Abstract
This article explores the ways in which age and gender intersect to shape the workplace experiences of first-year Canadian social workers. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with nine early-career (0.6–3.7 years post-bachelor of social work [BSW]), young adult (aged 23.9–32.9) social workers in Alberta, Canada, to understand their experiences in the first year of practice after completing the BSW; this article addresses the themes relating to age and gender. The methodology used in the study was hermeneutic phenomenology. Findings include negative conceptualizations of young social workers, meanings related to age and gender, use of evocative language to communicate positionality and practice values (“little girls” and “bitching up”), and feminized constructions of social work. Implications for social work education, practice, and research are discussed.
The number of students graduating from bachelor and master of social work programs in Canada is steadily increasing (Canadian Institute for Health Information, 2010), while the need for social workers in Canada has increased as “the demand for social services has both diversified and intensified” (Service Canada, 2012, para. 14). This “trend toward sharp employment growth” (Service Canada, 2012, para. 5) in social work is expected to continue. Employment growth in health care and social assistance is a longer term trend (Lin, 2008). The allied disciplines of nursing and teaching have high attrition rates among their early-career workers (Halfer & Graf, 2006; Ingersoll & Strong, 2011), but social work researchers have not quantified this loss. Importantly, the existing literature suggests that new social workers may experience significant challenges during their first year of practice (Author, 2011). Despite the increasing numbers of social workers entering the Canadian workforce who are facing the challenges of early-career practice, there is limited literature on the workplace entry and experiences of first-year Canadian social workers (Author, 2011), although this is an area of growing interest and there has recently been a “burgeoning of material on the experiences of newly qualified social workers” (Manthorpe, Moriarty, Stevens, Hussein, & Sharpe, 2014, p. 97) internationally, particularly in the United Kingdom. The existing literature tends to focus on induction and preparedness for practice, with a lesser focus on the subjective experiences of new practitioners (Author, 2011). This work is a corrective to the dearth of literature on the subjective experiences of new social work practitioners in the Canadian context, with a particular emphasis of gendered components of early-career practice and their implications for education, practice, and research.
Social Work as a Gendered Profession
Social work is a female-predominant profession, which is uniquely situated with regard to gender relations. Although the proportion of women social workers has fluctuated over time in North America, there has been a trend toward increased feminization. Women’s numerical representation among American social work graduates has been increasing since at least 1953, at which time women made up 58% of social work graduates (undergraduate and graduate level combined; Schilling, Morrish, & Liu, 2008). Over the second half of the 20th century, there has been increased representation of women at all educational levels in social work (Schilling et al., 2008).
It is therefore not surprising that social work has historically been viewed as a women’s profession. Discourses around social work and women (and more recently—men and masculinities) reveal social work’s highly gendered nature. In fact, social work is often referred to as a “female-dominated profession”—a description that McPhail (2004) critiqued in the hopes of removing this misnomer from the lexicon of social workers. In her provocative article, McPhail challenged equating women’s numerical representation in social work with dominance (with dominance implying power, status, and influence). McPhail presented evidence in support of her conclusion that social work can be more accurately understood as a “female majority, male-dominated profession” (p. 325). Although the majority of direct service social workers have historically been women, women social workers are underrepresented in administration, policy work, and higher education faculty. Men in social work are seen to benefit from the glass elevator effect (described by Williams, 1992), whereby their career development is positively impacted by their gender status including preferential hiring and encouragement to pursue administrative opportunities (McPhail, 2004). McPhail (2004) argued that correcting the misconception that social work is a female-dominated profession is important not just for the purpose of accuracy but also so that sexism and gender inequality in social work are not rendered invisible.
Social work is marked by significant sex segregation. In social work, this segregation is both vertical/hierarchical (i.e., involving the overrepresentation of men in leadership positions relative to their overall numbers within the field and horizontal/related to distribution across specializations and areas of practice). McLean (2003) analyzed the distribution of 585 British men who participated in the workforce studies by the National Institute for Social Work and found that while men composed 14% of the British social care/social work workforce, they were disproportionately represented in management positions. Specifically, while 60% of senior managers were men, the proportion of men decreased and the proportion of women increased with each position type conceived as a step down in terms of status, with men being: 25% of first-tier managers, 21% of field workers, 15% of residential workers, and 1% of home care workers. Nevertheless, most men were not senior managers; as McLean (2003) observed, “in spite of the higher proportion of men in higher-status jobs, the majority were in basic grade jobs as field worker, residential worker, or home care worker” (p. 53). However, 42% were either first-tier or senior managers, clearly disproportionate to their representation in social care/social work of 14%. Intersecting social positions including racialized and sexual identities also influences occupational sex segregation in social work. McLean concluded that: Comparisons…of the distribution of men in social services might be regarding as belonging to the “privileged” hegemony (broadly white, able-bodied heterosexual men, or men not disclosing a marginalized status) with the distribution of women and “other” men seem to support this. Whereas two-fifths of “privileged” men were managers, this applied to only one-fifth of black men. (p. 63) Whereas care work has been defined in terms of feminine gender norms that emphasize selflessness, emotionality, morality, and nurturing; “real” work has been defined as rational and impersonal—qualities associated with masculinity and requiring specialized knowledge or skills to advance. (Sulik, 2007, p. 300)
Overall, there is evidence of sufficient depth and breadth for reaching the conclusion that social work is deeply gendered work: Social work is a female-predominant profession (McPhail, 2004) that has seen increased feminization since the 1950s (Schilling et al., 2008), essentialist ideas of female caregiving contribute to reduced status and remuneration in the social work field (Lewis, 2004), both men and women “do gender” in both conventional and transformative ways in social work (Christie, 1998, 2006; Gillingham, 2006; Lewis, 2004; McLean, 2003; Warde, 2009a), and there is significant horizontal and vertical segregation within social work (McLean, 2003). Less is known about the impact of gender on the experiences of new social workers. Despite an extensive body of literature dealing with gender relations within the social work profession, to the best of my knowledge, my study is the first to substantively and qualitatively explore the role of gender dynamics in the experiences of new female practitioners.
