Gendered Precariousness in the Canadian Labour Market and the Crisis in Social Reproduction

...In this lecture, I shall forge an alternative approach.... My aim is to rethink feminization and this requires critiquing dominant interpretations of feminization that emphasize women’s high labour force participation and employment rates to the exclusion of other labour market trends through an analytical framework attentive to developments on both supply- and demand-sides of the labour market (i.e., production and social reproduction). I will argue that by focusing attention on the movement of women into the labour market, these approaches risk obscuring the gendered rise of precarious employment. This restrictive emphasis welds feminization to a narrow set of trends and glosses over key continuities, such as persisting occupational and industrial2 segregation, and discontinuities, such as the convergence towards precariousness, in the contemporary labour market. --From introduction

Robarts Canada Research Chairholders Series