Abstract
The decline of masculinised industries across the Global North is well documented; however, to date, there has been relatively little discussion of feminised paid care work in formerly industrial areas. Drawing on evidence of gendered and classed ‘care trajectories’ into paid adult social care and childcare care work in one such area, Teesside, North-East England, our findings show continuities with research documenting entrenched problems with low-paid, insecure work. We argue that greater recognition, increased valorisation and markedly improved care work employment conditions would bring wide-reaching benefits to places where they now comprise a large share of local employment.
Introduction
The idea of ‘social reproduction’ has been adopted by theorists across different traditions, such as feminism and Marxism, and within several disciplines. There can be varying nuance in meaning attributed, but many use it to refer to the ways social organisation is reproduced across time. In particular, there is an interest in ‘the ways in which the daily and generational renewal of human life (and thus of human labour power) is absolutely essential to the decade-over-decade tenacity not merely of inequality, but of capitalism’ (Ferguson, nd). Change and the organisation of care work have become of central interest to those focusing upon social reproduction because, during the 2000s, supranational (for example, the European Union) and national governments actively promoted women’s engagement in the labour market as a way of achieving economic growth while remediating social ills, such as poverty (Hayes, 2017). Record numbers of women have become economically active; central to this has been a shift from unpaid care work to paid care work, with adult social care (ASC) (Hayes, 2017) and childcare (White et al, 2016) employment expanding significantly across many countries.
As expanding ASC and childcare have remained distinctive and increasingly specialised forms of paid care work, it is tempting to view them separately. A growing body of research considering social reproduction and care, including that focused upon the labour conditions of varied care workers, indicates that this risks missing important ongoing aspects of convergence. Women continue to perform the bulk of paid and unpaid social and childcare work (Razavi, 2015: 423). Indeed, past path-breaking research (Skeggs, 1997; Walkerdine et al, 2001; Osgood, 2005) set in England revealed the gendered and classed nature of differing types of care work. Studies since, through the lens of social reproduction theory, document how both expanding ASC and childcare work across England and many other countries continues to be undertaken by working-class women, with minority ethnic groups often over-represented (Williams, 2018). Recent research shows how ASC and childcare work continues to be among the lowest-paid forms of employment across differing societies (Aulenbacher et al, 2018; Perrier, 2022; Farris et al, 2024).
Despite expanding and becoming more specialised, the systematic undervaluation of paid care work of different types means that poor wages and working conditions persist. Governments hold power to legislate to raise the pay and esteem of this work, and they are implicated in the continuation of low pay. Insufficient funding from successive governments is widely viewed to have perpetuated the poor pay and conditions evident in care employment in England (Hayes, 2017). Despite changes to paid care work’s nature, unchanging skills hierarchies based upon stereotypes also remain embedded into the logic of capitalist social relations rather than being an expression of the features of jobs themselves. This continues to shape labour market rewards for paid care work, which are embedded in social reproduction and drive social inequalities.
While those adopting a social reproduction lens within a new global sociology of care offer valuable insights about care work in the context of the gendered and classed structuring of the political economy, this work has been critiqued for tending towards economic reductionism (Williams, 2018). There is focus upon care work as a site for the socio-economic reproduction of gender and class inequalities in labour and the functional labour of care as essentially important to capitalism, but what gets downplayed are the biographical and agentic aspects of care work (Williams, 2018: 549), with care workers portrayed as passive in the wider determining of social reproduction. Missing is an explicit focus upon how care workers’ biographies might be of influence and how they navigate or negotiate these processes.
