Trading Choices - Discussion and recommendations

GO TO: TOC / Previous / Next - References

Locating the problem: influencing factors
Gender production
Family scripts
Media and marketing
Peer relationships
Schooling
Trades training and work
The pathways framework
Solving the problem by thinking about it in different ways
Past approaches
Recognising society’s transformations: the knowledge society and career development
Creating emergent ‘solutions’ for the unknown future
Suggestion 1
Suggestion 2

Young people's suggestions for change

The aim of this research was to examine the interconnections between gender and gendered ideas, and young people’s trades-related career decision making. We began this report with three questions in mind:

1. Do males and females experience the contexts of career decision making differently and/or inequitably?
2. If so, where is the problem located?
3. What policy – or other – levers might lead to a better gender balance in the trades, and/or an increase in women’s economic independence?

This chapter answers these questions via a synthesis of the evidence from interviews with our sample of young people, and current thinking about education and careers in the 21^st century.

Difference and inequity

The research reported on in this report shows that males and females do experience the contexts of career decision making differently. While there are many similarities, we have focused on the differences to suggest that gender has a major – if not always visible – influence on young people’s pathways navigation, and their steering towards and away from trades-related careers. Gendered discourses inevitably structure the young people’s narratives – we are, after all, gendered beings: however, we found that narrow thinking about – and production of – gender affects the ways in which families, employers, peers, education organisations, advisers, and other individuals and institutions, explicitly and tacitly, make some potential career paths and identities more – or less – accessible to young women.

The findings presented in this report unsettle the veneer of equal opportunities, limitless possibilities, and individual choices apparently provided by the New Zealand ‘pathways’ framework. The findings point to pervasive gender inequities, and, in particular, they show that there are not just inequities in what young people decide to do (e.g., more builders are men) but in how and why they come to these decisions. While many of the young people we interviewed argued that women and men can enter the trades, a deeper reading of their narratives shows us how social relations and structures smooth the pathway for men, while women are required to navigate more treacherous terrain, with the result that they often arrive later, having had more of a struggle, and/or less of a plan.

Locating the problem: influencing factors

This section looks at the main factors involved in young people’s decision making about trades-related occupations, and – most importantly – how we might ‘read’ or understand those factors. Typically, factors in research are presented as a list, and are often read in isolation from each other as if they were ingredients in a recipe, with each one contributing something different and identifiable to the overall product. However, contemporary social researchers argue that this approach does not ‘work’ well in complex social situations. Human beings, in particular, their identities, are much more than the sum of their parts (or a set of factors), so that it is more useful to look at the relationships and interaction between the parts, than to look at the parts as separate entities.

In the case of this research, though we can point to many influences on young people’s decision-making experiences, we cannot know precisely and definitively how these interact for each individual, let alone how these might interact for other individuals who were not involved in this study. However, we can look to the overall context in which these factors occur, are experienced, or are understood. We can understand the way in which gender is ‘performed’ and understood by young people and how it interacts with their decision making not just as sets of individual circumstances, but in the context of something bigger. This is the approach we take below. The ‘something bigger’ we have used to understand the ‘sense’ the young people we interviewed were making of their experiences is the wider shift from an industrial society to a post-industrial or knowledge society. In this context, careers and work are, increasingly, being conceived and experienced – or ‘produced’ – in ways that differ in important ways from the Industrial Age model.

Below we draw on our findings to summarise some of the factors that act to close down – and/or open up – nontraditional pathway options for young women within the main contexts that we investigated. Then we look at how these factors ‘work’ in the context of the industrial to knowledge society shift, and at the implications this has for gender and trades-related occupational decision making.

Gender norms play a major role in the production of young people’s identities. This becomes especially important in today’s environment where career development is about producing ‘who I can be’ rather than ‘what I will do’ (Barnett, 2004; Vaughan & Roberts, 2007; Vaughan et al., 2006). In the research reported here, we found that gender stereotypes and dominant hetero-normative discourse continue to have a pervasive influence on young people as they imagine and try out possible selves.

Our interviewees’ comments ranged from the outright sexist, to those suggesting that women can do traditional trades-related work, but it is men who (naturally) tend to be more interested in it. This corroborates other recent research showing that many young people will espouse equal opportunities while at the same time (re)producing old ideas about gender and gendered occupations – to the extent that their choice trajectories are constrained (see, for example, Equal Opportunities Commission, 2001; Howard & Tibballs, 2003; Osgood et al., 2006; Thomson et al., 2003).

Women in general continue to seek out work areas associated with stereotypical feminine qualities, in relation to sector (e.g. preferring the caring and service industries over the scientific and technical) and/or work environments (e.g., preferring quality relationships over autonomy) (Francis, 2000/2002 cited in Osgood et al., 2006; Razumnikova, 2005).

