Work is the silent majority stakeholder in our lives. We can all articulate what we think of the latest Netflix thriller, Arsenal signing or novel-length New Yorker profile. We can all discuss our children and grandchildren with a socially acceptable mix of humblebrag and frustration. Yet we are nowhere near as good at talking about what paid work means to us, nor about the weird ways in which human labour is valued (a great deal for lawyers, very little for carers). How can we begin to articulate the meaning of our work?
And while we may strive for fairness in our personal dealings, workplaces can be arbitrary, primal places where people’s worst instincts are exposed. The psychodrama of organisational life is a narrative of triumphs and setbacks, buffeted by internal machinations and, increasingly, wider economic and political forces. Given this instability, what does truly fair treatment look like in today’s workplace?
I have tried to articulate my own response to these questions after reading three recent books that explore work in contrasting ways. Patriarchy Inc by Cordelia Fine goes deep into biology and culture to debunk the common (and, in the second Trump era, ascendant) idea that men and women are genetically predisposed to desire different jobs. Charlie Colenutt has produced an oral history of UK workers in their own words, 50 years after Studs Terkel’s US version, Working. And Emily Callaci reanimates the 1970s Wages for Housework movement, a challenge to capitalist assumptions about which labour carries economic worth.
Fine’s book follows her bestselling Testosterone Rex (2017), in which she examines theories that this hormone is what creates inequality between the sexes: in Fine’s analysis, it’s culture, not nature. Patriarchy Inc takes these arguments into the workplace, to demolish the contention that our genetic and hormonal differences mean it’s natural that women and men do different jobs (this would neatly explain why there are so few women in corporate leadership, for example). Fine pithily calls this the “Different But Equal” argument. In her analysis — and it’s one I agree with — we have, rather, been acculturated from birth to expect one type of work or another. Fine calls this “mindshaping”. And it can be reversed.
Fine, a professor in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, brings expected academic rigour to this subject. She also offers the reader a rare gift (in the business-adjacent book world, at least): humour. While setting out practical ways to focus on “what diversity, equity and inclusion are actually for: creating a more just society”, she does it “with the gay abandon of someone who will not be held accountable for implementing them”. If only all academics (and journalists) were as self-aware about our lack of impact in the “doing” world.
Fine is not a fan of corporate DEI. It “has a contradictory heritage, as if a social justice activist had mated with a business tycoon”. Its economic goals, the often cited “business case”, are not about fairness, she says: “Despite the feel-good rhetoric, in DEI [as it relates to women] the issue is framed as an under-utilization of female human capital.” The popular “Fix the Women” strategy hasn’t got results: there is little evidence, for example, that leadership courses for women actually work. This approach “also neglects the possibility that it might be women’s jobs and workplaces that need fixing”. Quite.
Once men decide they want to do a job in large numbers, she argues, it becomes high-status. Fine outlines the early history of software programming, when women were considered suited to its demands as “a kind of puzzle-solving — like crosswords”, and held senior roles. In 1957, programmer Elsie Shutt became pregnant and was forced to leave her job at Raytheon Computing in Massachusetts. She carried on freelancing, recruiting other mothers as her workload grew. Shutt’s resulting business, Computations Inc, was rooted in collaboration between “physically dispersed part-time workers, in the days before email and Zoom”. It was very successful.
There’s no definitive answer, Fine says, to explain why women fell away from programming, after peaking in the mid 1980s — 37 per cent of computer science graduates in the US in 1984 were women. Software programming was rebranded as “software engineering” and, as more men rushed in, it became a high-status job. Screening tests became “dubious and gender-based aptitude tests and personality profiles”. Fine’s wider point is that when a significant number of a dominant group take desirable jobs, “social closure” occurs. Men hoard the roles for other men; the same would happen whenever there is a dominant group, because of our inbuilt affinity for others like us: “homophily”. It’s often not conscious, it’s how humans work, left unchecked. We can work to dismantle it — but in Fine’s account, this is what much of corporate DEI failed to tackle.
