Global Restructuring and the Impact on Women in the Service Industry
The role of women in the service industry exemplifies the struggle they undergo, both physically and mentally, in order to satisfy and comply with their employer’s wishes. In the process, they are degraded, rebuked, discriminated, paid less, made to work more, and dispensed with. Toward the end of the twentieth century, and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world witnessed a surge in social-economic and socio-political changes that instigated changes to challenge and compete in a globalized world. Women were recognized for their contribution to science & technology, arts and humanities. Inequality gave way to equality and men and women began to work on even terms. Job opportunities grew as countries and countries, began to experience economic growth. However, women continue to lag behind their male counterparts in the service industry. Global restructuring and its impact on women in the service industry is far from satisfactory. The role of women in the service industry remains challenging. This does not mean that women in other professions are better off, but yes, given the focus of women in the service industry, they definitely lag men in every sense of the word. Perhaps, it would be appropriate to understand why and how women came to be looked upon as inferior to men in public and social life.
Patriarchal issues rose during the Roman Empire and it continues even today. There is an ever-growing dismay among feminists that ‘multiculturalism’ is the root to inequality and suppression of women. However, when global restructuring and the impact of women in the service industry are considered, a lot more needs to be done on gender disparity and discrimination.
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) wrote the ‘The Canterbury Tales’ keeping in mind the multi-faceted account of individuals living within a particular time and place. In ‘Canterbury Tales,’ Chaucer portrays the Wife of Bath as one who is not only an equal to men, but someone who believes that women have the power and rights to do as they please and not be subjected to male domination. Right through the characterization of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer attempts to create “an illusion of a woman’s aesthetic embodied in his maleness. This attempt of Chaucer in many ways lead the reader to encapsulate the protagonist’s misogynist view of the world and one that promotes power, and a surge to seek equality for women. Therefore, in his experiment in feminine tale-telling, one is left fascinated by her insistence that men’s subjugation of women is a form of self-subjugation” (Brown, 2002).
In tracing the role of women in society, one could go back in time to the Roman Empire, where women had a very miniscule role to play in the lives of the Romans. History shows that the Roman society was centered on males, with the role of women inconspicuous. On following the history of ancient Greece and Rome, one would get to see the dominance of men in shaping its culture and history. Men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were not only their heroes, but also considered god-like. In addition to the role of the powerful political establishment of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church was also very powerful, and under the control of powerful priests, the Church was as powerful as the rulers of Rome. Women only played a supporting role and not much has been written about Roman women in the books of history. “During the middle and late republic, a noble was anyone who descended from someone who held an important position such as the consulship, and most of the nobility comprised of people of such descendents,” says Bailey (1986) and Burckhardt (1990), in Gary Forsythe (2005), A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War. This signified the role of males as dominant citizens in ancient Rome.
According to the Greek Historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c.20BC), the Roman Patriarchal society was preserved from the time Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome established the first laws
“Roman family relationships were almost asymmetrical, with power in the hands of the father, and the other members of the family were obliged to follow the rule laid down by him” (Saller, 1994)
During the rule of Romulus, the Roman law was such that, a woman, when she married, had to join her husband and share in all his possessions and sacred rites. This meant that the woman had an equal share of all responsibilities to the family as her man did. However, this was not the case; the law was interpreted in such a way that the married woman, having no other refuge, had to conform herself entirely to the temper of their husband, and the husband in return would rule their wife as an appendage. If the wife was virtuous and obedient to her husband, she was the mistress to the same degree as her husband was master. On his death, she became the heir to his property in the same manner as a daughter was to her father. If on the other hand, the wife was to disobey and betray her husband, he could judge and determine the degree of her punishment. Romulus’ law allowed the men of the family to dictate and punish their women if they were found guilty. Thus, men under Romulus dictated the way their women should live and eat (Cary, 1937).