The narratives of the young tradeswomen we interviewed disrupted – transcended even – gender-normative discourses – to varying degrees. Many were wary of assumptions about dichotomous gender differences, distancing themselves from, as one put it, ‘the girl versus boy mentality’. Others were able to maintain traditional ideas about gender alongside their participation in male-dominated work (for example, one claimed to be ‘a chick’ at home and ‘a tradesman’ at work).

Both groups used de/reconstructing discourses around marginalised ‘tradeswoman’ identities, perhaps exemplifying the ‘post modern person, replacing a static identity with a multiple, changing, and fluid notion of self’ (Atkinson & DePalmer, 2008 drawing on Turkle, 1996).^[29]

 
Many of the nontraditional pathways women we interviewed said that they needed to be very self-assured and self-confident to ‘be’ female in a male-dominated environment. In the next section we look at some of the factors that might have helped to produce some of that resilience, taking into account career identity literature which suggests that a sense of self is (re)produced through community interaction (Law et al., 2002).  

Family relationships and activities have a powerful influence on young people’s sense of who they are/can be. Although participants reported that their parents apparently support whatever they might choose for study or work, we know from other research that family background, experiences, and conversations throughout a young person’s upbringing clearly make some decisions more likely than others (Berríos-Allison, 2005; Bryce, Anderson, Frigo, & Mckenzie, 2007; Nota, Ferrari, Solberg, & Soresi, 2007; Taylor & Nelms, 2008; Vaughan, in press). As children grow older, family members can provide direct advice about career decisions, helping young people to make sense of all the options on offer, but material from the young people’s interviews suggests that they often use a gender ‘lens’ that was more appropriate to previous generations. These findings are well supported by research that shows how children learn about and construct their future (gendered) selves through family socialisation (see, for example, Equal Opportunities Commission, 2001; Gibson & Papa, 2000; Jacobs et al., 2006).

Some young women navigating nontraditional pathways described having families who consciously disrupted gender norming (and, sometimes, other socially prescribed notions of status and success). This could be particularly powerful when family members were also interested/active in trades-related areas.^[30] Such experiences can provide young women with hands-on knowledge about an area (to counteract other messages they might be receiving) and/or normalise female participation, making it a legitimate career possibility.

Young people today consume, interpret, and interact with a wide range of media that varies in the extent to which it entrenches or disrupts gender stereotypes in and beyond careers. Other researchers in this area have argued that media consumption is inseparable from young people’s identity production, and that the media provides limiting messages about gender and vocational roles (Garner, 1999; Hylmö, 2006). For the young people we interviewed, television shows and advertisements do glorify or selectively represent career options, but at the same time (when asked) some young people are critical of what they view. None of our interviewees mentioned female television characters in trades-related careers, but they had noticed current advertising aimed at opening up women’s career possibilities. While some young women found these campaigns useful, others were far more sceptical and suggested that the potential for change is often disrupted by characters that seem comedic and/or unrealistic.

Media, marketing, and information provision plays a different role in each young person’s career decision making; for example, from sparking a sudden interest in a new area, to ‘enabling’ a prior choice by finding an institution’s contact details. Young people are active consumers and the meaning each makes of any given information inter-relates with many other factors in their immediate lives, such as peer relationships and schooling experiences. The structure and opportunities for qualifications and labour market participation also play a role.

Young people’s social groups can be more or less accepting of nontraditional roles, and/or the trades in general. Previous research has suggested that girls tend to have a more collaborative approach to educational and career decision making, and so peers (and family) could be more influential for girls (Mastekaasa & Smeby, 2008; Reay, 1998). Classroom banter in male-dominated learning environments had negatively affected some of our young women interviewees, some of whom sought support from their friends. Some of our interviewees who had taken a nontraditional option without support from friends or classmates were put off continuing, while, for others, this experience made them even more motivated to prove they could do it.

Previous research suggests that while the public education system is supposed to provide equal opportunity for all, schools have a ‘hidden curriculum’ which acts to (re)produce hegemonic ideologies, as well as old patterns of social and economic dis/advantage (Apple with King, 2004). The data from the young people in this study (and other NZCER work) suggest that there are at least four aspects of schooling that serve to maintain traditional gender pathways in terms of subject choices, course design, and work experience(s).^[31] These are as follows:

• Logistics and clustering. Schools must balance offering as many subjects as possible against the constraints of time and resources, and understandings about what their students need and want. School timetabling practices create subject ‘clusters’ (groupings of subject combinations) and some of these clusters are more likely to be populated by girls than boys (Hipkins et al., 2006; Hipkins et al., 2005; Wylie et al., in press). We were told about one (co-ed) secondary school that insisted all students took all subjects in their first year (including the hard technologies), an idea that many of our interviewees approved of. However, this appears to be the exception rather than the rule.

