European women in business and management

318

Book Reviews

tions in which no man was available for comparison. Nor did it help to tackle the systematic undervaluing of women’s jobs and skills. Thus, campaigns were mounted in both countries for the right to claim equal pay for people doing dSffeenr jobs, where the value to the employer of those jobs could be demonstrated to be the same. This was partially accepted in the USA after certain court rulings and decisions of state legislatures, and in the UK because of the need to comply with directives from the European Community. These campaigns and their outcomes, termed ‘comparable worth’ in the USA and ‘equal value’ in the UK, are the subject of this comprehensive and informative book. The book is divided into two sections. The first deals with general issues, the second with case studies of particular campaigns or situations. A generally ‘feminist’ methodology is used throughout, though the attitudes and approaches of the contributors differ considerably. Race and class perspectives, in addition to gender, are upfront. The essays in the first section highlight problems and issues, draw out the comparisons between the two countries, and examine how these campaigns relate to other developments in feminist and labour movement strategy. Developments in the law and the technical problems related to job evaluation are well set out and debated in this context by, respectively, Jeanne Gregory and Fiona Neathey. The move to comparable worth/equal value has always been seen as important in class terms and as a way of extending equality campaigns to benefit working class women. Linda Blum makes the point that even comparable worth claims still have relevance only for certain types of workers, namely those with relatively stable jobs, probably in the public sector, and where arguments about skill and responsibility can be made. They do not on the whole benefit women with more fragmented work patterns and lower levels of skill. Julianne Malvaux, writing about the effect of comparable worth on Black women, points out that it is necessary also to look at how successful claims are paid for. For instance, employers in the state sector might be tempted to pay by taking funds from schemes for the unemployed or from childcare provision, thus disadvantaging other low paid women. She welcomes comparable worth schemes, however, particularly as the revelation of gender bias in wage scales opens the way for the consideration of race bias also. Both of these contributors emphasise that claims for comparable worth need to be part of an overall strategy for women workers, and conducted in ways that show awareness of the possible implications for other groups of women. The case study section provides additional vivid information which slots into the above. Overall, it would seem that comparable worth/equal value is most likely to be implemented in areas where the employer has something to lose from a public confrontation, for example, the Midland Bank and Sainsburys in the UK, Yale University and some public authorities in the USA. Alan Arthurs’ account of the (employer initiated) scheme at the Midland Bank shows interestingly that the management, aware that they were vulnerable in terms of comparisons between cashiers and messengers, waited to see ‘if there was going to be any fuss,’ when the EC measures were adopted. When they found that activism

was growing, they implemented their own, quite favourable, scheme to pre-empt further action. In all these accounts the relation among women’s militancy, trade union action, and use of the law is fully examined. Evidence would suggest that an equal balance of the first two, with the law in the background, is the most effective combination. Unfortunately, the existence of women at management level is not always a guarantee of favourable treatment. Linda Blum’s account of events in San Jose, California, styled by its woman mayor as ‘the feminist capital of the nation,’ makes this all too clear. As will be evident, there is a great deal of interesting material in this book which helpfully illuminates one strand of feminist practice in the 1980s. My only regret is that there is no final chapter drawing the material together. It would have been interesting to know the conclusions of the editors, and how they see such activity developing or changing in the circumstances of the 1990s. CATHERINE HOSKYNS SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AND LAW COVENTRY UNIVERSITY COVENTRY, UK

EUROPEAN WOMEN IN BUSINESS AND

MANAGEMENT,

edited by Marilyn J. Davidson and Cary L. Cooper, 199 pages. Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd, London, 1993. Hard cover, fBr25.96. This book explores the situation of women in business and management in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. There is not a common chapter format; each contribution reflects available material and issues of local significance. Most authors provide detailed statistics on women’s participation in the workforce (which is increasing throughout Europe), their entry into management positions, and their roles as entrepreneurs. Other topics frequently covered include equality legislation, pensions, access to education, lack of pay equality, childcare provision, profiles of women managers derived from survey data, attitudes to women managers, women’s career aspirations, combining professional and domestic roles, and government, corporate or women’s organizations’ initiatives to enhance opportunities for women. This is, then, a valuable source book which broadens horizons about women and employment by portraying different cultures’ situations and focal issues, often mapped against those of other European countries. There are, of course, many similarities between countries. For example, women are still largely segregated into traditional women’s jobs in a limited range of employment sectors, they are often found in part-time or contract employment, and they are poorly represented in senior management (especially in the private sector). Many new entrepreneurs are women, and they are more likely to be married and to have children than are women managers in organizations, suggesting that this may be an easier lifestyle base for reconciling different demands. Most authors conclude that legislation has so far had limited impacts. Several do, however, believe that European Community laws will soon set higher stan-

