GENDER DIFFERENCES IN WORK ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOUR AMONG SELECTED INDUSTRIAL WORKERS IN LAGOS

Current interest in gender issues is an attempt to correct,
criticise and re-conceptualise the epistemological basis of
traditionally accepted knowledge which failed to fully incorporate
women's activities. For exarnple, in Africa, for a long time now,
women's work has often been invisible and sometirnes undervalued or
under-reported. Though there have been several criticisms of
traditional explanations of women's experience at home, at work and
within the society at large, very few empirical studies actually
document the true reality of Nigerian women's social experience
particularly in the world of 'work'. It is this gap in knowledge
that the present study tries to fill.
The study therefore examines gender differences in industrial
employment looking at organisational opportunity structure at bath
objective and subjective levels. It also examines men and women's
work attitudes and behaviour looking at personal attributes and
ideological values about gender role relations. The unique
experiences of men and women in sex-atypical jobs are also
documented.
To achieve the objectives of the study, bath micro and macro
level analyses are made, as explicated in the 'gender-organizationsystem'
(GOS) schema adopted for the study. The GOS approach is
entrenched in the Weberian traditioD of the social action theory
and the Durkheimian objective social reality. Emanating from the
theoretical framework, three major assumptions are made, resulting
in nine operational hypotheses.