Applicant
Thierry Rossier
Funded by
SNF Postdoc.Mobility, see Project Page
Duration
2021-2022
Cousin et al. (2018) recently argued that gendered diversity among elites has been understudied and call for more research on elite gendered relations, as this will improve our understanding of both power and masculine domination. This project follows this call by focusing on gendered relations in elite occupations (i.e. the top class of the professional, managerial and cultural occupations that constitute the main reservoir of governing elites; Friedman & Laurison 2019) and draws from gender studies, sociology of work and elite studies. It builds upon several other calls to study elites in a cross-national, historical and biographical perspective and seeks to fortify extant research that addresses gendered relations in elite occupations.
This project emphasises the gendered selection and gendered career dynamics in elite occupations. It addresses three research questions: (Q1) How is the European space of elite occupations structured between different national gender regimes? (Q2) How has this gendered structure evolved during the last 30 years? (Q3) What are the gendered pathways into elite occupations?
This research will be carried out in close collaboration with Prof. Sam Friedman at the London School of Economics. It builds upon the EU Labour Force Survey (EU LFS) data for Q1 and Q2. First, it creates the European space of elite occupations and studies subgroups of men and women thanks to multiple correspondence analysis, comparing differences among national gender regimes. Second, through the same technique, it focuses on the gendered evolution of these occupations in a smaller group of countries from different gender regime types. Third, for Q3, it builds upon extensive administrative data on the Danish population to focus on gendered pathways into elite occupations through sequence analysis, providing evidence from a country from the “Nordic” gender regime type.
This project will result in new theoretical outcomes on elite occupations by focusing on a gendered perspective through an original methodology. It will profit from the research environment at the LSE and S. Friedman’s conceptual and empirical knowledge of the topic. It aims at getting other researchers and the public to understand new dimensions of gender and class inequalities in European societies through analyses of the profiles and resources of the most powerful individuals. It will finally strengthen collaborations between researchers studying elites and gender at the European level.