Gender and Early-Career Social Work Practice
Other researchers examining the early-career period in social work have found significant relationships between female gender and retention in child protective services (Scannapieco & Connell-Carrick, 2007), satisfaction with education (Lyons & Manion, 2004), likelihood of working part-time (Lyons & Manion, 2004; Marsh & Triseliotis, 1996), and/or of working in a temporary position (Marsh & Triseliotis, 1996). While not related overtly to the themes reported from her research, Bradley (2008) observed that “life course and gender are likely to play a part” (p. 349) in attitudes formed during early practice. Bradley (2008) further advocated that, “students of either gender may benefit from being positively encouraged to plan their careers to fit with preferred personal/professional biographies” (p. 361).
Warde (2009b) investigated gender in understanding the subjective experiences and meanings of new social workers but with an emphasis on male practitioners; likewise, Bagilhole and Cross (2006) explored how men understand entering female predominant occupations such as nursing, child care, and social work. My research increases the existing knowledge in this area by extending a critical interpretation of how gender dynamics may shape and be shaped by early-career practice in social work, with an emphasis on female practitioners.
Methodology and Research Design
The research question guiding my study was “how do young adult, early-career Alberta social workers understand subjective feelings toward their work experiences in their first year of practice following completion of the bachelor of social work (BSW) degree?”
Hermeneutic Phenomenology
My research approach is situated in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology. The idea of lived experiences is interpreted differently in distinctive phenomenological traditions and by different phenomenologists. For example, Moran (2000) explains phenomena as encompassing “whatever appears in the manner in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer” (p. 4). For my research, I understand lived experiences to mean the flow and meanings of life as subjectively experienced. An extension of lived experiences, life world refers to the domain of lived experiences—the prereflective, everyday attitude directed toward the world per Husserl (Lebenswelt), or “being-in-the-world” per Heidegger (Dasein; van Manen, 1990). My conceptualization of the life world is more congruent with Dasein than with Lebenswelt.
The essence of lived experience is understood through both structural and textual description, that is, a description of the “conditions, situation, or context” (Creswell, 2007, p. 60) of the experience, as well as a description of “the meaning individuals have experienced” (Creswell, 2007, p. 237). Interpretive phenomenology as conceptualized by van Manen (1990) focuses on both the descriptive element (what is it like to be a new social worker) and the interpretive element (what it means to be a new social worker). Understanding the life world of new social workers requires more than transcendental (i.e., attempting to divine what is present without interpretation) phenomenological description. As van Manen explained, “A description may properly aim at lived experience but somehow fail to elucidate the lived meaning of that experience. In this case the description simply fails to accomplish its own end” (p. 27). In hermeneutics, “the theory and practice of interpretation” (van Manen, 1990, p. 179), we take up lived experiences as sources of information about our research topics. The goal is not to present whole narratives of individual lived experiences but to discern how the lived experiences open up meaning about the topic.
While transcendental phenomenology is concerned with discovering the essential structures that make a phenomenon what it is, hermeneutic phenomenology is concerned with the meaning of a phenomenon. This focus on meaning leads to an unapologetically interpretive stance, a stance in which the researcher is actively and openly involved in interpreting the meaning of the phenomenon rather than attempting to maintain neutrality or objectivity. While transcendental phenomenologists use bracketing in an attempt to contain their preassumptions, hermeneutic phenomenologists agree with Gadamer (1960/1989) that “there is undoubtedly no understanding that is free of all prejudices” (p. 484). Prejudices, or prejudgments, rather than a negative impediment, are the conditions of developing further understanding (Gadamer, 1965/2007).
