Margaret Whittock - Feminising the Masculine?: Women in Non-traditional Employment

The gendered division of labour in the family, and in society more generally, is now a recognised and well-documented phenomenon. A wide sociological literature has sought to demonstrate and explain how gender roles are learned primarily in the family, then reinforced by the education and training systems, the media, religion, peer group pressure, and so on (see for example: Chodorow, 1978; Deem, 1978; Spender, 1982; Stanworth, 1983). But of course, that is not the end of the story. The cultivation of gendered roles during childhood and adolescence culminates in a gendered division of labour within the workforce, with women clustered in a narrow range of female occupations. Consequently, fewer women than men will be classified as manual workers, and within the manual category of employment, men are much more likely to be categorised as skilled (craft and similar) workers (Abbott and Wallace, 1991, p. 13 3).

Back in the 1960s, Blauner (1964) commented that successful work was not part of the traditional female role. Time has moved on of course, and as demonstrates, large numbers of women, both single and married, are now engaged in paid employment outside the home. However, as a consequence of such thinking a number of commentators (Brewer, 1991; Game and Pringle, 1984; Walshok, 1987) have noted how, in the past, there has been a tendency for sociologists to overlook women in the study of work. Moreover, where women have been studied, the focus has unsurprisingly been on what have come to be regarded as stereotypical female areas of employment such as teaching, nursing and clerical work. Nevertheless, despite a consistent failure to recognise their existence there have always been women who have stepped outside the stereotype. Indeed, in an effort to recover what Connell (1993, p. 188) refers to as a marginalised form of femininity, the reader will be introduced to such women throughout the following pages. In the main, however, apart from the two World Wars, when there was a general, if often grudging recognition of womens participation in non-traditional forms of work, we find that such activity, in Sheila Rowbothams words (1974), has often been hidden from history.

Two areas of employment where women have stepped outside the stereotype can be identified at this point: male-dominated professions, and, to a lesser extent, male-dominated blue-collar or manual employment. In compensation for the earlier dearth of literature on the subject, a considerable corpus of work has been developed in recent years which examines the position of women in male-dominated professions (for example, Agnew et al., 1987; Brewer, 1991; Greed, 1990, 1994; Spencer and Podmore, 1987). This will be referred to at intervals throughout the book, and more particularly in

The term non-traditional employment has now been mentioned several times. But, what is meant by this? For the purposes of this book, non-traditional employment can be taken to denote any occupation of a manual nature, which is, or has been, traditionally undertaken by a man. While areas such as transport, construction, and other trade jobs are of particular interest, a plethora of occupations remain which are still considered to be non-traditional for women. Research for this book uncovered the fact that women are working not only in those male-dominated areas already mentioned, but in occupations as diverse as road gang foreperson, landscape gardener, coastguard, motor cycle courier, saddler, stone carver, and stained-glass window installer. In Northern Ireland, where research for this book was undertaken, such women are invariably the sole representatives of their kind. A few professional occupations, such as outdoor pursuits instructor and acoustic engineer, have also been included. These occupations were deemed sufficiently physical or manual in nature to satisfy the criteria of the research, and, again, such occupations are normally associated with males. Of course, the terms non-traditional and traditional, with regard to womens paid employment, remain culturally specific. It is still relatively unusual to find women engaged in the occupations outlined previously, both here in the United Kingdom, and in Europe generally. However, this may not be so in other areas of the world, particularly in developing countries where both social and cultural conditions affect womens economic activity.

In many developing countries it is common to find women employed in unskilled, heavy manual work, such as labouring on construction sites, and road building. Similarly, women are responsible for much of the manual work in the agricultural sector, although generally, such employment goes unpaid. Mukhopadhyay notes of Indian women (1985, p.49):

Women who work as farm labourers put in an average of fourteen hours of work per day. This includes, besides the hard manual labour necessary in agricultural operations, arduous tasks like collecting firewood (and) fetching water.