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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Barbara Bagilhole, Women in Non-Traditional Occupations: Challenging Men (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2002)

AS THE TITLE suggests, this book tells the story of women working in occupations that have traditionally been performed by men. Bagilhole draws on data from four occupational case studies to identify common barriers faced by and strategies used by women working in these traditionally male fields. The case studies are comprised of samples of women working in civil service management, academia, and the priesthood in the Church of England. Matched samples of men and women are included in the fourth case study of construction engineers. These studies were carried out over a period of seven years, and each occupation contained a different percentage of women.

Bagilhole categorizes her four occupations by drawing on Rosabeth Moss Kanter's typology of proportionate diversity (Men and Women of the Corporation, New York 1977). Kanter's taxonomy ranged from skewed organizations wherein one social type predominates, to more balanced organizations in which the minority social type in question constitutes at least 40 per cent of the work group. The priesthood of the Church of England recently (in the early 1990s) moved from an all-male or "uniform" occupation to include women; it represents the most extremely skewed field of Bagilhole's cases. Male priests predominate numerically, and as a consequence, define the norms of the occupational culture often to the detriment of female priests. Although the construction engineering field has included women for a longer time period than has the priesthood, it is also an extremely skewed occupational field. Academia includes more women than either the priesthood or engineering fields and thus constitutes a less skewed occupation. The Civil Service is balanced as an occupation, but its management positions are still quite skewed.

Kanter predicts that as work groups become more proportionately balanced, minority social types (in this case, women) will face fewer barriers and exert more influence on the workplace culture. However, in contrast to Kanter, and consistent with more recent research, Bagilhole finds that women face considerable barriers in all four occupational groups, and perhaps most importantly, that once an occupation integrates to include women, gender segregation is re-instituted by assigning women to gender-specific specializations and job tasks. Of course, each occupation in the study exhibits its own distinctive version of this re-segregation process, but these gendered specializations and duties commonly prevent women from attaining the pay, status, and advancement associated with the duties assigned to their male coworkers. For example, female engineers are encouraged by senior male managers to enter supporting office-based roles rather than the site-based work locations that are most highly valued in promotional decisions. Women in the priesthood are much more often placed in half-or non-stipend positions than are their male counterparts.

Bagilhole promises to utilize her data to address the persistent question raised in studies of women in traditionally male occupations: will women change the fields that they enter? This question is nicely framed by Bagilhole's overview of international workplace gender segregation patterns (Chapter 1), and her extensive review of the theoretical explanations of occupational segregation and the emergence of gendered job categories (Chapters 2 and 3). Her analysis reveals the myriad ways in which women's "choices" about work hours, assignments, and careers are shaped by societal arrangements such as the gendered division of labour in the home, and by organizational conditions that value men's work over women's, and assume that the "best" workers are those unencumbered by geographical constraints or routine childcare and housework responsibilities. These same structural and organizational dynamics make it difficult for women to significantly transform work practices in the male-dominated occupations that they enter. Bagilhole's case studies consistently reveal the many barriers and pressures faced by women in non-traditional fields, and lead to the conclusion that these male-dominated work experiences change women more than women can change the jobs in their field. Importantly, however, Bagilhole's data do reveal pockets of women who think that their job performances have significantly altered their occupational field for the better. This finding was most evident among female priests who were working to develop a priesthood that was both more responsive to parishioners and supportive of increased gender equality in their society at large. Several female academics believed that their presence improved the quality of teaching and mentoring for university students. Yet, female academics recognized that the link between research and university career advancement led to the devaluing of those who cared for teaching over scholarly publication. The progressive female priests also perceived less commitment to occupational change among the new, younger women recruits to their field.

Given the strength and longevity of the male-dominated work cultures in all four of her case studies, Bagilhole concludes that increasing the numbers of women alone is unlikely to produce occupational change. She argues that individualistic solutions will not change sexist organizational cultures, and ends the book with a call for centralized, and state-driven interventions to promote gender equity. She briefly describes one such program in Sweden as having produced a number of successes.

Bagilhole's analysis presents an excellent overview of the societal and organizational barriers confronting women in non-traditional occupations. Given the time frame of the study, the book is important because it shows, sadly, that many of the barriers described by researchers during the 1980s and early 1990s continue into the present day. However, the book does not offer much in the way of new insights into the study of women in male-dominated fields. Most of the data seem to confirm existing theory rather than to forge new ground. The last chapter on challenging gender boundaries emphasizes state-initiated remedies as a solution, but this focus contradicts discussions in earlier chapters about the subversion of such initiatives at the organizational level. Moreover, while such strategies may be gaining ground in the UK and EU, US trends seem to be running in an almost opposite direction with the dismantling of many affirmative action programs nation-wide.

Most of the book focuses more on organizational dynamics than on the larger structural context of contemporary work organizations. Although structural levers for change that might improve or worsen women's position are briefly discussed in Chapter 2 and occasionally referenced in other chapters, the likely effects of major structural trends like globalization, downsizing, and outsourcing are not carefully considered in this study. The discussion of "international" workplace gender segregation only addresses First World countries such as the US and the member countries of the EU. It does not deal with the effects of international divisions of labour on gendered job segregation in First and Third World countries. The structural dynamics of the global economy are shaping and reshaping workplace organizational dynamics in ways that may both replicate past gendered organizational barriers, but also create new opportunities and new dilemmas for women in traditionally men's jobs. Future research should attend to these matters.

Despite these concerns, Women in Non-Traditional Occupations is a solid piece of research. It is well written and provides many rich quotations from interviews with women in four very interesting fields. The book would be a fine addition to courses focused on work and occupations, organizations, gender and work, or social inequality.


Nancy Jurik Arizona State University

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