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EOI
28,2
A price worth paying?
Women and work – choice, constraint or
satisficing
162 Susan Corby and Celia Stanworth
Old Royal Naval College, University of Greenwich, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose – Are women held back or holding back? Do women choose their jobs/careers or are they
structurally or normatively constrained? The purpose of this paper is to shed fresh light on these
questions and contribute to an on-going debate that has essentially focused on the extent to which
part-time work is women’s choice, the role of structural and organisational constraints and the role of
men in excluding women.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses data from interviews with 80 working women –
both full-time and part-time – performing diverse work roles in a range of organisations in the south
east of England.
Findings – It was found that many women do not make strategic job choices, rather they often ‘‘fall
into’’ jobs that happen to be available to them. Some would not have aspired to their present jobs
without male encouragement; many report incidents of male exclusion; and virtually all either know
or suspect that they are paid less than comparable men. Those working reduced hours enjoy that
facility, yet they are aware that reduced hours and senior roles are seen as incompatible. In short, they
recognise both the positive and negative aspects of their jobs, whether they work full or part-time,
whether they work in male-dominated or female-dominated occupations, and whatever their position
in the organisational hierarchy. Accordingly, the paper argues that the concept of ‘‘satisficing’’, i.e. a
decision which is good enough but not optimal, is a more appropriate way to view women’s working
lives than are either choice or constraint theories.
Originality/value – There is an ongoing, and often polarised, debate between those who maintain
that women choose whether to give preference to work or home/family and others who maintain that
women, far from being self-determining actors, are constrained structurally and normatively. Rather
than supporting these choice or constraint theories, this paper argues that ‘‘satisficing’’ is a more
appropriate and nuanced concept to explain women’s working lives.
Keywords Women, Gender, Employment, Career satisfaction, Individual perception,
United Kingdom
Paper type Research paper

Equal Opportunities International
Vol. 28 No. 2, 2009
pp. 162-178
# Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0261-0159
DOI 10.1108/02610150910937907
Introduction
Are women held back or holding back? Do women choose their jobs/careers or are they
structurally or normatively constrained? This article sheds fresh light on these
questions and contributes to an on-going debate that has essentially focused on the
extent to which part-time work is women’s choice (Hakim, 1991, 1995, 1997, 2002,
2005), the role of structural and organisational constraints (Breugel, 1996; Crompton
and Harris, 1998a, b; Fagan, 2001; Ginn et al., 1996; Walters, 2005) and the role of men
in excluding women (Cockburn, 1991; Walby, 1990). This article, by looking at both
full-time and part-time working women, performing diverse work roles in a diverse
range of organisations, takes this debate further.
This article uses data from interviews with 80 women working in the south east of
England, reporting findings that on the face of it seem contradictory. It finds that many
The research on which the article is based was co-financed by the South East England
Development Agency and the European Social Fund.
women do not make strategic job choices, rather they often ‘‘fall into’’ jobs that happen Women and
to be available to them. Some would not have aspired to their present jobs without male work
encouragement; many report incidents of male exclusion; and virtually all either know
or suspect that they are paid less than comparable men. Those working reduced hours
enjoy that facility, yet they are aware that reduced hours and senior roles are seen as
incompatible. In short, they recognise both the positive and negative aspects of their
jobs, whether they work full or part-time, whether they work in male-dominated or 163
female-dominated occupations, and whatever their position in the organisational
hierarchy. Accordingly, we argue that the concept of ‘‘satisficing’’ (Brown, 2004), i.e. a
decision which is good enough but not optimal, is a more appropriate way to view
women’s working lives than are either choice or constraint theories.
The article is structured as follows: in the first section we look at the literature. We
consider those who are of the view that women make choices about their contribution
to the labour market, and by contrast we next consider the view that labour market
constraints are the key factors determining where and when women work. Then we
discuss the concept of ‘‘satisficing’’, and the acceptance of realities in the labour market.
In the second section we outline the research questions and research methods adopted.
The third section covers our findings on job choice, pay, organisational culture and
hours of work. The final section draws conclusions, essentially arguing that women’s
job and career choices are made from a limited range of possibilities available to them
on the basis of imperfect knowledge. When taking up and performing jobs women are
‘‘satisficers’’ and make conscious trade-offs.

Holding back or held back?

Statistics from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Office of National Statistics,
2006) paint a picture of women’s disadvantage in the labour market as epitomised in a
gender pay gap of 17 per cent in 2006 (based on average hourly earnings of full-time
workers). There are a host of explanations for this and these have been summarised
recently and comprehensively in the Women and Work Commission Report (2006).
This article, however, does not rehearse these explanations. Instead, it concentrates on
the theoretical debates underlying both these statistics and the explanations for them
and focuses on the choice/constraint debate at the individual level, i.e. do women hold
back or are they held back?