• The academic/practical divide. Despite the pathway framework’s wide range of possibilities (e.g., for school subjects, qualifications, secondary–tertiary course alignment, and post-school study and career options), timetabling practices (and subject clustering) continue to separate the ‘academic-oriented’ and ‘vocationally-oriented’ pathways, and to reproduce the former’s traditionally higher status. Interviewees told us about their difficulties in combining academic interests with practical courses. They also told us of widely held assumptions that the trades-related options are for the less academically successful – and boys. Since educational progression along particular pathways requires particular prerequisites, some young women do not have the luxury of exploring options and this may close down future possibilities. Some schools struggle to offer technology and/or work experience/work-based learning programmes, as these courses are resource-intensive.

• Nontraditional vocational learning environments. STAR, Gateway, and other work experience programmes provide a much appreciated alternative to traditional academic routes. They can provide young women (and men) with a more practical learning environment and can facilitate school/training/work connections. However, the social environment of some courses and/or workplaces did deter some female interviewees.

• Careers-related advice. Students select their courses in collaboration with a range of school staff, and taking into account the various ‘messages’ they have been given about their abilities. Some teachers’ (possibly subconscious) reinforcement of gender norms undoubtedly acts as another filter. We were told of the occasional teacher, dean, and/or careers adviser who had actively discouraged young women from ‘choosing’ nontraditional school and post-school options, but more commonly we were surprised by the apparent lack of active support for young women to construct nontraditional pathways. This, we think, is important, as a few of our young women interviewees specifically said that it was the support from a subject-specialist teacher or trainer that ‘made the difference’ in their decision to carry on with trades-related learning.
  

Thus unacknowledged assumptions about the purposes of senior secondary education, and about differences in male and female interests, effectively filter women away from trades-related paths. This is particularly interesting in the light of our finding that our male and our female interviewees were attracted by the same aspects of trades pathways (for example, earning-while-learning, low/no fees, useful for life, earning capacity, high likelihood of employment, internationally recognised qualifications, etc.).

For many of our interviewees, male-dominated trades-related training and work is associated with dominant/hegemonic constructions of masculinity. For example, their narratives perpetuate the idea that men are more likely than women to be strong, to not mind getting dirty, to engage in physical activity, to follow vocational education pathways, and to have practical skills. From this, it ‘makes sense’ that men are more likely to be interested in this kind of work.

Apprenticeships are powerful ‘communities of practice’. They facilitate the process of newcomers ‘becoming’ community members through the ‘adaptation to and assimilation of various skills, procedures, and institutional norms via informal learning processes’ (Parker, 2006;^[32] see also Kahveci et al., 2007). Indeed, our interviewees’ narratives suggest that both women and men actively produce particular forms of masculinity in the trades (and therefore, also, particular approaches to the trades). The difference is that men are assumed to ‘naturally’ fit, while women are greeted with surprise and/or negativity. Many of our interviewees saw the presence of women in the trades, not as disproving these assumptions, but as individual exceptions. At the same time, however, they reported examples of active and passive discrimination in trade environments, including evidence of ‘double standards’.^[33]

Some of our female interviewees were clearly comfortable in current trades environments, partly because they provide access to particular identities, and partly because they unsettle outmoded ideas about gender. Some reported resistance strategies: however, this is tricky in that it necessarily disrupts/ threatens the current nature of the trades, current dominant notions of gender, and/or an individual woman’s sense of self.

Since career decision making is continually in process, it is important to note that several of the trades-oriented women we spoke to intended to explore other careers (or at least did not want to remain ‘on the tools’), while others were looking to craft a niche for themselves that would maximise the potential of what, as they saw it, women can offer to trades-related work.

The ‘pathways framework’ represents the spaces ‘between’ the factors discussed above. It is the organising system that connects (and blurs the boundaries between) learning and working environments, as provided by (or in collaboration between) communities, schools, tertiary institutions, employers, etc. Building on the findings of other recent research, our interviews provide further evidence of the ways in which this framework makes young people overly dependent on the quality of the advice providers they have access to, as well as their own capacity to make the ‘best’ decisions for their (future) selves. Many school-based careers advisers have not yet grasped the potential for the pathways framework to allow greater fluidity between different learning opportunities and working arrangements, and many of them are reliant on school structures that tie them to an information distribution – rather than a facilitation – role for young people’s decision making (Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007). Until this situation changes, we foresee that the structural impacts of the above factors will continue in the current largely invisible ways, as will the uncritical (re)production of gender segregation patterns in employment. We suggest that it is impossible for us to identify one or more of the factors outlined above as primarily responsible for gender-normative decision making. Rather, it is the inter-relationships between these different contexts – including cumulative layering, contradictions, and feedback loops – that make this problem so difficult to define and solve.
 

