Introduction

Abstract

In recent history workforces in rich, industrialised nations have been subject to a number of transformations. One of the largest changes is that women have entered the paid labour market in large numbers so that they now make up almost 50 per cent of the workforces in the UK and Australia (ABS, 2011; McDowell, 2009). However, occupations are horizontally segregated so that women continue to be clustered in certain occupational spaces and retain distance from others. For example, women congregate in occupations like nursing, teaching, social work, retail work, child care, beauty work and hairdressing but largely do not participate in carpentry, engineering, policing, mining and information technology. At the same time, men tend to be positioned in the occupational spaces that women are mostly absent from and appear to be largely quarantined from feminised work. Furthermore, some of these feminised and masculinised jobs are becoming more gendered (for example, in the UK and Australia the proportion of social workers who are female have increased since the 1990s (Meagher and Healy, 2005: 42; Perry and Cree, 2003; 376)) despite the introduction of equal opportunity policies and the weakening of gender norms in many areas of public life.