ABSTRACT
One of the aims of our research was to examine the extent to which gender differences in employment outcomes were influenced by differences in the motivations of men and women. We began planning our research in 1998, in the midst of the controversy regarding Catherine Hakim’s ‘preference theory’ (1998; 2000). Her idea, in brief, was that women’s labour market outcomes in rich modern societies could primarily be explained by their preferences: approximately one-fifth of women were ‘home-centred’, another fifth were ‘work-centred’, and the remaining majority were ‘adaptives’, wanting to combine work and home (2000:6). According to Hakim, this heterogeneity of preferences explained women’s secondary position in the labour market: only a minority of women shared the same ‘preference’ for a workcentred life as men, and thus only a minority shared men’s success. While we did not consider the concept of preferences as innate and immutable properties of individuals to be sociologically useful,1 we were interested in exploring whether women had particular orientations to work which shaped their labour market behaviour, and, in turn, outcomes. We see work orientations as being formed socially, and subject to alteration through interaction with a changing environment. Given such a definition, we did think it plausible that gender differences in socialisation and experience could lead women to have distinctive work orientations. Initially, therefore, we looked for differences in the work orientations of men and women in our data. But it quickly became clear that this was not a productive approach. Analysis of our data convinced us that similar-though not identical-work orientations were found among both sexes. The key gender differences in our data lay not in work orientations per se, but in the constraints and opportunities faced by men and women, particularly in terms of the gender division of labour in the household and gender norms. This chapter therefore analyses differences in the way that men and women with the same orientation to work responded to the challenges they faced in the labour market.
