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Structures of Opportunity and Structures of Constraint
Now women can go out to work and hold a high-ranking job, even in the army and the police. This is a great change since our parent’s time. —Urban young man, Khartoum, Sudan
In today’s world, women fit anywhere as long as you have the right qualifications.” They listed highly skilled work—some conventionally masculine jobs—as suitable for women, desirable to them, and available not only to men. They asserted that they can be police officers, lawyers, and doctors, just the same as men. They also remarked that they want to be like their fathers and “have prestige like him, and get [public] exposure like him.” For these young women, domestic work and care giving are not attractive jobs. But while their hopes for the future include professional careers, they also want marriage, recognizing that pursuing both has a cost: “If you are a married woman, it is even more difficult [to work far from home] and it can destroy the marriage. Men cannot wait for a woman. If you are gone too long, by the time you come back, he may have moved out to live with someone else.” These young women are forced to hang on to this dual role of professional worker and proper wife to accommodate male peers who may or may not welcome their income-earning role. “Yes, it is acceptable that they have the right to work,” noted a young man, “It is good because they can assist their husbands in meeting household demands. In some households, you find that the man is unemployed and only the woman works and supports the family.” Yet, another young man disagreed strongly, “It is not acceptable because a woman needs to be at home caring for the children. Most of the time, working women are promiscuous and don’t respect their husbands.” Unlike the communities that are struggling with limited jobs and high levels of poverty, these young women at least can take heart in the ready availability of desirable jobs and the prospect that some men are broadminded enough to welcome this development. As quickly as women’s public roles are changing in Umlazi township B, traditional gender identities continue to frame desirable jobs. Other young women consider construction jobs as more suitable for men due to their greater strength. And when men are employed in healthcare, “male nurses are discriminated against and people call them homosexuals.” Gender stereotyping allocates such jobs as nursing and office administrative work more often to women and authority positions to men: “If the school principal is a man, the school is highly respected because men are known for enforcing discipline.” In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, the market has become more dynamic, but it is still not easy for men or women to find jobs. Education remains a distant objective for everyone. Some young people aspire to technical and professional jobs, but they are not attainable by local workers. Indeed most of the good jobs are clearly manual skilled labor that is highly segregated by On Norms and Agency • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9862-3