Women and Career: Themes and Issues In Advanced Industrial Societies

Julia Evetts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138475601
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317894438
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Addresses the difficulties faced by women who embark on careers in the professions and considers the future of equal opportunties policies at a time of recession and high unemployment. It also explores the need to de-gender the concept of career in order to encompass women's expectations

PART ONE

Career Contexts and Obstacles for Women

CHAPTER 1

Women in professional careers: social policy developments

GILLIAN PASCALL

Working lives and professional careers?

Differences in the pattern of men’s and women’s working lives should lead us to re-examine the very ideas of profession and career in relation to women: ideas developed largely by men in relation to men. The themes of autonomy, control and power which identify professional work in the literature cannot be so readily applied to women, even those working in apparently the same jobs. This volume concerns women privileged by their educational qualifications, whose labour market position is much stronger than that of most women. But autonomy, control and power do not distinguish their working lives. Likewise the idea of career as lifelong dedication to enhancing skills, status, pay and authority in paid work also needs re-examination. Most women’s ‘careers’ involve unpaid work as well as paid, commitment to family as well as to paid work, discontinuity rather than continuity, downward mobility as well as upward mobility. To understand women’s working lives, we must examine unpaid work, paid employment and their interactions. This chapter, then, will consider career to involve a lifetime path trodden between paid and unpaid work as an alternative to its more traditional sense.

Women’s careers in the professions must also be understood against the changing pattern of women’s working lives more generally. Changes in women’s employment have been one of the most dramatic features of labour market and family change over recent decades. This is true even in Britain, where mothers’ paramount responsibility for children is barely questioned, there are no public childcare facilities for ordinary working mothers, most women’s wages are too low to make paid childcare a viable option, and general unemployment has been high for a decade.

Despite these obstacles, women’s labour market participation has steadily increased. By the late 1980s approximately two out of three women aged 16 to 59 were in paid employment (OPCS 1991: 48). In 1971, 51 per cent of married women were classified as ‘economically inactive’, but in 1990 this proportion was down to 29 per cent (OPCS 1992: 71). Most mothers of very young children in Britain still withdraw from the labour market – many have little alternative – but their period of absence diminishes.

This points to a major social change. Being a ‘housewife’ has been a major source of identity for women (as well as a lot of work). Mary Harrison has described the significance of domestic identity to an older generation of rural women – women whose only hope of paid work was domestic, and who have built their lives around the performance of domestic work for others or for their families. She describes their consequent obsession with housework routines (Harrison 1988). Younger women still do housework, but their lives are not built around it as ‘housewives’. The category – in its older sense of a career for women, an identity and a life’s work – is falling into disuse by younger generations, and becoming instead a temporary phase. British women are a considerable way from their Scandinavian counterparts, for whom paid work has become continuous, but the balance has shifted away from the housewife as a full-time role towards more decisive attachment to paid employment.

This attachment is greater for younger women. Higher rates of economic activity, especially in full-time work, are associated with higher educational qualifications. Young women with career prospects are the ones most likely to keep paid employment when they have children (OPCS 1991: 53).

The rewards women bring home from paid employment show more resistance to change. Evidence from the New Earnings Survey shows women’s hourly earnings at 76.6 per cent of men’s in 1990, with little change over the previous decade. Since women work a shorter week, their gross weekly earnings are a lower proportion still, at 68 per cent (IRS 1991: 3). Further evidence from the New Earnings Survey data on full-time workers indicates that the pay gap for non-manual workers is greater than that for manual. The non-manual group is wider than the careers which are the focus of this volume, but the figures are nevertheless interesting. Women in non-manual jobs earned 63.5 per cent of their male counterparts per hour (manual figure 72.0 per cent) and 60.7 per cent per week (manual figure 62.4 per cent) (IRS 1991: 3). It seems that women manual workers have pushed up their hourly earnings, but weekly earnings remain low compared with men who do longer hours, especially more overtime. Non-manual workers earn a low proportion per hour compared with men, but have earnings less sensitive to the length of the working week. These figures seem to reflect career pattern, with women having a flat career path contrasting with male career gradients.

Career mobility is another critical feature of employment. The traditional expectation is of a ladder going only up. Women’s withdrawal from the labour market to have children is often followed by a chequered pattern of part-time work, reduction in status and earnings, combining paid and unpaid work roles. Women in careers may be more able to accrue the advantages attaching to a more ‘male’ working life: in particular, resources to pay for childcare with the ability to sustain continuity. But their career pattern shares features with that of less advantaged women. In some ways they meet special hurdles. If careered occupations are organised as a continuous, upwardly mobile, single-minded pathway their structures put women at a peculiar disadvantage.