Solving the problem by thinking about it in different ways

As outlined above, we can identify some important factors, and describe their interactions, but we think it is important to understand these factors in the ‘bigger picture’ of the knowledge society. What then do we think should be done to tackle the problem of gender segregation in trades-related occupations in this new environment? We want to argue that past approaches, which do not take account of knowledge society developments, will not be enough, and something more is needed. We suggest an approach that involves:

• recognising the approaches that have been, and are being, used, looking at their successes and their shortcomings
• acknowledging how ‘knowledge society’ developments and various ‘new’ ideas about career make many of those past approaches less useful
• rethinking trades-related occupations in the new context in ways that allow gender to be less of a constraint on young people’s decision making.
  

We recognise that we have seen a great deal of progress in recent years towards equal employment opportunity. However, many areas have seen little change. The traditional trades (plumbing, carpentry, motor mechanics, and the electrical trades) continue to be male-dominated (90+ percent male),^[34] and, since women currently represent under 10 percent of industry trainees and Modern Apprentices in these areas,^[35] this pattern does not look as if it will be changing in the near future. Gender segregation patterns in the traditional trades remain essentially unchanged, despite many and varied attempts to intervene.

Currently there are two main strategies which attempt to disrupt the gender imbalance in the trades and trades-related occupations. The first one has involved improving the distribution, access, quality, and accuracy of information about the trades by marketing them to nontraditional audiences (females in particular). Course planning material, posters and brochures, and television advertisements aim to engage female audiences and convince them that entering a trade is appropriate for them. This strategy attempts to ‘push the buttons’ that drive young people’s (especially girls’) decision making, suggesting that the line of work would be, for example, fun, challenging, financially rewarding, and enabling of ongoing career/self-development.

This approach is underpinned by two conflicting ideas. Firstly, young people today are seen as being responsible for their own decision making and for building their own individualised pathway from school to work.^[36] The second idea is that young people have been socialised in ways that need to be counteracted by better/more information. This idea is informed by the radical feminist thinking of the 1980s: that is, if gender roles and identities are formed by early socialisation, then they can also be ‘undone’ by other later forms of socialisation (such as the media). It has resulted in strategies as apparently different as the Women Can Do Anything posters of the 1980s and the 2008 digitally animated Lara Croft/Tomb Raider army television advertisement. It fits with a recent recommendation from the Industry Training Federation to promote Industry Training and Modern Apprenticeships using images of women in nontraditional roles and industries (Curson, Green, & Hall, 2004).
 

The second strategy led to the creation of female-centred environments and approaches to (early) trades training. From the early women-only trades classes of the 1980s to Northland Polytechnic’s recent Women’s Trades Academy developments, these initiatives are based on the assumption that women have different ways of knowing, being, and doing things; that these don’t necessarily fit well with the way the traditional trades are organised; and that if women are to be encouraged into the trades, there needs to be some form of ‘transition zone’. They assume that women will flourish in women-only spaces that are tailored to women’s specific interests and needs, and that acknowledge, cater for, and celebrate women’s ways of ‘being’. This idea draws from radical feminist thought, in particular, the idea that women are essentially different from men, and this difference should be fostered.

There are some shortcomings with each of these two strategies.^[37] For example, a problem with the first strategy is that it does not take into account the multifaceted, complex factors that affect young people’s career decision making (including the structural and discursive ‘barriers’ that constrain and enable individual choices). Similarly, it does not take account of the ongoing – and constantly changing – ‘meaning making’ that young people need to do as they integrate the ‘new information’ into their current schemas (Hipkins et al., 2006; Vaughan et al., 2006). The second strategy doesn’t take account of the reality that women will eventually have to enter male-dominated trades employment at some stage. Both strategies assume that women are a relatively homogeneous group that are ‘essentially’ different from men; that gender differences can be predicted, targeted, and catered for; and that gender and/or career identities are stable across time. Neither strategy aims to directly alter current trades culture: the idea is that trades culture will become more inviting to women simply because there are more women present. But this theory of relative numbers – which underpins many diversity policies – fails to take historically-specific cultural and social processes (and productions of gender) into account (Kezar, Glenn, Lester, & Nakamoto, 2008; Laxton & Knight, 1992; Mastekaasa & Smeby, 2008).