Recruitment and sampling
I purposively recruited social workers with the goal of accessing information-rich cases for deep insights and understandings rather than for generalizability (Patton, 2001). I used criterion sampling, whereby “all cases that meet some predetermined criterion of importance” were included in the sampling frame (Patton, 2011, p. 238). Nine participants volunteered for my study and met the criteria. This sample size is consistent with phenomenological methods, which typically include 1–10 participants (Starks & Trinidad, 2007). My study focused on new social workers in Generation Y. Generation Y is the cohort born from 1980 to 1995 (Marshall, 2011); therefore, my study included social workers aged less than or equal to 32 years at the time of data collection. The first 3 years of experience has been identified as the early-career period in social work and allied disciplines (Chenot, Benton, & Kim, 2009; Cowin & Hengstberger-Sims, 2006); therefore, interviewing social workers still in the early-career period allowed for reflective insight that is still in the context of early-career development.
Participants were recruited via e-mails sent by the professional social work association to a Calgary area list service of registered social workers. My study received ethical approval from the University of Calgary Conjoint Ethics Research Board. All participants provided informed, written consent.
I employed open-ended, semistructured interviews that invited participants to reflect on both the experience and the meaning of being a new social worker. Two examples of questions used are: Could you tell me about a particularly satisfying encounter/experience in your first year of being a social worker, and what were your experiences of power and status as a first-year social worker? Interviews were taped and transcribed verbatim. The interviews lasted an average of one and one half hours and occurred in private locations in the community, at the offices of participants, and at the University.
Data analysis
I recorded the interviews digitally and a professional transcriptionist transcribed them verbatim. I completed an extensive process of cleaning and enhancing the data. I went through every transcript excerpt line by line to correct any errors in transcription; edit for grammar and readability; remove dross (Burnard, 1991); and add notations to signify pauses in speech, laughter, changes in the speaker’s volume (e.g., whispering), changes in tone, upward inflection, and emphasis on certain words or phrases. Although I edited for readability, I did not alter unusual patterns of speech or use of language that seemed pertinent to the meaning of the passage (e.g., referring to oneself as a “women” rather than a “woman”) or use of fillers such as “like” when these fillers seemed to indicate uncertainty (rather than a usual characteristic of the participant’s general speech). This process involved multiple, meticulous readings of the transcript excerpts as well as comparing the texts to the recorded interviews through repeated listening.
To facilitate organization of the data and identification of interpretive themes, I used the coding software HyperRESEARCH. I conducted data analysis using van Manen’s (1990) thematic analysis, wherein phenomenological themes are the “structures of experience” (p. 79), encompassing both the particular (this individual’s experience) and the universal (the meaning of the phenomenon). Thematic analysis is conducted to capture the essence (eidos) of the descriptions and meanings suggested by the transcript texts. Themes are not objects within the text; rather, phenomenological themes are anchoring points of meaning, described by van Manen as “knots in the webs of our experience, around which certain lived experiences are spun and thus lived through as meaningful wholes” (p. 90).
In order to identify thematic statements in the transcripts, I employed van Manen’s (1990) three approaches to thematic isolation: the holistic approach, wherein I explored the central meaning or significance of the text; the selective reading approach, wherein I sought statements that are particularly salient and germane to the phenomenon (being a new social worker); and the line-by-line approach, in which I examined each statement or cluster of statements for what it divulges about the phenomenon. Informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis as conceptualized by Smith, Flowers, and Larkin (2009), I analyzed each transcript individually before going on the next transcript. Looking at each transcript as an individual text before comparing across transcripts maintained respect for the idiographic nature of human experience. In interpretive work, the focus is not on looking for repetition in the texts but for meanings that can enlarge our understanding of the topic.
Sample
My sample consisted of nine individuals living in the Calgary area who had graduated with the BSW from a Western Canadian (Albertan or British Columbian) university between June 2009 and June 2012. They were all registered social workers or were in the process of applying for registration. They ranged from 23.9 to 32.9 years of age at interview (mean = 27.3, median = 26.2). Upon graduating with the BSW, the participants ranged from 21.8 to 31.8 years of age (mean = 25.5, median = 24.1). At interview, the participants had accumulated between 0.6 and 3.7 years of post-BSW experience (mean = 1.8, median = 1.6). All but three of the participants were under age 25 upon graduation. Eight of the nine participants were female, and all except two were unmarried/partnered. None of the participants had children. When asked to describe their ethnic background, four identified themselves as Caucasian, one as Canadian, one as Caucasian/First Nations, one as Middle Eastern, one as secular Jewish, and one as Filipino. Five had a previous university degree, one had completed her master of social work (MSW) in addition to the BSW, and one was enrolled in the MSW program part-time.Two participants had prior social work diplomas but were nonetheless included in the research: one because she had not worked in between the diploma and the BSW due to poor labor market conditions at time of graduation and one because I did not know she had a prior diploma until part way through the interview. Starting wages ranged from CAD$17 per hour to CAD$65,000 per annum. Diverse fields of practice were represented among first and current jobs including provincial child and family services, not-for-profit agencies (contracted child and family services, advocacy, addictions and mental health, homelessness, health, counseling, disability services, and immigration), provincial health services (policy, medical, mental health, and addictions), and governmental justice services. One participant no longer practiced as a social worker at the time of interview due to inability to sustain/secure social work employment; all other participants were employed in social work in a full-time capacity. With the exception of the participant who left the social work field and one participant who completed her MSW on a full-time basis, all had been continually employed since starting their first post-BSW job. Participants had held between one and five full-time social work jobs since graduation (mean = 2.3, median/mode = 2).
