Sexual Harassment Before, During, & After

Sexual Harassment Before, During, & After

Patricia Mckenzie

SOC402, Contemporary Social Problems & the Workplace

Instructor: Douglas Nelson

October 7, 2013

Sexual Harassment Before, During, & After

        There are many things we must consider when we decide to explore the various ways this society will change in regards to women in the workplace.  In my paper, I will explain how women in the workplace has change considerably due to the facts of wars and the society we live in. I will also show the need for women to remain a working force competitor due to self-reliance and family sufficiency.  While some may feel women should stay in the home to take care of the family, women feel they have the flexible capabilities of providing for their family in the workplace and maintaining a stable home life?

        As we look at “Women as Change Agents in America”, we are able to understand how career paths as we know them today are designed to effect and straighten out the career paths we choose to pursue.  The Fair Labor Standards Act did not address equity of pay between men and women. Before Roosevelts’s New Deal, the majority of working women were employed in low-paying jobs, as men were assumed to be responsible for supporting their families. In the early part of the 20th century, advocates for women’s voting rights and Progressives like Ida B. Wells and Jane Addams lobbied for equal wage legislation, recognizing that often women were the primary supports of families. (Giraffe, V. 2011)

Some of the research that we have supported over the years have shown that working women are not spending less time with their children compared to those who choose to remain homemakers.  In fact, those who are considered homemakers are losing sleep due to the fact that they are working more hours maintaining the house and children.  This can also affect the husband of a working spouse, because it is found that men, whose wives work 40 hours or more a week are in poorer health than men whose wives work shorter hours. It is not so much that the wives are taking care of their husband’s health, it is that the wives are often time the social organizers of the family’s social life. (www.thirteen.org 2013)

        When the United States entered World War II, thousands of men had to leave their jobs and enlist in the military.  Due to this drastic change, women were recruited to work in machine shops, metalwork factories, and munitions plants. This change in society increased the employment of women by 57 percent while continuing to manage their home and raise their children. After the war, men expected the women to relinquish their jobs and return to homemaking, but many of the women continued working.  By this time, the women had become accustomed to the added finances, the stability of managing the children, and home life.

        Women must remain flexible. In todays’ society, dealing with the high demands of equality in the workplace, some women feel they are always at the mist of trying to prove their worthiness in the organization.  They, in a sense, do not want to become predictable. Predictability dictates that the elements and products of a process be standardized and routine. (Giraffe, V. 2011)  Women look to be empowered within the workplace due to the changes and opportunities that they have become accustomed to receiving.  

        Some of the empowerment opportunities that women have been fighting to get and/or keep are; paid family and medical leave insurance, a raise in minimum wage, universal pre-k program, quality affordable child care, and equal pay for equal work.  These are just a few opportunities women are fighting for.  The lack of paid family leave insurance leaves some of the most highly skilled and hardest working mothers struggling to remain in the workforce. 88 percent of minimum workers are over 20 years old, 86 percent work 20 hours or more and 64 percent of all minimum wage workers are women. Universal pre-K is an essential piece of the puzzle that not only allow their kids to get a good start, but it also allows mothers to remain on the job earning a paycheck and helping our economy grow. With more and more women working and with rising demand and cost of child care, we must provide flexibility for different types of families to gain access to quality affordable child care. The US Census Bureau confirmed that in 2012, women, despite making up a majority of the population, a majority of the workforce and earning a majority of graduate and post graduate degrees, still made just 77 cents on the dollar a man makes. (www.huffingtonpost.com, 2013)

        As we look at these five common sense solutions would go a long way toward ensuring that working women have the tools and opportunities needed to earn and maintain the economic security needed to provide for their families. This would also be a big boost in our achievement towards economic strength and success.

        All of these factors will have a drastic effect on the way we see women in the workplace years from now. The history of the labor force is a story about dramatic change.  With that change comes opportunities.  The number of women working or looking for work is a dynamic concept that demonstrates the net impact of all social and historical forces. Some of these same forces have influenced the size and composition of the entire labor force for the past 50 years.  Changes in the growth of the labor force, gender structure, age structure, and racial and ethnic composition has shown that the labor force as a whole has gone through a drastic overhaul.