However, there have also been some successes – and we are not suggesting that we should ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’. The approaches will undoubtedly make a difference for some women in some situations. The proportion of women in the trades may continue to creep up (possibly over the next few decades) as some women are positively influenced by these interventions and not put off when they encounter the realities of trades-based employment. Initiatives could be added in to help rectify some of the problems we have identified. For example, more attention could be given to supporting young people to understand and interpret marketing material (such as through sessions aimed at parents to help them help their children decide what suits them^[38] or through better training for careers advisers). Female-oriented initiatives could continue to support women through the first few years of their working life, or they could provide women’s networks and peer mentoring for individual women dispersed around different male-dominated businesses.^[39]

While we see that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs could support re-energising these approaches, rectifying their past shortcomings, we suggest that this would be to look backwards, to ‘clean up’ the past, rather than developing approaches focused on crafting the future.

One of the major issues with a pathways framework and its invocation of ‘choice for all’ is that policies and strategies that are designed to tackle the structural obstacles to those choices (e.g., workplace sexism, careers advice in the form of information, without meaning-making assistance) may be seen as interfering with choice. We therefore think the Ministry of Women’s Affairs needs to take account of a broader picture as well and consider ways to work with emerging trends in society and economy, including changing priorities in the organisation of work and careers. In the next section we set out some ideas that, we think, need to be taken into account in developing this future-oriented approach.
 

In order to go beyond earlier approaches to the question of gender segregation in trades-related occupations, we need to recognise that our (Western) early 21^st century society is very different from 20^th century society, and, therefore, that the very concepts of gender segregation and trades-related occupations are changing. We need to understand how the ‘big picture’ shifts taking place – from industrial society to a knowledge society – are likely to impact upon young people’s career decision-making processes. These big picture trends affect, not just how young people make decisions, but also what they think their decisions are about. They are also affecting the development of trades-related occupations.

Knowledge society

In using the term ‘knowledge society’, we acknowledge that there are other names for this, which differently emphasise particular aspects of it: network society (Castells, 2000); post-industrialism, post-Fordism, or post-capitalism (Drucker, 1993); post-modernity and/or late capitalism (Bauman, 1992; Jameson, 1991); and ‘fast’ capitalism (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996). Some authors have taken up specific aspects of the societal and economic paradigm shift occurring: for example, the implications of ‘accelerated flows’ of people, ideas, and money between nations supported by a technological revolution (Appadurai, 1996); the fragmentation of structures and institutions such as the family, leadership, and church, and a heightened awareness and calculation of life risks (Beck, 1999); identities based in patterns of consumption rather than in social class (Kenway & Bullen, 2001); and the rise of a new ‘creative class’ of knowledge workers (Florida, 2002).

All of these authors and others explore aspects of the shift we are talking about. However, it is Gilbert’s (2005) account of the knowledge society that is particularly pertinent in the present context, because it focuses on changes in what knowledge is and what it does, and on what people need to learn in school in order to participate in the ‘new work order’ in New Zealand. Gilbert describes the transition from the late 20^th century Industrial Age, where economic wealth was generated by exploiting natural resources to produce commodities through mass production, to a 21^st century Knowledge Age, where the creation of ideas, new market demands, and niche markets (personalising of existing products and services) is emphasised. So as the limits of mass production, natural resources, product-specific machines, and semi-skilled workers producing standardised goods were reached, niche markets emerged and the nature of work changed, forcing workplaces to adopt different ways of operating, including changing the roles of workers, owners, and managers (Piore & Sabel, 1984).

The new work order

As Gilbert (2005) explains, 20^th century workers were educated to perform repetitive tasks, to respect authority, and to follow rules for a system they did not necessarily understand. However, as businesses begin to adapt to market demands and track their potential clients’ everchanging preferences, workplaces are increasingly required to operate more as networks than hierarchies, and to demand different skill sets and attitudes from those coming through school. It no longer makes sense for change directives to be communicated down from ‘people at the top’ who are disassociated from both the ‘producers’ and the ‘consumers’.

Everybody in the system needs to take responsibility for innovation and communication. The following table provides an example of the sorts of skill changes occurring. Although Reich’s 1991 work pertained to the financial sector, the principles could apply equally to other sectors, including the trades (Bertrand, 1998).
 

Table 4: Changes in the skills required of financial workers

Table reproduced from Reich (1991) in Bertrand (1998, p. 166).

The world of ‘employment’ is therefore becoming much more complex and uncertain, and the ‘old’ categories of skills and occupations are transforming into something more fluid. Furthermore, rapid change facilitated by information and communication technologies means it is no longer possible to accurately predict the jobs that will be available in the future. So it is now expected that everyone, if they are to be economically active, needs the capacity to adapt, change, and innovate: they need the ability to think ‘between the tasks’, rather than the ability to follow set protocols.

