Sustaining The Women's Ghetto: Gendering, Masculinization and Feminization Of Newspaper Organizations

This paper aims to explore the reasons why women are still unable to escape from marginalized, belittling and disadvantaged positions at work.  Previous studies on gender and women’s employment have acknowledged that the gendered construction of labour has either excluded women from the labour market or restricted them to the middle or bottom of the power structure within work organizations.

Using NotT Daily as an example, I argue that, apart from using the ‘gendering’ process, the organization may at the same time be attempting to feminize some particular units to intensify the gender segregation. In so doing, the organization may still appear to be segregated by gender, but the nature of the horizontal gender segregation is different from what it was before. To explain the differences, we have to employ feminization as an explanatory tool. In other words, to understand the way in which organizations are gendered, we have to examine the processes of both ‘masculinization’ and ‘feminization’, in order to acknowledge more clearly the difficulties women are confronting in the labour market.

In this article, I suggest that the women’s page was feminized by two means: isolation and normalization. The women’s page was isolated spatially. It was also isolated in terms of professional practices. The isolation reified the unimportance of the women’s page in the sense that the women’s page was a neglected and dead-end sector. The organization then normalized the labour process of the women’s page to render the working routine of the women’s page compatible with most people’s daily routines (particularly schoolchildren), thereby making the women’s page a women’s unit inevitably shunned by ambitious people. And it is the feminization of the women’s page that makes the women’s page a women’s ghetto.