Teacher gender and career patterns

In general, across the world, the career trajectories of men and women are clearly differentiated. There has been much research that demonstrates men and women tend to occupy different positions in the workplace and there is a clear gender divide between some occupational groups, with, for example, men predominant in engineering and women in nursing (horizontal segregation), and a gender divide within many occupations, where men disproportionately occupy senior positions and women disproportionately more junior ones (vertical segregation, Hakim, 1979). Such divisions have most recently been confirmed by the British Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which, in its annual report, ‘Sex and Power: Who Runs Britain? (EHRC, 2008a), likened women’s progress in the workplace to that of a snail, and recorded a ‘worrying trend of reversal or stalled progress’ in terms of ‘women in top positions of power and influence across the public and private sectors.’