Trading Choices - Introduction

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Sex, gender, socialisation, and equity: the wider social context
Schools, ‘transition’, choices, and career pathways
The trades, trade training, and gender: is there a problem?
It’s all about choice – but is it?
 

Introduction

As part of its plan to improve the economic independence of New Zealand women,^[1] the Ministry of Women’s Affairs is undertaking work on gender segregation in employment, with a particular focus on women’s representation in trade-related occupations. NZCER was commissioned by the Ministry to undertake research designed to look at the interconnections between gender and gendered ideas and young people’s career decisions. This report describes the main findings of this research. Its purpose is to inform the Ministry of Women’s Affairs’ policy work in this area.

Existing research shows clearly that women are under-represented in trades-related occupations, and in particular, that they are under-represented in trades with high wage-earning opportunities. Why are women under-represented in these areas? Are the male-dominated occupations unsuitable for women, or do people in general just think they are? Are women actively prevented from entering them, or do they choose not to enter them? If they choose not to enter them, what are their reasons? Are they not interested? Do they not have the entry qualifications?

Because women’s under-representation in these areas reduces the earning capacity and the opportunities for greater economic independence of women as a group, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs is interested in investigating the influences on young people’s career decision making, and to use this information to develop policies designed to address this imbalance. Past interventions – including advertising campaigns designed to address entrenched occupational stereotypes and provide alternative visions and female role models in traditionally male areas – have been only partially successful. Information provision on its own is, it seems, not enough. Policy initiatives designed to enable women to consider a wide range of options in their career decision making need to be framed by a deep understanding of the context(s) in which information is interpreted and used.

It is for this reason that the research described in this report was designed to investigate the ‘how’ and ‘why’ (not the ‘what’) of young people’s decision making in and around gender-segregated occupations. It looks at how ideas circulating in three contexts – family, friends, and society; schooling; and the trades and trade training process – have influenced the career decisions of a sample of young people, and the ‘sense’ these young people have made of these decisions. However, before looking at what the young people said, we provide a brief outline of – and give some background to – the gender ‘problem’ as it plays out in each of these three contexts.

Sex, gender, socialisation, and equity: the wider social context

This section outlines how gender – and gender inequity – came to be seen as problematic. The gender ‘problem’, while now widely acknowledged and discussed, arose, relatively recently, in mid-late 20^th century feminist thought. There are, however, many different ‘schools’ of feminist thought, each of which draws on different ideas and assumptions, and has different goals.

Liberal feminists, for example, seek women’s equality with men. They seek an end to sex-based discrimination, sexist practices, and other barriers to women’s participation in all aspects of public life. They work to develop existing social and political institutions in ways that can better include women, not to transform or obliterate them. Radical feminism arose out of disillusionment with this approach. Radical feminists focus on describing, explaining, and undermining the way patriarchal thought oppresses women, mainly by socialising them to accept this oppression.

The distinction between sex – as a fixed biological category, and gender – as the socially constructed set of features ‘added onto’ each sex via socialisation, is an important feature of radical feminist thought. Gender, because of its apparent amenability to change, is seen as the more interesting – and productive – category. Radical feminists do not seek equality or sameness with men: rather they focus on women’s difference from men, on women’s particular ways of knowing, being, or doing things. The notions of feminist research methodology and/or feminist pedagogy arise in this body of work.

Most interventions designed to redress inequities or imbalances between men and women are informed by a mixture of ideas from these two schools of thought: that is, it is common to see the liberal concepts of ‘equality’, ‘sexism’ and/or ‘removing barriers’ being used alongside the radical feminist concepts of ‘socialisation’ and/or the sex/gender distinction. This mixing of concepts is also common in popular thought and discussion of these issues.

More recently, feminist thought (in academic contexts) has been influenced by post-structuralist theory: in particular, the aspects of this work that challenge some of Western thought’s most deeply held assumptions. Very briefly, this has resulted in an emphasis on ‘perspectival’ or ‘situated’ forms of knowledge, and the idea of identity as something that is ‘constructed’ in discourses.