Segregation of women at work has been another theme of the literature (Hakim 1979). Women work in a limited range of occupations and are more likely to be at the bottom of hierarchies. Segregation applies also to careered work, with historical patterns in medicine and nursing a long way from obliteration, and some nearly exclusive male areas, such as engineering. The Hansard Society’s report on Women at the Top found that: ‘In any given occupation, and in any given public office, the higher the rank, prestige or influence, the smaller the proportion of women’ (Hansard Society 1990:2).

Women’s paid employment does not therefore have the same meaning as men’s – does not bring the same status, capacity for independence, daily life. Lower pay, lower status in hierarchies and segregation of many women into ‘women’s’ professions, some of which are collectively answerable to ‘men’s’ professions – these raise a question about the nature of professionalism for women. Family obligation and position in hierarchies likewise change the meaning of career. These are serious reservations to set against genuinely radical changes in the pattern of women’s working lives.

Women’s continued responsibility for childcare?

Rapid labour market change has happened against a background of a distinctive family policy. Malcolm Wicks describes the social objectives of the Thatcher government:

They were to encourage people to assume greater responsibility for their own welfare (and that of their families) and thus to become less dependent on the State. For families the fulfilment of political objectives would enable and encourage ‘choice’. Central to this objective was an attempt to bolster the ‘traditional’ family and its caring role.

(Wicks 1991: 6)

The policy was explicit and uncomplicated in the area of ‘community care’. Government documents adopted the theme of the significance of caring work – highlighted by feminists who questioned its exploitative use of women’s labour (for example, Finch and Groves 1983, Ungerson 1987) – and made it a policy objective. Informal care was the backbone of community care, and should remain so. Private services should also be encouraged. The government’s role was to manage, to make the most efficient use of ‘community’ resources and the private sector: ‘Helping carers to maintain their valuable contribution to the spectrum of care is both right and a sound investment’ (Department of Health 1989; see also Maclean and Groves 1991 and Land 1991). Key aspects of this policy wait to be implemented, but reliance on informal care is now both project and reality. Research has complicated the claim that community care equals care by women, but has nevertheless underlined the significance of gender in patterns of care, and the predominance of women among those with the heaviest burdens (Arber and Gilbert 1989, Green 1988, Finch 1991). The significance of unpaid work in women’s careers is discussed elsewhere in this volume.

If family responsibility for elders can be seen in terms of economy first and sentiment second, parental responsibility for children touches a more sensitive nerve in conservative thinking. Parental responsibility is a matter of economics too. The Child Support Act attempts to reduce the social security bill, while Britain’s low levels of nursery provision place costs squarely on parents. But the need goes deeper than economics: ‘we must strengthen the family. Unless we do so, we will be faced with heart-rending social problems which no Government could possibly cure – or perhaps even cope with’ (Margaret Thatcher, quoted in Wicks 1991). The Child Support Act goes well beyond the costs of social security; it is also a project for family responsibility.

Concern to strengthen the family has fitted neatly with public expenditure containment. Peter Moss quotes a Department of Health memorandum from 1989: ‘in the first instance it is the responsibility of the parents to make arrangements including financial arrangements, for the day-care of pre-school children’ (Moss 1991: 133). He argues that economic policy and government reluctance to make demands of employers was behind its ‘opposition to the adoption of a draft Directive on Parental Leave put forward by the European Commission in 1983’ (Moss 1991: 133).

Pressures for change have arisen from two sources: the demographic gap among school leavers, which has left employers looking for older women workers, and the changing shape of women’s working lives. The Ministerial Group on Women’s Issues responded with a series of proposals:

encouragement of a ‘voluntary accreditation scheme [to] provide information about the availability of childcare facilities and guarantee the quality of provision’; guidance to local education authorities and school governors ‘encouraging the use of school premises for after school and holiday playschemes’; support for the voluntary sector through ‘the pump-priming of projects and the encouragement of partnerships between employers and the voluntary sector’; and encouragement to employers ‘to use the tax reliefs available to provide childcare facilities’.

(Moss 1991: 138)

Little legislation or public money attached to these proposals, with their emphasis on voluntarism.

Women’s increased involvement in the labour market, then, has happened against a background of unchanging childcare policies. Public policy has been that family care is best, nurseries should be reserved for those children whose parental care is inadequate, and nursery education should be part-time and focused on stimulating child development.

Most women continue to leave the labour market to care for young children, leading to downward mobility in terms of job status and income on return. Here women’s careers come most sharply into conflict with the traditional idea of career. The very highly structured career paths of professions such as medicine, which require intense career building in the early stages, present a special barrier to women with children. But even traditional women’s occupations, such as nursing, have failed to offer a ‘career’ that can comfortably be combined with childcare (Mackay 1989, Buchan and Seccombe 1991).

While the pattern of full-time work, withdrawal from the labour market and later return to a more fragmented employment, experience is the most common in Britain, there is a shift towards a more conti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Series Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Career Contexts and Obstacles for Women
• Part Two Concepts and Explanations in Particular Careers
• Part Three Gender and Career: Identifying the Issues
• Index