Dividing line between sexes becoming blurred in workplace
By Shelly Simonds Gender roles in the workforce are changing for both men and women, breaking down the traditional stereotypes which had delineated the work of each sex, according to an ANU researcher. Dr Lisa Adkins, Research Fellow in the Sociology Program, RSSS, said people often think of the restructured, flexible work place in terms of women's work. But men are also entering into new employment territory, especially the service sector, raising interesting questions about gender in the workplace. "Jobs were much more sex stereotyped in the 1950s. Today there's much more blurring of sexual difference, women can perform traditionally masculine workplace acts and men traditionally feminine acts," she said. Dr Adkins said the meaning of gender is being restructured at work so that instead of defining work for men and women, gender is up for grabs. This process is part of the "cultural feminisation" of the work place. Dr Adkins' research has found evidence of this cultural feminisation in low-paying, casualised service-sector employment, where men have increasingly adopted the traditionally feminine values of body aesthetics. While researching her PhD at Lancaster University, she found appearance - such as good looks, clear skin, and trim figure - was a key labour resource in growth employment areas such as tourism for men and women. Although men were able to use these aesthetic criteria to their advantage, they were also better able to balance the need for proper appearance with other job skills. "Questions of aesthetics didn't totalise men. They could also emphasise other skills," Dr Adkins said. Women had a harder time than men selling personal attributes other than appearance to potential employers, she found. Dr Adkins' current research looks at higher-end service sectors like law and accounting, to see if similar trends toward work place cultural feminisation can be documented. Her work is part of an increased focus in the Sociology Program on employment issues, said Prof Judy Wajcman, also based in Sociology. "These areas of research have been rather underdeveloped in Australia where research on employment has been primarily done in either industrial relations or business studies. "We feel taking a broader perspective to encompass social, political and cultural theory will further the study of employment in Australia," Prof Wajcman said. Prof Wajcman's latest book, Managing Like a Man: Men and Women in Corporate Management, will be released by Allen and Unwin in November. Dr Adkins is writing a book on issues of cultural feminisation in the workplace.