Findings
While not explicitly a research question, exploring my participants’ narratives gave rise to emergent questions of how age and gender might influence the subjective workplace experiences of first-year social workers. This work addresses how new social workers perceive their colleagues’ constructions of their young age and the role of gendered beliefs about maturity, the wider hermeneutic meanings invoked by provocative language applied to young female social workers, and how first-year social workers’ subjective experiences and understandings of social work are situated in the context of feminized constructions of caregiving in the larger social work community. The following three themes form the “knots in the webs of…experience” (van Manen, 1990, p. 90) in my interpretation of the gendered experiences of my participants: “Young, And…,” “Little girls and bitching up,” and “Bleeding hearts and punching bags.” Additional components of the interpretation emerging from my study, beyond the scope of this article, included occupying undervalued space, encounters with privilege and marginalization, macrolevel disappointments, and renegotiated idealism and transformation.
Young, And…
While not a universal experience among my participants, colleagues’ reactions to their relatively young age were a concern for a number of participants. There was a sense that some colleagues used the young age of the social worker to dismiss their ideas, undermine their credibility, and generally marginalize the social worker in the work environment. Those who described this experienced it as hurtful but did not passively accept constructions of themselves as inferior to their colleagues based on age. Participants’ strategies to manage and transform age-related (mis)understandings that diminished the social worker’s sense of professional competence and inclusion included humor, assertiveness, proving oneself over time, avoiding disclosing age or experience level to others, leveraging the value of the BSW degree, highlighting pre-BSW human services experience, and emphasizing practice situations in which younger age was an asset. Additionally, some of my participants assessed that their young age and limited experience necessitated a deferential position with older colleagues but gained more confidence and a sense of professional independence over their first year of practice.
It might be questioned to what degree it is appropriate for younger colleagues to need to use such strategies to establish credibility as newcomers to a profession and a workplace. That is, we might try to differentiate between how the construction of young age may be used as an attempt to marginalize young women social workers and to what extent it is a valid reflection of potentially limited life/professional experience. I would argue that equating age with life experience in a strictly linear fashion ignores the multiple positionalities, unique perspectives, and lived experience that new social workers bring to the profession. Devaluing the contributions of a colleague seems to me to be an act of marginalization, regardless of the reason given for exclusion.
Participant 1 expressed surprise that her colleagues’ perceptions of her young age and childlessness influenced their assessment of her “ability to be a social worker,” specifically regarding her knowledge and understanding: P1:…I’m quite young relatively speaking, compared to people that I worked with, and I think that a lot of people saw me as young and thought, how could she know anything? I think that there’s a barrier associated with that and I wasn’t really prepared for anyone doubting my ability to be a social worker. [laughs] So that was a little bit of a shock…. I think that people say, “oh she’s young, she doesn’t have kids, she doesn’t understand what this is all about.”
The feeling that colleagues questioned the social worker’s abilities did not extend universally to the populations served, and that in some cases, young age was even understood an asset (both to clients and to the workplace). Participant 5 saw both her age and gender combining to make her accessible to the population she worked with. In this context, being a young woman social worker was an asset:
I’m wondering what your sense is of how your own social position may have influenced your experiences as a first year social worker?
…Right. I think maybe, maybe [emphasis] being a female was actually on my side. Only because most people I worked with were women although I don’t know, I don’t know. I tend to not even think about that in general because there’s so much that kind of goes into being who you are. I mean maybe, I think being younger [upward inflection] and female helped with the youth I worked with, the clients definitely [emphasis]. I think they felt really comfortable to talk to me [upward inflection], thinking that they probably saw me more as a peer but I was obviously very professional and I never treated them like a peer but I think that helped.
Participant 5 saw her intersecting social location (young/female) as allowing youth to relate to her more as a peer. The gender aspect of this is interesting, as she worked with both male and female youth, but nonetheless saw her gender as contributing to creating rapport and a sense of being-like-a-peer with all the youth. Participant 5’s use of both emphasis and upward inflection when exploring this topic suggests she saw being a young woman as definitely helpful to her practice with young clients but did not unreservedly identify with the idea that in her role as a social worker, “being a female was actually on my side” more generally.
Ultimately, I did not have the impression that my participants rejected the experience and mentorship of older and more senior colleagues; in fact, their support was usually strongly valued. However, there is an implicit request, or application, in the narratives of concern of feeling dismissed: “call me colleague.” That is, there is a strong need for new social workers, regardless of their young age, to be accepted as social workers by their colleagues. This is reminiscent of the subjective wishes of first-year teachers relating to their colleagues in Rippon and Martin’s (2006) work: “call me teacher,” that is, to recognize them as teachers despite being new to the field.
