Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

A fabulous article in the Guardian - “Bringing in Baby” takes a light but serious look at the practicalities of bringing a young baby into your workplace - apparently a promoted alternative to expensive childcare in the US where maternity leave is only 12 weeks.

After making some general points, three parents recount their experiences of an ‘experiment’ in the Guardian office. While the experiment is hardly reliable or representative it raises some interesting points. There is also a link to an audio slideshow which brings home some of the points.
As the article points out, such policies essentially negate the fact that childcare is a form of work - the assumption is that ‘real’ work is what is done outside the home and in exchange for payment. The message is that baby-care is easy and not time-consuming and that a young baby can essentially be wheeled into an office and left while the parent works at their ‘proper’ job.

This of course brings up the debate about maternity leave, maternity pay, working mothers, discrimination and whether modern women are trying too hard to ‘have it all’.

The latest claim about changes in the occupational structure of the UK economy seems to be that the caring professions traditionally staffed by women are to gain in importance.  According to Ian Pearson there will continue to be a decline in traditionally ‘male’ manual jobs, but there will also be a decline in service economy jobs as they are increasingly computerised.

The argument of the article, which is based on Pearson’s theories, is that increasingly “soft skills” ie interpersonal, communication skills will become of key importance - something which the current education system in the UK is often criticised for not helping students to develop.  Pearson argues that by 2020 “most of us will be working in the care economy”.

Pearson’s assumption seems to be that the increased importance of such soft skills will advantage women in the work place, however, this assumption raises several questions.  Firstly, Pearson seems to take a socio-biological view of gender - similar to that of Parsons and Murdock, assuming that men and women have naturally different roles, meaning that women are better suited to caring roles.  From a viewpoint that argues that socialisation is the cause of gender differences (eg. Oakley, 1984) it could be argued that over time the socialisation of boys and girls may change to develop greater caring capacities (for example, think of the emergence of ‘metrosexual man’).

Pearson also picks out jobs such as nursing, hairdressing and care-work (eg in nursing homes and children’s nurseries) as examples of areas which are female dominated and require such skills. He argues that these are areas which will therefore grow in importance and status.  Currently such roles are typically low-status and are relatively poorly remunerated and Pearson actually states that he doubts that pay in such sectors will increase significantly.  This brings into doubt the claim that women are likely to be economically and socially better off in a new economic order.  In many ways Pearson seems to be confusing such roles with much more highly paid, high status roles in business which also require interpersonal skills.

BBC NEWS | Business | ‘The future is female’ BT predicts

Another example of needing to put the headlines into perspective.  The following article popped up on my desktop this morning:

BBC NEWS | UK | Unemployed ‘must learn English’

The immediate image this headline brings to mind is that the majority of unemployed people do not speak English. So then you read the article and find that the number whose poor English prevents them from finding a job is 40,000 - a large number of people - and that ethnic minority workers tend to earn 1/3 less than other people.

Sounds terrible, so I spent a few minutes thinking about it:

• although no specific link has been made, the implication is that a lack of English is depressing the earnings of ethnic minorities
• ‘earn 1/3 less than other people’ - does this mean on average across the whole workforce, or than other people in the same jobs? Is this all ethnic minority groups, or just specific groups?  We aren’t given the details, so is this another case of social class effects being mixed up with the effects of ethnicity?

Then I looked at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) website - the latest figures available state that in September 2006 1.4 million people were claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, which means that the 40,000 people the article states have problems with English make up about 3% of those claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.  Given that the minority ethnic population of the UK runs at about 8% of the population, this would imply that lack of English is not as big a problem among ethnic minority groups as we might be led to believe from this article.
While it is important that people who struggle with English are helped to learn it if it will make them more employable, it does seem that this article is rather over-emphasising the scale and impact of the problem.

I’ve just read this article and it made me think about how we read the news and how it is written!

BBC NEWS | Education | Adults ‘wish for qualifications’

The article is about the findings of a survey of adults done by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) (ie a governmental body with the purpose of funding and promoting further education) looking at their views on their education.

Have a read of the article - it all sounds quite positive, doesn’t it?

