A Review Of Women S Participation In The Non Traditional Occupations

This book examines common issues and concepts concerning women in non-traditional, male dominated occupations. It explores the question of whether these women are the agents of change or are instead changed themselves. It provides a statistical examination and theoretical analysis of occupational sex segregation in the UK, the rest of the European Union, and the USA. Then, it provides a more in-depth understanding of women's work lives through the experiences of the women themselves in four occupations; management, academia, engineering and the priesthood.

Even though women have made substantial progress in a number of formerly male occupations, sex segregation in the workplace remains a fact of life. This volume probes pertinent questions: Why has the overall degree of sex segregation remained stable in this century? What informal barriers keep it in place? How do socialization and educational practices affect career choices and hiring patterns? How do family responsibilities affect women's work attitudes? And how effective is legislation in lessening the gap between the sexes? Amply supplemented with tables, figures, and insightful examination of trends and research, this volume is a definitive source for what is known today about sex segregation on the job.

This title was first published in 2000: This work aims to provide a comparative and temporal assessment of the position of women in non-traditional employment in Europe, Britain and Northern Ireland. Its second aim is to provide a new perspective on the division of labour in modern Western societies and to critically examine the issues, debates and perspectives which have traditionally dominated portrayals of women and paid employment. The book assesses the potential which women themselves have for transforming existing gender relations, particularly within the structural constraints of the education, training and employment systems. In so doing, it is intended to highlight flaws inherent in much contemporary feminist theorizing, and aims to provide a more satisfactory theoretical framework within which to elaborate and develop its arguments. While related texts have tended to concentrate on stereotypical notions of women and paid employment, this book aims to fill a gap in the literature by scrutinizing the lived experiences of women in non-traditional manual occupations, and relating these to a possible transformation of the existing gender order in Western societies