Getting In Is Not Enough—Women and the Global Workplace

Generations of feminists have linked women’s empowerment, autonomy, and oppression to issues involving work. Most conflated women’s economic and political clout with gender equity, arguing that increasing women’s access to and leadership in the public workplace is crucial to the success of the feminist project. But recent debates about women's continued inability to gain equality in the workplace raise the need for new approaches to teaching about gender and employment. Getting In Is Not Enough responds to the challenge.

Drawn from almost two decades of the Feminist Formations journal, the essays in this book critically examine assumptions about access and the ways in which women affect and are affected by work in three major spheres: economic, social, and political.

Getting In Is Not Enough focuses on how access-based feminism, a term developed by Colette Morrow and Terri Ann Fredrick, has both failed and succeeded in achieving equity and justice for women and looks at how transnational feminism has addressed these concerns using a global, fundamentally transformative approach. The contributors consider a wide range of issues, from an examination of the male/female wage gap that starts when girls are teenagers, to policewomen in Persian Gulf countries, to Latinas’ politics, to Aboriginal health care workers, to secretarial work, and to feminist activism in Cuban hip hop.

Colette Morrow sat on the editorial board of Feminist Formations from 2002 to 2012, served as president of the National Women's Studies Association (U.S.), and is a Senior Fulbright Scholar. Terri Ann Fredrick is an associate professor of English at Eastern Illinois University.