The home jobs do raise another important question. Why do men and women seem to have different types of home jobs? It appears that although gender is not necessarily linked to being self-employed or owning one’s own business, the types of businesses and the income earned do vary by gender. Thus certain occupations and job types are en-gendered. As engendering occurs, it erects barriers to the type of employment options that are potentially available to all people.

Qualitative investigations could help explain why people choose home jobs and how this could be gender-related. When home jobs are lumped together into broad categories of occupations or industries, such distinctions concerning the meaning of the work to the individual and her or his family are covert. home jobs within similar occupations or industries, regardless of whether they are women or men, could have quite different motivations, plans, and commitments to their work and its relation to other aspects of their lives such as children, household chores, marriage, or other personal relationships.

The social construction of gender might be different within homes where home jobs for pay is conducted and those where it is not. Elucidating these differences for use in educational programs will help current and potential families to understand the consequences of home jobs to each of its family members. All family members can find satisfaction in economic, social, and psychological terms more easily if they understand and discuss the underlying nature of home jobs. Men and women can modify their attitudes and behavior when open discussion clarifies the issues.

Gender effects on income are similar in home jobs and employment away from the home–men earn more than do women. Further investigation into gender linked issues such as motivations for home jobs in general and choice of specific types of jobs in particular might clarify whether biases are operating in obtaining of capital, in training, or in other areas that determine occupational opportunities. That is, do women and men have different types of home jobs because of gender biases in the society, or do women and men choose their type of home jobs for other reasons? One of these other reasons might be gender ideology. Given the culture of the time and place, do women and men have free choice in their employment? Are some avenues of income earning closed off to members of one gender or the other? Or, do men and women have differing interests in working at or owning particular types of home jobs?

Scholars interested in the role of women in relation to development have shown the extent to which women contribute in a variety of paid and unpaid ways to social development of nations. This scholarship also enlightens scholars and other professionals as to how such contributions are related to conceptions of gender and contribute to gender construction. It includes income earning activities that are often invisible, uncounted, and undocumented because they take place in the informal economy and often in or from the jobs from home. These activities include producing items as well as selling goods and foodstuffs on the street. Although much of this is jobs from home for pay or profit, it is often not recognized in a formal way as contributing to gross domestic production or to the quality of family life. In many cases, this income adds significantly to the standard of living for the household and is produced in addition to the other jobs from home that women do.

The other jobs from home is unpaid labor for the benefit of families and communities, sometimes referred to as household production, which is devalued under capitalist industrialization. Unpaid women’s work includes child care, food growing and production, fetching of water and firewood, production of clothing for their families, and nurturing of family members. It was argued that as capitalism advances, women are included as unpaid laborers by the process of "housewifization." In addition to activities that nourish and benefit children and other family members, there might be gender differences in participation in voluntary activities that benefit schools, churches, civic organizations, and the community.

These are services that help to maintain other people and enable them to participate in education and wage earning activities and are as important to social life as any other type of labor. But in the face of the social importance of this labor, labor for pay is often considered as the only "rear" work. This is the work that is counted and statistically analyzed when the economy of a country is being considered.

Scholars have related the economic position of women to the worldwide structure of unequal labor markets. This scholarship also brings understanding of how labor, including jobs from home, can be both cause and consequence of conceptions of gender. Scholars have developed models of a household division of labor and an international division of labor with a reorganization of production that uses subcontracting to save costs and raise profits for
organizations. Some have argued that transnational organizations, in particular, have exploited jobs from home –workers.

As gender is contested and negotiated in a specific locale, gender expectations can and do change. home based jobs might be one of those settings in which what it means to "do gender" can be different from that in other settings. Although families are embedded in societies and reproduce culture more locally, families are also the settings in which people confront daily the notions each member has of what is proper behavior. Maybe male home based jobs are more likely to define what it means to be a man in ways that are different from those other male workers use. Conversely, female home-workers, given their relative isolation from other peers in a work environment, might be more traditional or conventional in gender terms than their employed women peers working elsewhere. Investigating which aspects of gender are causes of home based jobs and which are consequences will add to the literature. Said differently, investigation can illuminate whether the act of home based jobs creates important gender effects or whether discovered gender differences are a result of the actors involved. Perhaps women’s (or men’s) self-selected employment types and the outcomes are more a factor of characteristics of these people than of gender alone.

