Gender Imbalance In The Early Years WorkforcE

Gender Imbalance In The Early Years Workforce. I want to look at why so few men enter childcare

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION3

2. LITERATURE REVIEW8

3. METHOD12

4. RESULTS19

5. SUMMARY, DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS26

REFERENCES36

APPENDIX39

Gender Imbalance in the Early Years Workforce: Men in Childcare

1. Introduction

Background

A recurring obstacle to the full participation of women in employment is the detail that women have the dual problem of work and household care (Fine-Davis, Fagnani, Giovannini, Hojgaard, and Clarke, 2004). The customary outlook is that childcare is 'women's work' and is certain thing men will not or manage not do. Encouraging men into childcare trials these prejudices and encourages equality in functions between men and women, both at dwelling and in the workplace.

The Men in Childcare Pilot Project was conveyed out in alignment to insert an innovative set about to gender mainstreaming at the early phases of a child's life when mind-set to gender functions are being formed. The Project was evolved to focus the require to desegregate a gendered profession and was the first of its kind to be conveyed out in an Irish context. It engaged two phases. The first was to boost more men into childcare through a crusade to employ men into the living FÁS Childcare Traineeship, and the second was to assess the consequences of men as childcare workers.

This engaged collaboration with FÁS, one of the partners of the National Flexi-work Partnership, as well as childcare providers in the public and personal sectors. Thus the navigate engaged an activity constituent and a study component. These will be recounted in minutia in Sections 2 and 3. Before recounting the task and the outcomes of the study, it may first be helpful to recount the rationale for the task in the context of some of the key outcome of preceding study in this area. 1.2 Rationale for the Men in Childcare Project Looking after and taking care of children has conventionally been categorised as certain thing that mothers do. Consequently childcare services are often glimpsed as proposing mothering alternates (Cameron, Moss and Owen, 1999). It is no shock then that the childcare profession is comprised of an nearly all-female workforce even though study has shown that young men and young women both advantage from combining with affirmative and nurturant male function models. Chick, Heilman-Houser and Hunter (2002) contend that childcare hubs should address the 'hidden messages' that all-female childcare hubs may drive to children. One such note is that childcare is certain thing that men will not or will not manage and that by  extension, nurturing of any sort is a task that is vitally “unmanly”. The occurrence of caregivers of both sexes illustrates to children that men as well as women can be carers.

Men can supply function forms for children in a nurturing context and display that “manliness can encompass caring” (Parkin, 1997).Male childcare workers can dispute stereotyped outlooks of women and childcare, i.e., customary and broadly held convictions that work in childcare is 'naturally' gendered in periods ...