TheWeekinCareers - Guest Blog: Improving gender balance within the career development sector

Full text below of my guest blog post that appeared in today's #TheWeekInCareers on one of my favourite topics, the gender balance within the career development sector.

#TheWeekInCareers: Episode 106 Link

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“It has only crossed my mind when you’ve pointed it out. I’ve never really associated it as a sort of woman’s role.”

These are the words of a CIAG Modern Apprentice I interviewed a few years ago as part of my PhD. As career professionals we are all familiar with concepts of occupational segregation and gender balance, or lack thereof, across employment roles and sectors. I am concerned about the presence of occupational segregation within our own field.

Diversity matters for our profession. As public facing advisers, we need to reflect the demographics of the public. Ok, so on the occupational segregation front, it’s not as marked in CIAG as other sectors (I’m not going to list them here, we know what they are), but we could do better.

However, there are other reasons why this really matters for CIAG  and why I mention it so much. From my research, I have found that the wider literature on career influencers suggests that women may have a stronger presence in relation to young people’s career choices than men, although I would be the first to remind everyone that women are not a homogeneous group. The gendering of career decision-making support is then potentially also influenced, if not reinforced, by the predominance of women in frontline career guidance adviser roles. Is this “women’s work” to sort out everyone’s careers, on top of all the other additional burdens we know women carry in relation to life’s caring responsibilities?

The CIAG gender split

How can we tell we work in a sector that has a gender imbalance? Well, look around. A review of the Career Development Institute professional register easily highlights a bias towards those who present as women. The same applies when we look collectively at staff employed by university or college career services and national and regional agencies; there are simply more women than men working in the sector. It’s in the region of a 70:30 split in favour of women. As a Senior Lecturer on a postgraduate career guidance and development programme, I can tell you, as can my fellow academics across the UK, that this is a statistic that plays out every year amongst our applications and intake.

Best practice leads to good outcomes

Here in Scotland, dedication to equality of opportunity is a priority for Skills Development Scotland (SDS), and work is continuously undertaken to promote equality and inclusion across their work and their staff.

As part of my PhD, I looked at the nature and efficiency of work undertaken to address occupational segregation with the CIAG sector itself via Modern Apprenticeship (MA) provision within SDS. Within the Skills Development Scotland Careers Information Advice and Guidance Equality Action Plan, the Modern/Technical Apprenticeship route was clearly cited as a mechanism via which the organisation sought address the figures for under-represented groups in their CIAG workforce (Skills Development Scotland, 2019).

SDS was at that point employing in the region of 600 staff across CIAG roles and the gender split within operational staff was 78% women to 22% men. SDS was undertaking work to address this. In this blog post I want to draw attention ways in which we might be able to continue to improve on their good practice and consider the presentation of occupational segregation in the sector in more depth.

I interviewed male apprentices in the CIAG sector, to help explore the extent to which gender atypical apprentices attribute and relate their career decisions to gendered influences and influencers. Although the numbers on this apprenticeship framework are small, I discovered clear evidence of success in positive action within MA recruitment, in relation to gender (and other equality characteristics, but that’s for another blog post!).

Drawing attention to a visible issue

How do we view the occupational segregation in our sector? Let’s hear from the apprentices themselves, rather than from me. In most cases, gender bias within the sector simply hadn’t been something the men interviewed had explicitly considered before joining the CIAG workforce.

Interviewees directly recruited to their apprenticeship were clear that their vacancies were specifically targeted for “people like them,” which encouraged them to apply. One interviewee, for example, explicitly noted that the MA offered a route into working for an employer he had not previously considered, in a role and sector outside of his prior consideration. Another interviewee noticed on the SDS vacancy advertisement that applications from men were encouraged, and the statement on the vacancy advertisement encouraging male applicants appealed to him. As with the other direct applicants, he was surprised to learn of the female bias in the sector and was surprised by the revelation of a gender bias.

Another interviewee showed awareness of gender as a bias in the workplace but emphatically prioritised age as a more pressing equality concern. Having worked in the sector for some time before moving on to a MA he was perhaps the most aware of occupational segregation in the sector, and explicit in that the female bias had never been a concern to him. 

Some of the interviewees did not actually perceive themselves as being under-represented by gender in the sector. Is this because they personally perceive it as unimportant to them? Is this a perception held more widely by those who enter occupations within the underrepresented gender? While there is scope to further research the intentions of those who willingly entered a sector in which they knew they would be underrepresented, it would be worth exploring the stage at which gender segregation within an occupation or role becomes an issue. One interviewee indicated how he had previous contact with SDS as a customer, but that much of it had been by email so he hadn’t considered the gender of the sender.

A tipping point at which gender bias isn’t seen to be detrimental as an issue or is most easily combatable has implications. Perhaps the greatest risk in future pertains to those whose awareness is not brought to gender imbalances in their occupations or sectors; this can be mitigated by an understanding that gender imbalance should be a topic for discussion in any workplace, including ours.

A call to action: keep talking about it

Are things improving? I would be very cautious about drawing any sweeping conclusion from the trends until we consistently reach a more balanced intake at training and entry level roles.

You can help by being vocal about how you would like to see better gender balance across the sector whenever you can. And, of course, a straightforward piece of positive action in relation to diversity overall always makes a difference. The inclusion of text on course information or job vacancies that states you would particularly welcome applications from those who are represented in our sector, in your organisation and/or your programme – stating exactly who they are – goes further than you might think.