By JANEY STONE

[This article first appeared as a chapter in Rick Kuhn and Tom O'Lincoln (eds), Class and Class Conflict in Australia, Longman Australia, Melbourne, 1996.]

The Women’s Liberation Movement raised new and controversial issues in the 1960s and 1970s and won important social changes in the years that followed. These changes include an acceptance of many ideas once considered to be on the ‘fringe’ of public opinion. Consequently various feminist ideas are so widely held today that they are reproduced constantly and uncritically. This is the case with certain labour market theories which sharply distinguish the characteristics of women’s place in the labour market from those of men.

The assumption is that oppression is closely linked to gender segmentation in the labour market. Government publications, academic articles and more popular feminist theorising, all take this for granted. The Office of the Status of Women says, for example:

NSW Labour Council secretary Peter Samms argues in much the same terms that women ‘tend, historically, to be employed in lower paid occupations and industries, in areas that are notorious for exploitation and that are traditionally more difficult to negotiate for at an enterprise level.’ This sort of thinking derives conceptually from Margaret Power’s 1970s arguments about labour market segmentation:

Such arguments that women are ‘ghettoized’ and disadvantaged across the board, based on simplistic theories of labour market segregation, lead in turn to another argument: if women’s situation and interests are different, then logically female workers need to use different methods to solve their problems. Thus Di Bolton claims that these ‘separate women’s labour markets suggest different forms of disadvantage which require different strategies …’ The conclusion often drawn is that men and women workers have different interests; for example Bettina Cass argues that the ‘interests of workers in different sectors of the labour market are unlikely to converge’.

Of course, analysts who focus on women as weak, isolated and victimised are unlikely to suggest a resort to militant struggle; rather they commonly propose relying on the existing authorities, as when Vivian Griffin, an industrial officer with the Queensland nurses’ union argues: ‘I believe that the reality is that women do not have industrial strength in the work place, and that therefore industrial tribunals represent the major industrial avenue for economic equity for women.’ Similarly, Belinda Probert has suggested that even the coordinated effort involved in enterprise bargaining is difficult for many women, because the ‘nice’ nature of much of their work entails ‘smiling, being polite. I think once you are like that it is very difficult to use industrial tactics’. Such writers commonly argue that women have to base their strategies not on their own actions, but rather on assistance from others.

In this chapter I will look at many of the mainstream propositions about the position of women in the work force and demonstrate that while some of the arguments are more or less correct, others are incorrect or outdated. I will argue an alternative view from the conventional one. The oppression that women experience in capitalist society includes discrimination in employment, but this does not lead to a fundamental cleavage between the male and female labour markets; women are not always ‘ghettoized’, victimised and on the defensive. Class divides women (as do many other factors), while women workers can be powerful through industrial struggle, often alongside their male fellow workers. Such an analysis suggests a very different approach to fighting women’s oppression generally. The argument will be strongly empirical with substantial use of statistics. Space precludes a comprehensive analysis; this is rather an exploratory discussion intended to challenge conventional thinking on some of the issues.

The idea that women are concentrated into a small range of jobs is so widespread as to almost be a truism. Here is a typical comment from a government publication:

A trade union publication similarly contends: ‘Most women are employed in personal services, clerical and sales work. Men by contrast work in a wide range of occupations, and dominate trades and managerial positions.’ But how true is this? Let us examine the statistics.

Table 5.1 shows the distribution of men and women into the major occupational categories. The four most important occupations for women (in order) are clerks, sales and personal service workers, professionals and labourers. We find that 68.5% are concentrated into three occupations, or 80.6% into four. The top male occupations are trades, labourers, managers/administrators and professional, resulting in 54.2% in three occupations or 67.9% in four.