A culture of innovation

The current emphasis on innovation and fostering a culture of innovation, first launched in New Zealand through the Growth Innovation Framework (GIF), is part of this shift to develop a more highly skilled population. It mandates increasing the investment in education, especially Modern Apprenticeships, and in improving the pathways between school, work, and further study/ training (The Office of the Prime Minister, 2002). The GIF was one of the first official acknowledgements that workplace and employment relations practices were a positive contributor to economic development, rather than a constraint on the ability of firms to grow; it underpins a focus on developing ‘high-performance workplace’ models where employees (including tradespeople) work in autonomous or semiautonomous teams, use communication ‘soft skills’, have a voice in the organisation through official mechanisms, and as management practices are improved employees not only have the skills to perform but are motivated to do so (Ryan, 2002).

In other words, people and the way they think about work are now central to economic development. Hence when the OECD reports on the strengths and conditions of New Zealand’s innovation ‘system’, it focuses on the skills, capacities, and dispositions of population in relation to physical resources (e.g., having a resourceful entrepreneurial population; a unique physical environment; an open society engendering trust; pro-competitive markets; a predictable political environment; and pockets of excellence in new industries like software, creative industries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007). Similarly the New Zealand Treasury identifies the development of higher skills, opportunities to re-skill, and ‘soft skills’ as critical to productivity: ‘attitudes and values matter as much as knowledge and technical skill’ (2008, p. 2).

From jobs to career development

So what do these shifts signal in terms of gender, careers, and trades-related occupations? Firstly they signal that forging a career is a fundamentally trickier proposition than it used to be because women and men must now take account of movement and shift throughout their careers and lives, whereas career used to define lives in a more reliable and fixed sort of way, including one where balancing work and other aspects of life was not the issue it is today (Vaughan, in press). As New Zealand’s Career Services estimates: ‘every year 200,000 new jobs are created and 150,000 disappear or are transformed’ and stresses therefore that ‘a reliable and enjoyable career cannot be left to chance’, especially given the ‘maze’ of future career possibilities (Career Services, n.d.).

Secondly, they signal that we are dealing with something more than simple participation (counting numbers) in work and in tertiary study and training (which has increased dramatically over the past 20 years at secondary and tertiary levels). Instead we are dealing with employability and workforce development issues. This study – along with other New Zealand research used to underpin several key careers and youth transition policies and initiatives – has shown that young people no longer have an immediate or fixed ‘destination’ from school. Many do not see a career-for-life, and motivations and identities mean that a pathway from school cannot be taken as a reliable proxy for what it means to the person or what role it has in their lives. Job security and/or pathways exploration are experienced differentially by young people (Vaughan et al., 2006). Other research shows that young people are on the edge of new understandings about the workplace: they see the new context of ‘careers’ in which having a job is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having a career, and they identify strongly with work/life balance or ‘work in life’ ideas. However, they are uncertain about other emergent career development ideas which address future uncertainty at the level of the individual (e.g. career portfolio construction and adaptability); the workplace (e.g., outsourcing and global competition, new skill demands); and society and economy (e.g., technology-driven changes, demands for constant innovation, and equity considerations) (Vaughan, in press). One reason for this may be that there is still a great deal of inconsistency across careers advisory systems in secondary schools, and provision of information is still privileged at the expense of the development of self-management and career management skills. Thus school leavers are often not equipped with the skills they need beyond entry to a course of study or the labour market (Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007).

However, an emergent emphasis on career development signals an end to the kind of vocationally-oriented forms of career planning and guidance that careers practitioners advising people, particularly in schools, have favoured. Career development is now designed to address people of any age and throughout life, as they make education, training, and occupational choices and manage their careers (International Symposium on Career Development and Public Policy, 2006, emphasis added). This is focused around shifts from lifelong (fixed and hierarchical) career to lifelong learning, from career as elitist (only some people have careers; others have jobs) to career for all (Watts, 2004). So careers guidance in schools is no longer just about providing information about options and encouraging young women and men to participate in tertiary learning or the workforce; it is about fostering individual progression and development (Watts, 2001) and, crucially, encouraging participation as learner-workers and engaging young people with the ‘production’ and management of their careers (Vaughan & Roberts, 2007). Within the context of a knowledge society, the ‘new’ forms of career development provide a way to blend social and economic goals – this was a key theme at the 4^th IS2007 (International Symposium on Career Development and Public Policy, 2007).

The following table (Table 5) shows some of the key features of careers development in the 21^st century, contrasted against common models from the 20^th century.
 

Table 5: Old and new orders of career development

Table adapted from Vaughan et al. (2006, p. 94)

What does all this tell us about the problem of gender segregation in trades-related occupations – and what to do about it? The next – and final – section of this report offers some suggestions.

