Passage Two
Alternative employment arrangements represent one of the fastest growing categories of employment in the U.S. labor force. Defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, alternative employment arrangements represent any employment arrangement that involves an intermediary or whose time, place, or quantity of work is unpredictable such as independent contracting and on-call work. About 10% of the U.S. labor force is currently in alternative employment arrangements, which include either full-time or part-time work schedules. In fact, access to part-time hours has often been given as one of the reasons women seek out alternative employment. Still, most people in these arrangements work full time; only 20% of temporary agency workers and 26% of independent contractors are part time, and many workers-both young and old-consider alternative employment arrangements as a viable employment option compared to standard employment.
Social observers often invoke gender to explain why workers "choose" alternative employment arrangements, i.e., prefer them to standard employment. The assumption is that alternative employment offers greater flexibility, thereby facilitating working parents'management of both their unpaid family care work and paid employment. Scholars have examined whether workers "choose" and prefer part-time work to standard employment, but less is specifically known about the choices of alternative employment arrangements. There are few empirical studies of alternative employment arrangements that focus specifically on gender and how gender influences alternative employment arrangement choices. Rather, the spotlight has been on the contingent or temporary nature of alternative employment. Management science researchers, in particular, have either ignored gender and family-related issues altogether or have treated gender as a proxy for preference for child care-taking responsibilities. Although recent qualitative research does point to the importance of gender values and stereotypes in shaping attitudes toward temporary employment, the study samples are small or else the topic is primarily about reduced-time arrangements.
Our goal in this study was to assess the gendered nature of alternative employment arrangements. Research shows that gender-related processes influence attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes on multiple levels, from the individual to broad structural and institutional features of societies. We first investigated how attitudes toward alternative employment arrangements are shaped by gender-related beliefs and gendered social contexts. Studying two very different types of alternative employment arrangements at different levels of analysis permitted us to capture the way people "do gender" even in "alternative" employment structures. We built on and extended recent qualitative research by drawing on a nationally representative sample of full-time and part-time independent contractors and temporary agency workers.
Gender Schema and Gender-Related Beliefs
Gender schemas represent the cognitive lenses through which individuals differentially view women and men. These cultural schemas （about the way things are and the way things should be） impose gender-based classifications on social reality, and encourage the sorting of people, attributes, behaviors, and other things on the basis of culturally prevailing, polarized definitions of masculinity and femininity. As such, gender schemas affect individual perceptions, interpretations, and expectations.
Gender schema provides patterned guides to everyday life in the form of specific and diffuse norms about men's and women's work and family roles. These schemas are reenacted and reinforced by the social organization of work, family, and community-policy regimes that privilege those who follow the standard masculine lock-step career mystique. But this pattern, developed in the 1950s, was predicated on the feminine mystique of full-time homemakers backing up men climbing career ladders. Even though most women are now in the workforce and most working men no longer have wives who are full-time homemakers, gender schema that presume the primacy of men in the public sphere of paid work and women in the private sphere of family care work are deeply embedded in American culture. Indeed most couples conform to this gender typing——married men continue to view themselves as the principal breadwinners, and even employed women remain the principal unpaid family care providers. Furthermore, research suggests that Americans harshly judge people who deviate from established schema.
1.Which of the followings is closest in meaning with alternative employment arrangements?
[A]Homemaking
[B]Breadwinning
[C]Part-time work
[D]Contracting
2.According to the article, which of the followings is one of the reasons why women seek out alternative employment?
[A]Access to part-time hours
[B]Personal freedom and independence
[C]Recognition
[D]None of the above
3.Social observers often assume that .
[A]alternative employment is more preferable to women than to men
[B]alternative employment is better than standard employment
[C]alternative employment facilitates working parents' management
[D]alternative employment is a temporary phenomenon
4.Gender schemas affect all of the followings except .
[A]individual perceptions
[B]individual interpretations
[C]individual expectations.
[D]individual social statuses
5.By and large, this article is most probably found in .
[A]a science fiction
[B]a newspaper report
[C]an academic journal
[D]a government report