Changing the gender paradigm: it’s women’s work

We're expecting a new childin our family shortly. While I was in the US recently, I looked for baby clothes. To my irritation, everything from newborn and up was sex specific, and so extreme that to dress an infant in clothes designed for the sex that it was not, would have to be an act of irony or willful resistance.

I approached the assistant. I don't know whether the baby is a boy or a girl, I said, don't you have something neutral? Not much, she told me. Practically everyone finds out what they're having.

This is an unnerving example of how advances in technology contribute to the construction of gender. Now that parents can discover their baby's sex before birth, gendering begins in utero. The foetus carries the burden of gender expectations before it has even started nudging its mother.

In the social process of gendering newborns, the imperative remains to make clear role differentiation between boys and girls. Research shows that little girls are far more likely to be praised for how they look, for example, while little boys are praised for what they accomplish. The way they both are dressed reflects this. Girls are also seen as more fragile and vulnerable than boys, and more in need of protection.

No one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation of why in our culture sexual difference is synonymous with gender inequality. While the position that men and women are different is intuitive, why is it acceptable to use that difference to devalue women in the workplace or anywhere else?

To be different is not to be lesser than. It's still the norm in much of the working world for women to be perceived as being of less value than men, for no reason other than the gender values imposed on us because of our sex. This attitude is similar to the social construction of race that allows prejudice to be framed as "natural" superiority.

In the workplace, the reification of the myth of devaluation based on gender roles has created a situation in which so-called "feminized" skills are poorly paid and under-valued.

Workers in the social and community sector, for example, are paid little more than minimum wage, in spite of many of them holding tertiary qualifications. There is no inherent reason to value so-called women's work less than men's. Yet, work to do with caring for vulnerable others, that is largely carried out by women, does not attract equal rates of pay.

The reason for unequal pay in this sector, according to Fair Work Australia, is that the jobs are overwhelmingly held by women. This is a chicken and egg question: which comes first, the fact that the jobs are done by women, or the fact that the jobs involve physical and emotional engagement with the old, the ill, and the vulnerable, and as a society we do not value the old, the ill and the vulnerable and by extension, those who care for them?

Perhaps one of the problems is that we don't value caring, whether it's done by women or men?

However, women also continue to be under-represented in boardrooms, and in the exalted realms of CEO's. According to US research company Catalyst, women they interviewed believe that male stereotyping and preconceptions account for some 52% of this under-representation, while some 49% point the finger at inhospitable corporate cultures and the exclusion of women from formal networks as reasons for the dearth of talented women in top jobs. That there are talented women is indisputable, and there is evidence in this report that companies with women at the helm are at times staggeringly successful.

So what is going wrong and what can be done about it?