Overall, women are more concentrated than men and some jobs are different. But we should note that while the range of options for women is limited, so is the range of options for men; they don’t really have ‘a wide range of occupations’. Nor do the statistics demonstrate the absolute cleavage suggested by a Victorian Trades Hall Council publication, which speaks of ‘women and men doing different jobs’. Actually, of the four most important occupations for each gender, two are the same: professionals and labourers. The reality is that quite a few women do the same jobs as men.

The argument doesn’t stop there however. Looking more closely at the statistics we find occupational distribution is not uniform within each gender.

Table 5.2, derived from the 1986 census (more recent data was unavailable), shows the extent of occupational segmentation for different groups of employed. For each country, the table gives the percentage in the three largest occupational categories. We find that:

• men from Greece, Italy, Vietnam and Yugoslavia are more concentrated than Australian and UK born women;
• Australian and UK born women are more concentrated than their respective men. However for Greeks the degree of concentration is similar, while for people from Italy, Vietnam and Yugoslavia, women are less concentrated than their respective men.

Australian born women also tend to work in different jobs from many migrant women. The top three occupational categories for Australian born women in 1986 were clerks, sales and personal services workers, and professionals, whilst for those from Vietnam and Yugoslavia the top three groups were labourers, plant operators and clerks.

So women are not always more concentrated than men, nor do they consistently work in different jobs. The job differences among women are at least as great as those between the genders. Now let’s look at a second, closely related notion. When one academic described most women as ‘being concentrated in almost wholly female-dominated occupations and industries’, he saw no need to substantiate it. The point is important because if it is true, then women mostly work with other women, and one might conclude that female workers have different interests from male workers. But is it true?

Table 5.3 presents occupations grouped into categories accor

ding to the proportion of the work force in each that is female. The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines a male dominated occupation as one in which women are less than 20%. Thus the column labelled 0-19% includes all workers in occupations where the work force contains under 20% of women. We find that 46.7% of all men work in these male dominated occupations. The column labelled 80-100% contains workers where over 80% of the work force is female. A total of 31.3% of women work in these female dominated occupations. The table shows therefore that the remainder, a majority of both women (68.7%) and men (53.3%), work in occupations not dominated by either gender.

Let’s look at the question in another way. Table 5.4 shows the current distribution of women and men across industries. The most important industries for females are community services, trade, finance and recreation. Women predominate in only two: community services and recreation. In finance and trade, females are disproportionately represented (although not by very much). The fifth most important industry for women is manufacturing, in which men predominate. Women do tend to work in industries in which they are disproportionately represented, but this doesn’t necessarily lead to them working mainly with other women. In fact four of the five most important industries for each sex are the same, although the order is different.

I have presented these statistics at a broad level of aggregation as does most of the literature. It could be argued that we need to break categories down further; if we do so a similar picture emerges.

Conventional wisdom has it that women dominate in manufacturing areas like food and beverages, or textiles and clothing. Table 5.5 shows that they are approximately a third in the former and only a little over half of the latter. In Health and Community Services women are three-quarters of the work force, but there are still 166 000 men in that industry.

Occupations which are either overwhelmingly male or female do of course exist. Those with the smallest proportion of women include electrical powerlines tradespersons (0.5%), locomotive drivers (0.6%) and crane operators (0.6%). The jobs with the fewest males include dental nurses (1.2%), office secretaries and stenographers (1.9%) and typists and typist clerks (2.0%). But these are extremes, not the whole picture. Although there is a tendency for women to work in occupations and industries in which they predominate, we must not turn a tendency into an absolute. Although some women work mainly with other women, many others work in the same jobs as men. Nor is the formal job title the whole story. Workers in different jobs may be contributing towards the same product, and this cooperation in production points to common interests. With union amalgamation, workers of both sexes are increasingly likely to be in the same union; and with modern management systems such as cellular manufacturing, in the same work team.

This notion is important partly because the conventional female role is conceived as passive and submissive, but also because it is a crucial proposition for those, such as Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle, who want to argue that ‘gender is fundamental to the way work is organised’.

