WOST 301 - Women and Work

Units: 3 ; Breadth Area: Diversity
A feminist intersectional analysis of earnings and employment differentials. Covered topics may include work/family balance, labor policy, sexual harassment, occupational micro-enterprises, colonial legacies, and transitional economies.

Prerequisites: Junior, senior or post-baccalaureate standing.
Possible Instructional Methods: Entirely On-ground, or Entirely Online, or Hybrid.
Grading: A-F or CR/NC (student choice).
Breadth Area(s) Satisfied: Overlay - Diversity
Course Typically Offered: Fall & Spring

Student Learning Outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:

Read, discuss and analyze debates over the definition of “work” and patterns of inequality in paid and domestic labor.
Analyze historical and contemporary research on women’s labor exploitation including sexual harassment. Examine issues of class, race, ethnicity, immigrant status and gender and the ways these identity markers impact women’s labor. Explore the social determinants of career choice and occupational sex segregation.
Examine theoretical and empirical studies on gender, organizations and institutions as they impact women’s paid and unpaid work. Examine how an analysis of gender and work in the U.S. necessitates a broader focus on how the categories of race, class, sexuality, immigration status, and nationality impact women’s labor. Examine feminist critiques of capitalism, comparable worth, and work/family issues.
Interrogate areas of gender inequality and paid and domestic labor debates and the experience of labor (and labor exploitation) according to race, class, sexuality, religion, and immigration status. Students will explore how gender, race, class, age, religion and disability impact women’s paid and unpaid work from a feminist perspective.

Diversity Overlay Learning Outcomes

describe the histories and/or experiences of one or more U. S. cultural groups and the resilience and agency of group members;
identify structures of oppression and the diverse efforts and strategies used by groups to combat the effects of oppressive structures;
analyze the intersection of the categories of race and gender as they affect cultural group members’ lived realities and/or as they are embodied in personal and collective identities;
recognize the way that multiple differences (including, for example, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, immigration status, gender expression, color/phenotype, racial mixture, linguistic expression, and/or age) within cultural groups complicate individual and group identities.