Gender differences and professional identities in health and engineering.
| Autor | Vieira, Adriane |
| Cargo | Report |
Abstract
The objective of this study was to compare the professional identity perceptions among undergraduate students enrolled in predominantly female and male courses. The research method is cross-sectional and the sample consisted of 502 undergraduate students in the fields of health and engineering. A questionnaire with the Scale of Professional Self and Hetero-Perception (EAHP) was used to collect the data and descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, and structural equations modeling were used as analysis techniques. According to the students from the two areas, the dimensions that best describe their professions are dynamism; technicity; effort; and ethics, while in the health field, the dimension that received the lowest average score was recognition, indicating that the professionals working in this field resent the lack of respect, admiration, and prestige in society, despite perceiving themselves as honest, honored, productive, and hardworking. Also, the average hetero-perception scores were lower for the health students and the difference between self and hetero-perception was less significant among the engineering students. The results confirm that the professional identities include gender-related attributes, leading to the conclusion that health professions remain vulnerable to gender domination relations.
Key words: identity; profession; gender; health; engineering.
Introduction
The increasing entry of women in the job market has caused profound changes in its dynamics. However, as for the occupation of positions, studies by Carrieri, Diniz, Souza and Menezes (2013), Capelle and Melo (2010) and Bruschini (2007) have shown that women in Brazilian organizations continue to play subordinate roles compared to their male counterparts, which reflects the maintenance of power relations.
At the international level, Gobillon, Meurs and Roux (2015) have shown that highly skilled men are more often hired than highly skilled women for high-paying jobs. In turn, Rice and Barth (2016) and Magee (2015) also point out to a substantial underrepresentation of women in the areas of technology, engineering, and mathematics, as well as in positions that require strong leadership skills. Harkonen, Manzoni and Bihagen (2016) have confirmed that men receive better rewards at work in terms of income, status, and promotion when compared to women.
According to Bimrose (2008), discrimination and segregation occur because stereotyped and sexist conceptions are developed since childhood, regarding what families and the society expect from girls and boys, especially as far as their vocational choices are concerned. Mothers and fathers educate their sons and daughters differently on issues involving daily responsibilities and chores, which entails implications for how these boys and girls will develop their professional and personal lives (Lundberg, 2005; Raley & Bianchi, 2006).
Similarly to Carrieri et al. (2013), we understand that the concept of gender goes beyond the mere reproductive systems and the differences between men and women are the result of social construction. Therefore, gender inequalities are more strongly expressed in the scope of professional choices and insertion in the labor market, giving very specific contours to professional identities (Bruschini, 2007).
Our theoretical choice is the category of social and professional identity proposed by Dubar (2015). According to the author, the construction of the socio-professional identity results from the confrontation of two phenomena: the construction of the identity for the other and the construction of the identity for oneself. The author uses the term acts of identity attribution to refer to the construction process of the identity for the other, taken by the institutions and agents that directly interact with the individuals. However, for the sake of the analysis model used in this paper, the construction process of the identity for the other is referred to herein as hetero-perception. The process of building the identity for oneself, on the other hand, takes place through the acts of belonging, which according to Dubar (2015) express what kind of man or woman the subject wants to be. In other words, it is the unique identity of a person, resulting from his/her individual life history, is referred to herein as self-perception.
According to the author, two processes occur simultaneously in the construction of identities: the biographical and the relational process. The biographical identity process (the identity for itself) is strongly influenced by the spheres of work and employment, as well as by one's educational and professional training. The moment of leaving school and entering the labor market constitute the primary professional identity, which is not only an identity at work but also a projection of oneself in the future, which anticipates a trajectory of employment. Therefore, to build a biographical and professional identity, individuals must establish working relationships and participate in collective activities in organizations (Dubar, 2015).
Sutherland and Markauskaite (2012) and Sims (2011) clarify that an individual's professional identity is one of the different ones they can simultaneously support. The professional identity develops over time and, instead of being coherent and stable, is prone to change and more likely to be fragmented.
Like Dubar (2006, 2015), Miscenko and Day (2016) and Hay (2014) argue that the work category derives from various inputs, such as social identity and professional identity. For Koveshnikov, Vaara and Ehrnrooth (2016), the identity work has the power to construct situations and relationships in the workspace, configuring the subjectivities that are constantly negotiated in social interactions.
Once we defined the theoretical categories of gender and social and professional identity, the research objective was to compare the self and hetero-perception of health and engineering students regarding the attributes that best characterize their professions.
To achieve this purpose, we started from the conclusions of Lundberg (2005) and Raley and Bianchi (2006). These authors state that cultural values, norms, and traditions measure the professional choices and career planning of young people since they establish different education paths, associated with the gender and the feeling of social belonging, defining which groups will be at risk or marginalized, as well as valued and rewarded. In summary, the key purpose of this paper is to identify and compare the professional attributes the students value most through self-perception, and how they believe society sees their professions through hetero-perception. In turn, this shall reveal aspects of the dynamic relation established between recognition and identification with the profession.
We adopted survey as the research method for this paper, with the participation of 502 graduate students of both genders. The health courses that agreed to participate were nursing, nutrition, biomedicine, and physiotherapy. The engineering courses were production, mechanical engineering, and metallurgy. The results confirmed that professional identities include attributes commonly associated with genders.
The results point to the absence of significant differences between the perceptions of female and male students within each area of knowledge (health and engineering), confirming that the image or status of a profession is linked to the power of the groups that naturalize which a profession should be occupied by men and women. In the health area, the dimension that received the lowest mean score was recognition and the difference between self and hetero-perception was lower for engineering students. We suggest that future studies include students from private institutions of education in their samples, as well as expand their database to comprise the perception of professionals who are already inserted in the job market.
This paper is organized in sections. The first section contains the theoretical framework and addresses the theme of gender and division of labor throughout human history, as well as its articulation with the construction of socio-professional identities. Following, we present the details of the research methodology, the data analysis, and the conclusions.
Gender, Professional, and Labor Relations
In accordance with the anthropologist Margareth Mead (1949), the identification with a gender is mediated by an apparatus of rules and physical and behavioral construction standards that shape the social identity based on the physical-biological substrate. The historian and feminist Joan Scott (1999) expanded the construction of gender by including the domination system through knowledge in her analyses. Along with the work of that author, gender constructions comprise images and meanings attributed to each sex, which determine how they relate. Therefore, the most important task is to analyze how the knowledge and hierarchies involving the genders are constructed and legitimized over time in a wide range of sociocultural contexts.
The origin of these differences begins to be constructed before birth, as Lundberg (2005) points out since the definition of what is expected from boys and girls starts even before birth and is clearly marked in babies' rooms by the colors of the furniture, clothing, decoration, and toys. The task division at home between mother and father and between male and female children also conditions what one can expect from one and the other in the life course. Traditionally, the fathers hardly encourage their male children to do housework, preventing them from trying out some roles they need to share responsibilities when they constitute their own families (Raley & Bianchi, 2006).
The moment an individual enters the labor market, these internalized and externalized differences in patterns of behavior, habits, and attitudes...
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