Get them while they're young

 
November 2005
 
What are the solutions to pay inequity and occupational segregation? Designing jobs to accommodate women’s lives, particularly family needs, and changing gender-stereotyped atti-tudes as early as kindergarten, according to Darel Hall, Director of the Industry Training Foundation (ITF).
 
 
The ITF’s position is that the gender imbalance in the Modern Apprenticeship scheme is best rectified by introducing more female-dominated professions into the scheme.
Industry training and Modern Apprenticeships should reflect their industry labour market.  But more industry training for women doesn’t necessarily mean the distribution of wages will be more equal.
 
Do you need to attract more women into higher-paid occupations? 
People even get out of nursing because of poor pay, shift work and the lack of ability to get childcare.  It is the job design and work organisation, as well as pay that matter more than training issues to get and keep women in an industry.  If you want to attract women into industries you have to think about those issues – childcare etcetera.  Training is really not the most important issue …It’s about job design, work design, and it’s about the decision-sets people form when they’re really young and the possible futures they see for themselves – ie the societal norms.
 
Is there a need to promote skilled trades to high school girls?

 
ITOs are doing that – you just need to go to the Coke Careers Expos to see that.   The question usually posed is “why aren’t more girls getting into traditional trades such as building and plumbing” and you see people who are not well informed trying to devise policy on the basis that training arrangements will make great societal changes to labour market structure. That’s quite dopey because it shows a lack of understanding about how people choose their work and how people choose their possible careers.  The decisions are being made a lot earlier than high school, in terms of the set of possible careers they might see for themselves. That’s preference of a range of work, not necessarily specific jobs. So by the time of five, you’ll find most boys playing with trucks and most girls playing with dolls. The socialisation processes are much earlier and much more embedded… if you get to the age of nineteen, it’s a bit too late to make gross societal changes through training interventions – although for individuals we all know it is possible. 

 
So you’d say forget about high school, get them at kindergarten?
The detail on how to effect societal change such as gendered role preference is not my area of expertise, but from what I have read it’s definitely much younger than the late teens. 
 
You often mention hairdressing. Why?
It’s a proxy for a bunch of foundation learning.  I think there is a section of young women in society in which the choices they see for themselves are quite limited, but hairdressing is one of them.  If they are getting some literacy and some numeracy skills, customer service skills, it doesn’t bother me if they don’t want to be a hairdresser at the end of it, it’s probably a good investment for society.  I would much prefer if they saw a broader decision set for themselves, and most industries scrabbling to get women would also prefer that – for example the electricity industry which has a very strong interest in getting to women. 
 
So how do you attract girls into these industries? 
What you do see are female-only taster courses for industries, and female networking sessions. Having females in your promo material does have an effect.  It sounds slightly trite but it remains true, and the ITOs believe it to be true. 
 
Whatever happened to the ‘Girls can do anything’ campaign? 
I wonder whether the time for something like that might be coming around again.  You’ve got engineering companies saying ‘hey we’re really interested in figuring out how to attract women into specific industries.’ Many of them are suffering skill and labour shortages…they have an interest in attracting women and Māori and Pacific people, to the extent of going to Samoa and trying to source people.  They’re more interested in labour and skills and less in gender and ethnicity and so on, and are more interested in what practical changes might have to be made to attract people to their industries.