But is most women’s work associated with housework and nurturing? Let us take the statistics first. Looking at industrial categories (Table 5.4) we find otherwise. Of the top industry groupings for women, perhaps community services and recreation can be partly identified with the female role. But in what sense can trade, finance or manufacturing? If we look at occupational groupings (Table 5.1), the argument at first seems more credible. The top four occupations are clerks, sales and personal service workers, labourers and professionals. Since a large percentage of the professionals are teachers (49%), it might appear that we could identify all the categories but labourers with the female role. But such a view is not really sustainable. To begin with, if these jobs are really linked to the female domestic role, why are there so many male teachers, cleaners and even nurses? But there is also a more fundamental objection, which concerns the assumptions make about the nature of traditional ‘female’ jobs.

Let us look at clerical work in some detail. It is conventionally portrayed as wifelike, as in this passage by Belinda Probert and Bruce Wilson:

We have here a conceptual slide ¾ from clerical workers in general we are suddenly talking about secretaries! Actually the typing pools of the recent past resembled factory work more than domestic tasks. Today’s office worker still operates machines (such as computers) and carries out repetitive and limited tasks with little control over the purpose of the work, its pace or conditions. Nor is other clerical work, such as ordinary administrative work in the public service where males and females perform much the same duties, derivative of domestic labour. Even in the case of secretaries, the ‘wifely and motherly tasks’ are a minor part of their jobs. Probert and Wilson also assume they are done for men. But in many large work places middle management is approximately half female.

Even where there is a historical link between women’s domestic role and their work, this may be in decline. Technological change means that today’s nurse doesn’t spend most of her time cooling fevered brows and demurely carrying out (male) doctors’ orders, but rather applies substantial technical and administrative skills unrelated to the traditional female role. Moreover many registered nurses, while they do follow doctors’ instructions, are themselves supervisors of state enrolled nurses, domestic and other staff. In any case, they may be taking orders from the approximately half of young doctors who are female.

Commercial and industrial cleaning tasks may sometimes be similar to housework, but the social context is different. A housewife can organise the day herself and to a degree set her own goals. There is no time limit; indeed ‘a woman’s work is never done’. By contrast cleaners in paid employment must do the work within a set time, and have no control over the work process or its objectives. Moreover, work inside the home is socially isolating, while paid employment is generally carried out in cooperative groups, opening up possibilities for class organisation. A similar argument applies to personal service workers.

Conventional notions of gender roles have certainly been used to manipulate women. For example, the idea that women worked for ‘pin money’ rather than to support themselves or their families helped employers to maintain lower wages or to exclude women from certain jobs. But male workers also suffer in such circumstances. The three lowest paid industries for women are also the lowest paid for men. The forgone wages don’t go to male employees but into the coffers of the employers.

The female role has also been used to justify bringing women into new industries. In the late 19th century it was argued that typing was like playing the piano, and therefore specially suited to women’s abilities! This was despite the fact that men had done typing initially ¾ its ‘feminine’ qualities weren’t discovered until women started doing the work on a mass production basis. So if we are to understand the relationship between women’s domestic role and the work place we must distinguish appearance from reality. With piano playing and typing, it was not the (spurious) association with their role that led to women becoming typists, but the labour needs of a new economic sector. In this century, Hitler imposed his children-church-kitchen ideology in Germany precisely at a time when women were entering the work force in large numbers. Although the ideology played a role in keeping women oppressed, this was not the same as actually keeping them in the kitchen.

Analysts often suggest women as a group are at a major disadvantage relative to men because there is ‘little in the way of training, defined career paths or opportunity for women to work their way up or out of [poor] jobs’. Lynn Beaton puts great emphasis on this point, arguing that training ‘is one of the factors that distinguishes female employment from male employment. That is most traditional male occupations involve formal accredited training and most traditional female occupations do not.’ Elaborating in another publication she writes:

Beaton assumes firstly that the skilled tradesman is the typical male worker and secondly that his supposedly privileged position is due to formally recognised skills. But while only 5.4% of people with trade certificates are women, only about a quarter of all men have a trade certificate (see Table 5.6). The typical male worker is not a skilled tradesman. Actually about half of workers of both sexes lack any qualifications and are disadvantaged by lack of formal accredited training.

