Gender Stereotyping in Careers: lessons from a positive deviant’s approach

Introduction Careers in the UK are highly gendered. Despite awareness of this challenge amongst employers, little progress has been made in making these careers more gendered balanced. However, these sectors acknowledge the benefit for business of harnessing the skills typically associated with all genders.  The challenges of working in a gender minority career are well understood, however, less is known about why some people opt to work in a gender minority career, what influences their decision-making and helps them flourish.

Goals This research took a positive deviance approach to understand the experience of those opting for a gender minority career. Positive deviance is based on the observation that some individuals or communities have behaviours or strategies that enable them to have better solutions to problems than their peers whilst having the same resources and facing similar challenges. Twenty qualitative interviews were conducted with young people aged 26 and under who had opted to study or work in a gender minority area in Scotland to understand their career influencers, what attracted them to the sector and what continues to sustain them in their roles.

Results Using the positive deviance approach enabled the researchers to uncover the uncommon practices that enabled the young people to flourish in a gender minority career. The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. The images were analysed using Systematic Visuo-Textual Analysis (SVTA). The findings provide actionable insight for SDS (national skills agency for Scotland) and our partners.

Conclusions The research has lead to actionable insight for schools, the careers service and employers. The authors feel positive deviance could be applied to other social phenomena as a way to move away from a problem-focused approach to more of a participant-generated solutions-focused approach, building constructive insight which has the potential to lead to change in the gender balance of careers.