Class and Gender Essay

, directors and managers while women occupy the positions of secretary, personal assistant and receptionists. In that way the man exercises his power over the woman thereby forcing her to conform to any personal advances whatsoever in order to keep her jod or to maintain cordial relationships with her top executives. Another angle to examine the connection is that women would be restricted from certain resources in the organization and to gain access, they would need to go through the top executives who might make certain advances in return for the favour.
1.2.7. Class and Gender
The word 'class' as explained in feminism or gender related issues refers to the different levels of importance which are places on individuals due to their status in society. Class is mostly determined by the job or educational level of the person in question. In the past, class was not really considered that much in gender issues but most contemporary theories tend to explain gender issues by emphasizing on class as a concept (Prandy and Blackburn, 1980). The concept of class also exists in capitalist-patriarchal societies as well and in this paragraph I would highlight more on its existence.
The explanation of class in this domain is not very deep and therefore could only be explained by referring to patriarchy and capitalism as a joint entity (Abercrombie and Urry, 1983). According to Goldthorpe (1983), social stratification is based on the family as a unit and not the individual. However, the class of family is also determined by the class of the man and so the status of the women is diffused totally. Her reason was that the contribution of the female is highly insignificant. She further raised the issue of 'conflicting responsibilities' on the side of women by explaining that women are not stable on their jobs because of domestic and maternal functions. As if the domestic factor was not enough explanation, she also acknowledged the fact that the woman's job is always rendered irrelevant by that of the man.
Just like any other opinion, Goldthorpe's opinion was subjected to a lot of criticism. The one critic point that stood out was that there were many families in which the females were rather dominant ones because the earnings of the woman were rather significant than that of the man. Another important criticism that was raised against the explanation of Goldthorpe was that she underestimated the importance of women's employment. If there is any category of people that deserve more than one break in annually, it surely must be women because their request for break is usually geared towards important or emergency occurring such as pregnancy or child birth (Martin and Roberts, 1984). Also women are known to use their earnings much more judiciously than men.
The argument of Britten and Heath (1983) was way more different than that of Goldthorpe. They rather chose to recognize the fact that the sustainability of the family depended on earnings from both the man (husband) and woman (wife).