Anyway, trade certificates are not the only form of post secondary training. As Table 5.6 shows, while women are less likely to have trade qualifications they are more likely to have other certificates. While they are clearly behind in apprenticeship trades they are ahead in other areas.

The school retention rate for girls is actually higher than for boys and continues to increase: in the ten years to 1993, the girls’ rate increased from 44% to 81% and the boys’ from 38% to 72%. Studies suggest that girls are generally outperforming boys by the last year of secondary school. In 1993 girls’ tertiary entrance scores were seventeen marks higher than boys, compared to 1.6 marks in 1981. In Victoria, girls outperform boys across the board, including in traditional male fields. Girls’ superior performance has actually generated calls for more education funding and research for boys.

The Australian Manufacturing Council claims that at school, girls ‘are still concentrated within a small range of subjects, mainly the humanities … This lack of participation within the sciences has significant effects’, implying a huge gap between girls and boys. Firstly, this is not factually correct: girls study a wider range of subjects than boys. And secondly, a tendency has again been turned into an absolute. In Victoria in 1986, 57.4% of girls in year 12 did at least one science subject compared to 58.5% of boys ¾ essentially the same proportion. For mathematics there was a difference: 50.7% of girls compared to 70.1% of boys. But even here, although fewer girls than boys studied maths, still a majority of girls studied at least one maths subject. And those girls who do science subjects actually outperform boys. Although fewer girls than boys study physics, 84% of Victorian girls achieved grades above C in year 12 in 1993, compared to only 68% of boys.

A 1992 study by the Department of Employment, Education and Training showed that class background is a more important factor. It found high levels of failure at school amongst teenagers from Melbourne’s working class western suburbs, compared to high levels of achievement in the middle/upper class inner eastern suburbs. There was an ‘enormous overlap in performance within genders’ and for physics students, ‘girls from professional/managerial homes … do better than almost all boys’.

At the tertiary level, by 1993 more than half (53.5%) of all university students were women. We often hear that at university girls take soft options while boys take ‘career-oriented’ degree courses, but the statistics do not support such a fundamental cleavage. Well over half of university students of both sexes are taking similar courses. In Victoria in 1986, 72% of women and 61% of men were studying arts, science or economics. Of the ‘career-oriented’ degree courses, women in 1993 constituted 47.8% of enrolments in law, 74.5% in health and 55.9% in veterinary science. These fields of study cannot be called soft options or non-technical. Female enrolment as a percentage of all enrolment increased in all fields of study between 1979 and 1993, with the biggest increases in architecture (15% to 34%) and business administration/economics (21% to 43%).

Overt exclusion of girls is no longer the main method of discrimination in education. They are admitted to virtually all courses, and arguments such as lack of toilets are rarely used today to keep girls from traditionally male apprenticeship trades. Although there is a tendency for girls to study science less than boys and sexist prejudices remain amongst employers and workers, the lower numbers of female workers in occupations such as engineering or the building industry is due more to socialisation and cultural factors in the occupation than lack of formal training.

Many authors attribute women’s lower average incomes to poor training and skills. However it is a fallacy that formal qualifications generally account for higher incomes. Men with a trades certificate earned only 12% more than those without post-school qualifications in 1989-90, and this was down on their 15% advantage in 1968-69. In fact the relative advantage of all formal qualifications declined over this time period. Even though men with a degree earned 79% more than those with no qualifications in 1989-90 this was much reduced from 138% in 1968-69. In areas of low socioeconomic status, a given level of education now delivers much less income than before.

