Gender as Vocation: A Sociology of Occupational Choice

Abstract

In Chapters 2 and 3, it was observed that individualist approaches to research into gendered-occupational segregation have rarely, if ever, sought to access accounts of occupational decisions from individuals directly. Instead they have assumed such decisions to be a function of underlying, comparatively fixed gender differences, innate or otherwise. Such differences are expressed at the level of the individual, via reasonably rational choices made by reasonably well-informed agents. The collective outcome of these individual choices, given the underlying differences, forms the social phenomena of both horizontal and vertical gendered-occupational segregation. As these phenomena result from such a basis, these are not often explicitly or even implicitly deemed problematic within this research approach, being far more readily understood as benign outcomes or reflections of acceptable and expected difference. Consequently, correctives to occupational segregation, and its attendant social outcomes, are more rarely proffered than solutions to the problems of accurately modelling the person-choicecareer relationship. Such modelling, as we have seen, insofar as its hypothesis-testing goes, has produced somewhat confused and contradictory findings, although more generally it has also produced valuable and insightful results.