Little Girls and Bitching Up: Where Age and Gender Meet
I was repeatedly struck by the interconnections among constructions of age, gender, and marital/family status in the interactions some of my participants described with their colleagues. Just as Participant 1 believed that some of her colleagues questioned her credibility because she did not have children, Participant 8 perceived an assumption by community members that she would be partnered and/or a mother. On the other hand, she sensed that people associated her gender with compassion and understanding and were therefore more willing to discuss challenges and barriers with her:
Well as I think as a women [sic], as a woman, people often, I think associate that with compassion and understanding. So I think there’s a sense that I was willing to listen and understand, often times it’s challenges or barriers. [upward inflection] I was working in a more rural community in the south, many people assumed that I would have a spouse or a partner and/or children which was not the case.
Note that Participant 8 first referred to herself as a women before correcting herself and discussing herself as a woman. This could be simply a “slip of the tongue” but could also signify her effort to connect her own experiences as a young female social worker to larger constructions of women in society and in social work. That is, how she brings her social location, in addition to her unique self, to her practice. Additionally, we might speculate on the relative importance assigned to a social worker’s marriage and parenting status. It is possible that younger women social workers might be asked about spouses and/or children more often because for young women, marriage, and motherhood are seen as signs of maturity, acting as a life experience that might offset assumptions about immaturity for practice based on age?
Powerful language regarding age and gender was present in some of my participants’ narratives. For example, Participant 1 remembered being called a “little girl” in a dismissive way by a colleague:
So when I first worked here there were a couple of people that said, “oh little girl,” or “young person” and I’d say, “I’m not that young” or they’d talk to me like I was their daughter or something. I’m not your daughter kind of thing [laughs] but just being a little bit more assertive…
Here, both the social worker’s young age and female gender are being combined to dismiss her. Using this type of classification in a female predominant profession suggests lateral oppression in a relatively low-status profession, whereby some social workers use their social location (in this case, as relatively older woman) to secure higher status in the workplace. This higher status is accomplished by contrast; in this case, calling a colleague a little girl starkly makes the comparison. This invokes wider hermeneutic meanings. This quote suggests that the speaker saw the participant as lacking the maturity to perform her job, but other questions emerge. Who in our society has less power than a little girl? If social workers use the characterization of being a little girl in a derogatory manner, this reflects on the gendered nature of our work.
There is also a sense that being a little girl means naivety or lack of understanding. This is a gendered construction of one way of being a social worker, albeit a devalued way. What about the other end of the spectrum? How might understanding and a lack of naivety, even leaning toward aggressive ways of being, be conceptualized in a gendered way? Participant 4 spoke about being told to bitch up:
I think coming into this work young [emphasis] it feels like there’s some stigma there. So like you are inexperienced, you’re sort of naive, at one point I was told I needed to “bitch up.”
What did that mean in the context you were told that?
I think it meant that I needed to be a little less nice and a little more mean…
According to Merriam-Webster (n.d.), the noun bitch refers to “the female of the dog or some other carnivorous mammals,” “a lewd or immoral woman,” or “a malicious, spiteful, or over bearing woman—sometimes used a generalized form of abuse.” In this context, the idea of “bitching up” seems to be most congruent with the third definition of a malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman. I doubt that the speaker intended this meaning and likely was advocating a stronger, more assertive, or even aggressive way of dealing with practice situations—perhaps a way of practicing that excluded stereotypically feminine nurturing approaches, seeing those styles as ineffective, or invoking unnecessary vulnerabilities. However, according to Gadamer (1960/1989), language is both the medium of interpretation and a source of continuity in human experience: “It is not just something left over, to be investigated and interpreted as a remnant of the past. What has come down to us by way of verbal tradition is not left over but given to us” (p. 391). Therefore, Gadamer (1960/1989) would instruct us that our words invoke the history and tradition imbedded in language, in a way that supersedes the subjectivity of each individual (Author, 2014): The claim of language can never be reduced to what an individual subjectivity intends. It belongs to the way of being of language…that we and not just one of us but indeed all of us are the ones who are speaking. (Gadamer, 1970/2007, p. 105)
Bitching up applied to social work practice is a powerful idea and metaphor and can be generative in our understanding of social work and even what it means to become a new social worker and develop a practice philosophy. The idea of bitching up is not merely, or even primarily, an intellectual idea. The word “bitch” elicits strong emotional reactions, given its history as a highly derogatory, gendered, and even sexualized term. Use of the term bitch as pejorative slang appeared sometime between the 15th and early 17th century (see Hendrickson, 2008 vs. Green, 2010) was initially used to imply disapprobation of a woman’s sexuality and later came to refer more generally to broad condemnation of a woman’s personality (Green, 2010). The use of bitch came to be generally applied pejoratively toward women (both heterosexual and homosexual) and homosexual men (or men who were victimized sexually by other men) and also toward persons seen as subservient or servile (Green, 2010). In this sense, we can understand the term bitch as a gendered, sexualized term used to denigrate persons or behaviors assigned low-status socially. When invoking the idea of bitching up, therefore, there is a sense of both aggression and subservience—a low-status person engaging in aggressive or unpleasant behavior. This is not an empowering image of social work practice. Interestingly, from the 1950s onward, to be a bitch at something implied exceptional skill in that area, for example, to be a bitch at cards (Green, 2010). Therefore, another way of understanding bitching up, albeit one that has less resonance given the context, is the idea of assuming a more skillful position in social work practice.
