Social Work

Abstract

As I discussed in Chapter 3, social work and nursing share similar cultures, demographics and histories. Social work, like nursing, is a feminised respectable middle-class ‘caring career’ and a connection is often made between social work, caring and femininity. These correlations resulted in similar themes occurring throughout the nurses’ and social workers’ narratives in regard to motivations, pathways and gender capital experiences, and this chapter is therefore organised along similar lines to the nursing chapter. Indeed, this chapter will demonstrate and conclude that both occupations occupy the same field: the field of ‘paid caring work’. However, there is an absence of male voices and an addition of academic voices in this chapter.