SOC317H5 Study Guide - Gender Studies, Labor Market Segmentation, Double Burden
Document Summary
Rising education levels and job opportunities have made more women career-minded, and the economic necessity of being self-supporting or contributing to the family income left some women little choice but to find a paying job. A central theme is that women s work has been undervalued and poorly rewarded throughout history. To avoid confusion, we should define how we use the terms sex and gender. Sex is the biological distinction and gender is socially constructed. We tend to prefer the term gender, given that male-female differences in employment are almost solely a product of socially created gender roles and ideologies. Although history has for the most part been written from the perspective of men, even a quick glance back to the past reveals that women have always performed a vital, if somewhat unacknowledged, economic role. Native women, for example, were indispensable to the fur trade during canada s colonial period.