Accordingly, our central objective is, we believe for the first time, to consider, map and attempt to explain a sample of recent workers’ ‘care trajectories’ (Gil, 2022) into both the ASC and childcare sectors as a way of illuminating a fuller account of entry into paid care work within conditioning structures and common socio-economic, political and cultural contexts (Williams, 2018). This involved drawing on the accounts of front-line ASC and childcare workers at the centre of the processes that social reproduction theorists consider, though less frequently talk about: their care trajectories. Limited previous research has asked workers (overwhelmingly women) about how they enter or come to be in paid care work. We did this in one locality, that of deindustrialised Teesside in North-East England, as it is typical of other places across the Global North where traditional industries dominated by men have declined and care work in varying forms has come to comprise a larger share of paid employment. Additionally, this helps us demonstrate the empirical scope of the concept of care trajectories, as discussed in the following.
ASC and childcare quasi-markets in England
The recent literature on the global sociology of care and social reproduction reveals how the grand narrative of neoliberalism and the pursuit of marketisation and quasi-marketisation are economic shifts influencing care work and the classed and gendered social reproduction of care work across different countries and care work forms (Aulenbacher et al, 2018). ASC in England operates as a ‘quasi-market’ (Le Grand, 1991), where local authorities have statutory powers over funding, commissioning and arranging care. In recent decades, the delivery of care services has migrated to the ‘independent’ sector, which consists of charitable and, in most cases, private providers (SFC, 2023: 29–47). ASC work in England is characterised by a deep and long-standing labour shortage, flux and high turnover, continuing very low pay, and poor status and conditions (SFC, 2023). Across England, these problems disproportionately impact over-represented groups: women comprise 81 per cent of ASC workers (SFC, 2023: 90), and they are overwhelmingly working class (Hayes, 2017: 7). Minority ethnic groups are over-represented in this racialised work, though this is not the case in North-East England, where our research setting, Teesside, is situated (SFC, 2023: 92–4).
Similarly, ‘a mixed market economy of childcare’, with a significant element of private and for-profit provision, operates in England (Lloyd and Penn, 2013: 6). In the English childcare market, services have expanded significantly since the year 2000, and working-class women dominate childcare education pathways and employment. Within paid childcare in 2021, group-based and school-based childcare providers both reported 97 per cent of paid staff as female (Department for Education, 2022). Globally, minority ethnic groups are over-represented among the childcare workforce, though, as with ASC, this is not the case across Teesside (Navani and Florisson, 2023). Rapid policy developments in childcare have included workforce remodelling to try to raise the quality and status of the expanding childcare workforce (Bonetti, 2019). Through the introduction of the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework in 2008 and its subsequent reforms, childcare workers became early educators and carers. ‘Schoolification’ in the early years – making young children ready for primary school – has meant an increased focus in childcare upon the academic and cognitive development of infants. Despite these developments over time, however, childcare work, like ASC work, has remained gendered, classed, poorly rewarded and insecure, and it continues to suffer from low skills visibility, with its complexity often missed. This means that it is systematically undervalued (Findlay et al, 2009).
Within their respective market models, ASC and childcare providers across England are heavily funded via public finances, but austerity from 2010 restricted state investment. Moreover, across the English quasi-markets, with much private for-profit provision made by large companies, their financial strategies reward investors via profit maximisation while perpetuating and worsening working conditions for the large, growing and persistently low-paid ASC and childcare workforces (Simpson et al, 2018; Farris et al, 2024: 1). This widespread devaluation of paid care work in England has been reproduced over decades and negatively impacts wages, working conditions, productivity and the economic footprint of the sector. This results in what Williams (2018: 547) terms ‘crises of care’, through care policy directions that have failed to produce ‘gender-just outcomes’ (Plomien, 2019).
Care trajectories within the life course
In this context of social reproduction, care markets and inequalities, we drew upon life-course theory to achieve our central objective of a detailed exploration of care trajectories into care work. The ‘life course’ is a multidisciplinary research paradigm for the study of people’s lives within structural contexts and through social change (Elder, 1985; 1994). The central focus is personal experience and ‘a sequence of socially defined events and roles that the individual enacts over time’ (Giele and Elder, 1998: 22). There are several central concepts within life-course theory, including transition, (care) trajectory and life events, which helped us make sense of our data on entry into care work (Hutchinson, 2011).