The occupational category ‘managers and administrators’ is often given an honorary billing as a ‘skilled’ group to account for the higher status, income and power of its occupants. But are they really more skilled? Only 46% of men in this group have any formal qualifications, similar to the proportion in the total male work force, and only 30% have university qualifications. An example from England, where a manager and his personal assistant swapped jobs for a day is illustrative. Whereas the assistant had no difficulty with the manager’s jobs, which simply involved carrying out the tasks she had prepared for him, he was totally unable to cope with hers, particularly the technology. The idea that the boss has special skills which ordinary workers lack is simply part of the ideology by which capitalism cements class divisions.

It is true that many women’s skills are undervalued or unrecognised, but this is not simply a matter of prejudice. Frequently the boss is well aware of the real skill levels. A manager in the electronics industry said this about a female process worker of fourteen years’ experience who was still paid at the base rate: ‘Julie over there has worked here for years. She knows how to operate everything on the floor … she could run this place.’ He knew Julie was skilled, but paid her less to sustain profits. Her disadvantage related not to skill but to exploitation. In a recent interview, the boss of resources company North Ltd said his secretary, ‘could probably do a better job as chief executive of North than I could’. Here the important division is not skill level but class.

In a sexist society, women will tend to be in positions of lower status and power. However, much contemporary writing implies something beyond a tendency. Lynn Beaton cites primary teachers, ‘the large majority of whom are women and yet the large majority of school principles are men,’ while Kim Windsor says women in manufacturing ‘tend to be clustered in clerical positions or machining and process work. Very few are found in middle management or executive positions.’ Bettina Cass generalises in this way:

Such statements create a simplistic image of men bossing women. But actually things are more complicated. Table 5.7 shows the situation in manufacturing.

The positions most likely to involve controlling other people are managers and professionals. While it is true that the majority of these are male (81%), the majority of the subordinate positions are also male (71%). Or put another way, it is true that only a small proportion of women are managers or professionals (10%). The number of men is higher but is still a very low proportion (17%). Few women are in ‘middle management or executive positions’, but so are few men. The vast majority of both women and men are concentrated at the ‘lower’ end occupying subordinate positions.

Looking at teaching, we find most primary school principals are male (82%), but there is a substantial number of female primary vice-principals (40%) who are thus in positions of power over other teachers. Furthermore, principals constitute under 15% of all male primary teachers: the vast majority of men in primary schools are in subordinate positions.

One problem with much of the argument about the concentration of women in low status jobs is that it assumes supervisory and management positions are more desirable. Not only does most writing about career paths take this for granted, it also assumes that aiming for the top is both feasible and desirable. Actually there are few positions at the top, so reaching them is not a realistic aspiration for most workers. But equally important, not everyone wants to be a boss ¾ and why should they? Power in a capitalist enterprise means taking responsibility for the exploitative process. The best way to create more interesting jobs would be to change the nature of work itself.

Assumptions that women are invariably at the bottom of the job hierarchy are often linked to the argument that they are last hired and first fired, and generally have a more marginal attachment to the work force. Such arguments need to be strictly qualified. In the postwar decades, the female unemployment rate was consistently higher than the male rate. But in the recent recession the picture changed. In the three years to January 1993, the female rate only rose from 6.7% to 10.3%, while the male rate more than doubled from 5.6% to 11.9% and a larger proportion of men are long term unemployed. At the same time women’s employment has been growing faster than men’s. Between 1976 and 1990, women accounted for seven of every ten new jobs for full-time non-managerial employees. As to being first fired, it was men who proved to be the more vulnerable in the wave of ‘downsizing’ that swept Victoria in the early 1990s. They made up almost two-thirds of those retrenched, comprising 13% of all male workers and 8% of all female workers, a picture in marked contrast to the early 1980s when married women bore the brunt of retrenchments.

