Women and Cosmopolitanism
The wage gap is already well understood, as is the fact that Western conceptions of femininity are often harmful to women. However, these issues are deeply intertwined beyond what most people realize; corporations intentionally structure labor in a way that appeals to stereotypical femininity in order to attract low-wage labor and reinforce a docile attitude among the labor force.
The three greatest areas of employment for women are as secretaries, nurses, and waitresses, all of which involve subordination directly below another, be it a lawyer, doctor or customer. Western feminism typically calls for more women in these dominant careers, as well as for equal pay within such careers. However, this fails to address the fact that women are herded from birth into a socially constructed identity of docile femininity that prevents them from gaining necessary skills and work experience, coupled with exploitative labor practices that seek to associate low-skill, low-pay factory work with feminine traits in order to attract cheap, unskilled labor from women in or from developing countries.
In 1980’s Silicon Valley, immigrant women held 90% of factory production jobs, 45–50% being immigrant women. Foremen interviewed had described the deskilled production work as “easy as a recipe”, as well as requiring a high tolerance for repetitive and tedious tasks, which are characteristics often associated with the labor of non-white, pre-modern cultures. Worse still, the work was contextualized as supplementary income for the family, as the women are primarily occupied with domestic responsibilities. In this sense, the capitalist profit motive rewards the perpetuation of gender and racial stereotypes in order to trap underprivileged women in jobs paying less than subsistence wage that do not improve their skills in the labor market.
These oppressions are exponentially compounded when considered in the global landscape of diminishing barriers to trade and the globalization of labor. Unmitigated global capitalism effectively expands the labor market to impossibly vast proportions, thereby increasing the level of competition. With the transition of Western governance from a liberal welfare state to a loosely-connected neoliberal state that requires its citizens to self-determine almost completely independently; as this system interacts with free-market global capitalism, a meritocracy emerges, where the global greats in each field gain the greatest salaries, while everyone else is forced to the bottom of the economic ladder in order to decrease labor margins and increase profits without notable price fluctuations, in competition with numerous global corporate entities. We are already seeing the effects of this neoliberal government-at-a-distance approach with wage stagnation and in some cases, decline, continuing from 1973 to 2016.
In a capitalist meritocracy, it logically follows that those who have been denied experience in skilled labor will be hurt most; a neoliberal meritocracy pays little mind to the differential social conditions of each individual life.
Western feminism understands that the wage gap is a problem, as well as the fact that conceptions of femininity are often damaging to women. However, we need to understand that these issues are intentionally intertwined in order to oppress women; from that point, we can begin to decouple gender and femininity in order to decouple gender and labor.