Common life transitions include, for example, the education-to-work transition and the ongoing employment transition through the life course. The employment transition also intersects with other transitions, for instance, the family (or domestic) transition, and there is much overlap. Care trajectories happen within employment transitions, and we also connect them to the domestic transition. We conceptualise care trajectories as a continuation of a pathway with an emphasis upon investment in paid care work over a relatively long period. As Gil (2022: 2157) notes, to understand care trajectories, one should consider care workers’ ‘educational and social profile, family experiences of caring, the reasons for choosing the profession, [and] what daily care work means’. The concept of ‘life events’ is important, as they can result in change into or from care trajectories, with some, as we highlight later, being turning points that result in a lasting change into a care trajectory. We also consider human agency as essential to painting a fuller picture of how and why people enter care work.
Previous work on care trajectories is rare and has been largely confined to a consideration of them in the context of unpaid care for adults (Keating et al, 2019). In the following, we show how a dual focus upon care trajectories in ASC and childcare, informed by the life-course perspective, is fruitful in offering important insights around common experiences of paid care work (in)security and the importance of considering influences in biographies often missing from care and social reproduction research. The care trajectories we identify, therefore, contain much of relevance to ongoing international debates on paid care employment and gender inequality (ILO and WHO, 2022), as well as on redistributing resolutely segregated care work (ILO, 2018).
Methodology
As noted, our focus is upon Teesside, North-East England, where all the data discussed here were gathered. The ASC data were generated as part of a study funded by Teesside University. This comprised semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 current and former young adult care workers between November 2018 and November 2019. Additionally, six young people were interviewed (in June 2018) at the start of a six-week, college-based care training course, which led to a job interview with a local care provider if completed successfully. All six care training course participants were aged between 18 and 30, as well as ten of the ASC workers (the exception was a woman aged 34 who had been an ASC worker for 15 years). The care training course participants consisted of five women and one man. All were looking for work, and their work histories, education levels and housing arrangements pointed to them being from broadly working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds.
The ASC worker group consisted of eight women and three men. Nine self-identified as working class, and nine self-identified as White British, with the remaining two being a mixed-race woman and a British Asian woman. The gender split reflects England’s ASC workforce’s highly gendered composition. Workers who are neither white nor British are over-represented in ASC work in England, but this sample’s high proportion of White British workers mirrors the North-East picture (SFC, 2019: 64–7). Direct care work includes variations on the care worker position, for example, care assistant and (one level up) senior care worker. Nine were direct care workers (SFC, 2019: 27), and the other two were more senior. Participants worked in various care settings, including residential care, homecare and live-in care, and one no longer did paid care work. Recruitment across the sample came from a combination of personal and work networks, direct contact, and snowballing. Ethical approval was received for the project, and key ethical practices included using pseudonyms for care workers and not revealing specific details about their employers or workplaces.
The data from childcare workers were generated through three projects at Teesside University. These projects focused upon (1) professionalisation in childcare from 2010 to 2012 (involving interviews with ten participants) (Simpson, 2011) and childcare workers’ responses to poverty (2) in 2013 and (3) in 2020 (including, among others, ten interviewees across Teesside in each project) (Simpson et al, 2023). All 30 interviewees participated in one study only.
The childcare projects adopted qualitative semi-structured interviewing. Childcare workers in each study had all worked in early years settings for several years, working their way up to being ‘senior practitioners’ when interviewed in nurseries and Sure Start (the English equivalent of Early Head Start in the US) settings. All were qualified at either Level 5 or 6 on the English National Qualifications Framework (equivalent of Levels 5 and 6 in the European Qualification Framework [EQF]), meaning that they had obtained a sector-endorsed Early Years Foundation Degree or a BA (Hons) Early Childhood degree. Using income as an indicator of social class, their low incomes indicated a broadly working-class position. Financial insecurity is a feature of the childcare workforce at all levels, and it has been almost exclusively working class for a long time (Osgood, 2005). Participant ages ranged from the mid-20s to mid-40s, and all were White British women (thus reflecting the almost exclusively female childcare workforce). Compared with the average in England, the childcare workforce in Teesside has a much smaller share of workers from all minority ethnic backgrounds (Navani and Florisson, 2023).
Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was undertaken within both the ASC and the childcare projects and as part of this study, drawing upon those data from across the projects. Key common intersecting themes explored in each study were workers’ respective backgrounds, entry into care work and progress within this employment. The samples were heterogeneous, but across the projects, interviewees were asked about how and why they had entered either ASC or childcare employment. Even if they were older and/or had longer service, they reflected upon their entry into these sectors. Thematic analysis was rigorously completed and the authors as ‘inter-coders’ entered into reflexive engagement and dialogue when scrutinising and considering the data from the respective projects (O’Connor and Joffe, 2020). The repeated engagement with the data demonstrates a good level of procedural objectivity and that the process undertaken was trustworthy (valid). Full ethical approval was gained from Teesside University to undertake all the projects from which the data are drawn for this article, and ethical propriety was ensured throughout.
Findings: Care Trajectories 1, 2, 3 and 4
Care Trajectory 1: Family members’ experience of care employment influencing individuals’ pursuit of paid ASC work
My dad’s worked in care homes all my life, so I was always visiting people, I was very, like, as a child, I was at the fetes, the Christmas parties, everything like that. I was known by the residents and obviously saw a lot come and go, and I was part of the culture already.
They had an outdoor centre, but it was, like, they had groups of people with learning disabilities or mental health or young offenders or that kind of thing coming and staying for, like, a week or two weeks, and it was residential, so they lived, like, in the same house as us and then, so I grew up around that, I just feel like I loved that environment and having that, there was always stuff going on, and it was always, like, interesting, and it made me and my brother very open to different cultures and different needs, and I would just like, just like to create something similar myself.
Like Teresa, service manager James (age 27) had family members with experience of ASC work, and this made him aware of it. His sisters and mother had ‘always done’ paid ASC work, and his brother previously worked for James’s employer. Contrasting with the less direct role of Teresa’s parents in her route to paid ASC work, James’s brother made the initial contact on his behalf to introduce James to his ex-employer.
I think, just in general, the whole, the whole idea of it really, just helping people and making sure that they pass away peacefully and just, my mum did health and care work, and she said that it was quite a rewarding thing as well, so, you know, that pushed me to do the same as what she sort of did.
Ah well, as a kid, I’d kinda grew up with, like, family members being, like, nurses and working in the care sector, so I kinda knew roughly what it was kind of about, so, it’s not really forced into, but it’s something I had, like, an idea I wanted to do.
Care Trajectory 2: Experience of unpaid care with adults influencing pursuit of paid ASC work
Others have established the connection between experiencing unpaid care work and pursuing a trajectory into paid care work, particularly among working-class women (Gil, 2022). The empirical scope of the concept of care trajectory was cemented in this pathway with a clear finding that previous unpaid care experience influenced entry into paid ASC and childcare work for some we spoke with in Teesside. Across the 17 prospective, current and former paid ASC workers, ten had experience of unpaid care for adult family members in advance of starting their work or course: four of the six care training course participants and six of the 11 current or former care workers.
Of the care training course participants, Alison, Helen, Wendy and Carol all had unpaid care experience (with adults) prior to starting the course. Helen (age 27) took the care training course with a view to starting out in paid ASC work, and she was offered a position once she completed the course. Her decision to do the course was shaped by seven years of caring for family members: ‘another reason I got, like, interested in care as well is because I’ve helped family members’. The length of time that she has done this indicates sustained, longer-term caring responsibilities (she mentioned mental health needs being an element of this) and that she has done it from a young age.
