How do occupational norms shape mothers’ career and caring options?

Abstract

Occupationally-differentiated patterns of paid work arrangements help shape the extent to which mothers of children under the age of 16 have access to both career and caring security (stable paid jobs with career prospects that also guarantee the ongoing capacity to provide and arrange high-quality care for children). Five sets of conditions critical to mothers’ work and caring security are: contracts providing two-way mobility between full-time and part-time work; actual hours worked; work scheduling; work location; and contractual security. Occupations can be clustered into ‘shapes’, based on the relative mother-friendliness of different ways in which they combine these conditions. Some shapes provide both employment security and caring security; others involve types of ‘flexibility focusing a trade-off between the two types of security. Data for 64 occupations, taken from early waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia (HILDA) Survey, were used to identify statistical norms for key aspects of each employment condition, and also the strength of these norms – that is, how flexible they were, for better or worse. These occupational norms and strengths were assumed to reflect regulatory standards or commonly accepted organisational practices. The 64 occupations could be grouped into five shapes that were associated with different concentrations of mothers. Occupational ‘shapes’ may thus act as barriers or enablers to mothers’ labour market transitions. They may tend to exclude mothers by denying caring security; allow employment maintenance based on a trade between caring and career security; or enable full occupational integration by providing both forms of security. The concept of shapes aids theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of occupational segregation and labour market segmentation, and may aid the targeting of regulatory interventions to improve mothers’ access to both career and caring security.