Because we all function in many different discourses, and are constructed differently in each of these, we have a multiplicity of – shifting – identities, or ‘subjectivities’, as they are called in this work. Subjectivity is thus a plurality. It is also a process of ‘becoming’, rather than an endpoint. The idea that we can be one permanent core ‘self’ is seen as an illusion, an illusion created by splitting off the parts that don’t fit with this core identity (the male parts, the white parts, the queer parts, and so on).^[2]

Thus the gender ‘problem’ looks very different in 21^st century thought. For post-modern feminist thinkers, this problem will not be solved by focusing on surface-level ‘indicators’ (removing barriers, ending sexism, discouraging stereotypes, and so on). It can only be solved via approaches designed to intervene at a much deeper level of our collective meaning system.

What do these lenses mean for how we understand today’s young people as they think about leaving school, getting a job, or embarking on job training? Young people are part of the post-modern world of multiple, shifting identities the theorists attempt to describe. They are immersed in it, they function in it, they produce it, and at some level they understand it.

At the same time, however, through family, friends, teachers (and other advisers), and the media, they are exposed to ideas from a different era. The ‘sense’ they make of these ideas will be influenced by the context, and by the kind of scaffolding they are given. This is one of the roles of schools.

The next section looks at how the career decision-making process is framed in today’s schools, and at the extent to which this is gendered.
 

Schools, ‘transition’, choices, and career pathways

The careers decision-making context in New Zealand, like many other countries, has been marked by significant and interconnected shifts in recent years. The key shift is away from traditional ‘age and stage’ models of adulthood and ‘transition’ to what Vaughan (2004a) calls a ‘pathways framework’. In ‘age and stage’ models, the transition from school is fairly linear (e.g., school, then study or training, then employment) and the milestones of adulthood are also linear and reached around similar and specifiable ages (e.g., school until 17 years, study/training until 20 years, then employment from 20 to 65 years, with marriage and then parenting beginning between 20 and 35 years).

However, these models no longer hold for increasing numbers of people, as the transition from school lengthens in time-span, and as different forms of, and milestones for, adulthood become more popular (e.g., delaying commitment to marriage and parenting later in life or not doing it at all).

In educational terms, three system-wide shifts in New Zealand underpin the pathways framework in order to both make possible, and deal with, increasingly nonlinear forms of transition from school, including periods of combined employment and study throughout life:

• a partially deregulated tertiary system (though some regulation is being reintroduced via new funding mechanisms)
• the development of a National Qualifications Framework, designed to be flexible, credible to employers, schools, and tertiary institutions, and use criterion or standards-based assessment
• an increase in career development support for a wider range of post-school careers, especially vocational ones, together with an increase in the status of vocational careers, in order to improve labour supply, alleviate skill shortages, and provide meaningful work opportunities for all (Vaughan, 2004a).

The pathways framework means ‘transition’ is no longer a school subject for ‘at-risk’ young people or early school leavers. Instead, the transition from school is something that concerns all young people regardless of school achievement, presenting educators and most young people with a wide range of possibilities for school subjects, qualifications, secondary–tertiary course alignment, and post-school study and career options. While this presents a wider range of options for young people – a ‘maze’ of future career possibilities (Career Services, n.d.) – there is an increasing risk that young people will get ‘lost’ along the way and therefore an increasing need to support young people to make informed career and work decisions (Vaughan, 2004a).

A number of specific initiatives have emerged to try and assist with students’ transition from school. 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.

The Creating Pathways and Building Lives (CPaBL) and Better Tertiary and Trade Training Decision Making (BTTTDM) initiatives both recognise the growing complexity involved in young people’s post-school decision making and their support and guidance requirements. CPaBL addresses this by focusing on the structure of the careers education in the school. It fosters a school-wide approach that explicitly links the careers advisory team with school management so that information and guidance are 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.

The Schools Plus scheme currently in development has the goal that ‘all young people are in education, skills, or structured learning relevant to their abilities and needs, until the age of 18’ and particularly addresses itself to early school leavers with low or no qualifications and ‘inactive’ young people not engaged in work, training, or education after leaving school.^[3]

While these initiatives are designed to support young people’s career decision making, and enable seamless and multiple connections between different possibilities, young people are effectively ‘responsibilised’ with expanded school subject choice and more pathway decisions (Vaughan, 2005). The pathways framework presents (career and life) opportunities to young people in terms of individual choice (no matter what, there is an individual pathway appropriate for each young person’s unique interests).