This section outlines some suggestions for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs which arise out of the above discussion of the focus, in the knowledge society/new work order, on constant innovation, and the ‘new’ career development’s focus on lifelong career choices and management. We have been emphasising changes in:

• the conditions of work for women and men (the knowledge society)
• the nature of work (and the nature of ‘the trades’) undertaken by women and men (the new work order)
• the role of work – or how women and men think about work in their lives (career not job, lifelong learning, multiple qualifications, upskilling, career development)
• the differential individual and collective experiences of gender segregation, occupational participation, and economic development by women and men (the implications of the knowledge society, new work order, and career development paradigms, taken together).
  

We make the following suggestions in the light of these changes:
 

Suggestion 1

Work with changes to skill sets needed in – and definitions of – ‘trades’

Rather than setting up programmes that have a ‘tight’ focus on developing the skill sets and dispositions that are needed now (which are basically the skills and dispositions of the past), we think the emphasis should be on programmes designed to develop the skills of the future. This ‘big picture’ approach will, we think, eventually produce changes in the culture of the trades, and that these changes, because they will widen the skill sets required for work in these trades, will make work in the trades more attractive to young women. This work could build on and strengthen policy work and other interventions currently being developed or reworked, as well as acting as a ‘bridge’ between past-oriented and future-oriented approaches.

For example, UNESCO suggests that TVET (technical and vocational education and training) should provide generic technical principles and practical skills for application in a variety of occupations, rather than highly specialised training for a single trade. It argues that:

the ability to learn independently together with the non occupation-specific training received in the vocational stream will ensure that the individual has the flexibility to respond to the demands of the workplace by acquiring new trade skills as older trades become obsolete. (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 2005, p. 15)

Our earlier efforts to encourage more young women into traditionally high-status areas, like medicine and law, have borne fruit just as knowledge society developments have reconstituted these professions as the providers of (specialised) services.^[40] We think we could be heading in the same direction with current work designed to solve the problem of the gender-segregated trades.

We also think it is possible to argue that the development of strategies designed simply to get more women into the trades could be misplaced. Building on the discussion earlier in this section, it could be argued that the traditional trades are an outdated mode of work (at least in their current form), and that the current apparent connection between traditional trades work and ongoing financial security may not continue (calling into question the assumed connection between less gender segregation in trades-related work and women’s greater capacity for economic independence).

One way forward could be to shift the focus away from ‘trades’ to ‘apprenticeships’ and ‘industry training’. Modern Apprenticeships cover a range of jobs across a range of industries, only some of which would traditionally be considered trades. And industry training (skill development and workplace learning) covers both the traditional trades, but also many new areas, in the services, primary industries, manufacturing, retail, and government/community services sectors. Throughout the 20^th century, trades apprenticeships have gradually moved away from being conducted solely through a master-learner relationship to taking place through an employer-employee relationship and also involving formal classroom learning (trades school, polytechnic study). Moreover, some entire trades have become obsolete through technological changes.

While traditional trade-related knowledge and skills will continue to be important (and people will still need to know and be able to do these things), this knowledge and skills will not, on its own, be sufficient for a successful career in the future. There are some obvious examples in the case of plumbers, electricians, and builders who will need business skills – including financial, IT, customer service, people, and relationship skills. It will not be enough for them to know how things have always been done: they will need problem-solving and innovation skills, and the ability to adapt and ‘personalise’ their services for new (and everchanging) ‘niche’ customers and markets. They will need creativity, design, and project management skills, and the ability to adapt to constant (and significant) change in methods, markets, and the overall operating environment. These skills will not be ‘add-ons’ to the core skills of, say, plumbing; they will be integral to a successful career.

It is interesting that this is what young people in our feedback workshops said about their vision of trades and trades-related occupations in the future. They expected to see a greater emphasis on brand loyalty coming to define occupations and a related emphasis on installation of systems and replacing parts in systems rather than repairing systems. They saw increasing computerisation of tasks and the possible splitting of occupations into very high-skill, ‘thinking’ work and very low-skill, repetitive work. They expected a greater need for communication, relationship, and business management skills in the future. Overall, their view was that there would be more:

• inter-relationships between trades occupations where people would combine different skill sets from across different trades to form hybrid occupations servicing niche markets. This fits well with the ‘Confident Explorers’ cluster in the Pathways and Prospects research, a group of individuals who had a strong sense of purpose about work in their lives, but who had not attached that purpose or their identities to specific vocations; instead they were willing to explore widely and expected to be creatively linking opportunities and managing themselves as a portfolio throughout their lives (Vaughan et al., 2006).
  