I just keep coming back to it, like, I’ll go off and try and do something else, and I always end up back at this point wanting to work in care. I don’t know, I think it’s ‘cos I’ve been my grandma’s carer as well, it’s just normal. I dunno, I just, I really like it, it’s interesting.
Towards the end of this quote, Carol refers to her interest in care work’s intrinsic nature, and she also invokes her sense of care work being ‘normal’ for her, which is notable in the context of its naturalisation and feminisation. This normality is tied to her unpaid care for her grandmother, and she has also played a role in her father’s care. Her father’s care included supporting his mental health needs, and she said that her experiences with him have led to her not being phased by the prospect of working with people with such conditions.
Naturalisation is relevant to the account of another care training course participant, Alison (age 27), for whom doing paid ASC work has been a long-standing aim: ‘I’ve always been, like, I wanted to do some care, but I just don’t have the, I’ve never done care, I’ve never got the qualifications, I’ve never been– The only thing I’ve done with care is I used to be a carer for my dad.’ In addition to caring for her father, at the time of the interview, Alison was an unpaid carer for her grandfather.
They also had other carers that would come. I couldn’t go there every single day, but I was thinking at the time, ‘I think I could do that job’, but I was, like, ‘I’m not sure if I wanna do that. I’m not sure’, yet, but I used to always think, like, after seeing them, after leaving, I think, ‘I could do this as a job’, but it took a while before I decided, ‘Yeah, I’m going to’.
Before she took up paid care work, field care supervisor Sonali (age 20) cared for her grandmother alongside her sister and her mother (Sonali was in her mid-teens when she did this). Again, this guided her choice to take up care work: ‘I think because I felt I was good at it and I knew what I was doing, I kind of felt like this is something maybe that I can do and maybe something that I will succeed at.’
Care Trajectory 3: School into childcare education and paid childcare work as an extended youth transition
Starting out at college, my aim was to go off and do my primary teaching, but because at school I didn’t pass my GCSE maths or science [EQF Level 3], I had to resit, and, unfortunately, I did worse at college than I did at school…. I had to take a different career path.
For Claire, childcare became a less desirable career path than teaching, but she noted how alongside resitting GCSE maths and science, ‘I went to college and completed my BTEC National Diploma in Childhood Studies’ (EQF Level 3). After failing her GCSEs again but gaining her childcare diploma, she left college and worked as a nanny and then in a private day nursery.
When I was young, I wanted to be a teacher, always wanted to be a teacher. Discovered when I went to senior school that … too much work, wasn’t going to progress to that point. Always thought I was a bit … and without sounding stupid, I always thought I was a bit thick. Wasn’t going to get to that level. Then, I left school and went into the hairdressing because it was an easy option. Didn’t really like that, so I went into the beauty; hated that. And decided that, when I was 19, my dad was sick of hearing us moaning about ‘I wish I had a job I liked’. ‘Go to college.’ And I decided, at that point, nursery nursing was what I wanted to do, and the rest, as I say, is history.
I qualified as a nursery nurse, and I’ve always worked in daycare settings. So, I started out as a nursery nurse, childcare practitioner, whatever…. So, I went in a bit later at 19 into childcare. And I’ve always worked in private daycare, and I just worked my way up through the ranks, if you like, and came here.
After school, I went straight to do my BTEC childcare at [a local FE college in Teesside] and then straight into employment about six months after doing that. I didn’t want to in the beginning. I wanted to do … I wanted to go down the route of solicitor or something, but I didn’t know what grades I’d get, so the careers woman said, ‘Why don’t you try childcare?’, and it was just easier to do a BTEC [a childcare vocational qualification at Level 3 in the EQF] … so I just went straight into childcare and I’ve been there ever since.
