Making A Career: Reproducing Gender within a Predominately Female Profession

Abstract

In this study, I apply the perspective of gendered organizations to nursing and use ethnographically informed career biographies of nurse practitioners, a subset of highly credentialed nurses, to investigate the reproduction of gender by inclusionary institutional practices. My findings illustrate how nursing’s historically subordinate position as a female profession has led to institutional arrangements and aspirational resources for contemporary careers. Features such as flexible educational institutions and an extended credentials ladder allow women to recast structural constraints into individual possibilities. This recasting allows individuals to make careers but also recirculates notions of “flexible women” whose careers are institutionalized as secondary to family concerns.