CHANGING THE DISCOURSE OF WOMEN’S WORK:
CHALLENGES FOR THEORY, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
Professor Wendy Patton
Executive Dean, Faculty of Education
Queensland University of Technology
10 June 2015
Structural labour market disadvantage
• Wage gaps are still evident with women employed in:

lower paid and lower level positions, and

part-time and insecure jobs, with few prospects for
advancement.
• As Blustein (2015 in Bimrose et al) commented, "equal
opportunity is the exception rather than the norm".
The “double-shift”
• The "double shift" - the universal challenge of women's role in
childcare and elder care
• Need for society to value both market work and care work
• Emergent holistic models and approaches are likely to better
accommodate the complexity of women’s career trajectories.
Learning from women’s stories
• The importance of the subjective career – women’s capacity to
manage their complex lives - accommodated both market
work and care work
• Demonstrated a range of career management skills and
personal qualities eg adaptability, responsiveness, resilience
and the ability to prioritise.
Learning from women’s stories
• Develop skills and personal agency - decisions and actions were
predicated on the needs of others and therefore agency was
qualified by their values and cultural traditions.
• Many of the decisions were to the detriment of their own paid
employment or learning but concerned their commitment to
their families.
The systemic nature of labour market
disadvantage and discrimination
• Should career practitioners ‘confine themselves to working
with individual clients or should they work also with the
structures in which clients make and implement their career
decisions’ (Bimrose , 2004, p. 115).
Systemic interventions
• Systemic influences which impact career practice –

Social and political value structures such as cultural values,

the position of work in society,

attitudes towards change and mobility,

the role of family and community,

the hierarchy of occupational status,

the influence of socio-economic status,
Systemic interventions
• reward structures,
• the communication of values and information
• the characteristics of the labour market,
• the sectoral structure,
• the dominance of an informal economic structure,
• demographic factors,
• the impact of globalisation, migration and urbanisation
• the limitations of institutional infrastructure in low and middle
income countries such as inadequate resources and equipment
Futures for career guidance practice
• Challenge to career practitioners and to those who
prepare career practitioners:



to become advocates for social justice and social
change, to challenge the systemic underpinning of
women’s labour market disadvantage.
to focus on the broad layered context in which women
live, and the structural challenges in the world of work
narrative approaches – place value on relationships and
stories rather than scores
Challenges for the future of this field
• to develop new epistemologies to explain theoretical
underpinnings of our field,
• to change our language, and
• to embrace more holistic conceptualisations of women’s
working lives, including a focus on relational and cultural
dimensions.
Theoretical positions
• Patton and McMahon (1999, 2006, 2014) Systems Theory Framework
• Narrative perspectives emerged from a constructivist epistemology -
Richardson and Schaeffer (2013), “narrative theory is foundational to
the counselling for work and relationship perspective because it is
about lives lived in time” (p. 37).
• Four major contexts through which people co-construct their lives:

market work,

unpaid care work,

personal relationships, and

market work relationships.
Theoretical positions
• Schultheiss (2013)- social constructionism - a broadening of the
understanding of contexts presented by Richardson and
Schaeffer (2013), proposing “A relational cultural paradigm ...
that emphasises the cultural shaping of meaning-making
through relationships as central to the understanding of work
in people’s lives” (p. 46).
Language
• “The basic idea is that language, the vocabulary we use and the
grammar in which our words are embedded, determines how
we think and the cognitive schemas in which we process our
experience” (Richardson, 2012b, p. 88).
Relational and cultural diversity
• Richardson (1993) social constructionist work and relationship
perspective.
• Blustein (2001, 2006, 2013a,b) - the psychology of working as
opposed to the psychology of career.
• Richardson (2012a, 2012b, Richardson & Schaeffer ,2013) -
conceptualise the importance of two major contexts of work,
market work and unpaid care work.
Workforce mobility
• Empirical work has tracked the emergence of new spatial
arrangements for households precipitated by work demands or
opportunities.
• Levin (2004) - the “new family form” (p. 224) of “living apart
together”.
• Van der Klis and Karsten (2009) - the gender imbalance of “commuter
families”, which “enable parents to seize distant work opportunities
and preserve solid local roots for family life” (p. 341).
• Schneider and Limmer (2008) - the growing demand for job-related
mobility in Germany and its impact on family and community life.
Workforce mobility
• Meil (2009) - what job mobility means for the division of labour in the
home.
• Haslam McKenzie (2010) - “fly-in-fly-out” family form in remote
Australia, whereby typically the male partner works in a remote
location with little social infrastructure over a compressed working
period, interspersed to returning to the family home.
• Green (1997) initially documented the long commuting solution
adopted by British dual career families to keep the family together;
but, in more recent work, Green (2015) reports the emergence of
“dual location households” (p. 17).
Gendered implications for workforce mobility
• Concerns that these solutions can lead to the reinvigoration of
an asymmetrical, gendered division of labour in the home and
further entrenchment of traditional female roles - “how
gender both constitutes mobility and is constituted by mobility
in a myriad of ways” (Uteng & Cresswell, 2008, p.5)
• - Hofmeister (2005) and Haasler (2015) - females do more
domestic work even when both partners were engaging in
extensive commuting.
Family mobility
• impact of family mobility on women’s careers - Roberts (2015)
emphasises that “Women’s family careers often disrupt their
employment careers”, in particular in the way “some women’s
careers had been unhinged by needing to relocate because their
husband’s jobs required this” (p. 244).
• the “trailing spouse” pattern (Doherty et al., 2015; Green, 2015) - it
is more typically the female parent who compromises her career
stakes in the collective’s interest, creating “workable solutions”
(Doherty & Lassig, 2013).
Roles for career studies professionals
• research role - empirically monitor how women’s careers unfold over
time, including the normative and moral climate around their
decisions.
• advocacy role - promote employment practices, institutional
arrangements and career paths that dignify and support multiple life
roles for all adults.
• educative role – explore attitudes to family responsibilities in the
future, and consider models and plans for ‘how they might do it’ so
that family and work roles are not in competition.