WGS 399
Feminism in the Workplace:
Field Study in Women's and Gender StudiesIntroduction
Calendar Assignments Reading sources
What do you do with a women’s and gender studies education?
This internship course is a chance for you to consolidate and enrich your undergraduate learning while building the transition to life beyond college. Women's and Gender Studies students learn to think critically and act strategically on issues of social inequity, particularly relating to gender and sexuality. Graduates have entered a wide variety of careers; there is no one set of career paths, professional skills, or occupational sites to which this training applies. Feminism in the Workplace therefore focuses not on the nature and demands of particular worksites, but on work itself and organizational practices that arise from feminist theory and scholarship.
Taking another step
Feminism in the Workplace is designed for students of junior or senior standing who are WGS majors or minors, as well as for WILL students. The prerequisite for enrollment is at least two WGS courses.
The course draws on your breadth of exposure to the themes of Women’s and Gender Studies, particularly:
- how gender norms shape social institutions and institutions, in turn, reproduce gender
- the impacts of intersecting systems of privilege and power (such as gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation) on what counts as knowledge in specialized fields of knowledge and practice
- historical and contemporary feminist strategies for resisting or transforming those systems
The course takes these themes a step further: you will be applying your prior learning to out-of-classroom experiences through immersion in a worksite, together with analytical reflection on self, the workplace, family, community, and political and civic institutions.
In the two-hour weekly class meetings, we are likely to explore most or all of the following issues, considering how individuals and organizations have addressed them in managing personal lives, transforming organizational structures and practices, providing advocacy and services, and promoting and instituting policy and law:
- The wage gap
- The “glass ceiling”
- Sexuality in the workplace
- Gendered communication and management styles
- Male-dominated professional networking
- Career-family role conflicts
- The devaluing of “feminized” work roles
- The feminization of poverty
- Intersections of gender with race, sexuality, class, and nation in shaping the workforce and the economy
This course does not assume that the point of feminism is simply to get women a fair share of what men have. Rather, feminism offers critical tools for understanding inequities of all kinds and addressing the systemic factors that keep them in place. What does it mean, for example, that 30% of the world’s economic production is carried out through women’s unpaid labor—work that is often not even categorized as “work”? And, in an economy dominated by hierarchical, individualistic, and competitive models of achievement, how can we reposition “feminized” ethical values, such as caring, community building, and mutual empowerment?
Throughout the course, you will be asked to analyze the impacts that the gendering of work have on you as you envision and prepare for the future, and to see yourself as a potential agent of change on behalf of yourself and others. Linking readings and research to one another’s onsite experiences, you will join other students in articulating how you situate your own work activities, both on the concrete, everyday level and on the scale of social systems, within a feminist analysis of gender and work.
What you will do in this course
Work in teams to select readings and plan and facilitate effective class meetings
Hold a 150-hour internship and keep an onsite journal (This link will take you to a page of guidelines for selecting an internship)
- Describe and analyze your experiences on the job both in writing and verbally
- Assist other students in analyzing their job experiences by listening actively and responding with thoughtful questions
- Develop a research project
All of these activities together are an opportunity to experience research and theory as part of everyday life. You are practical theorists as you perform in the worksite, reflect on and contextualize your activities, and collaborate with your classmates and internship sponsor to translate your reflections into useful knowledge.