Gill South: Career choices for women

Women who opt to work in male dominated industries are all pretty single-minded about what they're doing. Pictured: Jillene Managh, then Rotorua's only female firefighter in 2003 / Rotorua Daily Post

For women opting to work in male dominated industries, there is something they all have in common. They are all pretty single minded about what they were doing, have made their decision after much consideration.

And, once they were doing it in an applied way, they were even more convinced that they had made the right decision. The strong minded ones will give their formerly male dominated profession their own feminine twist.

Two woman architects, Carolyn Smith and Hilary Scully of Smith+Scully, said in the recent Herald Careers article that actually architecture was a profession well suited to women, as they were the excellent communicators.

Smith said she was pleased she had challenged herself to do architecture and that she had met women who hadn't done that with their careers and regretted it.

Are young women coming out of school with stronger ambitions and an expectation that they can go into any career they want? Are they seeking the advice they need?

According to young women graduates I have spoken to, the careers advice for boys and girls in school is negligible so the choices being made tend to be influenced by the parents and the students themselves. Nothing has really changed.

Parents' desires still have a strong influence on what careers women choose.

Young 19 year old Massey engineering student Banu Pashutanizadeh, who had wanted to be an aeronautical engineer since the age of 9, made the decision on her own -she was doing it because she was crazy about planes.

It didn't hurt that her father had also been an aeronautical engineer too – and he was delighted about the path she was following. Her girlfriends in India, however, who were also studying engineering, were doing it largely to please their fathers. They had the academic capability but weren't necessarily in love with it as a career.

According to the executive of the NZ Industry Training Federation, Jeremy Baker there are simply some occupations which women gravitate towards and others which men graduate towards and this is undoubtedly true.

But as women carve themselves family friendly niches in formerly male dominated professions like law or architecture, it appears that women don't just want to work in health and education.

Women law graduates now outnumber male graduates and women also outnumber men in medicine. Talking to a brand new lawyer recently, she felt optimistic about her ability to have a family and an interesting career. She also wanted to work and study internationally. The world was her oyster.


Gill South, author, "Because We're Worth It" a "where to from here" for today's working mother.