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Women's Health Australia homepage about the Women's Health Australia project Women's Health Australia staff Women's Health Australia current events Women's Health Australia surveys and data Women's Health Australia substudies information for Women's Health Australia participants University of Newcastle contact Women's Health Australia Women's Health Australia publications and presentations Women's Health Australia homepage about the Women's Health Australia project Women's Health Australia staff Women's Health Australia current events Women's Health Australia surveys and data Women's Health Australia substudies information for Women's Health Australia participants University of Newcastle contact Women's Health Australia Women's Health Australia publications and presentations

 
 


Research project

Lisa Milne
BA(Hons), PhD Candidate

 

Doctoral Thesis: The Complexity of Labour Market Inequalities: Gendered Subjectivity, Material Circumstances And Young Women’s Aspirations
Submitted: 16th July 2006
Supervisors: Dr Deidre Wicks & Dr Gita Mishra
University: Department of Sociology, University of Newcastle


Gendered labour market inequalities are a key area of feminist enquiry. Current approaches to theorising labour market inequalities usually conceive agentic social action and existing social structures as opposing forces, rather than as highly complex interwoven levels of social reality, which together constitute and reconstitute labour market inequalities over time. Further, these analyses tend to privilege either the social construction of gender or the different material circumstances of women’s lives in their accounts, inadequately addressing interfaces between ‘gender’ and the ‘material’. This study attempts to integrate these facets and levels of social reality more closely, offering an alternative account of how gendered labour market inequalities may be shored up or destablised over time. It builds on innovative work outside the field of labour market studies to do so.

While the key existing accounts of labour market inequalities offer quite diverse explanations for these inequalities, gendered marital power relations and child-raising responsibilities, along with gendered patterns of participation in, and outcomes from, education and paid work are prominent features of them all. To acknowledge this prior research and some of its insights, analysis of the ‘transitions’ young women are currently making in these domains is a central feature of this study. In doing so, I acknowledge the wealth of research and debate on the late modern fracturing of youth to ‘adult’ transitions, and the future social changes these imply. I further suggest that disruptions and continuities in the forms of education, work, parenting and relationships that young Australian women aspire to, along with shifts in the timing and form of these transitions, have important potential implications for the maintenance or destabilisation of existing broader labour market inequalities over time.

The alternative account offered here is developed by drawing on data gathered through a mixed methods study design, incorporating qualitative interviews and survey responses from groups of high SES and low SES young Australian women. Young women’s accounts of their aspirations for parenting, partnering, education and work, are treated using discursive analysis of the interview texts and comparison of these findings with descriptive statistics generated from the survey results. Theoretically, this analysis is guided by feminist poststructuralist notions of discourse, subject positioning and subjectivity. However, these poststructuralist concepts are reconciled with a notion of socio-cultural capital as a resource, developed to allow a ‘materialist’ edge in the empirical analyses. Additionally, insights from complexity thought provide a means for this study to conceive of the relationships between macro social structures and micro social processes as co-producing the labour market inequalities that the study addresses.

The thesis of this study is that the social construction of gender, the material circumstances of women’s lives, and their agentic negotiations with these, are critical and interactive features of an adequate account of the processes through which labour market inequalities are shored up or destabilised over time. I suggest that the synthesised theoretical framework developed and presented here may be highly effective for this task. The contribution of the study is therefore fourfold. Firstly, it provides a snapshot of the transitions young Australian women with different material circumstances are making into relationships and parenting, education and work. Secondly, it offers novel insights into the processes through which labour market inequalities may be maintained or not. Thirdly, it offers an integrated account of the interplay between discursive/cultural and material/economic social forces in producing these inequalities. Finally, it augments existing scholarship by introducing an innovative theoretical synthesis to the study of labour market inequalities.

 
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