General themes of cultural expectations for women such as those regarding child care and other unpaid household production activities have seemed to assign these tasks to women, but many women also have reaped great satisfaction from performing these tasks. Classes for men on parenting and popular books are contributing to a societal change in the United States in which men are being held more responsible for equitable family approaches to unpaid household production. However, this is not true worldwide. Educational programs and public policy need to be developed with consideration of current cultural expectations and of future directions appropriate to each cultural context and home based jobs. The rewards of child care and propinquous production activities should be emphasized to give them acknowledged societal value when performed by women or by men.

Another point that must be considered is that each study and its findings in this blog are bound by a particular cultural context–modern and industrialized societies with an emphasis on individualism and achievement–and each context studied here has some sense of gender equality. It is important to consider what the gender effects discovered mean within a particular society and how these findings fit into larger considerations of jobs at home as a global phenomenon. Whereas jobs at home might be seen and promoted in the United States or Canada as an effective way for women to combine child care and employment, it might not be so readily apparent that such beliefs are consistent with a more globally woven pattern of export-oriented business production that serves to perpetuate the image of women as secondary workers, more fit for jobs at home duties than those required in the public spheres of employment. Cross-country comparative analysis, either in primary research or in an integration and critique of findings from various locations, can further pinpoint the roles that gender plays in these contexts of jobs at home.

A final caution is in order. Gender is certainly an organizing factor in how societies are structured and in how people live their daily lives. In each society and subculture there is a gender ideology that gets played out in lived reality. Being a woman is different from being a man. The differences are reflected in choices about family division of labor, including income earning, household management and production, and propinquous production. But people are actors on their own behalf, having agency and making choices. Not all women jobs at home are alike; nor are all men home-workers. When looking for gender difference, there is some danger in seeing and reifying more differences than might otherwise be important. So, although gender is certainly important, researchers and others must keep in mind that there are differences within genders and that not all members of one gender or the other will be similar.

An empirical question is whether this type of employment and the motivations for choosing to work from home jobs vary in some patterned way by gender. That is, do women and men systematically engage in different types of work from home jobs and for different reasons? If so, then gender and the way it shapes one’s life would appear to be important conceptual tools for gaining better insight into work from home jobs as a social phenomenon. As home-worker, do men and women manage their time and activities differently? If this were true, then gender would be a force shaping the processes associated with work from home jobs. Do family dynamics, including interruptions to paidwork and family life, division of household labor, work-family conflict, and child supervision or care, differ, depending upon whether the home-worker is a man or a woman? If there are consistently different patterns for male and female home-workers related to these activities, then once again gender is to be regarded as an important force. Likewise, if the outcomes of work from home jobs, the rewards and costs, vary systematically by the gender of the workers, then once again the concept of gender and its social construction are important analytical tools for gaining understanding of this widespread employment life-style.

The popular press would have the public believe that a significant and expanding number of people are working at home for a variety of reasons. Among reasons frequently mentioned are that people increasingly choose work from home jobs to gain flexibility in balancing paid-work and family responsibilities, that corporations are increasingly contracting with at-home telecommuters to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and that many "down-sized" workers are starting their own work from home jobs in response to economic restructuring. The widespread nature of work from home jobs worldwide and indicates that in some societies significant proportions of the populations are home-workers.

Disagreement among researchers as to the definition of work from home jobs results in widely varying estimates of the numbers of these workers, disparities in estimates of their growth as an employment sub-population, and conflicting descriptions of their demographic characteristics. In the United States, for example, Deming analyzed the Current Population Survey using responses to a question about hours worked a home. He found that 67% of the home-workers were women, with work from home jobs mainly in the service industry. He did not include in his count those who worked from their homes with no other permanent work location. This exclusion eliminated many men such as electricians and plumbers whom others would consider to be home-workers.

Work at home jobs take place in what is often considered family space. When employment activities take place in one’s dwelling, it brings paid work into the space where duty, need, and love motivate labor. work at home jobs helps to construct gender at the household level.

Gender and its influence on family and household activities are rooted in the more general conceptions of gender within larger sociohistorical settings. The historically structured conceptions of gender within a particular cultural system (the gender order) influence the beliefs and expectations about the appropriate activities of men and women within a family or home setting (a gender regime). To understand the effects of gender on and from work at home jobs, then, one must be mindful of the intersections of culture, society, economy, and family at both the more macro-process and micro-process levels. The more micro-process level are face-to-face daily processes of negotiation and doing gender and are the lived reality of home-worker households.

