ABSTRACT
This chapter is about cultural variation not between societies, but between office workers in three different aspects of the welfare benefits system in the UK. It also examines how these variations influence the construction of gender relations within the workplace. These cultural differences may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer who passes between the different offices, but the staff involved were acutely aware of them and actively engaged with the public in such a way as to demonstrate these differences, both to themselves and to their colleagues. The processes which created this variation also produced different gender relations, but although these gender relations were constructed in very different ways in different contexts with very different types of femininity appearing, the net effect was always to subordinate the women’s position within the workplace.
