Gendering the warehouse

The extent to which my workplace is gendered smacked me in the face even before I started work, during the lightning interview at the tiny manpower agency office in Bet Quarter where I went to look for employment. "The wage is minimum – oh wait, you're a man, so it's 23 NIS", said the slightly disoriented lady crammed behind a small desk. "Really?" I was surprised at the blatancy. "Why do women get less?" "They do different work. You have to lift boxes."
Thus was I introduced to the strict gender roles of my new workplace, Yaakobi Warehouses (pseudonym). The main activity at the gigantic warehouse, or at least in the parts of it I'm familiar with, is the processing of clothing imported to Israel through the port of Ashdod, prior to shipping to retailers around the country. The merchandise enters and leaves the warehouse in cardboard boxes of various sizes, which are moved around – through the use of motorized fork lifts, mechanical "jacks" and bare hands – by men. Women open the boxes with utility knives, count, sort and shunt the clothes about in accordance with written orders, and close them up again with masking tape.
The gendered order is observed quite scrupulously, though occasionally women will move a particularly lightweight box if they need the room to continue working. When the supply of women is low, men are sometimes given women's work; this is considered slightly demeaning (though I don't think it affects wages). On one lunch break two teenage boys self-deprecatingly told me they had spent the morning as melaktot – the feminine plural for "gatherer". My academic imagination was piqued by this surprising reflection of the anthropological debate on gender in primitive (i.e. "hunter and gatherer") societies I later found out the term is technical, likut ("gathering") referring to a particular method of dispatching merchandise (by item, as opposed to by box).
Needless to say (but probably good to get it out of the way) – there is no justification for paying the men better wages. Our work does indeed involve more muscle strain, but not inordinately so – the boxes are generally not heavy. For me, at least, the most fatiguing aspect of the work is being on one's feet all day, and in this aspect the women are no better off; they also work standing up, and have less opportunities to stretch by walking. In terms of mental strain, the women's work is undoubtedly harder.
There's no excuse for the difference in wages, then, but that's only a small part of the story anyway. (I later learned that I do not make 23 NIS an hour, but 22. Starting April 1st, the minimum wage is 20.92 NIS, so that I make about 5% more than my female colleagues.) What strikes me as more significant is an aspect of the gendering I want to call "symbolic", though this is a very material kind of symbolism.
The division of labor in fact divides the materials in the warehouse into those handled by men and those handled by women. What the men touch – with their hands (only a few wear gloves) or with the aid of the aforementioned tools – is packaging: cardboard boxes, shrink wrap and wooden pallets. These materials are dirty and dusty, sometimes heavy and even slightly dangerous (splinters and nails lurk in wait). In accordance, we wear heavy-duty clothing that we don't mind getting dirty or even stained. Most of us wear the same clothes for a few days in a row. We look like factory workers.
The women, on the other hand, handle the merchandise itself – clothing – as well as paper, pens and stickers. Most of them scrupulously avoid touching the packaging, and this is enforced by informal social control: a male coworker told me that once, when a woman he was working with picked up a box, he was reprimanded by his (male) supervisor for letting her do so. The women wear day-to-day clothes (though only managers wear high heels). I haven't yet made an effort to track this, but I'm pretty sure they never wear the same outfit two days in a row. They look like office workers.
I was pretty sure Lévi-Strauss-type structuralism wouldn't be relevant to my fieldwork, but here it is nonetheless: the warehouse is subtly divided into female and male spheres, which are intricately intertwined but nevertheless remain separated. Even without going all psychoanalytical and making too much of inside/outside, private/public distinctions, the symbolic import of this separation is quite hard to ignore. For example, within the male group there is a clear hierarchy corresponding to the size and power of the phallic probosces we use to handle the merchandise. At the lowest level, where I stand, men use their hands; one notch up the ladder, the men use low fork lifts; above them are men licensed to use high lifts, the kind that can lift a pallet several stories up. The top of the ladder is occupied by the men who drive the giant tractors that move containers around outside in the yard. (The informant I cited earlier, who has worked at the warehouse for a year, is quite sure no woman has ever driven a lift of any kind.)
This kind of cosmological analysis wouldn't be too interesting, though, unless it reflected and reinforced some serious aspects of gender inequality at the workplace, which goes far beyond the entry-level wage difference I mentioned above. Women can advance from the assembly lines only to management positions, which are quite sparse. Men, on the other hand, can be promoted to fork lift operation – if they have the proper licenses, which are not cheap to obtain.
This gendered political cosmology is part of a bigger one, of course. This warehouse, which carries out "production short of manufacture", is midway between an industrial establishment and a commercial or service-sector workplace. These forms are of course gendered themselves – industry is "masculine" in relation to "feminine" services. Within the warehouse, the men's jobs are typed as industrial and the women's as service (or almost so), and the delicate cosmology that separates them enables this – in a very material way.