Gender is a general category of social relations, like race or social class, which can have a variety of specific forms. Patriarchal gender relations are one such form. This form empowers men and subordinates women and is contested with a range of social practices and institutions. Feminist scholarship uses gender as an organizing concept involving two interrelated facets (work at home jobs): (a) the social construction of gender, especially through the emphasis of differences between men and women, and (b) the uses of these distinctions to legitimize and to perpetuate the relations (especially seen as power) between men and women. Gender relations in most forms are basically power relations. Women as a group are subordinated (legally, economically, politically, and socially) to men. Although this contention is expressed by many feminist scholars, it is also recognized that women are not just passive victims. Women are agents and creators of culture–participating in the making of history as well as their own personal biographies. In other words, their gender relationships are constructed.

Feminists argue that the dichotomy between public and private, for example, the economy or society versus the household or family, is a false one. Such dualistic thinking contributes to the canard that logically men are the actors in the public spheres and women are the actors in the private spheres. It also hides the way gender in the work at home jobs is connected to gender in the greater domains of culture and society.

When profits fall and cheaper labor can be found elsewhere, these corporations move on, leaving disorganization and economic destruction in their wake. Studies have shown the connections among subcontracting chains, jobs at home, export increase, and rising profits for corporations. jobs at home -workers worldwide and Third World women in particular have been called upon because of their cheap labor. To the extent that homes in any country can and "should" be used for employment sites, and that women can and "should" contribute to community and state economic development via jobs at home, this leads to the en-gendering of specific activities at the same time that it legitimizes specific forms of surplus value and capital accumulation. This surplus and accumulation can be obtained at the expense of the more fundamental interests of women.

Gender can be a factor in the choice of jobs at home. Subcultural norms, gender conceptions within a particular cultural group, other opportunities for employment, and idiosyncratic or more general values and goals all seem to play a part. More careful analysis of how gender is connected to and constructed through jobs at home in specific occupation types and cultures is required. Some jobs at home occupations are considered more appropriate for men, some more appropriate for women. In the United States, for example, some jobs at home occupations appear to be dominated by men (with 50% or more owned by men–i.e., contractors, mechanics, professional/managerial, shopkeepers, sales representatives, truck drivers) and others are occupations dominated by women (i.e., agricultural sales, beautician, clerical, crafts, food services, human services, income managers, sales agents, service managers, teachers). People who cross these gender conceptions can be perceived as odd by others and be affected by the residuals of this reverse stereotype. For example, a man engaged in jobs at home knitting as an occupation might be considered out of place by others but a business partner by his wife. A woman running a construction business from her jobs at home might be admired or considered unusual.

Overall, although it appears there are some gender-related factors in who participates in jobs at home, why, and for what rewards and at what costs, it does not appear that there is one universal, global relationship. Universal statements of explanation for the relationships between gender and jobs at home might be misleading.

How does feminist theorizing shape the consideration of work from home jobs? As Osmond and Thorne determined:
Feminist scholarship on the historical development of the public-private dichotomy offers scholars a wealth of theorizing and research on the complex interrelationships between family and economy. In the process, feminists redefine social scientists’ concepts both of work (traditionally defined in terms of men’s occupations and organizations) and of family (traditionally defined in terms of "the" nuclear, middleclass, American model and "sex roles"). In summary: feminist scholarship (1) focuses on the organization of work within and outside of families as shaped both by a patriarchal gender system and by a capitalist economic system; (2) refutes the family-linked stereotypes of the man as sole provider and breadwinner and the woman as dependent and economically unproductive (this is neither a useful ideal–it embeds women’s subordination–nor a description of the actual lives of most people); (3) demonstrates that the locus of women’s subordination is not just in the economy nor just in the family, that is, "separate spheres" do not exist in women’s (or men’s) daily experiences; and (4) recognizes a societal gender system that is autonomous with regard to any specific institution yet links all major institutions.
 
Given the many overlapping spheres or institutions that influence work from home jobs (especially for family businesses [ Hennon et al., 1998]), it seems that the work from home jobs is a prime location to find how gender shapes all aspects of labor, both paid and unpaid, more visible and less visible.

