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Beyond ‘Gender Differences’: A Canadian Study of Women's and Men's Careers in Engineering
Author(s) -
Ranson Gillian
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
gender, work and organization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.159
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0432
pISSN - 0968-6673
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0432.00002
Subject(s) - career path , face (sociological concept) , similarity (geometry) , career development , gender studies , sociology , psychology , social psychology , management , social science , computer science , economics , artificial intelligence , image (mathematics)
This article explores the relationship between gender and career paths for a group of women and men who graduated as engineers during a period of labour market turbulence in western Canada during the 1980s. Using a model adapted from Brown (1982), the article uses ‘career path’ as a device to organize data drawn primarily from telephone and face‐to‐face interviews with 317 graduates. Three career paths provide the focus for the study: the ‘organizational’, characterized by stable employment with one employer; the ‘occupational’, characterized by mobility between employers; and the entrepreneurial, characterized by self‐employment. The use of the career path framework moves the study beyond global comparisons (of the dichotomized ‘gender differences’ kind) between ‘the women’ and ‘the men’. As well as allowing for comparison between the paths, it allows more refined and contextualized comparisons within each path. Such comparisons produce patterns of similarity and difference that sometimes transcend gender.