Today's society's concept of gender related to the division of labor in the workplace, and related to issues of power and control is a stereotype. The division of workplace labor by gender is based on the false ideology of innate sex differences in traits and abilities, which operates through various control mechanisms. These control mechanisms are primarily exercised by men over women and exaggerate differences between the sexes, especially surrounding women's presumed inability for doing "male" work.
Most forms of workplace control take the form of harassment, sexual bribery, gender based jokes and comments, which passively but briefly makes gender differences stand out conspicuously in the aspect of work relations. This reinforces such notions that men in Western societies have traditionally acquired and maintained the majority of wealth and power in society, and so in the workplace.
In a sense, women's traditional roles and identities have been formed and maintained by the workplace. The concepts of male and female are not independent relationships of the workplace; since they indeed have been strongly influenced and determined by the relationships of male and female in our society at large.
The gendered division of labor has its origins in the home, and maintains its structure in the workplace. This can be seen inside families through the distinctions between paid work and non-paid work, and the separation of the private and public spheres where women are viewed as attached to the private and men to the public domains. This is an important issue because while home and work may physically be separated for working men and women, home is often not a haven for women but just another place of work. The gendered division of labor then, is not limited to the paid work force; it also applies to the unpaid work at home.
The issues surrounding power inequalities in the workforce may be explained historically in terms of the arguments of socialist feminism.
