Gender Based Power In A Company

Thinking about our society and gender, gender polarization is evident in nearly every aspect of our lives! Power is also polarized by gender. From a very young age, we are socially constructed based on our sex and gender, which is also known as gender socialization.

Keeping this in mind, I decided to take a different twist to this matter and visit CENTCOM Projects to analyze the power within the employees based on their gender. CENTCOM Projects is a construction company based on steel, aluminum, joinery and interior fit outs. Therefore, majority of the staff in the labor section were men and barely had females in the office. This may be because women consider sex-appropriate positions such as the secretary and choose occupations that will not require them to relocate and work in unpleasant environments such as the factory.





From a sociological perspective, I examined the concepts of power-over, power-to and power-with while visiting the company’s office and factory in the industrial area. The notion of power-over was greatly evident as the foreman’s, manager and the director had the ability to get the workers do jobs when they didn’t want to. According to Weber, he defined power, as the ability of one actor to carry out his will against another. Clearly, this is was evident. While I was there, the foreman was achieving his goals by making one of the labor workers do his work. In this case of master/subject relation: the foreman is powered (master) and the worker is not (subject). At most times, this could possibly be a problem, as power is seen as an abusive force, unequal and the ability to force your physical strength and ideas over other employees in a workforce.



Luckily enough, I got to observe a power-to situation. One of the experienced workers came in and asked if he could either higher his position in the company or leave. From a sociological perspective, he recognized the control he has over his life, saw results of his actions and utilized his power. In other words, this could be described as self-control and self-efficacy.



In addition, the notion of power-with was not evident. However, it may be applied to labor workers if they come together as a group to challenge the system and ask for a change. In this case, if the workers struggle against the oppressive system, they would collectively work together to change it. This could happen if the workers need a rise in salary, new housing or even higher positions.



All in all, we could possibly say that the social construction of gender socialization goes back to social stratification and ethnic backgrounds.

Types of Women-Power in Mirror Mirror

We discussed last class the topic of the power of women in movies. Many people think that there is a shortage of the representation of powerful women in Hollywood movies, and others like Sutherland & Feltey think that there is a shortage of the right representation of powerful women in movies, which is, in their opinion, a power-with, which is a collective power of women who come together to influence social change.
Last Friday I went to the movies and watched Mirror Mirror, directed by Tarsem Singh, and staring Lily Collins, Julia Roberts, and Armie Hammer. The movie features the classical story of Snow White.



At first it is evident how the movie highlights the aspect of power-over in its representation of women. The Queen in the movie is the antagonist. She gets rid of the king, takes control over the kingdom, locks snow white in the castle, oppresses the people, and raises the taxes to spend the money on her parties, which leads to extreme poverty in the city. The movie reflects how this is a negative, oppressive form of power that women hold, and ends with the death as a consequence for the evil she does throughout the movie.


On the other hand, this movie had a twist in power distribution from the original plot in the classical Snow White movie by Disney. In the original movie, Snow White gets poisoned by the apple she gets from the evil queen while she pretends to be an old lady using magic. Snow White passes out, and she comes back to life when the prince gives her a true love’s kiss that breaks the spell of the evil queen. In the new movie Mirror Mirror, the roles are flipped. The queen gives the prince a puppy love potion to love her and marry her. The news both surprises and disappoints Snow white, since she shared a moment with the price where they showed interest in each other. Snow White ends up saving the prince from the situation, where she kidnaps him, and then gives him a true love’s kiss that breaks the spell of the evil queen. Moreover, Snow White saves the prince and the whole country from the queen’s oppression when she destroys the queen’s beast, which turns out to be her father under a spell. It is also important to mention that Snow White saves the elves while she lives with them from the fighting gigantic puppets the queens sends to kill Snow White and the elves.


