Product Description
A prestigious and successful book in the "Sociology For a New Century" series, this Second Edition addresses issues regarding women and men at work from a comparative, historical, global perspective, and in doing so, connects social science to the wider concerns of students seeking to make sense of our dramatically changing world. This book examines how gender has shaped the meaning and performance of work. Throughout, the book links theory and evidence-statistics that summarise work outcomes for women and men, research about the effects of workers' sex on their jobs, and accounts of the experiences of real workers. It demonstrates the patterns of sex inequality and segregation as well as the gendered nature of contemporary workplace cultures.By putting evidence about the experiences of today's workers in historical perspective, the author's also highlight continuities with the past and illuminate change. This book provides an extremely useful and critical summary of economic theories of gender differences in workplace rewards.
About the Author
Barbara Reskin is a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and, when this book went to press, President of the American Sociological Association. As a student, she supported herself in a series of female-dominated clerical jobs in such disparate settings as radio and TV stations, trucking firms, temp agencies, insurance companies, and universities. The fact that most jobs for women were boring, low-paid and deadend encouraged her to get a PhD. Her research examines how workers' sex, race, and ethnicity affect their work opportunities. She is especially interested in strategies that minimize discrimination, the focus of her most recent book, The Realities of Affirmative Action. Irene Padavic is an Associate Professor at Florida State University. Before becoming a professor, she worked in a variety of service-sector jobs: candy seller at a movie theater, waitperson, telephone solicitor, door-to-door promoter of real estate, paralegal, and marketing researcher. Her dissertation project provided experience in the industrial sector, where she worked as a coal-handler in a power plant. Her research has been in the areas of gender and work, race differences in campus peer culture, economic restructuring, and changes in childcare arrangements.