The assumption is that success is within reach of everybody, so long as the young person is able to identify and articulate their needs and desires, get the information about how to maximise their choices and which option(s) to take, and then do it. The sub-text is that young people, regardless of gender, are free to select and enter any trades-related pathway that might interest them assuming that they have received the right prerequisites, information, and support to locate and line up the appropriate pathway linkages. Specifically, young people need to ‘navigate’ some of the trades-related training possibilities presented in the table below.
 

Table 1: Initiatives and organisations relevant to trades training and work transition

Note: Descriptors were developed on the basis of relevant websites. This is not an exhaustive list by any means. For example, we could also include CATE,^[4] CPANZ,^[5] BTTTDM, CPaBL, etc.

Interacting with the dominant individual choice (and responsibility) discourse, however, are other discourses: in particular, ideas about what kinds of jobs are appropriate for young people with different academic abilities, and what kinds are appropriate for different genders. As Fuller, Beck, and Unwin (2005) put it:

The perception that young people could make nontraditional choices if they wanted to, tends to mask the reality of the obstacles (e.g teasing, feeling isolated and workplace conditions) to making such choices, and is likely to affect individuals’ response to policies designed to dismantle them.

Their work suggests that part of the problem with gender segregation in the trades is that it is not actually recognised as a problem by many of the young people involved. Girls tend to stress that, while they can enter any job, they personally do not wish to enter male-dominated jobs (Fuller et al., 2005, emphasis added).

Thus the emphasis on pathways and choices obscures the fact that differential access to resources[6] and structural barriers constrain individuals from ‘choosing’ particular pathways. As a recent Equal Employment Opportunities Discussion Paper for the Human Rights Commission on the Modern Apprenticeships (McGregor & Gray, 2003, p.2) puts it, a number of ‘historical issues’ have led to low participation rates by young women in Modern Apprenticeships:

• Participating industries have strongly entrenched gender barriers which make them particularly unattractive to young women.
• The parents of secondary school children have traditionally seen apprenticeships as a pathway for nonacademic young men.
• Secondary schools have promoted tertiary study in the form of university or polytechnic as their priority and young women, in particular, have chosen educational pathways.

 
The Human Rights Commission report concluded that it is a current policy challenge to combat ‘discriminatory attitudes and practices’, and provided 12 specific recommendations designed to address these (see Appendix A). Similarly, a report that provided the backdrop to Northland Polytechnic’s recent proposal for a women-only trades training academy summarises:

Responsibility for the lack of female participation in vocation trades lies in several hands: those of the employers via the robust application of anti-discriminatory practices; those of parents via their support for vocational trades as a career option and, in our general societal culture which reflects the status quo.

Broad societal changes in gender desegregation in New Zealand have barely impacted on the vocational trades sector. This will continue until an effective and efficient approach is adopted at both regional and national levels. Previous attempts to reduce this gender imbalance have failed to adequately resolve the multi-faceted challenges. An integrated change programme across government agencies, parents, schools, tertiary educators and employers is needed to support women entering and building successful careers in vocational trades. (Scripps, 2006, p. 9)

Thus a great deal of work is currently going on in schools to assist students to make ‘good’ transitions from school to further education and training. Recently, there has been a greater focus on providing better information and support to students – particularly girls – who are considering trades-related training opportunities. Why is this? What problem is this designed to solve? Is it working?

The trades, trade training, and gender: is there a problem?

New Zealand has high levels of gender segregation in employment, with women concentrated in a small number of occupations and both women and men working in occupations dominated by their gender. The 2006 Census showed that close to half of all New Zealanders work in occupations in which 70 percent or more of the workers are the same sex as them^[7] and 33 percent of the female workforce was employed in only ten occupations (out of a total of over 550 occupations). Seven of the ten occupations employing the most women (including nurses, caregivers, primary school teachers, and secretaries) were more than 80 percent female. There are similar patterns in the male workforce. In 2006, 24 percent of males were employed in only ten occupations. Occupations that were more than 90 percent male-dominated include trades such as builder, plumber, and motor mechanic.^[8] Dixon’s (2000) analysis shows that gender differences in occupations could account for around 20-40 percent of New Zealand’s gender pay gap. In 2007, the median hourly earnings of women were 12.1 percent less than those of men, and overall the average weekly income of women was 38.7 percent less than that of men.

