Changing Women's Workplace Status: Alone or Together?

Abstract

This review essay concerns what employed women can do to change their situation in the world of paid work. Now a perennial issue for women as well as men--going it alone versus mobilizing co-workers, assessment of several recent studies (Hertz 1986; Milkman 1987; Blum 1991; Paules 1991; Mcl1wee and Robinson 1992) from this perspective, chosen for the variety of occupations they represent, present very different ideas on this topic. The solutions which researchers, or the women they studied, pursue may be structural, cultural, or individual. Although the basic problem is essentially the same in each study-the lack of equity for women, researchers also arrive at different explanations of the problem, likewise structural, cultural. or individual. The objectives of this review essay are to: (I) map the variety of explanations and solutions; (2) examine the extent to which an author's explanation and solution are analytically consistent, and then characterize the researcher's philosophical stance on a continuum from voluntarist to detenninist; and (3) in conclusion, speculate as to the reasons for the obvious variation among these occupational case studies of employed women. The following table summarizes our analysis.