Choice
Hakim (1991, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2002, 2005) is of the view that at least some women hold
back. She regards women as self-determining actors, and gives primacy to women’s
choices, saying that women’s lifestyle preferences have causal powers. She divides
women into three ideal types: home-centred, work-centred and adaptive. She argues
that home-centred women do not work, or alternatively work part-time, take jobs
within easy reach of home, or even work at home, because they choose jobs that
accommodate domestic priorities. Thus home-centred women gravitate towards
female-dominated areas where part-time work is plentiful and high labour turnover is
tolerated. If they work full-time for reasons of economic necessity they opt for jobs that
are undemanding, because they wish to give priority to home. Furthermore, Hakim
says that her research indicates that childcare costs have only a very limited impact on
women’s work decisions, and part-time women workers have very high levels of job
satisfaction, despite being restricted to the least attractive jobs.
EOI In contrast to home-centred women, work-centred women fit family life around their
work, or remain childless. She also argues that lifestyle preferences are not determined
28,2 by educational level, thus dismissing the effects of social class position. For example,
she argues that data show that black British women are predominantly work-centred
(with a lower propensity to take reduced hours jobs), despite the fact that many have
few qualifications and tend to be in low earning jobs. Moreover, Hakim claims that
work-centred women may not necessarily invest in more qualifications than home-
164 centred women, because the educational system functions both as a training institution
and a marriage market (Hakim, 2002).
Hakim’s more recent work further develops the concept of adaptive women who
prefer to combine family and work without giving priority to either (Hakim, 2002,
2005). Certain occupations, such as teaching, are attractive to adaptive women because
they facilitate an even work-life balance. Alternatively some women opt for jobs where
they can work slightly reduced hours, for example four instead of five-day working.
Employers have a degree of monopsony in respect of home-centred or adaptive women
because such women tend to prefer certain work, hours, or location, and thus have
restricted employment options.
Hakim’s preference theory is supported by Rose (2005). Using the British Household
Panel Survey (BHPS), he found that orientations to work are linked to clear behavioural
differences. Similarly Thomson (1995) analysing the British social attitudes survey
data, found that the attitudes of mothers are important determinants of their
behaviour. Whether or not women go out to work appears to be a social choice which
reflects their values about the role of women in work and the family, rather than
behaviour driven by contextual and structural constraints, for instance economic
considerations or the availability of childcare.

Constraints
While Hakim’s work is supported by some researchers, others question it. Procter and
Padfield (1999) point out that Hakim classifies over two-thirds of women as ‘‘adaptive’’
and argue that when a residual category, or catch-all, comes to dominate a theory, it is a
sign that the theory itself is flawed. Similarly, Breugel (1996) criticises Hakim
theoretically. She feels that the attitudes and work orientations of women are treated as
givens, while the interesting question of how these are formed and develop is left
unasked. Moreover, she says ‘‘Hakim is reading preferences into outcomes without
considering how circumstances frame preferences’’ (1996, p. 177).
Walby (1990), for instance, has long argued that patriarchal modes of control are
crucial in excluding women from waged work, or certain types of waged work; an
exclusion reinforced by patriarchal state policy. Male dominance is hegemonic and the
masculine sway over women is not exerted by legal coercion or economic compulsion,
but rather by the force of ideas in society (Cockburn, 1991). As Bradley (1989, p. 233)
says: ‘‘Dominant social groups of whatever kind do not yield privilege, prestige and
power voluntarily. They will manipulate their advantage to ensure that whatever
changes occur remain compatible with their own continued supremacy’’. As a result
working women have ‘‘to try to fit into the procrustean bed of an employment template
presented as gender neutral but designed around men’’ (Dickens, 1998, p. 25).
Although Crompton and Harris (1998a) agree with Hakim that women cannot be
treated as a homogenous group and that women’s ability to control their fertility in
contemporary society results in more choices than ever before, they consider that
Hakim ‘‘offers no explanation of why women should fall into these categories in the
first place’’ (1998a, p. 145). They maintain that Hakim does not explore ‘‘the exigencies Women and
of context and structural constraints’’ which include the effects of social class on work
women’s career choices and opportunities (1998b, p. 120). Their research into women in
the sectors of banking and medicine in five countries, found that preferences may
shape choices, but they do not determine them.
Fagan (2001) also mounts a critique of preference theory. She agrees with Hakim
that work orientations are important, but she highlights the lifecycle component to 165
working hours preferences, as does Walsh (1999) in research into part-time women in
Australian banking. Fagan, analysing the 1995 BHPS and the Equal Opportunities
Commission’s hours of work survey, found that for both sexes the presence of pre-
school children is associated with a sharp decline in employment commitment and jobs
are designed to meet employers’ requirements, rather than labour supply preferences.
For example, one fifth of part-timers wanted to increase their hours and almost half of
all women full-timers wanted to reduce their hours. While, overall, part-time women
have lower average levels of employment commitment compared to men and full-time
women, in all the three groups employment commitment varies according to
occupational position.
Blackwell (2001) also emphasises the interplay between women’s labour market
activity and their lifecycle. Using Office for National Statistics longitudinal data for
1971, 1981 and 1991, she found that the majority of women in Britain work part-time at
some stage in their lives, most often when they have young children. The majority of
women were occupationally mobile, moving from full-time to part-time work and vice
versa. This undermines Hakim’s theory of relatively fixed preferences amongst work-
centred and home-centred women during their working lives.
Hakim’s work has also been critiqued by Ginn et al. (1996). They maintain that
Hakim equates women’s commitment with the amount of hours that women work,
without justifying or explaining the connection, and that Hakim over-emphasises
women’s attitudes and orientations to work, and downplays the role played by cultural
attitudes and also employers’ policies. Many part-time workers are over-qualified for
the jobs they perform, because of employers’ failure to provide high quality part-time
jobs, a point supported by more recent research (Equal Opportunities Commission,
2005). While Hakim found that part-time women expressed satisfaction with their jobs,
despite their poor quality, Ginn et al. (1996) argue that this is likely to reflect women’s
lack of choice, i.e. the poor quality of the jobs available. Women part-timers face a
restricted labour market and restricted workplace opportunities (Grant et al., 2005).
Indeed, a recurring theme amongst Hakim’s critics is that at best she downplays,
and at worst virtually ignores, the constraints on women arising from the gendered
nature of organisations. McRae (2003) also adds that women differ in their ability to act
on their preferences and overcome such factors as social class, educational level and
income, with the result that women with similar preferences may show very different
market behaviours.
Such constraints on women take many forms: for example the culture where long
hours are expected of those interested in a career and promotion (Coyle, 1995; Liff and
Ward, 2001; Smithson et al., 2004). Employers often offer mixed messages: they have
policies that offer reduced hours of work, but in practice they only reward and value
staff who work long hours (Coyle, 2003). Another constraint is male-dominated
networks at work (Catalyst and Opportunity Now, 2000) and the assumptions of
predominantly male managers when carrying out selection (Rubin, 1997) or making
EOI promotion decisions (Liff and Ward, 2001). Thus male assumptions, rather than
28,2 women’s orientations to work, determine women’s jobs.
In summary, many researchers argue that constraints, whether they are structural
(for instance the effects of social class position and the availability of jobs) or
normative (such as male attitudes) are very powerful, and lifestyle preferences are not
the main factor in determining outcomes: women are held back, rather than holding
166 back.