Care Trajectory 4: Experience of unpaid childcare influencing the pursuit of paid childcare work
I wanted to find out more about children and the way they worked, the way their little minds work when they’re doing, and plus I had, like I say, two children of my own, and my youngest was only two then, so I was really intrigued. My little girl used to go to the preschool … and my little boy had been there, and they asked me, one of those, ‘You’re not looking for a job, are you?’. It was one of those and I went, ‘Ooh, yes, I am’. And that’s how it all started.
So, somebody asked if I wanted to work with children and just as a fill in gap because I had two little children of my own, I said ‘yes’ and then went to do my NVQ2 at [a local FE college], and then went to do my NVQ3 [EQF Levels 2 and 3] And then went on to do my foundation degree [EQF Level 5].
Anne’s experience shows how recruiting mothers with ‘mothering skills’ has been encouraged as part of the childcare workforce strategy. However, Findlay et al (2009: 423) indicate how ‘mothering skills’ are largely ‘irrelevant to the complex task of caring for other peoples’ children’, hence the training requirements. This association with mothering avoids conceptualising childcare as ‘pedagogy’. In other countries where childcare is conceptualised as ‘pedagogy’, it is better paid and has a higher status and value, for instance, in Scandinavia, where childcare workers are known as ‘social pedagogues’.
I was a police officer, yeah, doing whatever, you know. Catching baddies and … you know, that was for seven years, and then when my daughter, my eldest daughter, was two and a half, I was finding the police very, very difficult because it was long shifts, there was no job share, no part-time working, no career break.
They have a career structure, but I am stuck at the minute. There isn’t a career structure beyond this…. I cannot hang around here much longer on this salary. I have done it because I love it, but … unless there is the recognition and the ability to actually develop yourself, you can’t hang around.
Discussion
Given the discussion of social reproduction earlier, it is unsurprising that our interviewees’ narratives and our findings offer consistent evidence of the enduring gendered and classed milieu of paid and unpaid care work for young, working-class women. Paid work in ASC and childcare remains overwhelmingly segregated, with women’s numerical dominance steadfast (and near exclusive in the case of childcare). Moreover, this is classed employment, with working-class women dominating these workforces. What our findings show is some of the processes by which paid care work connects with the biographies of young working-class women and how its different forms are embedded within their entry into care trajectories. A crucial point to emphasise here is that these patterns remain; they are entrenched. Path-breaking works by Skeggs (1997), Walkerdine et al (2001) and Osgood (2005) illustrate how young women (and men) learn to do gendered and classed work and become workers in gendered and classed educational and employment settings. Our findings chime with these works decades on and thus highlight the enduring nature of these trends across generations, consecutive governments and policy changes and reforms, and within wider ongoing socio-economic and cultural shifts.
Care Trajectories 2 and 4 highlight one of the key patterns within the care experiences our interviewees identified: interviewees’ unpaid care experience with adults or children influencing their pursuit of the respective form of paid work. Having experience of unpaid care for adults or children is gendered and classed and is shaped by additional factors, such as family composition, education and place and peer networks. Although the statistical prevalence of these pathways is not currently known, this is worthy of greater research attention. Data revealed how care trajectories do not necessarily correspond with an age norm. Trajectories 2 and 4 included both younger and older interviewees who entered paid care work, with unpaid care experience - with family members or after becoming a mother - a common influence. Although unpaid and paid care work are different, with the latter becoming more complex, life events involving unpaid caring happening at different ages in biographies can influence change towards a paid care trajectory. Age, though, remains important, as caring carries penalties, including materially, and if experienced young, it has the potential to trigger an accumulation of disadvantages. The trajectory towards paid care employment would appear to be a notable instance of this and is problematic due to the work being an undervalued, low-status destination. Furthermore, young people are at times faced with little option but to take on unpaid care work (particularly when caring for adults); therefore, the link with pursuing paid ASC work replicates questions surrounding volition and agency in that setting too.
