Patriarchy and Professions: The Gendered Politics of Occupational Closure

Abstract

The relationship between gender and professionalisation is a neglected one, and female professional projects have been overlooked in the sociology of professions. The generic notion of profession is also a gendered notion as it takes what are in fact the successful professional projects of class-privileged male actors at a particular point in history and in particular societies to be the paradigmatic case of profession. Instead, it is necessary to speak of `professional projects', to gender the agents of these projects, and to locate these within the structural and historical parameters of patriarchal-capitalism. Professional projects are projects of occupational closure, and a model of occupational closure strategies is needed which captures both the variety of strategies that characterise these projects and the gendered dimensions of these strategies. Such a model is set out and distinguishes between exclusionary, demarcationary, inclusionary and dual strategies of closure. This model is substantiated with material drawn from the emerging medical division of labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.