Satisficing and the reality of work

The debate set out above portrays women either as unconstrained actors freely
pursuing their ends by a choice of means, or as people unable to make free choices
because of many structural and normative barriers. Against that background of polar
opposites, we put forward another approach which is the concept of satisficing, which
was initially developed in the context of management decision making.
Weber (1924, 1947), in his seminal works looking at bureaucracy and authority and
at meanings in a social context, maintained that in bureaucratic organisations rational
actors choose the best means to a given and rational end. They exercise control on the
basis of knowledge, not tradition or charisma. Simon (1957) argued, however, that in
reality managers do not make rational decisions after having weighed up all the
alternatives as they lack complete information and cannot consider all options to
maximise objectives. Instead, Simon put forward a behavioural model based not on
maximisation, but on short-term expediency, where a choice is made within limiting
constraints. He called this behaviour ‘‘satisficing’’, i.e. when managers come to a
decision which is satisfactory for the purpose, and which is good enough rather than
the absolute optimal outcome (Brown, 2004). Another definition is:
To accept a choice or judgment as one that is good enough, one that satisfices. According to
Herb Simon, who coined the term, the tendency to satisfice shows up in many cognitive tasks,
such as playing games, solving problems and making financial decisions, when people do not
or cannot search for the optimal solutions (Reber and Reber, 2001, p. 644).
Satisficing goes hand in hand with the idea of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality
recognises that decisions are affected by both personal and situational limitations, that
the readily available information is generally incomplete and that individuals may not
have the time or the ability to maximise. Simon’s ideas continue to be widely applied in
the analysis of business decision-making, and are considered to be closer to the reality
of individual behaviour than rationalist theories (Brown, 2004).
Now the concept of ‘‘satisficing’’ has entered the gender literature. For instance
Crompton and Harris (1998b) refer to work by Chavetz and Hogan (1996) which applies
the concept to women’s choices at work. They argue that contemporary women in
industrialised societies confront a pre-existing dichotomy of socially valued goal sets.
On the one hand, women seek successful familial and romantic relationships, which
bring socio-emotional rewards. On the other hand, women seek market work which
brings financial rewards and sometimes fulfilment. In this context women will attempt
to ‘‘satisfice’’ to reach a reasonable level in both areas, rather than attempt to maximise
one to the detriment of the other. While there may be many ways to attempt to satisfy
the twin goals of labour force achievement and commitment to romantic partners and
to children, there are more externally imposed constraints on labour force roles than on
domestic roles. Satisficing is therefore more likely to entail a decision to compromise
the labour market component by, for example, exiting the labour market temporarily, Women and
working part-time or refusing a geographical transfer. work
Walters (2005) applies the concept of satisficing to part-time women in the labour
market. Based on 50 interviews with women in retail, she found that most women were
trading off intrinsically satisfying work in exchange for the extrinsic aspects of
convenience. They were satisficing, not satisfied.
Crompton and Harris (1998b) also question whether it is only women that appear to
be highly satisfied with what objectively seem to be low grade jobs. They refer back to
167
studies on working-class manual men by Goldthorpe et al. (1968) and Blackburn and
Mann (1979). Goldthorpe et al. found that male manual workers in Luton were highly
satisfied with their routine jobs and were instrumental in their work orientation. They
had traded off a lack of intrinsic work interest for the maximisation of financial returns
and interestingly these men regarded their families, and not their work, as a central life
interest. Blackburn and Mann (1979) found that satisfaction was shaped by
expectations of what was reasonable in relation to the available possibilities. Although
workers had some limited choices, job choice was narrow and the alternatives limited.
They say:
Very little choice is objectively available ‘‘on the ground’’ and workers do not delude
themselves that more exists . . . [T]he structure of the market presents many obstacles to
choice both because of its general hierarchical form and because the major systematic source
of variation in work rewards is the internal labour market, which is largely out of the workers’
control. Thus the context of choice is narrow and the possibilities are limited. Nevertheless,
this is not felt by the workers as constraint, in the sense of an active and alien force imposing
itself in their lives. They have internalised the constraint and identify it as reality itself (1979,
p. 287).
They go on to say that ‘‘workers accept their market situation in the sense that it is part
of the normal reality of their lives’’ (1979, p. 288).
To sum up, neither the choice model nor the constraint model are unproblematic.
Accordingly, we have adopted the concept of satisficing, in the light of which we
consider our findings on women’s labour market experiences, focusing on job
provenance, pay, organisational culture and working hours. Before this, the methods of
data gathering and analysis are outlined.

