Women ‘learning to labour’ in the ‘male emporium’: exploring gendered work in teacher education

Abstract

This article reflects an interest in exposing links between women's academic work and the gender codes which organize and shape working life in the university context, both now and in the recent past, as a contribution to the sociology of women's work. Our specific focus is the gendered division of labour in teacher education in universities in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on a theoretical framework based on Bourdieu and McNay, and through an analysis of semi‐structured interviews with 19 women who worked in faculties of education between the 1960s and 1990s, we examine how the gendered division of labour has influenced the careers and working lives of women university teacher educators during those decades. Our data are organized under three themes: public and private lives; women's work/place; and talking back. We identify continuities and changes as well as qualifiers, ironies and paradoxes.