'These Labourers in the Field of Public Work': Librarians, Discrimination and the Meaning of Equal Pay
| Autor: | Diane Kirkby, Caroline Jordan |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
1503 Business and Management
2103 Historical Studies 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management History Labour economics Sociology and Political Science Public work Field (Bourdieu) media_common.quotation_subject education humanities Neglect Marriage bar Industrial relations Meaning (existential) Sociology Workplace discrimination health care economics and organizations Gender pay gap media_common |
| Zdroj: | Labour History. 117:79-108 |
| ISSN: | 1839-3039 0023-6942 |
| Popis: | Librarianship has long been recognised as a numerically female-dominated occupation. Despite demonstrating a standard pattern of a sex-segregated labour force, it has suffered neglect in historical studies of women’s work. This article positions Australia’s librarians in the history of white-collar public service workers, and librarianship as illustrative of important themes of twentieth-century women’s labour history. For smart, educated, ambitious women, librarianship offered professional standing, economic security and opportunity for advancement. Strategies of overt discrimination, however, deliberately kept women librarians out of senior administrative positions and confined them to the lower-paying jobs. Librarians in state and municipal libraries worked under public service regulations that established a dual labour market of wages and conditions for clerical and professional workers. Key decisions between 1918 and 1922 explicitly advantaged men in recruitment, wages and promotion, denying women similar opportunities. Studying the history of women librarians sheds new light on the meaning of professional workers’ struggle for equal pay. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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