Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
makes brick-making a job for women and boys in Bali and a job for men and robots
in the United States?
Does being a brick-maker mean different things in each of
these places?
Throughout the world, different cultures and societies have different
ideas about what jobs are appropriate for men and what jobs are appropriate
for women. Geographers, especially those who study gender, realize people
have created divisions of labor that are
gendered
. Geographers Mona Domosh
and Joni Seager defi ne
gender
as “a culture's assumptions about the differences
between men and women: their 'characters,' the roles they play in society, what
they represent.” Divisions of labor are one of the clearest ways in which societ-
ies are gendered.
In Bali, brick-making is still done by hand by boys and women. The industry is
not technologically sophisticated, and bricks are made one by one. Even beyond
brick-making facilities, most of the factory jobs in Indonesia and in poorer coun-
tries of the world go to women instead of men. Factory managers in these areas
often hire women over men because they see women as an expendable labor pool.
Researcher Peter Hancock studied gender relations and women's work in facto-
ries in Indonesia and reported, “Research in different global contexts suggests that
factory managers employ young women because they are more easily exploited,
less likely to strike or form membership organizations, are comparatively free
from family responsibilities, and more adept at doing repetitive and delicate tasks
associated with assembly line work.”
In many societies in poorer countries, families see young women as fi nan-
cial supporters of their families. Thus, many women migrate from rural areas and
travel to cities or central industrial locales (such as export production zones—
EPZs) to produce and earn a wage that is then sent home to support the schooling
of their brothers and younger sisters (until these girls are also old enough to leave
home and work). In Indonesia and in neighboring Malaysia and the Philippines,
many women temporarily migrate to the Middle East to work as domestics: cook-
ing, cleaning, and providing childcare in order to send money home to support the
family. In the United States, rarely does an oldest daughter migrate to the city to
labor in a factory so she can pay for her younger brothers' schooling.
Although public education in the United States is free and open to boys and
girls, American society still has gendered divisions of labor. The few women who
work in brick-manufacturing facilities in the United States are typically assigned to
tasks that require little lifting—such as gluing pieces of the various types of brick
the company produces to boards so that salespeople can use them as samples. A
long-standing assumption in American society is that work requiring heavy lifting
needs to be completed by men and that good-paying, unionized jobs need to go to
men because men are the “heads of the household.” Times are changing and gen-
dered work is being increasingly challenged, but assumptions about gender still
have an impact on the labor market.
Society creates boxes in which we put people and expect them to live. These
boxes are in a sense stereotypes embodying assumptions we make about what is
expected
from
or
assumed about
women, men, members of certain races or eth-
nic groups, and people with various sexual preferences. By creating these boxes,
society can assign entire professions or tasks to members of certain categories,
for example “women's work,” thereby gendering the division of labor. Places,
notably the kitchen of a home or a store in the mall, can also be gendered. People
are constantly negotiating their personal identities, fi nding their ways through
all the expectations placed on them by the boxes society puts around them, and