Research methods
The research aim and questions
Our research aim was to discover whether women exercised choice or were constrained
in their working lives and our research questions were:
(1) How have women made their job/career choices?
(2) How do women perceive their pay levels relative to men?
(3) What positive and negative aspects of their jobs and careers do women
identify?
(4) How do women react to these positive and/or negative aspects?

The organisations
The findings reported below were part of a wider study investigating gender and the
labour market in south east England, funded by the European Social Fund and the
South East of England Development Agency. The funding bodies stipulated that we
EOI should also interview women in 40 organisations and in five sectors of employment
growth in the region: information technology (IT), financial services, the care sector,
28,2 advanced manufacturing and pharma-bio. The tables below show that we were
successful in achieving these aims except for organisations in the pharma-bio sector,
where we were unable to gain any access, so we supplemented with public sector and
‘‘other’’ organisations (see Tables I and II).
As can be seen from the tables the organisations selected for interview also varied
168 by location so as to ensure a spread around the region and by size – from a small IT
consultancy with 14 staff up to a local authority with 10,000 employees. In fact the
majority were small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): eight of the 40 had less than
50 employees (the definition of a small enterprise) and a further 18 had between 50 and
249 employees (the definition of medium sized enterprise).
Thus, besides large workplaces the researchers looked at a good number of (SMEs)
organisations where ‘‘there is little quantitative data’’ on employment practices,
‘‘despite the fact that 94 per cent of all private sector firms in the UK have less than 250
employees’’ (Forth et al., 2006). Moreover, the literature suggests that gender-based
equality issues are more problematic in SMEs than in large firms. According to an
analysis of the Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004, workplaces which were
part of SMEs appeared to make less use of equal opportunities practices and were
less likely than large firms (250 þ) to carry out a range of monitoring activities to
assess whether their employment practices had any discriminatory effects. See Kersley
et al. (2006); Forth et al. (2006). Similarly, Woodhams and Lupton (2006) in their
research found that a sizeable minority of SMEs were perpetuating discriminatory
practices.
Tables I and II also show that nine of our 40 organisations were in manufacturing, a
sector where women are very under-represented especially in management, compared

No. of employees Manufacturing Care IT Financial services Others Public sector Total

Less than 50 1 1 3 1 2 0 8
50-99 4 1 1 0 4 0 10
100-249 2 2 1 1 2 0 8
Table I. 250-499 1 2 0 0 2 2 7
Organisation by sector 500 þ 1 0 0 3 1 2 7
and size Total 9 6 5 5 11 4 40

County Manufacturing Care IT Financial services Others Public sector Total

E.SUSSEX 3 1 0 0 1 0 5
W.SUSSEX 1 0 0 0 2 1 4
KENT 2 1 1 1 1 2 8
BUCKS. 1 1 1 0 1 0 4
BERKS. 1 0 0 0 1 0 2
SURREY 0 1 0 1 1 1 4
Table II. OXFORD 1 0 1 0 2 0 4
Organisation by sector HAMPSHIRE 0 2 2 3 2 0 9
and county Total 9 6 5 5 11 4 40
to other sectors (Lawthorn et al., 1996; Wynarczyk, 2007). The tables also show Women and
that four of the organisations were in the public sector and six were in care, where
women comprise over half the workforce (Kersley et al., 2006). Thus we conducted
work
interviews in organisations where working women were both in the minority and the
majority.