In the context described, Participant 4 experienced being told to bitch up as an unsupportive response from a senior worker. She described a sense of “being lost.” There is a sense that she perceived senior workers to be reactive to new, young workers, who were seen as naive and were therefore not respected. While some senior workers offered support to newer workers, others did not, and this reflected power dynamics in the office. Participant 4 openly rejected the idea of bitching up, seeing it as an inappropriate way to practice in social work. This is tangible in her explanation:
Quite often I would see some of the styles that other people would have and I would say thank God you think I’m naïve because I don’t want to be what you [emphasis] are. I mean if you’re a senior worker and you know what’s going on and you’ve got it all together then I definitely don’t want to be where you’re at. I don’t want to bitch up because if this is what bitching up is I’m not going to go there.
Through observing the practice style of a senior worker who had advised bitching up (and perhaps other senior workers with whom she associated this more aggressive style), Participant 4 determined that this style was not one she wanted to emulate. As a form of resistance, she reconceptualized the label of being naïve positively, relative to what she saw as more aggressive practice positions.
Bleeding Hearts and Punching Bags: Feminized Constructions of Social Work
While a number of my female participants articulated a sense that, while their gender might be associated with nurturing traits (which were often, but certainly not always, viewed positively), Participant 10 explained how being female was also taken as a given in social work:
I mean as a woman, I think we’re all women, [laughs] most social workers are women so I don’t really get benefit [upward inflection] out of that.
Okay so that’s sort of a neutral?
Yeah if anything people are not surprised, I mean if I was a male in social work probably they’d be more surprised and more interested in why I [emphasis] was in the field cause it’s so unique. So as women it’s just kind of, it’s not surprising.
Participant 10 volunteered these comments when she was reflecting on how her own social location might have impacted her experiences as a first-year social worker. She articulated being a second-generation Canadian as an asset in her practice and in her organization because she could offer a unique perspective on what second-generation youth service users might be experiencing. However, she viewed her gender as a neutral factor in her practice, while she saw male social workers’ gender as playing a positive role in their professional visibility:
I don’t think it’s difficult for a male social worker to be that shining big star in the social work field because they do stand out.
They stand out because there are less men?
Yes, because there are less men, so they stand out more and I think, working in the field being around mostly females all the time if there is a male in the room there’s a change in energy. People pay more attention to what he says, to what his opinions are.
This is a bit different than her explanation of how being a second-generation Canadian aided her practice because she does not suggest that men are seen as knowledge resources only for working with male clients; rather, her quote suggests that she may believe men are seen as having more valuable contributions more generally. This relates to Williams’ (1992) work, which theorized that being male in a female predominant profession is often constructed as an advantage (the glass elevator, in contrast to the glass ceiling).
For Participant 6, social work is marginalized compared to psychology and this is related to the public’s perception of it as a feminized profession, as well as an implied degradation of caregiving work more generally. She discussed this when exploring why she eventually chose to self-identify as a therapist rather than a social worker, after experiencing different reactions to what title she used over her first year of practice:
Yeah, whereas therapist, [emphasis] I think about language a lot more, maybe more than I should but therapist, psychologist, [emphasis] I mean “ist,” dentist [emphasis on last syllable], physicist [emphasis on last syllable], like words ending in ist usually tend to be pretty like highbrow professionals whereas something “worker” just kind of implies that you know someone else gives you direction and then you do it…. I really feel like social work in the public eye is a very feminized profession [upward inflection] whereas psychology is a very masculinized profession in how they’re perceived [upward inflection]. You know, this is just me speculating but I feel like people hear “social worker” or look at the words “social worker” and they imagine a woman. Whereas a psychologist is much more likely to be a man than a social worker…. You know psychology I think we really associate it with the whole psychoanalytic tradition and Freud and Jung and you know men in suits [emphasis] who were just pioneering new fields of knowledge [emphasis] and you know really part of almost a scientific community. Whereas in social work you picture more like the loving churchwoman devoting her free time to helping the needy. You know kind of at the mercy of her emotions and you know a bleeding heart, much more than we see a psychologist as a bleeding heart. I think we see them as being more analytical whereas we see social work as being more emotional and nurturing or associated with a mother figure.
