Women in the Office 1980's - 2000's

For this weeks blog post I have chosen to look at women working in an office. This leads to stereotyping women's jobs and gender inequalities in the work force. This includes feminism in the first and second wave and post - feminism.

The first image is a woman working in an office in the 1980's. The picture shows a woman hard at work on what seems to be an average working day. As you can see the woman is well dressed which indicates a high income and therefore must be well educated. Even though it was becoming more common for women to go to work after university or college most women didn't work until there children had started going to school. It was very unusual to see a woman being the main bread - winner in a family. She is also doing two jobs at once (multi-tasking) which shows that she is hard working even though her job may not be manual and possibly not classed as a "man's job". This indicates good organisational skills and that she is just as dedicated to her job as man would be with his. In this image the woman is very glamorous. This shows she can have a good job and still look feminine.


The second image is of a woman in the same profession but 20 years on. As you can see this picture is very different to the first one. The woman here is very relaxed and seems to have some leisure time to paint her nails. This indicates that she has the "have it all" factor. This means that she can have a well paid job, be well educated, look glamorous and have the social life. It is becoming less unusual to see women without a job and it is becoming more common for a woman to be the main bread- winner in a family. On the other hand this picture could give a bad image of women in the work place. This could indicate that women are not as hard working as they were in the 80's and therefore should not get paid as much as a man in the same profession. This is refering back to the post - feminine wave, as women do not need to prove themselves as much and therefore deserve to have more leisure time for themselves and can relax and enjoy their job.

Women in the work force have had major breakthroughs such as more women working after they graduate from university and I am sure they will continue into the future.