The data
First, the manager responsible for human resources in each organisation responded to
169
a questionnaire on the policies and practices of the organisation in respect of gender
equality. Then we conducted face to face semi-structured interviews with 80 female
employees in 40 organisations. In almost every organisation both a junior and a senior
woman (defined by their position in the company hierarchy) were interviewed. These
women’s occupational roles were very varied; from company directors to catering and
care assistants, data entry clerks and administrators through to women engineers and
thus in female and male dominated occupations.
We adopted an informal, exploratory approach as we wanted to enquire into
women’s subjective interpretations of their experiences at work. We conducted semi-
structured interviews, following a series of open questions with opportunities for the
interviewees to discuss their stories and experiences. Questions included how they had
come to occupy their current positions, their career/jobs to date, their working patterns,
what had helped them at work (with prompts for flexible work, training and
development, help with childcare) and then what they felt had made difficulties at work
(with prompts on organisational culture, domestic responsibilities and constraints).
Questions were also asked about their pay relative to comparable men in the
organisation and their views on the organisation’s policies and practices on gender
equality.
Each interview lasted from 30 to 90 min, and was taped and transcribed. The
findings were written up and analysed using content analysis of the open-ended
questions. A further analysis was made of the additional issues raised by the
respondents by means of categorisation. This led to the emergence of patterns in the
interview data that form the basis for our findings.

Limitations
One limitation is that the HR managers who gave us organisational information in
response to our questionnaire and responded positively to our request for interviews
were likely to be those with an interest in gender issues (but this certainly did not
necessarily mean that they were exemplars in this regard as the survey information
that we obtained revealed). Furthermore, the sample of women was selected by the HR
manager, which could bias the findings towards positive attitudes to the employing
organisation. However, the interviews were entirely confidential and anonymous and
none of the content was disclosed to the employer. An additional limitation, which
essentially applies to much qualitative research, relates to the question of
generalisability of our findings to the general population of working women. However,
we have clearly indicated that the research is exploratory, and raises issues that could
be tested in future research.

Findings
The findings are reported under the headings: jobs and careers, pay issues,
organisational culture, hours of work.
EOI Falling into jobs and careers
28,2 The interviews revealed that women, at all levels, often did not search for alternatives
when job-seeking, nor had they obtained wide-ranging labour market information. The
jobs they filled had often been determined by chance or informal contacts. For instance,
in two separate manufacturing companies mothers who already worked there
prompted their daughters to apply. One woman said: ‘‘I was sitting around at home not
doing anything. Mum worked here. I had a phone call saying [K] there’s a job going
170 here – get yourself up here’’. In another case a male friend put forward a woman who
became a matron in a boy’s boarding school, though she had no previous experience.
(She had lived in a religious community, farming, cooking and doing office work, and
then she had organised recreation in a nursing home). In another case an administrator
in a pub chain said: ‘‘the chap [sic] I used to work for came here as director and he rang
me up and said I need an administrator down here’’.
We found that informal contacts as sources of jobs were found in fairly large
organisations as well as smaller ones, where word-of-mouth is a common recruitment
channel, despite the possibility of indirect sex discrimination. This finding is
supported by the research (on both sexes) carried out by Carroll et al. (1999). We also
found that these methods were not confined to lower level occupations such as factory
work.
Once within an organisation, women often ‘‘fell into’’ higher level jobs, to quote a
woman who started in secretarial work in a solicitor’s practice, but then became the HR
manager. Another ‘‘got into computing completely by accident’’, having started as a
sales assistant in a nationwide, high street chain of newsagents, then supervisor, then
manager when the company was introducing an electronic point of sales system. From
there she joined the company’s computer support team and then left to join an IT
company.
Often women were picked out for advancement by men. For instance in a data
processing company the male export director had singled out his female personal
assistant and made her export manager. She said: ‘‘certainly it was not formal, sort of –
you’re going to be interviewed for this position’’. In an advanced electronics firm, a
woman who had started in administration, said that she was ‘‘just asked’’ to do more by
her male manager and at the time of interview she was an IT applications engineer
having picked up her technical knowledge by experience, not formal training. Another
woman, an assembly worker, was ‘‘chosen as an internal auditor’’ because her male line
manager singled her out, as was a factory operative in a different organisation who
started a new role looking after orders. A food technician, promoted to an assistant
quality assurance manager, said she only considered applying for promotion after her
male manager had urged her to do so repeatedly and emphatically. Another erstwhile
factory worker said:
I just got singled out all the time – all of a sudden I’m given something else. My first step up
was looking after a little section and then I went up to do the training – I’m now production
controller.
This informal process of promotion was summed up in the words of an HR
administrator in a US multi-national company. She said that ‘‘she never had to apply
for jobs here – I’ve always been approached’’ by men. Male sponsorship could be
interpreted as patriarchy, given that such support is not a right but based upon male
power and patronage. However it is unusual to find positive male sponsorship of
women.
 Though the amount of promotion experienced by the women interviewed might be Women and
overstated because of the method of selection of the sample, nevertheless, the findings work
indicate that serendipity – or being in the right place at the right time – is often more
important in terms of being promoted than the more bureaucratic methods of rational
search advocated in the human resource management literature. The decisions made
demonstrate bounded rationality, and thus may be sub-optimal, demonstrating that
women have satisficed rather than gone for optimal choices. 171
Pay: women do not query
In nearly all the private sector organisations visited, both large and small and in a
variety of sectors, there was no structured pay system: pay was determined
unsystematically and unilaterally, mainly by reference to market rates, what the
individual had earned previously elsewhere, or what was negotiated on entry. In fact
the managerial and administrative private sector staff were more affected by this,
because fixed hourly rates were more common amongst workers we encountered in
such jobs as catering and caring and in the public sector.
Often, women had little means of knowing whether or not they were paid equally
with men who performed the same job, or jobs perceived as of equal value, because the
organisation enjoined workers not to discuss pay, or because lack of knowledge of the
pay levels of colleagues was custom and practice. Nevertheless, some women strongly
suspected that they were paid less than a comparable male, but because of secrecy did
not know for sure. As a female marketing manager in a commercial organisation said:
‘‘Mine is definitely lower: I can’t prove it’’.
As we noted above, some of the women had been given career advancement by men.
Although none suggested that this was because they would accept lower pay rates, our
findings show that they had, and that they were fully or partly aware of this. Some of
the female human resource managers interviewed felt that this was because men
tended to negotiate much harder than women over pay on entry or promotion,
perpetuating the gender pay gap.
Even in organisations where women were knew for certain that they were paid less
than comparable men, they did not voice a grievance. For example the female HR
director of a Dutch owned multi-national IT company reported that her pay was ‘‘not
on a par’’ by a long stretch with that of the other, male, directors. She had an
understanding of equal pay law and wanted to introduce an analytical job-evaluated
pay structure, but the parent company would not countenance this at present. Rather
than challenging her pay, she was waiting until a formal system was introduced.
Similarly a female HR director in an insurance company said that the new male
training and development manager earned considerably more than her. Although she
did not think the value of his job was ‘‘any more than mine’’, she had no plans to
challenge the situation. Another example was a finance manager in an electronics firm
who reported that she was the only person in the otherwise all male department who
was underpaid according to market rates. She was thinking of broaching this with her
line manager, but had not yet done so.
In a manufacturing firm a woman had taken on a managerial role previously held
by her husband, when he left. Although the job title changed, the work remained
virtually the same, but she received less pay. The husband and wife had discovered this
when they compared notes on job content and remuneration. However she stated that
she was satisfied with the job on the whole, in particular because she had started on the
EOI shopfloor. Although she considered asking for a pay rise in future, she had not done so,
28,2 despite the fact that at the time of interview she had been in the job for three years.
In yet another case in a small manufacturer, a finance manager also knew that she
was paid less than her male predecessor. She had chosen her employer, however,
primarily on the basis of location, not remuneration, because she worked close to her
son’s school, and he was a haemophiliac. Her choice of job was clearly constrained by
her circumstances, and she considered that the lower pay was a price worth paying for
172 the proximity to her son. She had clearly traded off a better-paid job further a-field to fit
in with her current non-work circumstances.
In short, our interviewees had made a choice within limiting constraints; they had
‘‘satisficed’’ (Brown, 2004). Whether it was for a location or an interesting job, women
traded off lower pay than men. Often the opacity of pay systems precluded women
from complaining; in other cases they were critical of the pay gap but reluctant to
complain.

