Male and Female: Job versus Gender Models in the Sociology of Work

Work has been seen as the central social process that links individuals to industrial society and to each other. Although work issues are considered universal, the actual study of work has proceeded along sex-differentiated lines, so that (1) women are rarely studied as workers; (2) studies that do include women offer biased interpretations; and (3) the entire analysis of work is distorted. We argue that these problems arise from the use of sex-segregated models of analysis: the job model for men and the gender model for women. Further, we argue that these models lead researchers to ask different kinds of questions according to the sex of the workers, to treat men as uniform in relation to family and women as uniform in relation to employment and, implicitly, to use the patterns of men's relation to employment as the standard in analysis. Two case studies are examined in detail to illustrate the varying ways in which job and gender models have distorted investigation and interpretation. The paper ends with suggestions for reconceptualizing work to include forms of unpaid as well as paid work and for incorporating gender stratification into the analysis of work.