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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Strategic Uses Of Gender In Household Negotiations: Women Workers On Mexico’S Northern Border, Leslie C. Gates Dec 2002

The Strategic Uses Of Gender In Household Negotiations: Women Workers On Mexico’S Northern Border, Leslie C. Gates

Sociology Faculty Scholarship

The study illustrates the potential of the ‘doing gender’ perspective to explain why employment helps women win some negotiations at home but not others. Eighteen in-depth interviews with women maquiladora workers in Mexico suggest that employment may help women gain new rights and extend the limits of respect accorded them by male companions and parents. Women were more successful when they used negotiating strategies that conformed to their gender identity, such as making offers, than when they used negotiating strategies that challenged traditional gender norms, such as withdrawing services or making threats.


A State’S Gendered Response To Political Instability: Gendering Labor Policy In Semi-Authoritarian El Salvador (1944-1972), Leslie C. Gates, Kati L. Griffith Jul 2002

A State’S Gendered Response To Political Instability: Gendering Labor Policy In Semi-Authoritarian El Salvador (1944-1972), Leslie C. Gates, Kati L. Griffith

Sociology Faculty Scholarship

Unlike much of the gender and welfare literature, this study examines why a regime that constrains pressure from below would adopt gendered social policies. The Salvadoran case (1944-1972) suggests that political instability rather than societal pressures may prompt semi-authoritarian regimes to adopt gendered labor reforms. We extend the motivations for adopting gendered labor reforms to include co-opting labor by examining gendered labor reforms in the context of El Salvador’s historically contingent labor strategy. This gendered analysis helps explain how a semi-authoritarian regime secured political stability and reveals the special appeal gendered labor reforms may have to semi-authoritarian regimes.