Organisational culture
Nearly all the senior women we interviewed worked in a predominantly male
environment, and were thus highly visible. A few welcomed this: ‘‘You make a mistake,
people will know about it. Equally, if you do something well, people know about it’’.
Most, however, were not positive about being in a tiny minority and encountered an
exclusionary male culture which incorporated covert and/or overt sexism.
Dealing first with the overt, one interviewee (a marketing executive) said: ‘‘When
I first started marketing to oil companies, I was getting awful comments, like you are
the receptionist – really outrageous remarks’’. She said that now long-standing
customers were aware of her job-role, and she had eventually become accepted.
Another interviewee in a manufacturing company said: ‘‘There are a few comments,
but I ignore them; I take no notice’’, while a marine geophysicist reported that: ‘‘There’s
a bit of a kind of male humour thing – attractive ladies that were at the gym, women
drivers and things like that, and mums-in-law’’. A technical accounts manager in an IT
organisation said:
You know you have to sort of turn your ears down a bit. Well, you know – just office banter,
that sort of thing. You couldn’t be too sensitive, I don’t think, working where I do.
A female public house co-ordinator said:
I think the pub industry is definitely sexist. I mean we’ve had a member of staff – and I was
shocked at his sexist comments. I think probably within this industry people are used to
joking about minorities, gays and women – it’s a very male-dominated industry.
As to the more subtle forms of exclusion, one interviewee said: ‘‘It wasn’t anything that
anybody said or did, but just in the atmosphere as it were’’. A quality assurance
manager spoke about the ‘‘old boy’s network’’ she had experienced. An estates manager
felt that often the men from other organisations with whom she dealt were
‘‘patronising. . .or they don’t take you quite seriously’’. Two senior women said that
men did not readily take orders from a woman. An engineer in a construction company,
who also mentioned this, was of the view that the reaction would be different if she
were a man. A production co-ordinator in manufacturing said: ‘‘I have to deal with all
the managers – male managers – and sometimes it’s difficult’’.
Other senior women also commented on the sex-stereotypical assumptions of their
male colleagues. For instance a woman who worked for a US multinational firm was
not selected for a 12 day management course in Houston. When she queried this, she Women and
was told that it was thought that she would not want to leave her young child for that
length of time, although in fact she could have made the necessary arrangements. She
work
commented that since she had had her baby: ‘‘it’s a little bit like being written off a bit:
that’s definitely there now’’.
Another senior woman in a large British manufacturing company said that when in
meetings where everyone else was male, she would be asked to make the coffee
although she was not the most junior attending. The head of service delivery in an IT
173
company reported she ‘‘had had instances where I was a technical consultant and I’ve
gone out [to a meeting] and project managers have ignored me’’. A female manager in a
Japanese-owned company said: ‘‘Japanese companies are very male-oriented. All the
top positions are male’’.
Although one woman who had started work as a mechanical apprentice gave up
this career as she found it ‘‘quite difficult working with so many men’’ and went into a
female-dominated area – telephone answering services, this was the exception. All the
other women who worked in male dominated occupations accepted negative aspects in
order to stay in otherwise satisfactory jobs. They satisficed by accepting less than
optimal experiences at the hands of male colleagues and clients.