Patriarchal issues rose during the Roman Empire and it continues even today. There is an ever-growing dismay among feminists that ‘multiculturalism’ is the root to inequality and suppression of women. “Multiculturalism,” says Okin (1999), “locks women up within the confines of their traditional, often patriarchal communities and hands them over to the power of the men within that community.” In the 1960s, feminists fought their ideological battle over female sexuality when issues then surrounded the topic of pornography and prostitution. While radical feminists denounced pornography and prostitution as forms of sexual slavery to me, liberals argued that feminists should conceive them as legitimate forms of work, on the condition that women engaged in them voluntarily. Thus, questions such as, to what extent are women indeed better off with a liberal view of gender relationships and sexual autonomy?, or should public policies be guided by the unconditional respect for the autonomy of (adult) citizens, or was it better to adopt a more cautious or even paternalistic approach? One person who has strongly reacted against discrimination of women is
Some have praised her as a brave woman, is the former Dutch politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who consistently defended the thesis that Islam, and spoke up against patriarchal traditions (Prins, 2008).
Masculinity vs. femininity is related to the distribution of roles between genders and manifested by the values highly regarded as aggressiveness, competitiveness, seeking material success, power vs. tenderness, and cooperation (Hofstede, 2001: xix, 29). However, this has not been more conspicuous now then it was during the Roman Empire.
The Double Ghetto (p.15) states that since 1941, women’s share of the labour force more than doubled, while their participation rate tripled. However, the momentous changes in the sex composition of the labor force have not been accompanied by similarly momentous changes in the kinds of work women do for pay.” Changes are constant, and at the workplace, with the arrival of new technologies, new forms of work ethics, new expectations and requirements, an American study by Garfinkle (1967:4-5), estimated that non-married women would spend forty-five years in the labor force, but it would reduce to thirty-five when she married, and reduce further to twenty-five by the time they had a child (The Double Ghetto, p.18). Salaries are lower in those sectors where work is done by people than by machines, and these are the sectors where women work (p.27).
Inequality at the workplace is conspicuous by the way promotions, preferences, and recommendations are issued. Inequality at workplace has brought about a huge negative impact on patients seeking medical attention in hospitals. There has been a debate for increasing the efficiency of the National Health Services (NHS), and its Trusts decided to implement the policy on Equal Opportunities (EO). There is a large of migrant workers from third countries to the first countries in search of jobs. Most of the migrant workers are women nurses. Most of these nurses join nursing homes and hospitals on a salary far lesser than those for native white nurses. Here too, discrimination and racism is evident. Considering the huge deficits and the devolved system of individual trust, the government move to implement EO is most welcome. Racial inequalities in the field of job recruitment, training and promotion hampered quality services and to elucidate validated information to this end, the government ordered a hospital under the NHS scheme to be examined for unethical practices in recruitment, career development, training and promotion of female ethnic minority employees. On interviewing, the majority of ethnic minority interviewee women complained of inequalities at workplace, which included recruitment and training to career development. This was due to certain people in power who used their political influence to indulge in practices that served them more than the common man. There was an overall perception of discrimination and harassment among this group (Bagihole and Stephens, 1999).
Another sector where women find more acceptability is the tourism and travel industries. Like the nurses who migrate to western countries in search of jobs, there is a large number of women migrating from less affluent to wealthier Third World countries, says Marchand and Runyan (2000). Reporting on women working in third countries, Vandegrift (2008) says that women’s work in Puerto Viejo’s tourism industry is an example of the global restructuring processes. North Americans and Europeans visit Costa Rica because of the comforts they get for less money. They also go there because of the publicity and promotional strategies adopted by that country to lure visitors. Puerto Viejo’s tourism industry is well supported by their government, who portray themselves as a nation having political stability and ecosystem diversity. “Tourism has played no small part in Costa Rica’s emergence as a ‘model’ for integration into the global economy in Latin America,” says Fox (2003), and the tourism industry there, “generated one of the largest proportion of total foreign currency earnings between 1992 and 2003” (ICT 2003). As tourists like to enjoy the occasion as far as possible, they indulge in such activities which include, eco-tours, sunbathing, dining out, or surfing, they are in most cases taken care of women, who perform the majority of the labor that creates these daily experiences. Women take responsibilities that include acting as guides on tours, translators, “preparing food, cleaning rooms and clothing, waiting tables, clerking shops, making souvenirs, street-vending, and braiding hair,” says Vandegrift (2008:783). All these job profiles require people who are flexible, and possess diverse skills, and will work for wages that keep businesses competitive.
