Making the Shift from Pink Collars to Blue Ones: Women's Non-Traditional Occupations (Research NOTES / NOTES DE RECHERCHE‪)‬

As GOVERNMENT STATISTICS INDICATE, men are disproportionately represented in the trades and industrial occupations. Women are quite simply so few in number as to be non-existent or invisible; hence, for women such employment is often referred to as non-traditional. Maria Charles and David Grusky ponder whether this gender imbalance "is best regarded as an organic feature of modern economics." (1) Gillian Creese characterizes it as "an important feature of contemporary labour markets." (2) Two factors help explain the persistent absence of women from the trades and industrial occupations. The first is that the work itself is gendered (3) or sex-typed. (4) It is viewed by most people, almost without second thought, as men's work. The trades and industrial occupations are, by their very nature, understood to be masculine because those who fill them "have a gender and their gender rubs off on the jobs they mainly do." (5) As Cynthia Cockburn observes, work is designated male or female by "ascribing a series of polarized characteristics, complementary paired values, to the 'masculine' and the' feminine'. Normally men and women, things and jobs, comfortably reflect these complementary values." (6) The accumulation of experiences of working women demonstrates that the sex-typing of the trades and industrial occupations is deeply entrenched and highly resistant to challenge and change.