COVID-19 has become a mental health pandemic. The impact on vulnerable demographic groups has been particularly severe. This paper focuses on women in employment in Hong Kong who have had to balance ...remote work and online schooling for over 2 years. Using semi-ethnography and theme-oriented discourse analysis, we examine 200 threads that concern members’ mental health on a popular Facebook support group for mothers. We demonstrate that mental health messages are typically framed as ‘troubles talk’. Other support group members actively align with a trouble-teller through ‘caring responses’, namely expressions of empathy and sympathy. These are realized through assessments of the trouble-teller’s experience, reports of similar experiences; expressions of compassion and advice-giving. Mental health talk online is heavily mitigated, nevertheless the medium provides a space for expressing mental health troubles and providing informal psychosocial support. We advocate the importance of microanalytic discourse studies for mental health research to get insights into people’s lived experiences during the pandemic.
Timely initiation of complementary feeding and pattern of complementary feeding is suboptimal in India. Women in employment faces challenges for following optimum Infant and Young Child Feeding ...practices, which have a significant impact on growth and development of child under 2 years of age. Objective was to study challenges faced by women in employment for complementary feeding and pattern of complementary feeding in rural area. Qualitative study was conducted in rural area of Wardha district, India. Six FGDs were conducted and participants (total 39) were women in employment having child between 6-23 months and community level service providers. Women in rural area resume work early, could not practice exclusive breast feeding for six months. They initiate complementary feeding early and had inadequate awareness regarding complementary feeding. Women initiate semisolid and soft food at 4-6 months, smashed solid food at 7-9 months. Women leave their babies at mercy of the elders or sometime neighbours when they are at work. Villages do not have child care facilities or creches. All these determinants compromises complementary feeding with regards to timely and adequacy, recommended dietary diversity, safe feeding. Challenges for practicing exclusive breast feeding for 6 month, early initiation and inadequate complementary feeding adversely affect growth and development of children in rural area which may have undesired long term implication on the cognitive development. Strengthening Anganwadi program in India with more focus on children under 2 years, community baby care rooms / creches services would be useful strategy for supporting the women in employment to practice the optimum IYCF recommendations. India needs a conducive workplace policies and adequate protection by law for women in employment.
In large corporations in Japan, much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as "office ladies" (OLs) or "flowers of the workplace." Largely nameless, OLs serve tea to the men and ...type and file their reports. They are exempt from the traditional lifetime employment and have few opportunities for promotion. In this engaging ethnography, Yuko Ogasawara exposes the ways that these women resist men's power, and why the men, despite their exclusive command of authority, often subject themselves to the women's control. Ogasawara, a Japanese sociologist trained in the United States, skillfully mines perceptive participant-observation analyses and numerous interviews to outline the tensions and humiliations of OL work. She details the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that OLs who are frustrated by demeaning, dead-end jobs thwart their managers and subvert the power structure to their advantage. Using gossip, outright work refusal, and public gift-giving as manipulative strategies, they can ultimately make or break the careers of the men. This intimate and absorbing analysis illustrates how the relationships between women and work, and women and men, are far more complex than the previous literature has shown. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998. In large corporations in Japan, much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as "office ladies" (OLs) or "flowers of the workplace." Largely nameless, OLs serve tea to the men and type and file their reports. They are
exempt from the trad.
PDF