In 2005, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs commissioned research into wages and costs of education and training in male- and female-dominated trade-related occupations. This research indicated that although many of these occupations have similar entry-level wage rates, wages increase more rapidly in the male-dominated occupations. The male-dominated occupations also tend to have more formal training, which is often paid for by the employer (Moyle & Hendry, 2006).

Recent and pervasive skills shortages in traditionally male industry areas have produced a renewed urgency about attracting skilled workers and have possibly made employers more open to female workers in these areas. Some attempts to attract workers are nongender-specific but include women, such as the dairy industry’s recent Go Dairy campaign. Others have targeted women directly as part of an attempt to change the culture of their organisation, such as the New Zealand Army’s use of a Lara Croft/Tomb Raider female character as the face of their recruitment campaign over the last few years. However, we are aware that these recent campaigns must contend with a schooling system that still lacks good relationships with Industry Training Organisations and still tends to regard university as the best pathway for high-achieving students.

Thus, despite recent efforts, gendered patterns persist in young people’s participation in trades-related learning in New Zealand. In February 2008, the Minister for Tertiary Education, Pete Hodgson, announced that ‘The Labour-led government has exceeded its target of 14,000 Modern Apprentices by the end of 2008 with more than a year to spare’ (Modern Apprenticeships, 2008). However, women still represent only 29 percent of all industry trainees, with 50,462 participating in 2006 – a one percentage point increase from 2005 (Tertiary Education Commission 2006, 2007).^[9] As at 31 December 2006, women represented only 8.7 percent of 9,466 Modern Apprentices, up from 8.2 percent in 2005 (Tertiary Education Commission 2006, 2007). Thus, this situation is still a major area of concern to the current government.

It’s all about choice – but is it?

This background information points to a highly complex problem. Young people nearing the end of the compulsory years of schooling find themselves in a context in which the variety of different pathways and choices available to them is emphasised. They – and their advisers – are encouraged to frame their career decision-making process as a series of individual choices, which will lead them down particular pathways. Information and advice are available to help them make these choices, some of which is formal, explicit, and structured (e.g., from school careers advisers) and some much less so (e.g., informal comments from teachers, parents, and other adults, and from friends). Because these messages can be very mixed (e.g., the ‘girls can do anything’ message is likely to be mixed up with other, competing ideas about what is appropriate for males and what is appropriate for females), the meaning that is made from them is also likely to be mixed. We think that the choices available to young people are in fact constrained by a raft of factors and processes that are not be necessarily visible to them (or to those advising them).

In the research described in this report, our aim was to investigate how and why young people make the decisions that lead – or do not lead – them down particular career pathways. We have attempted to identify the factors and contexts that, according to the young people we interviewed, enabled or dissuaded them from ‘choosing’ occupations traditionally dominated either by their own gender, or the opposite gender. Our purpose in doing this was to investigate whether or not there are factors (including information about the trades) that can and do influence the extent to which different occupations are perceived as gendered, and whether or not these factors are amenable to change. The ultimate aim is to provide information to inform the development of strategies that could widen the choices available to young people, particularly girls, so that the statistics cited earlier can be improved.

The report is structured as follows. After describing how the research was designed (who was interviewed, what they were asked, and why), we outline the findings in three chapters corresponding to the three contexts outlined in this introduction: family, friends, and society; schooling; and the trades and trade-related training. Our aim was to explore how – if at all – males and females experience the career decision-making process differently. A second aim was to attempt to investigate where the ‘problem’ (if there is one) is located – in the young people, in society, in the education system, or in the trades themselves. The three findings chapters are followed by a discussion of suggestions made by the young people we interviewed for improving the gender balance in the trades. The report concludes with a discussion of the findings and their potential policy implications.

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Footnotes