Explaining Men's Entry into Female‐Concentrated Occupations: Issues of Masculinity and Social Class

This article seeks to add to an understanding of why some men enter female‐concentrated occupations (and why the majority do not). Drawing on the results of in‐depth interviews with 27 men in a range of occupations, I illustrate and interpret the complex and often contradictory ways in which men approach the notion of working in female‐concentrated occupations and examine the impact that this has on their occupational outcomes. The data suggest that different attitudes to female‐concentrated work cannot in themselves explain men's presence there. Consequently I explore, with particular reference to social class, the context in which attitudes around gender, work and occupational destinations, are framed. I conclude that men's entry to female‐concentrated occupations may best be approached, not as an issue of ‘masculinity’ but as one of social mobility operating within a gendered labour market.     

Teachers as good mothers,mothers as good teachers: Functional and ideological work–family alignment in the South Korean teaching profession

As one of the largest women‐dominated employment niches in many national contexts, the teaching profession has been widely studied, yet the gender, work and family negotiations within this profession deserve fuller attention. The case study of South Korean teachers, one of the most highly qualified teaching workforces in the world, illuminates how particular professions create specific challenges as well as supports for work and family that can counter national patterns of women's low labour force participation. This study engages with theoretical debates regarding ‘work–family conflict' and ‘work–life balance' to develop the alternative framework of ‘work–family alignment' giving greater attention to cultural, ideological and functional dimensions within specific occupations and national contexts. However, rather than expanding opportunities for women, work–family alignment often depends on conformity to normative gender roles — both at work and within families. Nonetheless, the framework of work–family alignment can inform policy implementation by demonstrating that both functional and ideological supports are needed for workplace and state policies to be effective.     

Going Against the Flow: A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Cognitive Skills and Gender Beliefs on Occupational Aspirations and Outcomes1

Occupational sex segregation persists in part due to cultural beliefs in the existence of gender differences in skills. This article explores potential resistance to the gender‐typical aspirations and outcomes that re‐create occupational sex segregation: cognitive skills in gender‐atypical areas (i.e., math skills for women and verbal skills for men) and beliefs about women’s prioritization of family over paid work. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort, I find that individuals with skills in areas considered gender atypical have less traditional occupational aspirations and outcomes than their otherwise‐similar counterparts. This process varies by gender, however. The results reflect the differential valuation of math and verbal skills. I conclude that programs designed to encourage women to pursue gender‐atypical occupations that align with their gender‐atypical skills are focusing on the least resistant group.     

Preferences,constraints or schemas of devotion? Exploring Norwegian mothers' withdrawals from high‐commitment careers1

Despite decades of focus on gender equality and work–family balance, parenthood still affects mothers' and fathers' careers differently. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Norwegian mothers who are relinquishing high‐commitment careers of law and consultancy, this paper questions the adequacy of established explanations emphasizing constraints vs. individual preferences. Our sample of female professionals living in a well‐developed welfare state is particularly apt to explore the processes and mechanisms upholding the statistically gendered pattern of women reducing their work commitment after childbirth. These doubly privileged mothers might be considered to have the best odds for combining career and work commitment with motherhood. Thus, we argue that the approach emphasizing practical constraints does not sufficiently account for the withdrawal from high‐commitment careers among these female professionals. Nevertheless, we are not content with the claim of Preference Theory that this shift in commitment is merely a matter of ‘not‐so‐dedicated’ women discovering their ‘genuine’ preferences. Rather, in order to understand why and how this shift occurs, we explore the culturally constructed rationalities and schemas of both work and family devotions. We specifically examine the circumstances, mechanisms and steps in a seemingly individual process of making the shift in commitment from a promising career to a family‐friendly job. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how generous parental leave arrangements designed to enhance gender equality and work–family balance by simply reducing practical constraints may have limited – or even counterproductive – impact within high‐commitment occupations where the ‘irreplaceability’ of workers is taken for granted. Our findings indicate that unless the culturally (re)produced discourses, demands and expectations of both work and family are exposed and challenged, even intentionally gender neutral work–family policies will continue to facilitate mothers' career withdrawals, expressed as modified individual preferences.     