• intra-relationships within trades occupations where people develop particular specialisations. This meshes with the ‘Passion Honers’ in Pathways and Prospects – a group who were looking to build careers from longstanding interests in industry areas and to grow an everdeepening expertise and a strong vocational or industry identity based on the specialisation itself (Vaughan et al., 2006).
  

At first glance, this approach might seem at odds with current worldwide skills shortages in many trades areas. New Zealand’s Department of Labour has repeatedly identified serious shortages in the trades through its Job Vacancy Monitor (JVM) and Survey of Employers who have Recently Advertised (SERA) reports over the past few years. There is also increasing recognition among careers practitioners around the (Western) world of a lack of information and encouragement of young people into trades and trades-related occupations, usually as a result of the lower status these occupations have in societies. It might seem as if we are suggesting something that is a bit ahead of where things are at. We are not suggesting that skill shortages in trades occupations are not real. We are, however, suggesting that the shape of those occupations may change, and that the way women and men think about those occupations will also change. This means the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in its policy work would need to maintain a tricky balance between understanding what is currently happening, what is starting to happen, and what has already happened in some specific areas. It will need to be able to sponsor or develop programmes that can meet current and future needs and provide bridges between the two.
 

Suggestion 2

Support initiatives across and within other agencies that assist young women and men in career decision making and meaning making

Another way forward is to work across a number of different government ministries and support initiatives which are currently being developed specifically to take account of knowledge society and career development trends, issues, and priorities: in particular, those that are related to youth transition and pathways from school to work and further education. This could be a way to maximise the Ministry of Women’s Affairs resources and thinking by not having to start or run entire initiatives from within its own agency. Recent careers and youth transition initiatives are designed to work across agencies and to eliminate the common problems of agencies repeating existing work (‘reinventing the wheel’) and/or missing vital information or expertise (‘falling through the cracks’).

The Secondary–Tertiary Alignment Resource (STAR) and Gateway scheme provide tertiary-level and workplace learning opportunities and experiences for students that are useful in allowing students to explore, (re)adjust, or ‘kick start’ future plans. They have specific goals around facilitating the transition from school to further education and work and retaining young people in school. These initiatives will now be part of the recently launched Schools Plus scheme, which has its goal to ensure that ‘all young people are in education, skills, or structured learning relevant to their abilities and needs, until the age of 18’ (Ministry of Education, 2008, p.2). This scheme has a particular focus on early school leavers with low or no qualifications and ‘inactive’ NEET young people (‘not in education, employment, or training’), and building coherence and co-ordination of programmes in different sectors (Ministry of Education, 2008).^[41]

The joint Ministry of Education–Career Services-Schools Support Services’ Creating Pathways and Building Lives (CPaBL) project and Career Services’ Better Tertiary and Trade Training Decision Making (BTTTDM) initiative recognise the growing complexity involved in young people’s post-school decision making and their support and guidance requirements.^[42] The CPaBL programme addresses this by focusing on the structure of careers education in the school. It fosters school-wide approaches that explicitly link the careers advisory team with school management so that information and guidance is better co-ordinated. BTTTDM addresses the information and guidance issue by creating a ‘one-stop-shop’ service for young people, parents, and other influencers, providing information and support for tertiary education and career pathway decisions.

These initiatives take different approaches, but they share some common themes. They attempt to provide more information, better quality information, and better access to it. They aim to co-ordinate information and guidance within and between institutions, and to provide guidance for students in understanding the information. They draw on research that shows an over-reliance on information distribution at the expense of assistance with students’ meaning making in school-based careers advice (Grubb, 2002; Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007); the preference of students for personal contact with careers advisers (Walker, Alloway, Dalley-Trim, & Patterson, 2006); and the importance of structured school management support of careers and transition function (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2004; Vaughan and Kenneally, 2003; Wilson & Young, 1998).

Arguably the most significant feature of these initiatives, in terms of the ‘pathways framework’ or broader landscape of the transition from school, is that they continue to position students and young people as the key decision makers. Even where Schools Plus is looking to place obligations and conditions on young people, there is an emphasis on having a range of options from which young people can choose. This follows the invocation of choice, in the wider context of a (Western) society saturated with (consumer) choice and usually expressed in individualistic terms. It says to young people that no matter what your background or rate of school success, there is a pathway to a good future for you (Vaughan, 2005).

Building on – and adding to – initiatives like this, while apparently focusing on the education sector, actually involves work that makes connections between a wide range of different areas (including schools, community agencies, training providers, businesses, and so on). We think that approaches based on connecting thinking – and practices – in these areas will contribute to change in all three areas that have been the focus of this research (society, schools, and the trades). However, we also think schools are an obvious and important site for intervention.

GO TO: TOC / Previous / Next - References