This quote is full of fertile imagery presenting a world of masculinized helpers (psychologists) contrasted against a domain of feminized helpers (social workers). In the masculinized world, ideas include men in suits, pioneering new fields of knowledge, part of a scientific community, analytical, and highbrow professionals. In the feminized domain, notions involve someone else giving directions, not the mind, churchwoman, free time, at mercy of emotions, bleeding heart, emotional, nurturing, and mother figure. The idea of a bleeding heart is also a class-based metaphor; bleeding heart refers to “a reasonably well-situated member of the bourgeoisie, who for sentimental reasons of left-leaning political views, always espouses the liberal cause, whether sensibly or not” (Makkai, 2013, p. 31).
Some of my participants also reflected their initial ideas about idealized social work that seemed to evoke feminized (and marginalized) constructions of caregiving. For example, Participant 10 identified her starting image of a social worker as someone who is unaffected by stressors, willing to do very difficult work for low pay, even someone willing to be a punching bag:
“The social worker” then [emphasis] was not afraid of social change, was so passionate to the point where stressors just don’t [emphasis] stress them out, don’t bring them down.
So almost untouchable by stressors because they’re so fuelled by passion?
Right, right, untouchable by stressors. Also very [long pause] willing to do very difficult work for low pay. [laughs] Just I would say willing to take anything they get, by anything I mean anything from difficult participants to yeah just very—punching bag [upward inflection]—but someone very strong and willing to take it on with that bleeding heart.
So self-effacing, like where the needs of the self are subordinated to the cause or to the participants?
Right, the cause, very good way to put it. Yes, very much about the cause.
So all about the cause even to the expense of—
self.
Participant 10 later talked about revising these ideas over her first year of practice. Interestingly, she stated she initially applied this view of the ideal social worker to both male and female social workers. Initially, she explicitly saw the ideal or archetypal social worker as self-effacing and willing to subordinate the self. Used metaphorically, a punching bag can be understood as a person who is “constantly beaten up” (Green, 2010, p. 362) and “someone who takes much abuse and punishment” (Hendrickson, 2008, p. 681). It is potentially dangerous for new social workers to be internalizing these constructions of social work, not only because willingness to have one’s boundaries breached is not sustainable over one’s working life but also because as a value position it implicitly accepts oppressive conditions. The commitment of the social work discipline to social justice needs to include the self, and young social workers ought to be encouraged not to accept marginal compensation, abuse, or mistreatment as a natural part of their working conditions.
Discussion
The results of my study demonstrate that first-year social workers enter into a complex world of practice and organizational context that is deeply gendered. Many of my participants were surprised to be assessed by others on the basis of their social location rather than only their acquired academic preparation and professional status of “being a social worker.” The ways in which social location was taken up in the workplace reflect the ways in which social work has been conceptualized as a “women’s profession” and its subsequent, relative low status, as well as ideas about the general occupational/professional credibility of young women (particularly unmarried young woman who are not mothers). Making these dynamics visible is critical to the discipline’s social justice mandate; by bringing gendered ageism in social work out of the shadows, we can try to challenge and overcome it, and in doing so affirm the value, dignity, and equality of all of our colleagues.
One of the ideas that emerged in my findings section is the idea that social work is under the direction of others, which reflects the idea of social work as a semiprofession. A number of female-predominant occupations, particularly caregiving occupations, are conceptualized as semiprofessions (e.g., nursing, social work, midwifery, and occupational therapy). Although some scholars posit criteria for distinguishing between full and semiprofessions, Hearn (1982) argued that what is missing from this discourse is acknowledgment of the gendered nature of the characterization, that is: “‘established professions’ are staffed, wholely or very largely, by men; ‘semi-professions’ are staffed for the major part by women” (Hearn, 1982, p. 185). Also distinguishing the semi from the full professions are the gendered functions and power relationships performed and inhabited by their practitioners, which are performed in relationship to (Hearn would argue in service of) the full professions. Hearn conceptualized professionalization as a process through which reproduction and emotionality come to be controlled by men and cautioned that increased professionalization within the semiprofessions tends to be accompanied by increased control of the profession by men. Hearn presents an interesting argument that semiprofessions such as social work and librarianship are positioned in subordinate roles to full professions: Social workers spend much of their time serving, that is receiving referrals from and writing reports for, medics, lawyers, the courts, even the police. Even librarianship is seen as its fullest development when serving men, in universities and other “places of learning.” (Hearn, 1982, p. 192)
Validation
Although there is general consensus among qualitative researchers that qualitative work must be evaluated by different criteria than those historically applied to quantitative work, there are myriad approaches to achieving this distinction across the diversity of qualitative traditions (Creswell, 2007; Smith et al., 2009). Reliability and validity have historically been criteria for quality in quantitative research. In the 1980s, Lincoln and Guba first proposed alternative criteria for determining the “trustworthiness” of qualitative research (Emden & Sandelowski, 1998; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). This marked a turning point in a long and complex debate about assessing the quality of qualitative research (Emden & Sandelowski, 1998), which is informed by epistemological and rhetorical divergence across qualitative traditions (Yardley, 2000). Interpretivist approaches, based on postmodern ways of knowing and emphasizing socially constructed and situated truths, require validation approaches that are “appropriate to the epistemological assumptions and goals of the lifeworld ontology” (Angen, 2000, p. 387).
