who owned the means of production and exploited their property assets and the three non-owning classes whose skills and credentials were exploited to varying degrees (Devine 1998). However, this schema was expanded to twelve classes for Wright’s study on the labour force in Britain, Sweden and the U.S. In conclusion he found that the proletarians were the dominant group in the labour force consisting of approximately 40% and that this was a consequence of the proletarianisation of the middle class as a result of deskilling (Marshall 1988). The data collected by Wright did not include women for their own worth. Wright has constantly argued that the male workers and their female partners do not have divergent interests so thus the family is the unit of analysis (Devine 1998). In practice he did allocate class position for men and women but significantly did not include the unemployed in his data due to his theoretical framework and the likely inability for the respondent to recall, with accuracy, particular details relating to previous employment. Information deemed relevant for class allocation such as extent of autonomy and supervisory responsibilities would therefore be inaccurate (Marshall 1988). Wright’s findings found that women were concentrated in the working class (58.3%) and that men dominated the exploiting class categories. Cross-class families were not salient; most workers live in unambiguously working class families (Marshall 1998). These findings were found to be virtually the same across Britain and America. Critics of Wright include Dex (1995) who questions the worth of his class analysis in regards to his exclusion of women who are unemployed. Women’s employment is profoundly affected by their role in mothering and childcare (Reid 1998), because the majority of women leave the labour market for a number of years when they have children (Dale 1988).
Women cannot be assumed to be silent, passive or without social experience of their own. If they were to merely echo what their husbands would say, much work within the realms of social science would seem irrelevant and contradictory (Porter 1983). Our attention has hitherto concentrated on paid employment yet unpaid duties within the home interact with and shape paid employment (Marsh 1996). Numerous studies have shown that despite some shift towards equality, women still perform an unequal share of domestic labour in the home and childcare. Henwood et al (1987) found that women were still primarily responsible for domestic and caring tasks (Bilton et al 1996). It is therefore of no surprise that women are highly likely to enter into part-time employment so as to enable themselves to balance their home and working lives (Warren 2000). Warren’s research investigated why women work in part-time positions in which the bulk are low-paid and at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy. A study into women’s part-time employment was undertaken by Catherine Hakim (1991) who suggested that “part-timers and full-timers are qualitatively different types of women with different attitudes to working and home-life”. Bradley argues that once middle class women are relieved from domestic responsibilities they are in a position to compete with male colleagues and attack vertical segregation yet at the other end of the class spectrum, working class women remain trapped in low-paying, sex-typed jobs struggling to find employment which can be fitted in with household demands (Bradley 1989). An example of an occupation deemed as lower status is the traditional female occupation of clerical work classified somewhere in the intermediate class of Hope and Goldthorpe’s scheme (Marshall 1998). The occupational trajectory for this type of work has been constructed in a way that most women cannot hope for promotion. The clerical career structure works against women, as they cannot meet criteria laid down by management (Saunders 1990). It is therefore vital that opportunities are adapted to a women’s life –cycle with time-off for child bearing and part-time work while children are dependent (Rutter et al 1976). The structures in place for re-entry into the labour market must be suitable so as females can continue their career development otherwise men will move onwards and upwards into jobs which are defined as more skilled and women will remain in lower grades which are rewarded poorly and are held in much lower esteem (Saunders 1990).
Pioneer of class formation studies, John Goldthorpe, became embroiled in an argument over the unit of class analysis but stood his ground over charges of intellectual sexism similar to those accused of Wright (Marshall 1988). Goldthorpe’s work on social mobility and his complex class schema has arguably been the most helpful in identifying groupings of people who share similar amounts of authority and share roughly common life chances through their participation in the labour market (Saunders 1990). Despite Goldthorpe’s sterling reputation within academia, his opinion that married women’s employment is affected by the class experiences of their conjugal partners has raised considerable backlash, not least from Marshall and his colleagues (Marshall 1988). Goldthorpe’s conventional approach in his comparative social mobility study in 1992 employed the family as the unit of analysis and concluded that trends in women’s marital mobility proved how little difference there was between women’s and men’s experience of class mobility (Devine 1998). In response, Marshall and his colleagues allocated class positions according to individual market and work situations thus finding women were distributed across the class structure in different ways to men. However, in affinity to Goldthorpe, Marshall states that women share the same class positions as their husbands or occupy a lower position (Devine 1998).
Dale, prominent in class analysis and supporter of Marshall, relates the inequalities of the labour market to structured inequalities of society and suggests that categories based upon Weberian notions of market power explain this adequately. Dale’s belief is that the exploitative nature of the labour market, that is, ‘the market is intrinsically a structure of power, in which the possessions of certain attributes advantages some groupings of individuals relative to others’ (Giddens 1980), which systematically disadvantages women helps to understand why women are also powerless in the political arena and within the home. She argues that there exists a self-perpetuating cycle for women in which relations at work are wholly detrimental to relations outside the workplace thus she stipulates the importance attached to occupational identity and social stratification (Dale 1987). Under the premise that large sets of class related questions relating to women’s earnings and occupations need to be addressed, she developed an occupational classification specifically for women taking into account the variables of each occupation in each class (Devine 1998).
Marshall’s findings have sparked a plethora of agreement and hence spurred a positivity for the debate on the re-conceptualisation of the occupational and class classifications for individual social phenomena including women’s role in the labour force. Contemporary research indicates there is a dramatic trend in the realisation of the need for an approach which is wholly inclusive of men and women on equal terms since traditional social structures of society continue to be torn down. Once the trends and characteristics of women’s employment begin to fade into history, women’s absolute mobility chances may become equal to those of a comparable man.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Bilton et al (1996) Introductory Sociology. London: MacMillan Press
Bradley, H (1989) Men’s Work, Women’s Work. A Sociological History of the Sexual Division of Labour in Employment. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Devine, F (1997). Social Class in America and Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marsh, I (1996) Making Sense of Society. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
Marshall, G et al (1988). Social Class in Modern Britain. London: Hutchinson.
Porter, Marilyn (1983) Homework and Class Consciousness. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Reid, I (1998) Class In Britain. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rutter, M et al (1976) Cycles of Disadvantage. A Review of Research. London: Heinemann.
Saunders, P (1990) Social Class and Stratification. London: Routledge.
Journals
Cotter et al (1995) Occupational Gender: Desegregation in the 1980s. Work and Occupations 22:1 (pp3-21) California: Sage Publications.
Dale, A (1987) Occupational Inequality, Gender and Life Cycle. Work and Occuptions1:3 (pp326-351) California: Sage Publications.
Warren, T (2000) ‘Women in Low Status Part-Time Jobs: A Class and Gender Analysis’. Sociological Research Online, vol 4 no4,
WWW
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/nsbase/methods_quality/ns_sec/default.asp
www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/ssdataset.asp?vink=3471