Fine deals in the structures that underpin corporate life. For what happens “on the ground”, I turned to Charlie Colenutt’s Is This Working?. He interviewed 100 people across the UK, and 68 made it into the book, identified only by age and job description. Throughout this long (probably too long) book, the common thread is that it is fate or chance meetings that determine many working lives, rather than planned careers.
A childminder in her forties, for example, regrets that she wasn’t able to go into nursing, because of an injury at 20: “I was working in a residential care home and one of the residents hit me on the back with a walking stick and knocked me down. To this day, I’m still troubled with my back and shoulders.”
Colenutt groups the interviews into sections: “Sales work”, “Bosswork”, “City work” and so on. An online sex worker is with a panel beater, a security guard and a warehouse worker, in “Bodywork”. She’s a student, supplementing an inadequate loan, and finds the work “freeing” — but her account is a glimpse into the invisible, underpaid sectors that service those in well-paid corporate jobs.
At the end of Colenutt’s project, one of his conclusions is that “pride is an everyday kind of thing”. We often struggle to define what pride in our work actually is. Here, I think, Colenutt has cracked it: “The interviewees who were most proud of their work were the ones who performed an act of mental substitution: in their mind, they replaced their real client either for someone they loved — most often, their family — or for themselves.” For example: “Even if the car you’re working on is a shithole, that could be someone’s mum in there. Think about it like that.”
There’s simplicity in how we find meaning at work: “the lack of abstraction, the immediate and satisfying tasks, the autonomy, the smallness”. All of these are human-scaled. Now, Colenutt observes, we are faced with generative AI and a “tendency towards complexity and speed and scale”. Can our fragile happiness survive?
Colenutt leaves us hanging. I am more decisive: I believe in progress, both technological and, as Fine would hope, cultural. How could I not? I have seen corporate culture improve immeasurably since the early 1990s, when women in job interviews were routinely asked if they planned to get pregnant, and my first boss asked if the women in the office got our periods at the same time.
The biggest question about work, which Colenutt and Fine approach, focuses on what and who we value. Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework goes further: it explores a feminist campaign to pay housewives. Why do we tolerate the lack of economic worth assigned to caring? And is a different view possible?
The book is, in part, a chronological account of Wages for Housework in the wider landscape of women’s liberation in the early 1970s, and also contains chapter-long biographies of five key figures in the global movement. I previously knew nothing about this important strand of second-wave feminism and the women behind it, including the American activist and anti-racist organiser Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, an Italian academic and political radical.
These two women are still alive, and Callaci honours their legacy. “When I asked [Dalla Costa] what Wages for Housework has meant to her personally, I was surprised by her curt answer: ‘It wasn’t personal,’ she told me: through study and political struggle, she concluded that it was the correct analysis of capitalism.”
Callaci, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came to the subject when the burden of caring for her children upended her cherished notions about gender equality. “Wages for Housework,” she writes, “is perhaps best understood as a political perspective, which starts from the premise that capitalism extracts wealth not only from workers, but also from the unpaid work of creating and sustaining workers.” As well as their employee, an employer gets “the labor of the second person who is at home sustaining him”. When the movement emerged in the 1970s, that worker was presumed to be a him.
All humans want the same things from our lives and our work: love, connection and friendship, fair chances — and fair reward and recognition. It’s an imperfect world, but the sudden, brutal dismantling of corporate DEI in the US and beyond might, I have to hope, allow fresh, Fine-like thinking and action to rise up.
Most radically, and dreamily, Callaci describes how the Wages for Housework campaign created a vision beyond work. One rooted in subsidised childcare that left women free to do “whatever the hell we want. A nap. Art. A swim in the ocean. Slow, luxurious sex. Time to nurture our friendships . . . Having grown up with a feminism that equated liberation with the right to pursue success at work, this was a revelation: a feminism that was unabashedly anti-work.”
What a glorious world that would be.
Isabel Berwick writes FT’s Working It newsletter and is author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’.
Patriarchy Inc: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work by Cordelia Fine Atlantic Books £22/WW Norton $29.99 (from August), 352 pages
Is This Working? The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them by Charlie Colenutt Picador £20, 400 pages
Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise by Emily Callaci Allen Lane £25/Seal Press $30, 288 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
Read the full article here