Gender and occupational change: women and retail pharmacy in New Zealand

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Abstract
Recent work on women and professions has suggested that gender is an important influence on occupations' success in establishing and maintaining professional privileges. It has been argued that women have been excluded from professionalising occupations, and that feminisation is linked with de skilling, declining rewards and the development of secondary labour markets, in which women are concentrated. However, the case study of New Zealand pharmacy suggests that this is an incomplete account of the links between gender and professionalisation. For instance, women were partially excluded from retail pharmacy in order to maintain the market structure desired by pharmacists, but their entry in large numbers in the 1960s was an unintended consequence of the success of pharmacists' professionalisation project.