Patriarchy and Professions: The Gendered Politics of Occupational Closure

Abstract

The relationship between gender and professionalisation is a neglected one, and female professional projects have been overlooked in the sociology of professions. The generic notion of profession is also a gendered notion as it takes what are in fact the successful professional projects of class-privileged male actors at a particular point in history and in particular societies to be the paradigmatic case of profession. Instead, it is necessary to speak of `professional projects', to gender the agents of these projects, and to locate these within the structural and historical parameters of patriarchal-capitalism. Professional projects are projects of occupational closure, and a model of occupational closure strategies is needed which captures both the variety of strategies that characterise these projects and the gendered dimensions of these strategies. Such a model is set out and distinguishes between exclusionary, demarcationary, inclusionary and dual strategies of closure. This model is substantiated with material drawn from the emerging medical division of labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Finding a ‘Normal’ Woman: Selection Processes for Board Membership

“…Strategies of the dominant group Witz (1990Witz ( , 1992 argued that a dominant group, in this case male board members, tends to use various strategies to ensure social homogeneity in a position or occupation. The incumbent board members in the current study tended to police the boundaries of entry with the use of two strategies.…”

“…Negotiating gender and fit Witz (1990Witz ( , 1992 argued that inclusion (fit) and exclusion (lack of fit) are the result of processes of negotiation between dominant and subordinate groups. She linked fit/ lack-of-fit to material and ideological privileges that accrue to individuals based on intersections of social relations such as gender, ethnicity, and/or sexual preference.…”

“…Such perceptions of lack of fit, therefore, sustain a gendered structure of the labor market and domestic life in both management and governance. Witz (1990) showed how gender, fit (position), and dominance are inextricably bound up with each other and are constantly negotiated by the dominant and subordinate groups.…”

“…Women's use of behaviors commonly associated with either gender may, therefore, be situation-specific as they negotiate gender to show that they "fit" certain positions of leadership. Thus, they negotiate inclusion for a position from which they were originally excluded (Witz, 1990(Witz, , 1992. The use of Witz's theory may, therefore, provide insight into the gendered processes of negotiating fit and marginalization.…”

Exercising soft closure on lay health knowledge? Harnessing the declining power of the medical profession to improve online health information

“…In explaining his concept of Dual closure, Parkin (1979) provides the example of the teacher who relies primarily on credentialist exclusion devices in an attempt to attain professional status, but in addition employs the usurpation strategies of organised labour (Murphy, 1986). Usurpationary closure can signify the evolution of the status of allied health professionals and 'para-professionals' in relation to the medical profession (Larkin, 1983;Holloway et al, 1986;Witz, 1990;Nancarrow and Borthwick, 2005;Hollenberg, 2006;Traynor et al, 2015).…”