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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Catherine Hakim, Key Issues in Women's Work: Female Diversity and the Polarisation of Women's Employment, Second Edition (London: The GlassHouse Press 2004)
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| IN THE REVISED and updated edition of her 1996 book on women's employment issues, Hakim has triggered a controversy worthy of the much earlier debates among scholars about why the labour market experiences of women are as they are. Women at the turn of this century continue to exhibit markedly different labour market circumstances than men. They are far more likely to work in nonstandard employment, employment that is less than fulltime, paid below the rate of men, and often does not make full use of their qualifications. As explanation, Hakim puts forward a new theory, developed and tested by her, called preference theory. She puts forward this theory as more in tune with the data, which she presents in great detail over six chapters loaded with statistics, than other theories such as Goldberg's theory of male dominance or Becker's theory of comparative advantage or various other feminist theories of labour market discrimination. |
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Hakim claims that preference theory is: historically informed; empirically based; multi-disciplinary; prospective; and applicable in all rich modern societies. By presenting pages and pages of European data, much of it outdated, to support her theory, she contends that it is historically specific, reflective of the diversity of women's lifestyle preferences, and based on new surveys which put it to the test. From this she concludes that women's weaker attachment to the labour market, lower pay, and predominance in the nonstandard workforce is not a result of discriminatory or less than women-friendly policies and attitudes in the labour market, but a consequence of the choices women freely make. The issue of choice is a difficult one. |
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Can we be regarded as having made a choice because we find the barriers and daily struggles of juggling work, childcare, and the myriads of demands on our time and energy beyond what we can endure? We cannot opt out of our families, once our children have been born. So we compromise in the areas we can — we take part-time work because we need to work but cannot make the economics or practicalities of working full-time work for us, at least not without public affordable childcare and supportive partners. Does this imply a less serious commitment to our work as Hakim would suggest or does it simply recognize the limitations of the current structure and organization of society which forces women to make choices we do not ask men to make? |
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Hakim's conclusions are hard to agree with. The reasoning is flawed; great leaps of presumption are made about women. If anything, she is guiltier than most current researchers in this field in presuming to know what women want. It is hard to tell how Hakim would respond to labour market data based on race or class. If one followed her own logic, these individuals, like women, would be exhibiting a choice to work in less desirable employment than white, middle and professional class men. This stretches credibility. The reality is far more sinister than that. Discrimination continues and women who are also members of another minority by virtue of ethnic origin, race, or disability are doubly disadvantaged. Further, neoliberal economic and labour market policies have resulted in the erosion of employment security and conditions for a large portion of workers. Increasingly, two breadwinners, not one, are required to survive. This is not a matter of choice, but one of necessity. And just because one of those individuals may earn less than the other, it does not make that employment secondary, and most certainly, not optional or discretionary for that family, as Hakim claims. In the seven years between 1995 and 2002, lone mothers in Canada increased their labour force participation by 17 per cent. Have preferences changed that much over that period? In 2002, 67 per cent of female sole parents worked compared to 72 per cent of women in two-parent families. Are the women in sole parent families that different from those in two-parent families? Also in 2002, 26 per cent of women working part-time wanted full-time work, while 30 per cent of men did. Is this enough of a difference to assert that all women working part-time are choosing to do so? (Statistics from Women in Canada: Work Chapter Updates 2003) Labour markets in industrialized countries are increasingly polarized, with increasing numbers of workers working multiple jobs to make ends meet and earning less. Simultaneously, the portion of low-income men is increasing while the percentage of women is decreasing marginally. With more women in the workforce by necessity and by choice, women's education levels reaching or exceeding those of men, jobs becoming less stable, and wages stagnating, the sex difference among the lower paid in Canada has dropped from a 15 per cent gap to a 7.8 per cent gap from 1981 to 1998. The gender wage gap has similarly narrowed substantially from 41.6 to 27.5 per cent between 1967 and 1997. Is this a result of changing preferences or other phenomena? (Statistics from Winners and Losers in the Labour Market of the 1990s) |
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For those interested in exploring the contemporary issues of women's employment in the Canadian context, there are many useful sources. Leading the pack is the work of the Alliance on Contingent Employment [ACE] headed by Leah Vosko. In this comprehensive look at precarious employment, Vosko and her fellow researchers are unpacking the difficult questions of what dimensions of our labour market and social policy and regulatory framework play a role in facilitating the precarious nature of increasingly large numbers of employment alternatives. Unlike Hakim who argues that seasonal jobs, temporary work, and term jobs offer an opportunity for a better work-life balance, ACE recognizes the involuntary nature of much of this work and sees a societal responsibility to ensure that workers in these forms of employment are not vulnerable. Other interesting sources to consult include the work of Heisz, Jackson, and Picot in the above-mentioned Winners and Losers in the Labour Market of the 1990s, Zeytinoglu in "Gender, Race and Class Dimensions of Nonstandard Work," Industrial Relations (Vol. 55), the special issue of Just Labour (Vol. 3, Fall 2003) on ACE's work, and Hughes, Lowe, and Schellenberg in Men's and Women's Quality of Work in the New Canadian Economy. Basic data on women's employment circumstances are available in the Women in Canada: Work Chapter Updates released periodically by Statistics Canada, most recently in 2003. |
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Reading this book, one is left wondering if Hakim sees herself as the latter day conscience of overzealous feminists whose work on women's employment left little room for women who might prefer to remain out of the paid workforce for any number of reasons. To move from providing room for such diversity of choice to suggesting as Hakim does in this book that all but a small margin of women's continued disadvantage in the labour market is the result of women's preferences is to deny the evidence and the reality of the very difficult experience of the many women who struggle every day to earn respect for all the roles they may either choose or find themselves in. In so doing, Hakim provides fodder to those who would continue to subjugate women and create structures and rules that punish them for their circumstances. This we do not need. |
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Ursule Critoph
Athabasca University |
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