Part-time work can also be a form of hidden unemployment, for those who would prefer full-time jobs. The part-time work force is certainly overwhelmingly female: 75.1% in 1993. But this has declined from 78.4% in 1983, while the male share rose from 21.6% to 24.8%. Similarly for casual work: the proportion of females was 61% in 1992, but the rate of increase has been greater for men (17% for women between 1988 and 1992, compared to 32% for men). Thus, assertions that women are an increasing proportion of these two categories are incorrect.

Space precludes a detailed discussion of part-time and casual work, but let’s consider one further point. Higher part-time and casual rates are often presented as evidence of women’s more marginal attachment to the work force. This is not necessarily so. While many employers benefit from the greater flexibility, so do many workers. For example part-time hours allow women to return earlier after childbirth; thus their attachment to the work force may be greater not less.

Unemployment statistics can be misleading due to hidden unemployment. This point is emphasized in the literature, but often overlooked are other factors which cause greater differences in unemployment rates than gender does. For instance, people from non-English speaking countries have a much higher unemployment rate than those born in Australia. In 1994, the rate for men from such backgrounds was 13.1% compared to 8.1% for Australian born women. Within metropolitan Melbourne, rates in 1991 varied from 7% in affluent Brighton, Camberwell and Eltham to much higher rates in such working class areas as Footscray (22%), Sunshine (20%) Fitzroy and Richmond (both 19%). This again shows the importance of class in determining social experience.

Bob Gregory and Boyd Hunter have shown that when neighbourhoods are ranked by socioeconomic status (SES) there is a widening gap between the highest and lowest status areas in employment and income. Men and women in the top neighbourhoods have quite different experiences to those in the lowest. In the top half, the proportion of women employed increased about 10% between 1976 and 1991. In the bottom half women’s employment fell by 40%, while for men there was a return to the 1930s pattern of substantial ghettoes of non-employment. In fact in low SES areas, the employed proportion of the male population in every age group is lower than the employed proportion of females from high SES areas. While women’s income has increased overall, inequality of incomes has widened between different groups of women and in society as a whole.

In Australia about a third (34%) of all employers are women. Female-owned small businesses have increased at three times the rate of men’s, with the fastest growth in traditional male areas such as construction, transport and manufacturing. About one-third of small and medium-sized businesses are now owned by women and another 28% are owned jointly with men. A recent study also found that women in small businesses actually have a higher success rate in applying for a bank loan. Nearly three-quarters rejected the idea that they were disadvantaged as a woman in trying to run a small business.

The process hasn’t gone so far in big business: women are only 3% of all company directors. But a 1992 study showed that 17% of the boards surveyed had at least one, up from 11% the previous year. They are now on the boards of big companies with nothing of the traditionally ‘feminine’ about them, including Caltex, Esso, James Hardie Industries, Lend Lease, Western Mining, Brambles and News Corporation. In the USA, 60% of boards now have women.

Many women are now in power and decision making positions. Across all industries 27% of managers and administrators are women. In the Commonwealth public service in 1994 they made up 54% of middle managers in the administrative service compared to 40% five years earlier, and 26% of senior officer ranks compared to 18%. In the Senior Executive Service they have risen from 7% in 1987 to 17% in 1994, with almost 30% of new entrants in the latter year being female. Although the proportion of women in Australian parliaments is still small at 14.5%, that is double the figure of the 1980s; one in five of the federal Senate in 1992 was female and one in eight local councils were headed by women.

The glass ceiling has slowed the movement of women into the upper echelons but not prevented it. For rank and file workers of both sexes, the decision makers in management controlling their lives include women as well as men. Just as the working class contains both genders, so do the ruling class and its agents.