This change in the plot of a major classical story in the movie industry to empower women is very interesting, where it gives agency to Snow White to be able to save men, which is the opposite of what usually happens in Disney movies. moreover, Snow White is portrayed with this kind of power-over without being portrayed in an masculine, oppressive or sexualized way as Sutherland & Feltey argue in Cinematic Sociology.
Snow white also shows a form of power-to, when she realizes her interest in changing the bad situation in the country. So, she goes against the rules of the queen, confronts her, and then defeats her.


Yet, many people argue that there isn’t enough good and powerful representations of women in movies as well as in the film industry, where men keep on dominating the field.

The Witch is on her Broom: A sociological analysis of the first 5 minutes of a movie

"It's here!"



A dramatic change sweeps across the entire office as the words pop up on the computer screens of each cubicle. In a blink, the dormancy of a relaxed office atmosphere shifts to a tensed frenzy as the weightage of the words dawn on the employees of Margaret’s Book Publishing company.

Enter the boss.



Her glossy chestnut-brown hair is tied in a neat ponytail that bobs up and down as she tic-tocs (surprisingly gracefully) on killer heels. The dress is classy, albeit the tad-too-deep V-shaped neck of the blouse. Her most striking feature though is definitely the shapely supermodel like figure. Add to that alert eyes and a hard mouth and voila, you have Margaret Tate-- “the cold, chillingly mean, emotionless boss, incapable of maintaining any relationships.”

The employees, meanwhile, are hurriedly cleaning up their act.

They have all been alerted by the instantly messaged code word for when the boss is on her way to the building: “The witch is on her broom.”



Someone dumps the doughnut with a gasp and hastily picks up the telephone receiver. Someone else cries, “Shhhoot!” and scurries to the cubicle. Magazines are hurriedly put aside and suddenly water-cooler-breaks are up.

The movie being discussed is the 2009 romantic comedy, The Proposal, starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. With a total earning of over $317.5 million, The Proposal was the highest grossing romantic comedy of the year.



Following is the movie’s one-line description on ibmd.com: A pushy boss forces her young assistant to marry her in order to keep her Visa status in the U.S. and avoid deportation to Canada.



And this is where cinematic sociology can be used as an effective tool to explain the portrayal of empowered women in Hollywood movies.

The kind of power symbolized by Margaret (Sandra Bullock) in The Proposal may well be explained by the Weberian “power-over” definition of power. Simply put, it explains power in terms of the ability of individuals to further their will and attain their goals. This form of power “with perhaps the longest history in sociology, philosophy and psychology” was described by Weber as “the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action, even against the resistance of others...” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 115)



According to Amy Allen, author of The Power of Feminist Theory, this conceptualization takes the form of "a dyadic, master/ subject relation… a kind of masculinized power” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 115).

The typical “pushy” boss, who embodies a certain masculine- feminity, wrongly exploits her co-worker by coercing him into marriage, just so she is spared deportation. Also, alongside being depicted as a headstrong young woman who has the world on her fingertips, Margaret Tate has also been considerably physically sexualized (remember the dress, the figure and the heels?).



Cold, callous yet stunning: these are the defining characteristics of womanly roles that demonstrate a “power-over,“ one of the three types of the most prominent literary definition of power.

And in case of The Proposal, it takes barely the first 5 minutes to conclude the category of power that the movie is based on.

Although Margaret is “a woman with power, it looks like the masculine version of a power-over that we have grown accustomed to, perhaps the only kind of power we recognize as power” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 120).



Consecutively, the “masculine woman” dominates, oppresses and exploits. All this to the extent that her assistant Andrew drinks "the same coffee as you do, just incase yours spilled.” (She had cast aside the comment as “pathetic,” with a role of her eyes.)



This kind of power portrayal, however, is the exact opposite of the way feminists would like it portrayed-- their goal is certainly “not to transfer domination and oppression (and masculinity) into the hands of women” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 116).

Nonetheless, what with movies like The Devil Wears Prada, No Reservations and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to name a few, the power-over conceptualization continues to remain a popular theme for popcorn flicks.