Maintaining Gendered Practice: An ethnographic study of female maintenance trade workers in heavy industry

This work makes sense of the continued underrepresentation of women in manual trade occupations in heavy industry. It reveals that while legislation and employment policies have changed, conventional gendered practices in the cultural and social processes that structure daily life have not. The lived experiences of women demonstrate, that although cultural and social shifts in practice toward parity are being made in some workplaces, there is a lack of synchronicity of attitudes and practices outside of the workplace, creating a lag in social transformation. Identification of sociocultural lag between and within social fields is a key finding of this thesis.