Teresa’s Trajectory 1 example shows how moves to take up paid ASC work can combine influences like her unpaid care for her grandfather with a more practical factor, which in her case was the necessity for her to pay her way at home once she had turned 18: ‘Within the constraints of their world, people are planful and make choices among options that construct their life course’ (Elder, 1994: 6). Teresa negotiated constraints within social class and gender structures, and her experience represents ‘bounded agency’ (Hamilton and Adamson, 2013). Despite the limited local employment opportunities and the immediate material driver (both shaped by her social class), she used care work in an instrumental way and never intended to stay in it in the long term (despite her evident attachment to the work). Teresa’s parents’ experiences as paid ASC workers – as well as her own resulting exposure to care work settings from a young age – mark this out as a vivid example of the multiple ways in which care can imprint itself on young, working-class lives.
Trajectory 3 demonstrates explicitly how gender and class continue to shape education provision and settings, as well as employment choices. Laura’s account is a prime example, with childcare work selected from a range of viable and notably gendered and classed sectors, including hairdressing and beauty. Again, this revealed how as part of her care trajectory, the conditions of choice were not ideal but still required some negotiation. ASC and childcare are primary areas of employment for (young) working-class women, and in areas like Teesside, health and social care work now accounts for a significant proportion of overall employment. One of our reflections from our empirical work was that with the quality of these jobs as they are currently – set against a backdrop of limited opportunities locally – young people, especially young, working-class women, are being let down by demand-side failures to create and sustain good-quality, secure (care work) employment. By bringing together evidence from both paid ASC and childcare work and illustrating some crucial ways in which they link to their respective unpaid forms, our empirical scope covers key strands of socially reproductive work of significant societal value. As things stand, however, while this ‘value’ is undisputable, these forms of work – with their connotations of caring penalties, low pay and status, and limited esteem or political leverage – continue to function to perpetuate gendered, classed and racialised inequalities. The situation of working-class women continuing to dominate this work lends credence to Lewis’s (1997: 164) description of women’s increased labour market involvement as a move from private patriarchy to state (or public) patriarchy.
Pervading the narratives attached to our interviewees’ trajectories were patriarchal expectations of lowly qualified working-class women’s destinations and work. Indeed, gender stereotyping is identified within the organisational processes through which the caring skills of our participants are measured and rewarded across both care sectors. The stubbornness of gendered constructions of caring skills as the natural, innate or acquired attributes of women is evident in such processes (Findlay et al, 2009: 422). There has been an attempt to counter these stereotypes around paid care work and to valorise it since the research of Skeggs. For instance, between 2007 and 2011, the government invested £305 million via a graduate leadership fund focused upon improving the status of childcare workers and leaders across England. Some of those we interviewed achieved graduate status through this policy, but as they revealed, this did not mean that they then received graduate-level pay. In such a context, gendered constructions of care work being ‘women’s work’ are unlikely to be budged.
Conclusion
Within wider care and social reproduction theory and research, we set out to use insights from the life-course perspective to explore aspects of care work largely invisible in the literature, including care trajectories, biography and agency. To the best of our knowledge, no other study has brought together insight from ASC and childcare work to discuss care trajectories, certainly not in the English context. As such, we have mapped and provided an initial typology of care trajectories across ASC and childcare for the first time, which can be further examined by other researchers. Through the processes of social reproduction, paid care work remains resolutely dominated by working-class women. While this has remained the case over decades, this continuity should not render invisible the changes to the paid care work contexts into which the women we spoke with transitioned. Both paid ASC and childcare have expanded greatly, and the levels of responsibility and required skills attached to both have become more complex in recent years (Findlay et al, 2009; Hayes et al, 2019).
This upskilling, though, has not been matched by material rewards. The unprecedented impact of COVID-19 reinforced the essential importance of paid care workers and their societal worth. Public praise during the pandemic was widespread: upskilling and praise, though, has not translated into a commitment for higher wages and improved working conditions for paid care workers. Paid care workers’ frustration and anger over the limited status and rewards of their employment featured in our participants’ accounts.