Commitment refers to attentiveness to multiple aspects of the research process that must be carried out with care, such as facilitating a productive and comfortable interviewing context and thorough analysis of data (Smith et al., 2009). Broadly understood, rigor involves “the thoroughness of the study” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 181). The sample should therefore be appropriate to the study and research question, and interviews should be of sufficient depth and interpretive focus—“moving beyond a simple description of what is there to an interpretation of what it means” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 181). The rich data obtained through my interviews are evidence of the engagement of my research participants in the cocreation of meaning in a safe and respectful environment. My interviews show evidence that I elicited reflexivity from my participants. I also exercised considerable commitment in the data analysis stage of my research: reading and rereading transcripts, comparing to the digitally recorded interviews, noting speech patterns, coding, making interpretive notes, and developing a coherent interpretation of the data. This part of the research took place over approximately 18 months, satisfying Yardley’s (2000) requirement of “prolonged engagement with the topic” (p. 221).
The final measure in the validation of a hermeneutic phenomenological work lies in its importance—does the work communicate something impactful (Smith et al., 2009), and does it have sociocultural consequences (Yardley, 2000)? My work is strongly situated in the applicability of the findings to social work education, practice, and research. Therefore, I believe my work has potential social–cultural consequences, which are discussed in this section.
Limitations
While my sample is less homogenous in terms of ethno-racial background, eight of my nine participants were women. To protect the anonymity of the one male participant, I ensured that none of his quotes identified him as male. The experiences of new male social workers may be very different than the experiences of females, and caution should be exercised in applying the findings to understanding male experiences.
Finally, social workers who had difficulty in making sense of early practice might have been less likely to volunteer to participate in this research, meaning that the experiences of social workers who have unresolved distress and confusion about their first year of practice are likely underrepresented in the interviews.
Application
In social work education, my findings suggest that educators might need to challenge internalized oppression that reflects gendered norms in caregiving work—such as being willing to accept poor treatment in professional settings and constructing male gender as a positive difference and female gender as neutral. Gendered expectations and narratives emerge in social work classrooms and field placements before they emerge in postgraduation practice. Instructors need to be alert to gendered power dynamics in their classrooms, with the goal of facilitating classroom spaces that model equity and inclusion for students of all genders. While it is important to ensure that men feel included in the classroom, as they are often the numeric minority, instructors must guard against treating male social work students in preferential ways that reinforce a special or privileged role in the profession.
In social work practice, we need to identify and challenge negative characterizations of young female workers. This is important for new social workers themselves, colleagues, and managers. We might alert ourselves to the use of language that generally devalues young females (i.e., little girl used derogatorily). Rather than tolerating poor work conditions as an inevitable part of caregiving work and viewing acceptance of these as expressive of our professional commitment, we might advocate for improvements through more manageable workloads, fair pay, and emotionally safe (i.e., abuse-free) working conditions.
Consistent and high-quality supervision is critical for new social workers as they develop their emerging practice frameworks and learn to cope with a new range of workplace stressors. Supervisors need to be critically self-reflexive and cognizant of the gendered dimensions of early-career practice throughout this process. Supervisors may be alert to devaluation of parts of our practice that may be seen as feminized, such as compassion and gentleness; differential attention paid to the workplace contributions of men and women practitioners; how we select and groom social workers for leadership roles; and their own personal beliefs around new practitioner credibility and competency, particularly the extent to which these beliefs reflect gendered expectations. Senior social workers often act as informal or formal mentors to new practitioners, effectively supporting and extending the supervision received from managers. For this reason, reflexivity is also critical in these mentors.
Future research could focus on further understanding the gendered nature of early-career social work practice across the life course and gender identity continuum (e.g., mature female students, men, transgender persons, and noncisgender identified social workers), with consideration for the unique configurations of gendered experiences across social locations including race and ethnicity. Work operating from an explicitly feminist epistemology would help extend our understanding of the role of gender in early-career social work practice.
Using hermeneutic phenomenology, in this article, I explored how gender intersects with early-career social work practice in a Canadian context, with a sample of mostly female Generation Y social workers. Key points in my interpretation included new social worker’s perceptions of how colleagues viewed their young age, provocative language used to speak to and about young women social workers, and feminized constructions of caregiving. This work can be used to inform future social work education, practice, and research in the ways discussed herein. As a profession, we must follow the lead of other professions such as nursing and teaching and develop a robust body of research to support the critical needs and experiences of our newest colleagues.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received funding via the Joseph Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences Research and Humanities Council of Canada.