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Unbending gender: why family and work conflict and what to do about it
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2000
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Gender JusticeSocial SciencesGender DisparityJudith ButlerGender IdentityFeminist EthicsGender StudiesSocial InequalityFeminist EconomicsFeminist ScholarshipGendered ContextFeminist TheoryHousehold LaborWork ConflictFeminist PhilosophyFamily EconomicsSociologyBusinessGender EconomicsJoan WilliamsGender DivideUnpaid WorkWork-family Interface
The book critiques the ideal‑worker norm that marginalizes caregivers, arguing that it harms men, women, and children by forcing child‑care responsibilities onto parents while keeping caregivers at the economic margins. The author argues that flexible workplaces benefit employers and that wages should jointly reflect the contributions of workers and their primary caregivers. Using Butler and Bourdieu, she explains gender’s persistence, reframes equal‑vs‑special treatment debates, and proposes ways to mitigate race and class conflicts in work‑family discussions. She finds that mothers remain economically marginalized, that their marginalization and divorce often push children into poverty, and that workplace designs centered on men’s bodies discriminate against women.
Joan Williams' Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Oxford, 1999) is a theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly accessible treatise that offers a new vision of work, family, and gender. (Publisher's Weekly, Nov. 1, 1999) It examines our system of providing for children's care by placing their caregivers at the margins of economic life. This system that stems from the way we define our work ideals, notably from our definition of the ideal worker as one who takes no time off for childbearing or childrearing and who works full-time and is available for overtime. The ideal-worker norm clashes with our sense that children should be cared for by parents. The result is a system that is bad for men, worse for women, and disastrous for children. Williams documents that mothers remain economically marginalized, and points out that when mothers first marginalize and then divorce, their children often accompany them into poverty. Williams argues that designing workplaces around the bodies of men (who need no time off for childbearing) and men's life patterns (for women still do 80% of the child care) often constitutes discrimination against women. She also engages the work/family literature to show that flexible workplaces are often better than existing practices for employers' bottom line. On the family side, she argues that the ideal worker's wage -- after as well as before divorce -- reflects the joint work of the ideal worker and the primary caregiver of his children, and should be jointly owned. In a comprehensive examination of the theoretical issues surrounding work/family issues, she uses the work of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu to explain why gender has proved so unchanging and unbending, reframing the special treatment/equal treatment debate, the debate over women's voice, and offering new perspective on how to avoid the persistent race and class conflicts that emerge in debates over work and family issues.