Gender inequality in manager recruitment: The case of welfare professions

Abstract

Becoming a manager is, in many occupations, easier for men, persons from the ethnic majority, or middle- or upper classes. This paper examines whether this is the case in Danish welfare professions. These constitute a career pathway for women, for people belonging to the working class and ethnic minorities. Their ethos embrace values traditionally associated with femininity, and both these aspects of welfare work might counter the inequalities prevalent elsewhere in society. The paper asks whether prevalent dominance relationships of gender are being reproduced within welfare professions through unequal access to management, how these relations intersect with class and ethnicity, and whether this changed between 1980-2020? We analyze these intersections for the 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 cohorts of welfare professionals. We examine microdata on socioeconomic origins of the professionals and their careers, using logistic regressions, and find that men and persons outside the working class have privileged access to management, in all years examined. This is also the case for the ethnic majority, but since the population contains only a small fraction of ethnic minority persons, this is because of social closure at recruitment to the profession, rather than management.