The missing and needed male nurse: Discursive hybridization in professional nursing texts

The role of men in nursing has been of ongoing interest to gender and work scholars who examine the processes that maintain or challenge occupational gender segregation. Drawing on professional nursing texts, the current study moves beyond individual men to investigate organizational practices within nursing that discursively construct the male nurse. Using the rhetoric of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’, texts frame men in nursing as a missing and needed antidote to projected worker shortages and a homogenous workforce. Taking a critical lens to these arguments, analysis of professional discourse reveals an appropriated disenfranchisement that masks men's gendered privilege. Professional leaders frame men in nursing as equivalent to women in traditionally male occupations with little attention to the ways in which US men, particularly white and heterosexual men, are advantaged currently and historically. The findings trace a process of discursive hybridization through which organizational leaders appropriate rhetoric from historically disenfranchised groups to benefit predominantly white, middle‐class men.     

Gender Segregation,Size of Workplace and the Public Sector

Gender segregation is considered to be a key structuring factor in the labour market, and is central to explanations of phenomena as diverse as the everyday experience of men’s and women’s employment to the underachievement of women and the limited impact of equal pay legislation. Studies of occupational segregation by gender tend to be polarized between qualitative and quantitative extremes. At the quantitative end, a primary focus of research has been to quantify segregation to a single index, permitting simple comparisons between countries and over time. However, detailed case studies of particular occupations have often hinted at ways in which breakdowns in occupational segregation have been replaced by other forms of gender segregation. This paper will present data showing that even within occupational categories there is still significant gender segregation and concentration by public/private sector and by size of workplace. For instance, female pharmacists are very over-represented, and female gardeners very under-represented, in the public sector. And the general tendency for women to work in smaller workplaces is severe for some occupations (e.g. office managers) and reversed in other occupations (e.g. production fitters). These analyses question the usefulness of single indices which take account only of segregation or concentration by occupation and therefore underestimate the gendering of job opportunities even within mixed occupations.     

‘Heroes and Matriarchs’: Working‐Class Femininities,Violence and Door Supervision Work

Door supervision work is traditionally seen as a working‐class, male‐dominated trade. In addition, it is deemed to be one that is physically risky, where violence is seen as a ‘tool of the trade’ and where ‘bodily capital’ and ‘fighting ability’ are paramount to the competent performance of the job. This paper is a timely analysis on the manner in which the increasing numbers of women who work in door supervision negotiate their occupational identity and construct their work practices. The analysis focused on the way in which discursive constructions of both violence and workplace identities are variably taken up, reworked and resisted through the intersection of gender and class. This resulted in the identification of two main discourses; ‘playing the hero’ and the ‘hard matriarch’. These findings allow us to theorize that multiple, gendered and classed occupational identities exist beyond normative expectations and can be seen to be both emancipatory for working women, while simultaneously bolstering exploitation, workplace harassment and violent practices.     

Understanding Professional Projects in Welfare Service Work: Revival of Old Professionalism?

The professional terms for occupations that provide welfare services are changing, and here the introduction of new public management in the Nordic countries since the 1990s is indicative of wider developments. The article explores professional projects in welfare service work from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. The aim is to produce a gender‐sensitive analysis of the professional projects at the lower levels of the occupational hierarchies in health care. The first part reviews the literature conceptualizing the societal and institutional embeddedness of professional projects. The institutional matrix of welfare states emerges as a key context in shaping the welfare service work performed by women‐dominated professional groups. The second part examines the case of Finland and suggests that recent reforms have created new inequalities in the system of professions, in which occupational groups in welfare service work are becoming marginalized. This signals a move away from ‘democratic professionalism’ towards a revival of ‘old professionalism’.     

Surviving on the inside: Reflections on being a woman and a feminist in a male academic institution

This article considers what it is like to be a woman on the inside: a white woman lecturer and tutor teaching social work students inside the white male bastion of the university. Universities are notoriously male-centred in their organisation, their teaching and their knowledge base; women working in universities have referred to themselves as ‘outsiders in the sacred grove’ (Aisenberg and Harrington, 1988). We might expect Departments of Social Work to be different to this, since social work has historically been a profession staffed by women, working with female clients (Brook and Davis, 1985). I will argue that patriarchal ideas and practices persist throughout higher educational institutions and that the impact of gender (as well as class, ethnicity and ‘race’, sexuality and disability) must be addressed at all levels within social work education.     

Occupational Cultures and the Embodiment of Masculinity: Hairdressing,Estate Agency and Firefighting

Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project, this article explores the implications of different occupational cultures for men's masculine identity. With a focus on embodiment and individual agency, it explores the argument that it is within ‘scenes of constraint’ that gendered identities are both ‘done’ and ‘undone’. In this article we examine embodied experience in occupational cultures commonly stereotyped as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (hairdressing, estate agency and firefighting), showing how men conform to, draw upon and resist the gendered stereotypes associated with these occupations. What we argue is that gendered conceptions of ‘the body’ need to be differentiated from individual men's embodiment. Instead, processes of identification can be shown to emerge via embodied experiences of particular kinds of gendered body, and in the ways in which men negotiate the perception of these bodies in different occupational contexts.     

