- 10.00: Trial lecture: "Traditions and controversies regarding analysis in qualitative research"
- 12.00: Public defence.
Opponents
- First opponent: Dr Barbara Read, University of Glasgow.
- Second opponent: professor Kari Nyheim Solbrække, University of Oslo.
- Leader of the committee: professor Kåre Heggen, OsloMet.
Leader of the public defence is centre director Beate Elvebakk, Centre for the Study of Professions, OsloMet.
The candidate's supervisors are professor Håvard Helland (OsloMet) and Julia Orupabo (The Institute for Social Research).
Summary
Norway is ranked as one of the most gender-equal countries in the world. Yet, Norway has, like most countries, a gender divided labour market. How does this division of work affect young men and women’s interest in and assessment of different occupations? The labour market is one of the most important social arenas in which expectations are formed about what people are good at and suited for. What men and women do in a given society shape cultural assumptions in that society about the interests and competencies of men and women.
This thesis is an exploration of such cultural assumptions among students and teachers in two gender-typed study fields in Norway; nursing studies and nautical science studies. The study qualitatively investigates how assessments of competence intersect with gender and explores what shapes notions of suitability in the education.
Although much research is devoted to educational and occupational gender segregation, the male minority position has been comparatively little studied within this literature. Moreover, most of the research on gender non-traditional choices, or on gender inclusion and exclusion in education, is done within either male-dominated or female-dominated fields of study.
Data
The empirical material in this study is produced by the means of individual interviews with and observation among both male and female students in both study programs. The thesis thus brings new insights to what shapes processes of inclusion – sustaining diverse views of who belongs, and exclusion – a narrowing of who belongs, in gender-typed study fields.
The study investigates on the one hand the role of gender in the students’ accounts of their educational pathways and how young people in Norway reflect around the making of gender traditional and gender non-traditional choices of education. On the other, the study enquires how institutionally embedded assessments of competence in the two study fields interconnect with conceptions of gender. This double attention allows for analyzing what feeds processes of gender inclusion and exclusion both regarding the entry to gender-typed study fields and the shaping of notions of suitability and belonging in the education context.
Conceptually, the thesis proposes a theoretical composite of boundary theory, repertoire theory and gender frame theory. Building on the insights generated by the combination of these perspectives, I study gender inclusion and exclusion in gender typed study fields through processes of categorisation and valuation. This conceptualisation helps grasp under what conditions gender inclusion and exclusion take shape.
Discussion
The findings show that assessments of competence and notions of gender had different intersections in nursing and in nautical science. Based on three empirical articles, the thesis suggests that understandings of how educational fields or types of competence are gendered require attention to both the conceptions of gender available to people through the society at large, and the institutional frame within which individuals are acting, as well as the dynamic relationship between these contexts.
Furthermore, the study displays pluralistic and adaptable notions of gender and competence among the students. Such variability, interpreted as a plurality of cultural resources available to frame
gender and competence, is conceptualised as carrying the potential for change in the processes sustaining gender exclusion in gender typed study fields.
