Trading Choices: Young people's career decisions and gender segregation in the trades

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or HERE for a PDF copy of the media release.

This report was prepared for the Ministry of Women's Affairs by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER).

The aim of this study is to examine the interconnections between gender, gendered ideas, and career decision making on 'how and why' young people navigate to, or avoid trades-related pathways. 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Executive summary

1.    Introduction

• 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?

2.    Methodology

• Research questions
• Focus groups
• Individual interviews
• Sample definition
• Interviewee subgroups
• Recruitment
• Interviewee questions
• Participant feedback

3.    Impacts of family, peers, and media on young people’s emergent career identities

• Family
  Family contexts that open up nontraditional possibilities
  Negative, neutral, or mixed family messages about females in the trades
• Childhood play
• Media
  Television portrayals of nontraditional occupations
  Media and young people’s early career ideas
  Nontraditional roles and authenticity
  Seeking and producing career-related media
• Friends and other peers
  Impact of friends on those pursuing nontraditional pathways
  The influence of peers on those pursuing nontraditional pathways
• Generational change
• Summary

4.    School structures and discourses: providing choices, or screening and sorting?

• School organisation for curriculum delivery
• Subject clustering and student ‘choice’
• The impact of gendered and hetero-normative thinking
  The influence of careers advisers
  The Gateway, STAR, and work experience programmes
  Careers expos
  Schools’ attempts to change the status quo
• ‘Transition’ from school and ‘practical’ aspects of decision making
• Summary

5.    The nature of trades work and training: implications for young people’s career decision making

• Does male or female participation in the trades ‘make sense’ in relation to the way gender is constructed in the trades?
  Strength versus weakness
  Dirt versus cleanliness (activity versus appearance)
  Practical versus theoretical
  Worksite culture versus office culture discourse
• How do women and men maintain or resist the conflation of trades training and trades work with men and masculinity?
  Resistance against women in the trades
  Resisting resistance: strategies of/for women in the trades
• Summary

6.    Young people’s suggestions for change

• Changing young people
• Changing the pathways framework and its components
• Changing trades training and trades occupations

7.    Discussion and recommendations

• Difference and inequity
• 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

References

Appendices

Appendix A: Human Rights Commission Recommendations
Appendix B: Trainees and apprentices
Appendix C: Information sheet
Appendix D: Interview and focus group schedule