'It's like saying "coloured" ': understanding and analysing the urban working classes

This paper draws on data from a qualitative project exploring the engagement of working class families in London with childcare. It is a first attempt to throw some light on our usage of the term ‘working class’, and consider what forms ‘working class‐ness’ takes in relation to our respondent families. We discuss some recent sociological literature on the working class(es) in order to understand the emphasises and focuses of other research. We emphasise the heterogeneity of the working class(es), the differences in attitude and experiences based on place, gender, occupational status, education, age and family membership. Then we consider our respondents in relation to their strategies and exercise of agency, their engagement with the labour market, and their embedded‐ness in social networks. We conclude that one way of understanding the lives of urban working class families is to consider the extent to which they ‘manage or struggle to cope’, a focus which emphasises process, activity and the differential degrees of agency which the respondents are able to exercise.     

Gendered Organizational Cultures: Narratives of Women Travellers in a Male World

The paper will present various self-identity narratives of women pioneers in male occupations who ‘take their place’ in a male gendered organizational culture. These narratives belong to a single discourse of what may be called ‘travellers in a male world’. This discourse presumes the existence of a territory marked out as male which is trespassed upon by females who are formally members of the same occupational community, but who, in actual practice, must stake out their positions in the field. Social structures coerce discourse positions and set up a series of expectations and social obligations, although several subject positions can be taken up for oneself, and for the ‘other’. This process has been labelled ‘positioning gender relations within an organizational culture’ and has been described as liminal work, performed discursively and in transitional spaces. Gender relations can therefore be viewed as cultural performances learned and enacted on appropriate occasions both by men and women.     

Occupations and the cyclical behavior of gender unemployment rates

The men’s unemployment rate first exceeded the women’s during the recession of the 1980s, a pattern repeated in the 1990s recession. During non-recession years, this gender difference disappeared. We use data disaggregated by occupational categories and show that occupational distribution is critical for explaining the behavior of gender unemployment rates. Although women’s rates are consistently higher than men’s within occupations, the gender distribution across occupations favor lower rates for women. In recessions, the unemployment rates rise for both genders, but the occupational distribution shifts in favor of women’s employment. For expansionary periods, these two effects are offsetting.     

Girls’ Jobs for the Boys? Men,Masculinity and Non‐Traditional Occupations

Occupational segregation by sex remains the most pervasive aspect of the labour market. In the past, most research on this topic has concentrated on explanations of women’s segregation into low paid and low status occupations, or investigations of women who have crossed gender boundaries into men’s jobs, and the potential impact on them and the occupations. In contrast, this article reports on a small‐scale, qualitative study of ten men who have crossed into what are generally defined as ‘women’s jobs’. In doing so, one of the impacts on them has been that they have experienced challenges to their masculine identity from various sources and in a variety of ways. The men’s reactions to these challenges, and their strategies for developing and accommodating their masculinity in light of these challenges, are illuminating. They either attempted to maintain a traditional masculinity by distancing themselves from female colleagues, and/or partially (re)constructed a different masculinity by identifying with their non‐traditional occupations. This they did as often as they deemed necessary as a response to different forms of challenge to their gender identities from both men and women. Finally, the article argues that these responses work to maintain the men as the dominant gender, even in these traditionally defined ‘women’s jobs’.     

Seeking Legitimacy: The Professionalization of Life Coaching

This article uses life coaching as a case study for understanding the attempts of one occupational group to define their work as a profession and themselves as professional people. Life coaches' efforts to legitimate their work are examined within the context of the economic downturn and exemplify an emerging employment trend in the American labor market: college‐educated workers pursuing non‐standard work as independent contractors in personalized service occupations. Using in‐depth interviews with life coaches, I focus on the collective and individual strategies workers use in their attempts to carve out new occupational jurisdictions for their services and bolster their professional status. I explore how gender shapes life coaches' experiences and professionalization tactics; further, I predict that these gendered processes will ultimately influence the trajectory of the life coaching industry more generally. My findings highlight the complexity of current employment relations and offer empirical insights into the study of work, occupations, and gender.     

