Gender in a caring profession
The most recent article from Matt Tidmarsh’s substantial piece of research on professional identity, culture and practice in probation looks at the feminisation of the profession. Published in the current edition of the Probation Journal, Gender in a ‘caring’ profession: The demographic and cultural dynamics of the feminisation of the probation service in England and Wales, starts by saying that the number of women working in occupations that lay claim to professional status has increased markedly in recent decades, but the speed and extent of the ‘feminisation’ of the probation service in England and Wales render it unique.
Change
Tidmarsh noes that this change has occurred against the backdrop of attempts to present the service in more ‘masculine’ terms, to increase punitiveness while maximising its efficiency.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 members of staff from across the probation estate, and with particular regard to the unification of services, he focused on three main issues:
- What skills and attributes are essential to professional probation practice?
- What working conditions are most advantageous for sustaining professional practice?
- How can unification of probation services contribute to enhancing professionalism in probation?
In this article he explores the demographic and cultural dynamics of feminisation with probation. The article argues that the sustained (and ongoing) devaluation of probation’s professional project, pay and working conditions have impacted retention and recruitment in such a way that has filtered into the gender composition of the service.
History
Dr Tidmarsh traces the gender composition of the service, from an approximate 70/30 split between men and women practitioners in the postwar period to 2006, when a ‘gender
switchover’ had reversed the ratio of two-thirds to one-third men/women in 1980. The latest HMPPS workforce figures (for September 2023) show that 75.7% of probation staff were women.
Conclusions
He goes on to argue despite efforts to embed within the service a ‘macho’ organisational culture of control, the influx of women entering the profession could be an unforeseen consequence of the cultural dimensions of feminisation – namely, an assault on probation’s professional project, including the degradation of pay and working conditions.
This certainly chimes with my personal experience. When I was a probation officer — admittedly so longer ago that one of my cases was a chap on life licence called Cain who had killed his brother — the service was roughly half and half men and women and we were paid (slightly better) than social workers and had excellent conditions of service including 36 days’ leave and the cost of home to office travel was reimbursed.
Dr Tidmarsh argues that Feminisation is a “productive lens” through which to study the interrelation between demographic and cultural trends in probation. For the interviewees in this study, recruitment trends has further entrenched the women-dominated nature of the profession.
A starting salary of just £23,637 in most parts of the country at PSO grade – the band at which most, including trainees enrolling on the PQiP, enter the service – has proved insufficient to entice second careerists into probation.
This means that the typical entrant is a recently qualified graduate who comes through the ‘pipeline’ from university-level social science courses to probation. That these degrees are also women-dominated has resulted in what many interviewees raised as a problem — that the lack of life experience in probation put much of the workforce at odds with the nature of its predominantly male caseload.
Tidmarsh is clear that he does not see the fact that the probation service is a mainly female career as a problem but argues that it does reflect falling professional status and pay and conditions.
Thanks to Christina for kind permission to use the header image in this post which was previously published on Unsplash.
One Response
I worked in Probation after working in prison. At that time in my probation area, the ratio of women to men was 70/30 but the ratio of managers was 30/70 and the trustees wanted to achieve more balance. The main changes in Probation nationally have been the disastrous policies of successive Governments: training cadres of qualified probation officers have suffered interruptions, creating gaps in the workforce; sub-contracting elements of the service to contractors has been littered with failures and extra costs; top-slicing funding to pay for regional management has not produced any of the benefits that justified the scheme and introduced a layer of obstacles; more recently, musical chairs in the home office have resulted in a succession of ineffective ministers. In my opinion, the decline in professional status is as mmore related to short term policies that have degraded the social and caring role of probation officers, turning the function into an administrative one and pursuing an ineffective policy of putting rehabilitative work out to arms length contractors, which is bound to cost more, introducing extra administration and management, and extracting profit from a public service. This was tried with the police, with the introduction of lower grades and contracting out; this approach was tried in prisons, with the attempt to transform prison officers to mere turnkeys and contract out meaningful work; and is currently destroying our National Health Service. I accept that some contractors may be fully imbued with the values that drive good public service, but as we have seen with many public services the overall effect is that profit taking and a lack of coordination will be detrimental to the overall mission, and occasionally will result in cynical exploitation