Journal
WORK EMPLOYMENT AND SOCIETY
Volume 32, Issue 2, Pages 312-329Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0950017017714198
Keywords
career; career commitment; case study; femininities; Irish; outsiders; relational commitment; STEM; typology; university
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Funding
- European Commission [287526]
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This article describes a typological framework with axes relating to career and (non-work) relationship commitment to show how a specific cohort of women enact femininity(ies) in the context of the institutionalised practices that define science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as a masculine domain. Based on the accounts of 25 women in such disciplines in an Irish university, four types are identified: careerist femininity; individualised femininity; vocational femininity; and family-oriented femininity. All of these are constituted in relation to the meanings attached to the masculinist STEM career which performatively render women outsiders. The typology moves beyond the career/paid work and work/life dichotomies to encompass both the re-envisioning of career as vocation (Type 3) and the development of a highly individualised lifestyle orientation based on a high commitment to both (Type 2). It points to the variation, complexity and contradictions in how women do femininities in the academic STEM environment.
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