Hours of work
There was much evidence of the prevalence of the ‘‘long hours culture’’ in both small
and large organisations. Two interviewees had changed jobs because, although
continuing to work full-time, they did not want to carry on working the excessively
long or unsocial hours required in previous roles. One who previously travelled quite a
lot: ‘‘going out early in the morning, coming home late at night’’, was no longer
prepared to do that even though she no longer had responsibilities for young children.
Another no longer wanted to work weekends after the birth of her child, only
weekdays.
Many interviewees, however, continued to work in organisations with a long hours
culture, knowing that their failure to work long hours would prevent promotion. An
administrator who worked full-time for a Japanese company, but did not work extra
hours, said: ‘‘It’s very much a Japanese culture to work long hours, whether you have
any work to do or not. You have to be seen to be doing the long hours’’. Similarly a
manager in a local authority, a single parent already working more than contracted
hours, said if she were promoted she would have to work even longer hours. She also
noted that most senior women in the organisation were childless.
A technical accounts manager in an IT company, working full-time, said she had
been prepared to travel and make short stays, visiting companies and putting in lots of
hours, and she had ‘‘got on’’ and been promoted. Now, although she still worked full-
time, she ‘‘was not prepared to do that any more’’. She had a young child and she felt
that a failure to be promoted further was a price worth paying for not working
excessively long hours. Again, there was a conscious trade-off here.
The part-time working women too were well aware that they would not get
promoted. They accepted the fact that more senior jobs in their organisations were not
organised on a part-time basis. An administrator in a financial services organisation
said that she had gone as high as she could, from office junior to senior administrator,
but could not advance further. ‘‘The next stage up was like a team leader, that type of
thing, supervisor’’. She worked every day ‘‘so it wasn’t like I was off (not in the office)
for certain days’’, but she worked reduced hours, leaving at 2.30 p.m.
EOI A local authority employee, who worked two full days and one part day said: ‘‘It’s
been suggested to me that in order to be taken seriously [for promotion] I would need to
28,2 do at least an extra day a week’’. A gardener in a tourist attraction, worked five days a
week, and sometimes at weekends, but with reduced hours each day. She reported that
she could ‘‘not get promoted on part-time work’’. In contrast, a managing director of a
small IT consultancy worked reduced hours, leaving early to collect her child from
nursery. She admitted that the board only agreed to this because her father had
174 founded the company and was still a significant shareholder. She was the only
respondent we found in a top position working reduced hours.
In summary, both women who worked part- time and full-time accepted the reality
that senior jobs were only available to them on a full-time basis, with the most senior jobs
requiring even longer hours. Those who had non-work responsibilities were often
grateful for the flexibility of hours that employers allowed. An administrator said:
‘‘They’ve allowed me to work the hours that I wanted to work, at the times I wanted to
work. I should imagine that I’m pretty lucky’’. A data entry clerk in IT said: ‘‘That’s the
good point of a job here – flexible – if you tell them you want to vary your arrangements
they always allow you’’.
They were also generally of the view that lack of promotion opportunities was a
price worth paying for work-life balance. An export manager in a manufacturing firm
who worked part-time said that she enjoyed ‘‘the mix of home life and work life’’, and a
finance assistant in private healthcare working part-time said ‘‘it’s just nice to be able
to balance the two’’, as did a factory operator who worked four days and had three days
a week for hands-on healing and counselling.
Full-timers too were grateful for working time flexibility. An electronics engineer
said: ‘‘I changed my hours, still full-time, but so that I can come in later having dropped
my child at school. They were very, very good about that’’. This was echoed by other
full-timers, for example a local authority worker who was able to attend her son’s
assembly at school, and another insurance administrator who was able to attend a
school play. In short, there was ample evidence of women being grateful for the
opportunities to modify hours to fit in with non-work interests. Aware of the positive
and negative aspects of their jobs, they made a decision to compromise, to satisfice.