Consequently we are already able to answer the question posed by a panel at the international women’s meeting in Nairobi in 1985: ‘What if women ruled the world? Would it be any different?’ The conventional view, as expressed eight years later by the International Labour Organisation, is that ‘an increase in the number of women at the top would make a huge difference in the quality of decision making’:

But do powerful women ‘speak with a different voice’? Alice Walton of Wal-Mart stores (worth $5.4 billion) and Estée Lauder (worth $3.5 billion) are famous not for their ‘social ethos of development’ but for making money. Margaret Thatcher attacked the working conditions and welfare of British workers of both sexes indiscriminately, while an Indian woman at the Nairobi conference drew attention to the ‘painful experience’ with certain female rulers, such as Indira Gandhi who imposed forced sterilisation on tens of thousands of Indian women.

As early as 1983, an article in the New York Times Magazine complained that successful women were not being ‘as gentle with one another as we once hoped we’d be’ and were not displaying the expected ‘biologic tenderness’. Rather we find the Harvard Business Review advising top managers:

This could be written about Australia, where the architect and consultant Rita Avdiev declares: ‘My contribution to the feminist movement is going out and doing what men do’, while Suzanne Evans, owner of a Tasmanian logging business, ‘had to toughen up a lot to be a boss and learn to hire and fire’. Or take Robin Greenburg, self proclaimed leader of the ‘women’s financial revolution’, who promised investors her company Western Women would be a secure place for funds, an financial institution that would cater for the special needs of women. Her clients lost about $6 million while she bought herself clothes, jewellery and furniture.

These women act much like powerful men because they have the same class interests. When The Good Weekend ran a series on powerful women, the introductory blurb claimed that they ‘present a very different profile to that of their male counterparts’, but the potted histories revealed similar social backgrounds and political career paths. A report on small business in Australia notes that ‘male and female entrepreneurs display increasingly similar performance and characteristics where, in the past, there have been significant differences’. When in power their decisions are no more in the interests of workers or the community than those of male bosses.

Consider recent ‘reforms’ in local government. City of Sydney Chief Executive Officer Katie Lahey was ‘smart, tough and not from Sydney’. Lahey made the conventional claims that women tend to prefer consensus but her ‘very personal approach to managing the staff’ meant announcing major cuts at her first staff meeting. Elizabeth Proust (CEO, City of Melbourne) didn’t even bother to present a caring front. Her initial cut of 20%, was followed by a reduction of 1600 employees to 300, major sell-offs and contracting out. Early on she announced that hers was the first city government in Australia to adopt a ‘hard-headed business structure’, and on leaving boasted that she had turned an ‘employee culture’ into an ‘employer culture’. Such experiences led an unnamed woman of ‘power and influence’ quoted in the Good Weekend to remark: ‘All this talk about the feminisation of business and sisters-together is nonsense. We [as a group of powerful women] can be deadly.’

Even where female bosses are consultative, it won’t necessarily benefit women workers since, as Elizabeth Nosworthy of AOTC says, ‘At heart, all business is business …’ The push to promote more women and make use of their supposedly different approach simply reflects new profit-driven management strategies. The Department of Industrial Relations says today’s managers ‘need to adopt a less gladiatorial approach’ to improve productivity, while a recent Australian Women as Leaders conference advocated ‘leading by example, empowering self-managing teams and … giving encouragement not orders’. The Harvard Business Review argues that women’s ‘less structured and more consensual style’ is better suited to the demands of business in the 90s. Two Victorian architects who used the ‘team attitude’ in their small business reported it had ‘paid off handsomely in terms of productivity, loyalty and morale, and for the firm’s public reputation’.

Even if female managers do help open up opportunities for other women, these are mostly useful for a small number of careerists; if workers benefit it is a by-product of the drive to meet corporate goals. As one government report says:

Despite the nod towards rewarding workers, the real agenda is the ‘competitive edge’. As another publication remarks:

This is a program to prop up capitalism under the impetus of the economic crisis: increase productivity by increasing the exploitation of workers ("a more efficient and flexible work force") and improve Australian capital’s international competitiveness. It requires an on-going attack on workers, through various government industrial relations strategies ranging from award restructuring through enterprise bargaining, of which new training methods are a part. Far from benefiting as governments and company managers push these changes through, women workers have seen their living standards and working conditions deteriorate ¾ as have working men.

