Introduction: A Feminist Project

Abstract

In a matter-of-fact way, the engineer in this quote encapsulates the gendered division of labor in the professional workplaces I visited for this project. In North America, as in most of the world, women continue to be underrepresented at the higher ranks of traditionally male professions while they are simultaneously overrepresented in support staff positions in the same workplaces. They are likely to be the “girls” that “type.” Given this asymmetrical representation, even when women and men work side by side, women experience different work climates than do men. Gender bias is evidenced in the demographics, economics, and hierarchical positions of women in professional places of work, and differences in the status of women and men are also revealed in research on evaluative responses of both men and women toward women (Valian, 1998; Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). Popular self-help books and workshops urging women to improve their styles notwithstanding, the biases against women’s advancement are far more fundamental than changes in dress and talk can possibly remedy. In a contribution to a 1999 panel discussion on language and gender in the workplace, linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet emphasized the importance of attending to evaluative bias. She insisted that

the major issue is not differences in women’s and men’s competency—including their communicative competency. The big problem is people’sattitudes towards women and men, their sharply differentiated expectations that lead, as psychologist Virginia Valian puts it, to persisting under-evaluation of women’s work and over-evaluation of men’s.

We calculate the charges. We establish the conditions under which we’re going to approve it. Send that on. The girls type that up.

Engineer, public utilities workplace meeting, 2005