There has been a significant increase in womenâs labour market participation in the UK overall in recent decades, with a continued advance into professional and managerial positions. Yet some traditionally male sectors, such as construction and transport, have remained highly resistant to change in their gender balance, with women still only accounting for 12 % of those working in construction (and only around 1 % of the construction trades) and 22 % of workers in transport and storage, with little change in the past two decades (ONS 2015). Furthermore, women are concentrated in certain occupationsâcaring, administration and sales and customer service rolesâthat are associated with lower pay levels than occupations dominated by men. Such occupational segregation by gender is one of the causes of the persistent pay gap between female and male earnings.
Many initiatives have been introduced to encourage women to enter male-dominated occupations, highlighting the loss to the economy of failing to attract women into engineering, for example, and much research has investigated the reasons for womenâs low participation in male-dominated sectors. This reveals many experiences of hostile, masculine work cultures, discriminatory attitudes from employers and colleagues, and long and inflexible working patterns, but also finds that for women who remain, doing traditionally âmaleâ work can be hugely satisfying and rewarding, including financially. This book is concerned with the diversity among women in male-dominated work, and seeks to better understand the varied experiences, motivations and support networks of those who enter male-dominated occupations. Increasing our knowledge of how and why women enter male-dominated work, and, importantly, the organisational and structural factors that enable them to remain in these jobs, is necessary for devising effective strategies for increasing womenâs numbers in sectors where they are underrepresented. The book therefore also examines interventions for change, drawing on international examples.
Women working in previously male domains are of great interest to those concerned with challenging traditional gender hierarchies and roles. The entry of women into jobs traditionally said to require âmasculineâ attributes challenges the supposed ânaturalnessâ of the association of these traits with men and the ideology of inherent differences that justifies male dominance (Reskin and Padavic 1988). Such challenges are frequently met with hostility, with research highlighting the ways in which men have sought to exclude or control women, often through sexualised workplace interactions, questioning about their sexual availability and sexual harassment (Collinson and Collinson 1996; DiTomaso 1989; Frank 2001). Women face scrutiny about their sexuality, with âdyke-baitingâ suffered by all women, regardless of actual sexual orientation, as an assertion of male power when women transgress traditional gender roles (Frank 2001). Thus, lesbianism may be âused as a category with which to control heterosexual womenâ (Cockburn 1991: 196). However despite this concern with sexuality, the actual experiences of lesbians in male-dominated work are largely absent from studies of non-traditionally female work. Yet some have suggested that lesbians may be found in high proportions in some male-dominated occupations such as the construction trades or bus driving (Frank 2014; Wall 2004; Weston 1998) or may be attracted to male-dominated work in rejecting the pursuit of gender-traditional interests and occupations (Croteau et al. 2000; Fassinger 1996; Morgan and Brown 1991).
This book seeks to explicitly examine the experiences of both heterosexual women and lesbians of working in male-dominated1 environments, focusing on two of the most heavily male-dominated sectors in the UK, construction and transport. The study, therefore, is not solely an examination of minority sexuality, but instead aims to bring insights from the growing literature on lesbians, gay men and bisexuals at work into âmainstreamâ sociological analysis of gender and work. By exploring the heterogeneity of womenâs experience and paying closer attention to how processes of dominant heterosexuality affect the lives of all women (Rich [1980] 1996), this can enable âmore intellectually rigorous accounts of how the gender order is reproducedâ (Dunne 2000: 135).
Few studies of women in male-dominated work have compared or given equal weight to the experiences of workers in manual/operational roles as those in professional occupations. Although there are studies of women in manual or skilled jobs, such as the building trades, particularly in the USA, greater concern to date has centred on womenâs professional careers, and on increasing womenâs entry to science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) areas leading to professional careers. This is despite the fact that women have made greater inroads into previously male-dominated professions than into working-class manufacturing or blue-collar trades (England 2010). In transport, however, there has been little research on women workers in either professional or operational jobs. Furthermore, research on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers has tended to be biased towards middle-class or professional groups, due to difficulties in collecting diverse samples that include those who are not open about their sexuality at work.
This book, therefore, contributes original empirical data to deepen our understanding of the heterogeneity of womenâs experience of male-dominated work. To do this, it adopts an intersectional approach that takes account of how gender is also affected by sexuality and occupational class. There are, of course, extensive debates about meanings, definitions and use of class as an analytical category (see Crompton and Scott 2000), with occupation representing only one, imperfect, measure of class (Crompton 2008, 2010), that ignores important cultural meanings (Skeggs 1997). However, I am here using occupational group as a proxy for âclassâ (Crompton 2010: 12) to examine differences in womenâs experience of male-dominated work by including interviewees in a range of professional, managerial and skilled manual occupations. Attention will be paid to material differences in womenâs experience, as well as bringing to the fore often underrepresented perspectives.
The concept of intersectionality is central to the bookâs approach. It is an influential, much debated, complex and âmurkyâ concept (Nash 2008) within feminist theory and gender studies, but at its heart is the notion of challenging universal understandings of the category âwomanâ that in reality only represent the experiences of white, middle-class, Western women (Collins 2000), usually also heterosexual and able-bodied. Intersectionality therefore seeks to examine how advantage and disadvantage operate through, for example, interactions of gender, race, class and sexuality. Theories of intersectionality developed initially to understand how processes of gender, race and class intertwined, to give voice to the neglected experiences of black women (Crenshaw 1991). It has been said that sexuality is one of the least explored intersections (Hines 2011), with intersections of class and sexuality a particular absence (McDermott 2011; Taylor 2005).
While there have been extensive theoretical debates about conceptualisations of intersectionality and appropriate methodologies, there have been fewer attempts to operationalise it within research. A useful discussion of intersectional methodology is offered by McCall (2005), who identifies three approaches (described in Sect. 2.â5). The approach adopted by this study is McCallâs intercategorical approach. Unlike the approaches that either seek to deconstruct social categories such as gender or race, or focus on neglected points of intersection, for example, the experiences of black women, the intercategorical approach takes the relationships of inequality among social groups as the centre of analysis and seeks to uncover the links between inequality and the categories themselves. This has the benefit of examining âboth advantage and disadvantage explicitly and simultaneouslyâ (ibid.: 1787). In this case, comparisons can be made between women in different positions in occupational hierarchies, by including professional and manual jobs, and those identifying with dominant heterosexuality and those of minority sexuality, lesbians.
In order to appreciate the institutional, organisational and individual factors that contribute to the production and maintenance of occupational gender segregation, the study adopts a multi-level framework. A useful framew...