Gender
It has been widely acknowledged that women are at a disadvantage in comparison
to men when it comes to the job market. There are numerous explanations
for this fact that women really may have to work twice as hard to attain
the same level of success as a man. The main question which Adler poses
is, "what is the extent of the gender gap in job autonomy "(link
this to Mie's page on work and family)(Adler, 450)? Adler loosely defines
alienation as the loss of control over work and the degree of separation
between the worker and the work. She also emphasizes "time-related
autonomy" as being important to women because often their lack of autonomy
comes from not being able to choose their own working hours in relation
to child care and family related needs (452). The results of this study
showed that men do have more job autonomy than women.
The question is: what does this mean? There are many ways of measuring job
autonomy and this study could use only a limited number of them. In this
study Adler is defining autonomy as: (a) the degree of creative input a
worker excursuses, or "conceptual autonomy," and (b) time-related
autonomy. The study shows that "more of the observed gender gap in
autonomy is explained by authority position than by occupational segregation
(461)." In other words, it is the position of hierarchy a woman holds
in a specific work place instead of the actual occupation she may have been
channeled into which determines her degree of job autonomy. Adler also points
out that it is not one single process that leads to the lack of job autonomy
for women, but instead, a combination of factors and that more refined studies
need to be done in order to fully understand this phenomenon.