Colloque

An Internally Segregated Profession: Women Teachers in Ontario

Yoko Ueda

Dorothy E. Smith

Membre a labase

Yoko Ueda

Résumé du colloque

This paper explores the nature of women’s inequality with reference to career development in the context of the teaching profession. The situation of women teachers in Ontario still shows marked inequalities. There are patterns distinctive to teaching, but in exploring these, we begin our investigation with a piece of more general institutionalization of inequality in the workplace between women and men. The careers and career processes in professions are coordinated to a male course of life. For example, the established pattern of advancement through university education, the possibility of achieving qualification is adapted to a male life-cycle and does not take into account the possibility of time out for child care and family responsibilities women have needed to make choices which men have not had to make. That we have taken these patterns for granted is an indication of their institutionalization, but not of their necessity. In this paper, we are concerned to explore the ways in which teaching and the teaching profession share in the gender-differentiation in order to provide an analysis of the way in which the gendered division of labour in the Ontario Ministry of Education. In the use of the data, we are not concerned to evaluate hypotheses or to locate the factor or factors which contribute the most to variations in the dependent variable etc. Rather, we take the statistical information available as information arising in and reflecting a social organization which determines social relations, but not fully visible in the statistical data. That is, we treat the data as “hears” underlying processes of organization. Our intention is to make a systematic description of the gender differentiation and social organization in teaching with respect to the career development of women teachers.