Melissa Gregg Critical Analysis

In the most recent article from this course, the author, Melissa Gregg claims that in Australia women are being encouraged to use social media and media devices to climb the workplace latter. She says that with that being said, it puts a lot of pressure on them and that their use of “actual communications technologies reveals such devices to be directly complicit in perpetuating increased workplace expectation” (p. 74). While saying this, Gregg points out the fact that resulting from this pressure, women feel the need to take workplace tasks into the home to complete. These tasks include making phone calls, responding to emails and planning for the next work day. The author gives two specific stories and talks about a third participant as well

The idea that we are prosumers, and that we produce things outside of the factory. To think that as recent as the 70’s or 80’s, people left their work at work, instead of bringing it home is surprising to me. Since then we have been more and more connected to jobs and workplace at home than ever before. In this case, I happen to agree with Gregg, that women may feel more of a need to prove themselves in the workplace by taking work home to get ahead of things, but I do not think this is a good thing. I think that it is important, as Fitzpatrick says to separate work and play to optimize both. The problem is though, that workplaces are getting away with putting larger workloads on employees because they are willing to do work outside the workplace. My mom, for example works in an office and is overloaded with work. Sometimes she will work from nine in the morning until seven o’clock at night, and even so she has to work on things at home to be caught up, unless she wants to stress about it. She often complains about how much work she is required to do, and that she just wishes her boss would hire someone to help her out. This is a huge problem, because i can see it directly affecting my moms down time at home. By the time she gets home, she is completely exhausted, mentally and physically that she has no energy or time to cook dinner, spend time with family

Although I do believe that Gregg could have broken this article up into two topics, one being feminism in the media and workplace, and division of workplace labour and leisure at home she did a wonderful job at connecting the two on a very general level. I would have enjoyed if she was more specific on how the idea of feminism relates to women’s expectations in the workplace compared to men. How does this affect men as well? In order to talk about feminism, shouldn 't we also include how men come into play? Overall, I found this article extremely relevant to today, as well as how this article can be applied to personal experiences and several workplace issues for women. I was happy that I could relate, as well as compare her writing to a recent article that helped me personally divide work and play in my