Discussion and conclusions

The research outlined here adds to our understanding of women’s work and careers
because it covers the experiences of women working both full and part-time, in a wide
range of occupations and sectors and also at various levels of the occupational
hierarchy. It adds to the sectoral studies by Walters (2005), Walsh (1999) and Smithson
et al. (2004).
Looking first at our findings on jobs, we reject Hakim’s argument that ‘‘preference
theory works well in predicting women’s employment choices’’ (2005, p. 72) and that
women’s motivations are independent factors with causal powers. Women of all
educational levels tended to have ‘‘fallen into’’ jobs, rather than making strategic
choices, and the way that jobs were allocated was not always rational or systematic,
even in larger organisations. Rational choice, after having weighed up all the
alternatives is not a good explanation for what we found, and does not explain where
women end up working. There is clear evidence from our findings of women’s decisions
being made on the basis of bounded rationality, choosing from the immediately
available information rather than wide-ranging research and investigation of the
possibilities, calling into question Hakim’s economic rationalism. Our findings on jobs
did in some cases clearly reflect male power in the workplace, but unusually to the Women and
advantage of certain women. Many of our interviewees reported that their promotion
arose because of men’s actions.
work
Turning to our findings on pay, our research indicated a gender pay gap in all
sectors. Especially at management level, this gap went hand in hand with opaque
payment systems which prevented women from knowing their true pay situation
compared to men. Yet these women who knew or suspected pay discrimination
appeared to do little about it. This cannot be explained by their lack of legal
175
knowledge, although some appeared only to have partial knowledge, e.g. to be unaware
that they could compare themselves with a predecessor. The main explanation,
however, could be the concept of satisficing (Simon, 1957) in that women were trading
off lower remuneration than comparable men against positive elements of the job. In
short they accepted a sub-optimal solution often on the basis of incomplete knowledge.
When we turn to culture, we should note that women were not necessarily passive
in the face of organisational ‘‘bad’’ behaviour. We did find a few cases where women
had previously exited organisations where the situation had become intolerable,
because of bullying and sexual harassment, or a refusal to allow hours flexibility.
However, we were surprised at the level of sexism and unfair practices women
tolerated and this supports the concept of satisficing. The women we interviewed
criticised sexism at work, but at the same time clearly traded off such sexism or
accepted it as a sub-optimal part of their experience at work. In short, they considered
that a woman-hostile culture was a price worth paying for working in a predominantly
male environment, especially where they were able to progress into managerial roles.
Finally on working time, many of the women interviewed – especially women
managers with expectations of a career trajectory – were trading off the possibility of
promotion, better pay and more interesting work for a better current balance between
work and non-work. They accepted that climbing the corporate ladder to the top often
included very long hours (which some had explicitly rejected) and that senior roles
were only considered by management as suitable for full-time workers. In short, the
reduced hours workers had satisficed, by adapting their work commitments rather
than their domestic lives and making often sub-optimal decisions, in order to achieve
some kind of integration of the two spheres of their lives.
We reject Hakim’s preference theory and the assertion of three types: home-centred,
work-centred and adaptive. All the women we interviewed made compromises and
satisficed. We also reject the view that all the women we interviewed fitted into
Hakim’s adaptive women category. They were not independent actors positively
choosing a lifestyle and their preferences do not provide a causal explanation of how
they obtained their jobs and accepted the conditions that went with them. Furthermore,
Hakim’s categorisations are static and permanent, while our findings indicate a
processual approach, a continuing process of coping with changing priorities.
We adopt a more nuanced approach. The women we interviewed made conscious
compromises on the basis of the often incomplete information available to them and
traded-off by accepting less than optimal aspects of work. These women were
performing jobs that they considered were good enough in the circumstances. These
women, like the women in the study by Chavetz and Hogan (1996), had twin goals
(emotional and market) and attempted to reach a reasonable level in both areas. Thus
we feel that satisficing is a more appropriate explanation than either preference theory
or constraint theories. It allows for the interplay between choice and constraint. It
recognises women’s agency, yet recognises that such agency is circumscribed.
EOI Interestingly also, our findings suggest that the concept of satisficing applies to
28,2 women working in both small and large organisations. Accordingly, distinctions in the
literature in relation to sex equality according to size of organisation (e.g. Forth et al.,
2006; Woodhams and Lupton, 2006) are not supported here.

Further research
Satisficing is a dynamic concept and our findings showed how many of the women we
176 interviewed made different choices about, for instance, hours at different stages of their
lives. This supports research by Blackwell (2001), Fagan (2001) and Walsh (1999), see
above, in respect of women. Similarly, Goldthorpe et al. (1968, p. 148) recognised the
dynamic nature of work orientations in respect of men. They said:
. . . it would also seem likely that as workers move into older age-groups than those covered
by our sample, and their children become employed themselves, the motivation to maximise
the economic ‘‘pay-off’’ from work will weaken and allow more weight to be given to other
considerations.
In the light of this, an area of further research could be links between satisficing, age
and life-cycle position. Furthermore, we were only investigating women, but the
concept of satisficing could be applied to both sexes at work, suggesting another area
of further research.

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Corresponding author
Susan Corby can be contacted at: s.r.corby@gre.ac.uk; sc03@gre.ac.uk

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