I've started this blog as an outlet for a course I'm taking at Arizona State University: Women, Work and Justice. I felt that the blog's title, "Thoughts on Women, Work & Justice," makes clear that what I post will be my reactions and responses to topics that are being discussed in the class.
I am currently entering my senior year at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where my focus is Digital Journalism. My minor is in Justice Studies, hence my taking this course.
I chose this class to satisfy part of my minor because I've always been a bit of a feminist at heart. The topic of women and work is a great interest of mine, and has been since I was a child growing up with two working parents. To inject the viewpoint of justice studies into the realm of gender relations seemed like something that could be beneficial as a woman with a few jobs, and as a student from a purely academic standpoint.
To me, studying women, work and justice will mean looking at women from all walks of life, exploring how they work, what they do, how they are treated and how all of the above compare to men and their work norms. Justice comes into the picture as a means of attempting to balance out inequalities, or injustices, found as discrepancies between men and women and what society expects from them and deals to them.
Justice in this topic would equate to women and men making equal pay, getting equal benefits and having equal expectations levied at them when doing the same job. Injustice, presumably more common in reality, would mean an imbalance between men and women due to ingrained expectations, perceived gender roles (weak vs. strong; worker vs. caregiver, etc.), or any other force that makes one gender supposedly better suited to working one job than another.
I look forward to further exploring this topic and hope that this semester will be a fruitful one.
