Abstract
Class and gender are inseparable. But separating them is precisely what many social analysts do. Kate Huppatz, however, picks up a line of inquiry that positions class and gender as a singular focus. Her persuasive Gender Capital at Work uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory to examine how gender and class subjectivities and circumstances are reproduced, as well as re-worked, through occupation. But Bourdieu is only a starting point for Huppatz, as he did little to explicate how gender and class intersect. Huppatz uses life narratives, or ‘work-life stories’, to demonstrate how women, and some men, operationalise ‘gender capital’ in four socially feminised occupations: nursing, social work, exotic dancing, and hairdressing. Her approach is to analyse people’s symbolic and embodied negotiations of their careers. Huppatz argues that the feminisation and masculinisation of labour produces ‘gendered occupational segregation’ (p. 182) and inequalities. This look at the ‘gender economy’ successfully demonstrates how social dispositions are used as ‘gender capital’, alternately buying credibility and denying, or at least limiting, opportunity for mobility.
Gender Capital at Work is a book about, among other things, embodiment and symbolic recognition. People inhabit their work with their bodies and minds. They simultaneously act within and are acted upon by the people and structures cohabiting social (occupational) spaces. Class and gender, argues Huppatz, are produced at work through the body and its relation to other people. ‘Gender capital’ – what Huppatz calls a feminist appropriation of Bourdieu’s theory – denotes how embodied subjectivities have exchange value within occupations. Importantly, Huppatz focuses on how people can consciously use such gender capital, which she highlights to counter the tendency, including in Bourdieu’s own work, to describe women ‘as objects rather than subjects’ (p. 23). Huppatz expands on the notion of ‘gender capital’ to demonstrate how jobs are produced and reproduced as feminine or masculine. This happens not only through labour market regulations and cultural norms, but through the power dynamics and everyday embodied interactions between those who do the work. People’s words and deeds on the job are legitimised or stigmatised according to classed and gendered values and practices. Huppatz makes a distinction between female capital and feminine capital; female capital is potential occupational advantage through being perceived to have a female body, while feminine capital is potential occupational advantage ‘from a disposition or skill set learnt via socialisation, or from simply being hailed as feminine’ (p. 27). This distinction helps make sense of the complexities of gender capital, including, for example, in how men can also operationalise feminine capital at work by performing femininity.
Huppatz’s use of ‘gender capital’ is an effective way of analysing the paradoxical occupational advantage and disadvantage of gender. Chapters on nursing and social work show how, because these occupations are seen to rely on ‘feminine caring’, women have an advantage for getting jobs. Within the jobs, they excel if they demonstrate high levels of ‘emotional competence’, often viewed as ‘emotional labour’, following Arlie Hochschild. The counterweight to this advantage is that, as the emotional and instinctual are framed as ‘natural’ capacities of women, rather than acquired capabilities, ‘feminised occupations continue to be undervalued and underpaid’ (p. 90). Women are likely to undervalue and underemphasise their other capacities and the technical skills required of their occupations. Meanwhile, men who become nurses or social workers are found to benefit from their gender (e.g. holding most management positions) and also to benefit if and when they employ feminine capital within their work. While gendered advantages play out thus in ‘caring’ occupations, class simultaneously surfaces within inter-occupational segmentation and hierarchies. For example, the middle-class are more likely to obtain social service employment, while the working-class do community welfare work. Class is seen in embodied distinctions in feminine practice as well, as for example in middle-class women saying they are motivated by service and care versus working-class women saying they are motivated by income. Workers in all four occupations in Huppatz’s study discussed aspects of care in their work, but there were also classed distinctions between the broader occupational fields of nursing/social work and exotic dancing/hairdressing.
Huppatz’s analysis focuses on the symbolic valuation and devaluation of traits and practices perceived as inherent to women and men. The chapter on exotic dancing describes interviewees’ simultaneous sense of empowerment in the workplace through sexiness or glamour, and disempowerment outside of work. Performing femininity in exotic dancing requires caring and hustling skills (in this context they are sometimes described as synonymous) and the performance of glamour; both are emotional capacities that assist with the job. This is work performed largely by working-class women, and the interviewees described it as empowering, providing work flexibility and reasonable wages, even if the work was temporary and insecure. But outside the four walls of occupation, this work is stigmatised as ‘dirty work’, so workers tended to describe their jobs as temporary, in order to maintain their own sense of respectability in their narrative. Gender Capital at Work variously describes the occupational-specific benefits and the limits of gender capital. The logics of gendered practice and valuation shaped people’s work practices. Just as women validated their exotic dancing work in order to counter gendered stigma, men in hairdressing were more likely to emphasise the ‘technical proficiency and logic’ of their work in order to guard against the stigma of participating in a largely feminised occupation. Women performing hairdressing work employ care, or emotion work, which serves them well within the occupation. However, as with nursing and social work, it continues the perceived naturalisation of these characteristics as feminine. This is part of implicit justification for the under-valuing of these occupations as labour, and for under-valuing the technical aspects of the work. Exotic dancers and hairdressers exercise autonomy and are able to trade on their female and feminine capital, but within constraints that also limit their prospects for higher pay, occupational mobility, and social status.
Huppatz manages to contribute to three research fields – gender, class, and occupation – by successfully linking them through the symbolic. Her analysis showcases the flexibility and capacity of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to consider intersecting identities and inequalities, beyond his primary focus on class. Against longstanding critiques of Bourdieu as simply a theorist of social reproduction, recent scholarship convincingly argues for Bourdieu’s usefulness in understanding class mobility. Gender Capital at Work is a welcome addition to research that uses Bourdieu to analyse social mobility as well as stasis, as it is a study of careers, of trajectories, involving spatial and social mobility as well as immobility. Huppatz’s empirical focus on the way people inhabit workplaces and spaces, the occupation-based practices of gender and class, allows us to see what happens in the course of people’s mobility, the interstices, beyond the comparison of the point A where someone starts and B where they end up. Her analysis is enriched by comparing four occupations. This study opens new possibilities for, and implicitly calls for, consideration of how gender and class intersect in every occupation, while convincingly offering methods for doing so. Work, we know, is at the heart of class. Gender Capital at Work prompts and reminds us that gender, too, is at the heart of class.