The way writers understand the female labour market will inform their proposals for dealing with discrimination and oppression. From Margaret Power onward, analyses based on simplistic models of labour market segmentation have linked the labour market position of women to a low capacity for industrial struggle. Lynn Beaton writes:

The argument that women fall behind when militant sections of the work force take action is factually incorrect. Take wages. It is sometimes argued that in periods of militant collective bargaining, gender wage differentials begin to increase. But in the period 1968-75, which included the greatest postwar surge of wages militancy, the gap narrowed considerably. The process continued for a time thereafter as formal equal pay was institutionalised. In more recent years, characterised mostly by defensive struggles or passivity under the Accord and enterprise bargaining, the female to male ratio has changed relatively little.

The proportion of women in unions at 31.3% is lower than that of men (37.9 %). However, women’s participation in the work force has grown all this century, so it is not surprising that their unionisation rate lags somewhat behind men. It takes time to organise. But the results can be explosive. The major postwar change occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. Overall female union membership rose by 50% between 1970 and 1975, while male membership rose by 12%. Women moved into poorly organised service jobs, while white-collar occupations were losing their elite status and becoming ‘industrial’. In the public service, for example, proletarianisation and feminisation went together. The number of female staff in the Department of Social Security (DSS) doubled from 1976 to 1983, while the number of males rose by about half. These were also the years in which DSS saw its first industrial action: work bans in 1977, a public service wide strike in 1979 over anti-union legislation, and the prolonged DSS strike of 1981.

Nursing still retains its quintessentially ‘feminine’ image: the lady with the lamp cooling fevered brows. How could such a being withdraw her labour? In the 1960s student nurses worked a full day for a pittance and attended lectures out of hours; until 1984 the Royal Australian Nursing Federation had a no-strike clause in its rules. Yet this period saw mass struggles among nurses. In April 1975, 4000 angry nurses demanding improved staffing and pay stormed the Victorian parliament singing, ‘We shall not be moved’. During the 1970s and 1980s there were pickets, bans, rallies and strikes in NSW, Queensland and Victoria, culminating in a seven week strike in Victoria in 1986. Union membership climbed steadily during the dispute, and the nurses proved adept at supposedly ‘male’ industrial tactics.

Other ‘female’ occupations, such as teachers and shop assistants, organised strikes in the 1970s and 80s. As with wages, the more recent decline in struggle is due not to gender but to the incorporation of unions under the Accord and the pitfalls of enterprise bargaining.

This chapter has shown that women tend to work in certain areas, often with other women, but also frequently alongside men. They tend to be disadvantaged, reflecting the sexism of society; but a majority of men are also disadvantaged relative to a ruling class which contains both males and females. Industrial weakness is not automatically women’s lot. Rather than having to rely on assistance from above, women workers have unionised and engaged in militant struggle on their own behalf.

Ultimately the empirical facts are only an aid to resolving a political argument. Seeing women as ‘ghettoized’ and invariably downtrodden leads logically to a stress on their separate interests as against men and to a search for separate strategies. We have seen that such strategies tend to be elitist and to rely on existing structures. They represent an adaptation to the capitalist class society which is the source of oppression, not only for women but for so many other groups. A limited focus on ending women’s disadvantage in certain areas of the competitive labour market avoids questioning the justice of the competitive framework itself. It is not surprising, therefore, that the power brokers of capitalism have become increasingly eager to embrace contemporary feminism. The Harvard Business Review, for example, has embraced ‘Women as a business imperative’, because:

Have we really fought all these years to gladden the hearts of stockholders? The alternative is an approach which locates the oppression of women in a wider social context, and seeks to unite workers of both sexes in a challenge to class structures as well as glass ceilings.

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