work that will pay enough to support her and her family. Historical factors have weighed heavily on women's current status. In the nineteenth century, attitudes toward women were very different to the present attitudes placed upon them now. In the nineteenth century, there was a great need for women to work. Working class women had jobs in clothing factories, or worked as seamstress. Their work was more domestic-related. Middle class women were not expected to work. There were some jobs, but they were very limited. Middle class women were more expected to teach, to support themselves, until they found a husband. During this time there was a lower value place on a womens work than that of a mans. Therefore, women were paid less to do the same work as men were. This lower value on womens work accounted for androcentric biases, which put men at a higher standing in their work. Men were often paid more for dangerous, dirty, and physical work such as mining. On the contrary, women who worked, per say as nurses whom also did heavy lifting and dirty work, were undervalued and underpaid. These biases brought into play occupational segregation, which implied that men and women tend to do different jobs because of their gender. According to Luhaorg and Zivian, women have remained concentrated in predominately female occupations, i.e., clerical, sales, and service occupations,...while men enjoy a much more heterogeneous occupational structure; no major occupational category being dominant (Luhaorg, 1995, 608). Luckily for women, in the 1980's, federal law declared solutions to their two major problems involving the work force. Pay equity was established to solve the problem of the wage gap, which enforced that people who work the exact same jobs were to earn the exact same pay. The second solution that was established by the government was employment equity, which helped with occupational segregation and gave employers a set of ...
