The sociology of professions and the profession of gender

Notwithstanding the growing numbers of women entering the professions and considerable public debate concerned with equal opportunity and barriers to women's advancement, attempts to theorise the relation between gender and profession within the discipline of sociology remain relatively rare. This paper draws on recent work on the gendering of organisation and bureaucracy to suggest that a key issue for consideration is not so much the exclusion of women from work defined as professional, but rather their routine inclusion in ill-defined support roles. This adjunct work of women, it is argued, facilitates the 'fleeting encounter' of professional practice, thereby resting on, and celebrating, a specific historical and cultural construction of masculinity and a masculinist vision of professional work. In an era where professions are under unprecedented public scrutiny, sociological attention to their renewal needs to recognise that a key feature of profession, as presently defined, is that it professes gender.