Paper Short Abstract:

In most Euro-American societies, teaching jobs in primary and secondary schools are predominated by women. Although Czechia’s teaching occupation took a slightly different path, it ended up in the same position. My aim is to describe what forms the experience of the teaching profession from the perspective of gender and what the feminisation of the profession looks like. I zoomed in on one VET secondary school in Czechia and drew from the five-year ethnographic research of the school, its management, staff and students. The distribution of powers and responsibilities was highly gendered and influenced the evaluation of a person's job.

Paper Abstract:

Gender has become an embedded organising category that shapes all our experiences. Male perspectives dominated fields of knowledge, shaping paradigms and methods (Babcock, 1987), and in many aspects, still do. Conrad’s concept (2021) of “women work” refers to “how women of the early twentieth century, who were increasingly entering the public sphere and outside-the-home employment, were discursively contained and diminished by subsuming their work into the (already-in-place) gendered logic of the domestic sphere” (Conrad, 2021, p. 101). As much as we have moved far from the early times and women have been in public jobs successfully for many decades, a lot of the gendered logic of occupations persisted. The teaching profession is a prime example. The profession is still, and even more than in the past, gendered.

I analyse data generated in five years of ethnographic research at Lego Upper Secondary Vocational School (SŠ Lego) through the lens of feminist theories of gendered work and its value. I show structural and experienced gendered teaching identity.

Male teachers are more represented at upper secondary schools than in primary and lower secondary; their role is largely different from that of female teachers there. Their position is that of a professional in the field who is not expected to do the “little things”, like administration. However, a man is called to help when greater power is necessary. It shows the stereotype of man greater authority and the stereotype of women caring and being kind, perhaps too kind to be taken seriously.