Masculinity and Non‐Traditional Occupations: Men's Talk in Women's Work

Occupation segregation is a persistent aspect of the labour market, and scholars have often researched what happens when women and men enter into what are seen to be ‘non‐traditional’ work roles for their sex. Research on men within women's roles has concentrated mainly on the challenges to a masculine identity, while research on workplace language has focused on women's linguistic behaviour in masculine occupations. To date, there has been relatively little research into the linguistic behaviour of men working in occupations seen as women's work (e.g., nursing, primary school teaching). To address this gap, this article focuses on men's discursive behaviour and identity construction within the feminized occupation of nursing. Empirical data collected by three male nurses in a hospital in Northern Ireland is explored using discourse analysis and the Community of Practice paradigm. This paper discusses how the participants linguistically present themselves as nurses by performing relational work and creating an in‐group with their nurse colleagues by actively using an inherently ‘feminine’ discourse style.     

Making the Best of a Bad Job? Female Part‐Timers’ Orientations and Attitudes to Work

This article uses data from 50 qualitative interviews with female part‐time workers in low‐level jobs in Britain to illustrate their attitudes, orientations and aspirations towards paid work. The research reports two main findings. Firstly, even female part‐time workers at the bottom end of the occupational structure are not a homogeneous group of workers. Secondly, they are not all highly satisfied with their jobs. The article argues that many women (especially those in working‐class households) still do not have a genuine choice between ‘family work’ and ‘market work’. It concludes by presenting a theoretical model of orientations to work.     

Commercially arranged marriage and the negotiation of citizenship rights among Vietnamese marriage migrants in multiracial Singapore

Globalization and increased mobilities have multiplied cross-border transactions not only in the economic sphere but have also a major impact on human relationships of intimacy. This can be seen in the increased volume of differently mediated forms of international marriage, not just straddling ‘east’ and ‘west’, but within Asia and across different ethnicities and nationalities. International marriage raises a host of social issues for countries of origin and destination, including challenges relating to the citizenship status and rights of the marriage migrant. This paper examines the negotiation of citizenship rights in the case of commercially matched marriage migrants – namely Vietnamese women who marry Singaporean men and migrate to Singapore as ‘foreign brides’. While they are folded into the ‘family’ – what is often thought of as the basic building block of the nation in Asian societies – they are not necessarily accorded full incorporation into the ‘nation’ despite Singapore's claims to multiculturalism. This is particularly salient at a point when cross-nationality, cross-ethnicity marriages between Singapore citizens and non-citizens are on the increase, accounting for over a third of marriages registered in Singapore in recent years. Vietnamese women who marry Singaporeans are positioned within the nation-state's citizenship regime as dependents of Singaporean men, having to rely on the legitimacy of the marriage relationship as well as the whims of their husbands in negotiating their rights vis-à-vis the Singapore state. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with 20 Vietnamese women who are commercially matched marriage migrants, the paper first focuses on the vulnerable positions these women find themselves, particularly given difficulties in forging their own support networks as well as weaknesses of the civil society sector in what has been called an ‘illiberal democracy’ characterized by a political culture of ‘non-resistance’. The paper then goes on to examine the way they negotiate rights to residency/citizenship, work and children within webs of asymmetrical power relations within the family and the nation-state. We draw on our findings to show that citizenship is ‘a terrain of struggle’ within a multicultural nation-state shaped by social ideologies of gender, race and class and negotiated on an everyday basis within spheres of family intimacy.     

Introduction

Empirical studies of occupational structure in South Africa have tended to be unsatisfactory, detailed work on small sectors of the economy coexisting with across‐the‐board studies too crudely aggregated to allow for a precise assessment of a changing situation. This study presents the results of an analysis by ‘race’ into 14 occupational groups of South African employment outside agriculture, domestic service and the informal sector over the period 1969 to 1977. It argues that over the period there has been a definite increase in the share of owner I manager and, more particularly, petty bourgeois occupations, with a corresponding decline in the proportion of unskilled workers. It also suggests that changes in the ‘racial’ division of labour are more complex than has sometimes been supposed.     

Parental values in the UK

This article investigates the extent to which parental values differ between social groups in the UK at the start of the twenty‐first century. The study of parental values is an important area of sociological enquiry that can inform scholarship from across the social sciences concerned with educational inequality and cultural variability in family life. We draw on data from the Millennium Cohort Study to show how parent’s social class, religion, religiosity, race and ethnicity, and education are related to the qualities they would like their children to have. Our rank‐ordered regression models show that parents in service class occupations place significantly more importance on ‘thinking for self’ than ‘obey parents’ compared to those in routine manual occupations. We also show that although class matters, the relationship between education and parental values is particularly strong. Parenting values also differ by parental racial and ethnic background and by levels of religiosity.