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Women's Expertise, Men's Authority: Gendered Organisations and the Contemporary Middle Classes

In the past two decades there has been a striking rise in the number of women employed in managerial and (particularly) professional jobs throughout much of the advanced capitalist world!. Having been excluded from these sorts of jobs for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the apparent expansion of women employed in middle class jobs raises crucial issues about contemporary social change. From one angle the increased employment of professional and managerial women might be read as being of epochal significance, allowing women to move in significant numbers into high status occupational positions for the first time in human history. From another, however, these changes might be seen as cosmetic, as changing little the underlying patriarchal structures which continue to subordinate women to men. This chapter is an attempt to think through some of the implications of the increasing numbers of 'middle class women', with specific reference to research on contemporary Britain. One of the central arguments, however, is that in order to understand the significance of the expansion of the female professional and managerial workforce it is essential to relate the issue to the analysis of class formation, and in particular the role which organizational hierarchies play in processes of middle class formation. I intend to show that whilst women have moved into professional and 'skilled' jobs within the middle classes loosely defined they have rarely been able to secure positions of managerial authority within organizational hierarchies. Women have moved into positions of high expertise, but not into positions of high authority. I will argue that it is only by registering the significance of organizational structures as elements behind class