The findings have evidently been presented by the LSC (and by the BBC) in a way designed to promote the importance of formal education and qualifications.  While there is obviously a serious point to be made about education and the fact that adult education schemes do have a positive impact, I did have some thoughts on some of the figures stated:
“The survey of more than 2,000 adults also found 27% regretted not making the most of the opportunities at school.” - which does raise the question about the other 73% (or 7 out of every 10 people) -

• did they make the most of their opportunities?  Or do they still think that a lot of what they were taught in school was irrelevant? - Tooley (2000) argues that a lot of what is taught in school is irrelevant to students’ later lives.
  
• Or do they feel that they weren’t given opportunities at school?  Neo-Marxist sociologists such as Althusser and Apple argue that school exists to reproduce existing social inequalities and that therefore schools often restrict the opportunities available to working class children, preventing them from achieving educational success.
  

“more than one in four (30%) of those who had completed retraining said it had made them more employable and 17% had got a pay rise.” - so 70% had found that retraining had had no effect on their employability. Oh dear! that’s not quite the picture the LSC would want to present when the government is encouraging more people to take up work-related training and to stay in education for longer.  Also, while there are statistics to show that getting a degree does significantly raise your earnings, less than 1 in 5 people who had undergone retraining found that they ended up earning more money.

The article then goes on to talk about the government wanting to promote more work-related training and how important it is.  All in all another interesting example of the use of official statistics to show what officials want them to show.

Thinking about the previous post on women’s happiness in marriage and men and women’s roles, reminded me of Fay Weldon’s short story ‘Weekend’ (which can be found online as a PDF here).

Weekend is a fictional story of a normal weekend for a middle class family of five, told from the mother’s point of view as she juggles paid, domestic and emotional work along with social expectations from her husband and other adults.  It is a powerful tale which makes the reader think about contemporary gender roles and although the story was first published in 1978 it does not feel dated and in some ways is possibly more typical now than then.

If you’re a teacher then this would be a good story to use with students to introduce topics around gender or conjugal roles or to contextualise work already done and would promote some interesting discussions.  I would look at the different roles, attitudes and expectations of the characters with students, looking at viewpoints, maybe getting them to write a short piece from Martin or Katie’s point of view and comparing.  The British Arts Council website has some suggestions for questions to ask when looking at the story.

The Happiest Wives website is about a study by Nock and Wilcox published earlier this year, looking at factors that are associated with women’s happiness in marriage in the US.  A quantitative study, the findings are based on a survey carried out in 1992-4, although in answer to criticisms about the age of the data the authors argue that analysis of more recent data shows similar patterns.

The study identifies several factors that have a positive impact upon a woman’s experience of marriage, including:

• the husband’s emotional engagement in the relationship, carrying out emotional work
• the husband being the main breadwinner
• shared religious attendance
• the woman staying at home

These findings are interesting in several ways.  They suggest that the quest for Young and Wilmott’s (1974) symmetrical family may not be as beneficial to women’s lives as is commonly thought (although the study did find that women’s perceptions of the ‘fairnes’ of task division was important) and that the move towards women having careers and financial independence may be in conflict with women’s models of marriage and male-female relationships where a predictor of happiness is that the male earns the majority of the household income.

The study seems to provide support for Dencombe and Marsden’s (1994) findings about the “triple shift” carried out by contemporary women in the UK, whereby women carry out housework & childcare, paid work outside the home and emotional work, with the paid work as an additional burden rather than the liberating role it is often seen as.  Dencombe and Marsden found that women were happier in their marriages when their husbands shared some of the burden of emotional work and were emotionally involved in their marriages.

Overall Nock and Wilcox’s study found that women were more likely to be happy in their marriages where traditional domestic/breadwinner roles were maintained but where the husband was emotionally involved in the relationship.

There is of course the whole question of what is happiness? - can it be objectively defined and measured?  I would argue that happiness can be seen as largely socially constructed - it tends to be defined against what is seen in society as the ideal in life.  So does this study just tell us that, despite the social changes over the past 30 years in what is seen as socially acceptable and expected for women, that we still hold an ideal of marital relations that is largely traditional and therefore has a defining impact upon women’s judgement of their own happiness in marriage?

It’s worth having a closer look at the website and even reading the article itself as it goes deeper into the findings and how they apply to different social groups.  There is also a page looking at some of the criticisms of the study - a nice set of evaluative points.

Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed had an interesting interview today with social historian Dr Selina Todd about her study of the lives of young women between the World Wars.  Contrary to the common portrayal of women of that era as housebound and excluded from economic activity, Todd’s study identifies work as central to women’s lives in terms of identity, relationships, leisure and choice.

Follow the link below to “listen again” to the programme:
BBC - Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed

A group of researchers at York University have classified the UK’s neighbourhoods according to characteristics of technology uses, in particular looking at internet usage.  It suggests that there are interactions of age, social class, education, wealth and occupational sector that affect how much we make use of IT and the ways in which we use it.  The different classifications are quite detailed and you can search for your postcode’s classification to see where your neighbourhood fits in.

Although the research itself doesn’t seem to be seeking to create any particular social theory, but rather to facilitate future economic and town planning, it does raise some interesting social questions.  The suggestion is that the use or non-use of IT affects individuals purchasing power and habits and their participation in any kind of consumption culture that may exist.  There are also questions about the ways in which groups which are marginalised in terms of access to and knowledge of the internet may, through that process of marginalisation, be further excluded from society in a wider sense.

The rapid pace of technological change impacts on society in a wider way than may initially meet the eye.  This website might make a good starting point for class discussions on social change and stratification, taking it beyond simple divisions of gender, ethnicity and social class and indicating the ways in which all these interact and have far reaching impacts.

Spatial-Literacy.org | esociety | profiler

Apologies to all my readers if updates are sparse between now and early September - I am frantically trying to complete my MA research and dissertation, which is proving to be lots of work, and once term ends that will be my main focus.  You are still free to e-mail me and I will try to respond as soon as possible.

This is for  teachers out there who have struggled to think of an interesting Sociology field trip to spice up the course!  It’s especially relevant for those of you teaching the OCR Individual and Society module and if you have students who come from suburban/rural areas.  I took our Lower Sixth group out to London last week and they enjoyed it and learnt a lot.  (Admittedly this is a trip that works best with small numbers of pupils)  I would imagine this could easily be adapted to work for those of you not in reach of London.

Our day went as follows:

• train journey into London - we had looked at Burgess and Park’s (Chicago School) theory of a city being set out in concentric circles, I got the group to make a note of the way the buildings and use of space changed as we moved in towards the city - this appears to support the concentric circles idea (we knocked it apart later as we walked round smaller bits of London)
• tube to Aldgate East, where we visited the exhibition at The Women’s Library which currently has a fabulous exhibition called What Women Want looking at changes in women’s lives over the past century and asking some searching questions about women’s lives today and how they have improved.  The exhibition runs until 26th August 2006 and is well worth visiting, my students became very reflective looking around and had a good conversation about what they had seen and how it linked to what they had learnt in lessons.
• we then walked round the corner and into Brick Lane, part of the fascinating Whitechapel area and a good example of an ethnic minority community, we walked up Brick Lane to Fournier Street and looked at the outside of the mosque there which started life as a Huguenot church and then became a synagogue before becoming a mosque - there is a good article in The Economist on the history of the area
• From Brick Lane we turned left onto Whitechapel High Street and walked past the large mosque and had a wander around the market, which is predominantly Bangladeshi - lots of unfamiliar fruit and veg. 
• We then walked down New Cannon Street towards Wapping, and turned left onto Cable street and then right down Dellow St and crossed The Highway, there is then a cut through into a park where we ate lunch.  For this and the rest of the day we had a Booth Map of the area (created just over 100 years ago to map out the social classes in London - there is a good Economist article here).  The girls were able to compare the Booth map with a current map and what they saw (the park is actually an old dock basin that has been filled in, but you can still see signs like morring rings set in the walls).
• We then walked past Shadwell Basin and along Wapping Wall and Wapping High Street where most of the old warehouses have been converted into luxury flats - this allows you to discuss changing occupational structures as well as consumption patterns.
• Eventually you come to St Katherine’s Docks which have been converted into a luxury marina - a nice place to sit and have a final discussion before heading to Tower Hill Tube station to go home (now accessed by a foot tunnel from St Katherine’s Docks so no busy roads to cross)

The girls are still talking about the trip, especially the Women’s Library, and we’ve just put the date in to do it again in September so the students have the benefit of it before the exams this time.