Even among women, there is discrimination; “Aboriginal women in Canada face many challenges compared to non-Aboriginal women and to their male counterparts,” states Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (2006). This is not because they are women, but because they are colored. Compared to European and other White women, Aboriginal women have lower incomes, and work in lower level occupational categories. The reason for this is simple; Aboriginal women lack the education others have, and live in low income areas. There are not too many options open to them to prove their credibility, and even then, they are a suppressed lot. There is a lot of scholarly articles in journals and newspapers that covered the discrimination of women on gender and color bias, and a number of movies have also been produced that show racist, and discriminative attitudes toward Aboriginal women. One such movie is the ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence.’ Rabbit-Proof Fence is the story of three young Aborigines who dared to challenge the extreme and hostile terrains of the Australian bush country and desert to escape from captivity to freedom. This movie signifies the life of the Aborigines from the early part of twentieth century to the present and their struggle with the whites for social and cultural equality. Right through the movie, there are references made to the Aborigines as ‘the third race, and half castes,’ and these remarks are symbolic of labeling a certain section of people as ‘primitives.’ For hundreds of years, the Aborigines have been isolated and castigated from civilization by the white settlers. The movie is a reflection of how the so-called civilized society discriminates the primitive Aboriginal society, and brings to light the brutal and unethical policies of white Australians till the 1970s.
“Contingent work is growing in Canada, as early as 1900; the Economic Council of Canada observed that the growth of nonstandard employment outpaced the growth of full-time jobs. Human Resources and development Canada (1995) claimed that only 33% of Canadians held such full-time jobs and that there is a rise of precarious forms of nonstandard work, and their persistent gendered and racialized character,” says Krahn (1995), and Ornstein (2000), in Fudge & Vosko (2003:183).
With the growth in racial and gender discrimination, the media has also become deeply involved with this issue. Gender bias is an issue that has hurt the cartoon series. In Family Guy for example, in one particular episode, Lois and Meg go shopping to a Mall. In an attempt to make Meg popular with the guys, Lois offers to buy her shirts (epitomizing sexist slurs) with texts written on them like ‘Little Slut,’ and ‘Cum Dumpster.’ This infers Lois’ attempt to make her daughter Meg, acceptable to male approaches. Meg seems willing to trade her pride and feminism to please a man (Seiber, 2007).
There are a number of mediums used to reflect on feminism and Procrustean. In studying feminism through the theory of a political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, Wendy Wasserstein, and her play, ‘The Heidi Chronicles,’ Wasserstein juxtaposes her own life experiences through her characters. The Heidi Chronicles written by Wendy Wasserstein was set between the periods of 1965-1989, and it chronicled the life of Heidi Holland from her adolescent years to middle age. Wasserstein says that sexual discrimination still existed and that power feminism mandated that there should be more activism and protective legislation. In Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein portrays Heidi Holland as a woman with an unmistakable sense of self-empowered awareness and initiative right from the start of the play. From a minuscule beginning to become a historian, Heidi portrays the spirit of a committed feminist. Her spirit toward feminism is so strong that once she gets a taste of politics, she becomes involved in protests, once marching in protest against the lack of museum retrospectives for women artists. While Heidi fought for equality and woman’s lib, she didn’t personally have a happy life. She had a few affairs and none of them were successful, and her disillusionment with President Reagan’s era of greed put a dent in her sense of ‘we're in this together’ which left her ‘feeling stranded.’ She used her class as a medium to convey her feelings for women’s rights. Although a feminist impulse pervaded and sustained each of her plays, it does not automatically create a ‘feminist drama’ technically (Ciociola, 1998).
Conclusion
There is no doubt that a woman today, even though they proudly claim to be equal to men, still do the job of the tramp. They get paid to do job that men least care for, and are paid nowhere near as much as men. They are predominantly seen in service industries, and work for hours and hours, with nothing in comparison in return. Racism, discrimination, and harassment are common phenomenon, and they try to fend for themselves in the hope of making a living. ,
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