Research Notes Gender and work in Malaysia: The necessity of a ‘woman-friendly’ workplace

Horizontal and vertical division of work in the organization still takes place in Malaysia. However, horizontal division of work has changed a lot with female employees no longer confined to agriculture and participating in manufacturing and service sectors. In the vertical division of work, female and male employees are still found to be focused in different job hierarchies. While women are stucked to the lower levels blue collar jobs and to the lowlevels of the white collar and professional jobs male workers continue to dominate the professional and skilled job categories as well as holding senior positions. The relatively slow upgrading of female employees may have to do with their maternal roles and concerns which hamper their work performance . This article discusses rules at the workplace that is woman-friendly as one of the ways to reduce the occurrence of a gendered division of work. For the present study, 12 families were sampled from those that have three generation of women. The findings showed that respondents were faced with problems of taking care of the children when they were out working, hence their divided attention to their work. For these women to progress at work creating rules at the workplace that are truly woman-friendly is imperative.