Book Reviews

dards for equality and may well force member countries to take these issues more seriously. I particularly enjoyed contributions which gave me insights into historical and cultural factors which have shaped women’s lives. For example, I learned that from 1930 to 1947 in the Netherlands married women were legally barred from taking paid employment to safeguard jobs for men. The chapter on Germany was fascinating, looking at the very different practices and expectations East and West bring to women’s employment. In Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain women are only recently entering management in significant numbers, reflecting major changes in cultural attitudes and economic conditions. In France women do seem more likely than in other cultures to assert the value of their potential differences from men, especially in certain employment sectors. As you might expect, there was plenty of attention to how women (and men) do and might combine professional and domestic lives. Childcare facilities are considered inadequate in most countries (Denmark is a significant exception). The situation is especially difficult for those with children of school age. In countries with a short school day, such as Portugal and Greece, problems are exacerbated. Some contributors described impressive-seeming parental leave entitlements, but often leave is unpaid and/or in practice the opportunity‘is seldom taken up, particularly by managers, and particularly by men. In most countries domestic labour is still mostly the responsibility of women, with men spending relatively little time per week on household work. I was interested to find out how far different countries had gone, either through government or corporate initiatives, in supporting positive action programmes to encourage women into traditional men’s jobs and into management. Some examples were reported, but often these were motivated by concern about a future shortfall of employee talent and so reinforced the traditional view of women as a secondary labour pool, to be drawn on in emergencies. The editors provide an initial chapter which makes some comparisons between the different countries. The volume is, however, more a collection of distinctive profiles than an integrated work. The mass of detail given in most chapters, and the variations in topics covered, mean that it is not easy to achieve a simplified overview. This seems, however,.appropriate given the complexity of the issue involved. This book is therefore a valuable resource, both for providing information on individual countries and for collecting together the diverse strands of women’s current status as businesswomen and managers in Europe. As I finished reading, the question that stayed with me was whether it is possible to change our cultural foundations sufficiently for women and men to be on equal terms both in employment and in domestic life. The chapters had shown me signs and possible change processes and evidence of the resiliance of dominant social systems. They had also given me a sense of the attitude of initiative about gender-related issues many women, and some men, are now adopting in their lives, and showed how women are proving themselves as respected managers in many countries. Certainly much change is afoot, and legislation is only part of the picture. JUDIMARSHALL SCHOOLOFMANAGEMENT UNIVERSITYOFBATH,UK

319

ANATOMY OF LOVE:THE NATCJRALHISTORYOF MoNOGAMY, ADULTERY, AND DIVORCE, by Helen E. Fisher, 431 pages. W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 1992. Hard cover, USS22.95. Scientific questions that reflect female perspectives in a Darwinian framework focus on social behavior of males and females. Increasingly females are characterized as active players in evolutionary games. Despite recent improvements, readers of Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce will observe that some evolutionary biologists have not yet fully incorporated female perspectives, but are making progress. In Anatomy of Love, Helen Fisher discusses evolutionary hypotheses about human mating patterns. Her main emphasis and the most novel aspect of her discussion is a description of the naturalness of divorce and her speculation on the evolutionary significance of divorce. Based on the fact that most divorces occur at about 4 years after marriage, she hypothesizes that “human marriages originally evolved to last only long enough to raise a single dependent child through infancy, the first 4 years, unless a second infant was conceived” (p. 154). This is a notion of adaptive divorce, and it depends on the evolutionary idea that monogamy, adultery, and divorce evolved because those that married, philandered, and divorced had higher reproductive success than those who did not. Anatomy of Love begins with six chapters describing proximate correlates and evolutionary hypotheses about mating in people: What we do when we court, the role of olfaction, how we feel when we are falling in love, how we bond, and so forth. The last 10 chapters are speculative accounts based on debatable inferences about the lives of our protohominid ancestors. Fisher’s data are historical records about marriage and divorce in the US during this and the last century, in modern traditional and other industrial societies, and from predominantly Western cultures. From these patterns and their variations and assumptions about both past environments and behavior of our ancestors she develops adaptive scenarios to account for monogamy, infidelity, and divorce. The interpretations that Fisher provides of these behavioral tendencies in humans are main-stream, by-and-large, with a few notable exceptions. In an introductory note Fisher says that “ . . . this book is about the innate aspects of sex and love and marriage, those mating traits and tendencies that we inherited from our past.” She says “human beings have a common nature, a set of shared unconscious tendencies . . . that are encoded in our DNA . . . .” This may indeed be so. There are many mechanisms of heritability including genes, but none of the information that Fisher reviews is relevant to the issue of the genetic basis of monogamy, adultery, and divorce, which is what she says she is talking about. Nowhere does she discuss the genes that supposedly underlie the behaviors that interest her. In order to identify gene(s) for monogamy, adultery, or divorce, variation in expression of these traits will have to be tracked through known genealogies. So, the important first question is: How do we characterize variation in monogamy, adultery, and divorce? Even this apparently simple sort of exercise seems hard to do. In fact, no one has done studies identifying the gene(s) for monogamy, adultery, or divorce. Such discoveries will be long in coming even if such genes exist. Therefore, I think