Despite being undervalued and poorly rewarded, the expansion of paid care work has been of importance in ensuring that such places as deindustrialised Teesside have avoided becoming ‘zone[s] of complete abandonment’ (MacDonald and Shildrick, 2018). Although paid care work is not going to eliminate the economic marginality blighting such places as Teesside, its ubiquity and importance signify it as work that, if enhanced, could bring significant socio-economic benefits. It is working-class women who still ‘do’ care, and paid care work remains a ‘default career’ for them. Participants pursued care trajectories into paid care work because they are conditioned to an extent by some of the material and non-economic workings of class in the cultural realm, such as limited opportunity structures, low educational attainment, public patriarchy and the ‘hidden curriculum’ within educational settings. Structures of class and gender conditioned in relatively obvious but non-transparent ways the subjectivities of our interviewees, for instance, via the legacy of unpaid care work’s influence on trajectories.
Adopting life-course concepts developed a fuller picture of care trajectories into ASC and childcare. Biography, family relations and bounded agency were important in shaping the pathways of the members of our heterogeneous sample. In negotiating their respective care trajectories, interviewees were not passive in the face of structural forces. Rather, while care work has been described as a ‘default’ career, there were aspects of design within these care trajectories, and ‘bounded agency’ was evident within restrictive local and wider conditions of choice. This included differing orientations to paid care work within trajectories, with it described as work that was ‘loved’ despite bringing limited financial rewards. This also influenced what have been called ‘legitimising frames for precarious work’ (Trappmann et al, 2024), and these could vary at the biographical level. For instance, it meant a willingness to tolerate childcare work’s non-financial rewards across some time despite feeling trapped on low pay and contemplating leaving for something better paid, such as school teaching (for example, Katheryn). Paid ASC work was also constructed as being a temporary stepping stone (for example, Teresa).
Accentuating the social good of paid care work ought to be part of efforts to increase its valorisation, and this should be accompanied by marked improvements in the demand-side offer to (potential) workers (Addati, 2021). In addition to benefiting individual workers, it would improve the quality of work in places like Teesside, which have struggled to recover from the decline of traditionally masculinised work. It would also bring both symbolic and material gains to women and the work they do, which have been marginalised in areas like Teesside where men’s work is revered as central to its history and identity. Achieving increased valorisation of care work will, according to Tronto (2012), take a paradigm change built upon a ground-up approach that understands care workers’ and care recipients’ experiences and considers their demands. We hope our consideration of care trajectories here contributes to such a process. We argue that greater recognition, increased valorisation and markedly improved working conditions across ASC (OECD, 2023) and childcare employment will bring wide-reaching benefits to places like Teesside where they have come to comprise a large share of local employment.
Limitations of the sample sizes in our respective studies mean that we refrain from exaggerating our claims about care work and care trajectories from such small numbers. Within qualitative research, though, there remains scope for ‘moderatum generalisation’, meaning that we consider our conclusions to be ‘testable propositions that might be confirmed or refuted through further evidence’ (Payne and Williams, 2005: 296). We have produced data that support a coherent chain of reasoning to explore, explicate and challenge propositions. Despite the small sample sizes, the aggregation of data from them suggests that the reported trajectories and processes we have found are important to reproducing the demographic composition of the respective care workforces. Greater awareness of them opens up the possibility of challenging them or presenting alternative options for different groups to play a greater role and contribute to care work’s redistribution (ILO, 2018). Relying on working-class women – and their ‘goodwill’ – is not enough, and more concerted efforts to diversify both workforces ought to be more central to attempts to increase staff numbers.
Note
Bridget is aged 34 but has done paid ASC work since she was 19.
Funding
The ASC research mentioned in this work was supported by Teesside University. The childcare research mentioned in this work was supported by the British Academy under Grants SG112074 and SRG20\200451. It was also supported by a grant from the Society for Educational Studies (30705010).
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the care workers participating in our studies for their time and insights.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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