Future of Work: Is the future female?

Literature Reviews

Muneerah Al-Yahya: Corporations will be equally hiring men and women based on their skills and knowledge.

The role of a working woman nowadays has changed drastically over the past 50 years (Mínguez 2012). In the past, females were stereotyped all around the world as only being housewives and mothers with basic responsibilities such as cleaning, cooking, child rearing and full filling the needs of their husbands. Today we see the change in the performance of a woman where education and employment is as important as the family life. However, many women suffered to reach their career goals due to the bias opinions that many corporations secretly rely on. Nevertheless, women are still fighting back and proving their abilities to take on extreme tasks resulting with the growth rate of female workers to increase in the labor force (Schwarzwald, Koslowsky & Bernstein 2013). In fact, a study was conducted in Australia showing that women outnumber men in the labor force holding 55% of full-time jobs, leaving men as a minority with only 45% (Megalogenis 2013). According to Ainsworth (2002), even older women are considered advantaged in the labor market and preferred above older men for having more work flexibility.

Many people have different opinions when it comes to “gender equality” in the perspective of labor force involvement. Though the highlighted mutual aspects consist of occupation segregation, level of job position in the workplace hierarchy, and the gender pay gap (Travis 2009). Women tend to be highly ignored when it comes to promotions and new job opportunities based on the fact that they are categorized as the sole household caregivers (Emslie & Hunt 2009). Nevertheless, fulltime female workers are now able to balance their work-life and family-life with the help of technology, using mobiles and emails to communicate with their children anytime of the day (Wade & Schneiders 2012). Flexible working hours is also important to create a balanced work-family life, therefore flexible jobs such as call centers where working at home is permitted are dominated by female employees (Scholarios & Taylor 2010).

The future foretells equality in the job selection process between genders based on the progressing stages seen over the years. The post-fordism narrative states that globalization will lead corporations to expand operations through offshoring and outsourcing jobs with a competitive advantage of skill, knowledge and labor (Dejardin 2009). Therefore, the future predicts the vision of a positive workforce vision free of gender discrimination, employment restriction, with growing recognition of equal opportunity (Strachan, Burgess, & Sullivan 2003).

Sara Al-Otaibi: Women will become more independent leading the marriage rates to drop.

Based on a study by Frisén, Carlsson and Wängqvist (2013) Both men and women agree that the want to have a stable relationship and be financially stable before starting a family but women wanted to prioritize both work and family and try to balance it while the men want to prioritize either work or family. There is gender differentiation in parenthood and because of that women feel like they may not be able to do it all like a man does (Thompson & Walker 1989). Therefore there are trends in marriage delay and parenthood because women feel the need to establish a career before taking on the role of a housewife (Dales 2014). Delaying childbearing is a world phenomenon, an investigation in Sweden by Schytt, Nilsen, & Bernhardt (2014) has shown that 32% of women have postponed their marriage and starting a family for the sake of their profession and independence alongside other reasons. Williamson (2009) showed in her article that in the past majority of women valued the stability of their marriage and its public profile more than the right to independent freedom. The rate of job separation is 86.3% all due to marriage or childbirth, this percentage has remind unchangeable since the 80’s regardless of the development that are been witnessed (Unayama 2012).

Based on Mehta and Sharma (2014) that empowerment is equally important to the women and men in the work place but women straggle more with it. There many things that could make women more empowered and successful is to make it more accessible for them to have more control such as making women schedule more flexible so that they can balance between work and caring for her family. By making their schedule more flexible it is creating more opportunities and resources for women to take. With creating a culture that is respectful to women in higher positions that will limit the need for women to think they need to postpone their marriage life for them to succeed in their career. Other authors such as Wu et al. (2013) have shown in their study that the employment of women has affected the marriage rate which resulted in low social security replacement.

But other study still shows that traditional women would still more likely leave their job and independents to support their husband and family (Mosser & Hanson 2012). Women are still suffering because of that they are still viewed as caregivers or destined to do domestic work (Travis 2009).

Scenario: Everything Will Change

“Post-Fordism”