Gender is not absolutely tied to biological sex. Rather, femininity and masculinity (what it means to be a woman or a man, or of one gender or the other) are understood within feminist scholarship as contested, negotiated, and constructed via a magnitude of face-to-face transactions and more macro-dynamics (e.g., policies, laws, media, religions) within specific sociohistorical locations (work from home jobs). Biological sex (e.g., chromosomes, anatomical and reproductive physiological characteristics) is distinguished from cultural gender, which can be defined as all the cultural phenomena associated with biological sex (work from home jobs). Gender is understood as a social construction that organizes one’s life and the people in it. Gender is also understood as something people do in their daily lives. "’Doing gender’ is the everyday interactional process of constructing and reconstructing differences between women and men, girls and boys, and using these differences to create a male-female polarity that devalues women" (work from home jobs). Gender and the associated expectations for appropriate behavior acutely influence both men and women.

This is a blog about men and women engaged in online jobs employment for pay or profit. The focus is on gender and its influence on the type of work individuals do as well as their work processes and outcomes. Because of the spatial link between these workers and their families’ living activities, a study of online jobs provides a unique opportunity to study paid-work and family interaction with a special emphasis on gender differences and similarities.

Traditionally, women dominated the online jobs front as the so-called breadmakers with major responsibilities for child care and household chores; men were mainly considered to be breadwinners, providing the money income for the family. Increasingly, however, men and women engage in similar patterns of paid employment activity. online jobs employment seems an ideal situation to explore whether or not the traditional gender division of labor still influences what men and women do for pay and family as well as the outcomes of their efforts. For example, do online jobs -workers take on different types of employment than on-site workers, or do they tend to follow the same gender conventions when choosing online jobs?

How do the motivations for choosing online jobs -based employment differ from the motivations for choosing on-site employment? Do online jobs -workers manage their work in the same way as on-site workers? Is being a online jobs -worker associated with a different division of family and household labor, or different online jobs -management practices, from the patterns associated with onsite workers? Are outcomes, such as economic rewards, human capital development, or "psychic income," different for online jobs -workers? And, importantly, what are the differences and similarities associated with the gender of the worker both among online jobs -workers and in comparison to on-site workers in all of these areas just mentioned? In a sense, the question becomes, does gender make a difference? Is online jobs -based employment an arena where conventional gender ideologies are challenged, contested, negotiated, and changed? Or, given the linkages of family, household, and employment to other social spheres, are the prevailing patterns and gender ideologies of a society or culture reproduced in online jobs -based employment? Another way to frame the question might be, how is gender constructed in online jobs -based employment and what are the implications for all the people and all the levels of society concerned?

One limitation of the work presented here is the lack of distinction between home-workers who have jobs from home and those who work from their home (with no other office or consistent work site). Differences between the two groups of home-workers obscure significant gender influences on either group. First, it is important to ascertain whether gender plays a role in who works at home or from home, and the types of home that people do in either situation. In societies where women are typically confined to domestic roles and "staying at jobs from home," distinct gender expectations would likely be present in employment conducted either at or from home. But even in other societies, gender could be a determining factor in who works at or jobs from home. Second, if there are differences in work at or jobs from home by gender, or in the amount of time spent out of the home when fulfilling jobs from home activities (making service calls, buying supplies, delivering products, and so on), then some research findings attributing differences between jobs from home and work at a more traditional location might be confounding gender with work site. Third, if gender is a determining factor in working at, compared to working from, home, then not considering this might further muddle research findings. Real estate agents or truck drivers who work a great deal of the time away from their home are not likely to be able to take their children along. Likewise, they are not going to be interspersing home chores with paid-work. In these ways, jobs from home might be more like having conventional employment than jobs from home. Without considering in a more systematic fashion the way gender is linked to such decisions, important gender differences in processes and consequences can be overlooked.

A second limitation of the research presented here is the relationship between gender and the length of time employed at home for pay. It seems fundamental to know whether jobs from home is seen as a short-term option that is fulfilling a need for income earning while the children are of a certain age, in contrast to a lifetime career. Do both women and men employed in the home tend to move in and out of the traditional work force? Also, in how many cases does the home precede the need to fulfill household duties? That is, does being a home -worker allow certain decisions to be made about having children or dividing household labor that would perhaps not be made if the person were working at a more traditional work site? Investigating more closely who works at home, why, and how the decision is made can shed more clarity on how jobs from home and gender are linked. Careful studies of the etiology of jobs from home as well as the internal family processes over time can help bring understanding to what being jobs from home means to the women and men involved as well as to their families.