We All Love Charles

"We All Love Charles": Men in Child Care and the Social Construction of Gender
Author(s): Susan B. Murray

Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Aug., 1996), pp. 368-385
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"WE ALL LOVE CHARLES"
Men in Child Care and
the Social Construction of Gender
SUSAN B. MURRAY
University of Redlands
Based on four years of participant-observation field research and focused interviews with men and
women child care workers, the author analyzes how the marking of men workers and their experienc
doing child care work show how deeply feminized the work of child care is. When men choose to d
child care work, they become suspect. This suspicion manifests in restriction of men's access to children
in child care centers. Restricted access of men workers to children (compared with the access of wome
workers to children) implies men 's desirefor access to children is pathological. In these and other way
the organization of child care and the accountability ofpersons to sex category systematically push me
away from nurturing responsibilities and bind these responsibilities to women workers.
Child care is a gendered occupation,' and as such, child care is largely "women'
work." Gender shapes what women workers bring to this work and what they find
when they do it. Analyzing the experience of women, however, only yields a partial
understanding of gender. As Gerson and Peiss (1985, 327) state:
[T]he conception of gender as a set of socially constructed relationships which are

produced and reproduced through people's actions ... suggests that we appreciate
women as the active creators of their own destinies within certain constraints, rather
than as passive victims or objects. At the same time, this suggests that feminist
scholars must avoid analyzing men as one-dimensional, omnipotent oppressors. Male
behavior and consciousness emerge from a complex interaction with women as they
at times initiate and control, while at other times, cooperate or resist the action of
women. Clearly researchers need to examine men in the context of gender relations
more precisely and extensively than they have at the present time.
When women workers walk into child care settings, they both bring and are met
by gender-that is, a set of socially constructed relationships. It is, therefore,
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am greatly indebted to Wendy Brown, Jennifer Eichstedt, Craig Reinarman, Pam
Roby, Candace West, and to anonymous reviewers at Gender & Societyfor their comments on this arti
at various stages of its development. This research was also made possible, in part, through a resear
grant from the Feminist Studies Organized Research Activity under the Division of Humanities at th
University of California, Santa Cruz
REPRINT REQUESTS: Susan B. Murray, University of Redlands, Department of Sociology an

Anthropology, PO. Box 3080, Redlands, CA 92373-0999.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 10 No. 4, August 1996 368-385

? 1996 Sociologists for Women in Society
368
Murray / MEN IN CHILD CARE 369
difficult to see how many of these relationships they bring and how many are
already there. Men workers, however, enter a women-dominated setting. As a result,
men experience conflict and dissonance as men doing women-centered work.
Analyzing the experiences of men in child care can reveal constructions of gender
that may otherwise be obscured.
METHODS
Data for this article were collected as part of my dissertation proje

care workers (Murray 1995). In my research, conducted primarily in
California between June 1988 and June 1992, I used a combination of
observation field methods, focused interviews, and survey methods.
multimethod approach to maximize the validity of my findings. This
ever, is exploratory. While my findings seem to parallel other research
men in nontraditional occupations (e.g., Williams 1992), my "case stud
limits their generalizability.
My primary field sites included two child care centers, a group of
union organizers, and an informal group of gay and lesbian child care
conducted 18 focused interviews with child care workers between June 1990 and
September 1994; 12 of these interviews were with women, and 6 were with men.
I used a snowball sampling technique in determining whom to interview. I surveyed
gay and lesbian child care workers at the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the National
Association for the Education of Young Children meeting in Washington in No-
vember of 1990, distributing 50 mail-back surveys. The surveys contained 16
open-ended questions related to child care work and sexual identity, plus a number
of questions related to demographics. I received 35 back in the mail from 16 states
and Canada. Of the respondents, 63 percent were women, and 37 percent were men.
The data collected from each of these methods were analyzed using a combina-
tion of principles drawn from Becker's (1970) discussion of quasi-statistics, Glaser
and Strauss's (1967) formulation of grounded theory, and Katz's (1983) description
of analytic inductive methods.
Analytic coding occurred in two stages: initial coding and then focused coding
(Charmez 1983). The initial coding stage was primarily descriptive and served to
summarize the data. In this stage, I coded my data into as many categories as
possible. As I continued the analysis, I compared each new datum with the existing
codes. If it matched with an existing code, I placed it in my existing theoretical
category. If it varied from an existing code yet seemed related, I coded the datum
descriptively and then created a new, more general code that would encompass both
bits of data. As my initial codes shifted into more abstract codes, my analysis moved
into focused coding. For the categories I created through focused coding, I devel-
oped theoretical memos (Glaser and Strauss 1967). I compared these memos with
one another and continued to build my understanding of what was occurring in
these child care settings. Eventually, I compared and contrasted my findings with
existing theory. In deciding which conceptual categories to pursue, I followed
370 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1996
Becker's (1970) suggestion of using quasi-statistics to count frequency of recurring

codes. I focused my analysis on the themes that came up time and time again in my
field notes, my interviews, and my survey data. I wanted to produce the most valid
interpretation of these that I could.
In the interest of validity, I also drew upon Katz's (1983) analytic inductive
method in my search for correlation between data, developing analytic categories,
and existing theory. Specifically, in my larger examination of child care as women's
work, I looked closely at the experiences of men in child care. The experiences of
men in child care became the negative cases against which I compared my findings
about child care workers in general-most of whom were women. In other words,
a finding about child care workers was not a finding unless it fit the case for both
men and women. When it did not fit, then I modified my conceptual categories. At
some point in my analysis, it became clear that some of what was occurring for men
in child care was outside of the experience of women in child care and could not
be contained even within modified conceptual categories. These experiences of
men in child care seem to warrant their own explanation.
ANALYTIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDER
A substantial body of feminist research indicates that gender is co

three different levels. First, gender is a system of social relationship
and informs the organization of society's institutions (Gerson and
Lorber 1994). As an organizing system, gender interacts with and
institutional structures, such as economic structures, the family, relig
(Acker 1990). Thus, at one level, gender is a social structure in
constantly changing; it has a history; and it is linked to other structur
The constraining power of gender as a social structure is not found in its ge

much as in its fluid dynamics, the logic of its historical transformation. T
social structure is basically to work out its constraints, its internal pressure
and disruptions, and its potentials for change. (Connell 1985, 267)
Second, at the interactional level, gender is an accomplishment: the

of situated conduct in relation to normative conceptions of appropr
and activities for one's "sex category" (West and Zimmerman 1987,
other words, is something people "do" in and through the interactions
child care centers.
Finally, gender is an attribute of individuals, inasmuch as individuals are the
ones who do gender in interaction. However, the idiom for that doing comes from
the institutional arena and the unequal power relations that prevail there. The
pervasiveness of the asymmetry in power between men and women is linked to the
doing of gender and thus rendered indistinguishable from personal wants and
desires (e.g., Oakley 1972).
Gender is constantly being constructed at all three levels: structurally, interac-

tionally, and individually (as a continual self-assessment of one's gendered
attributes). Each level is analytically separate yet practically connected.
Gender as a social structure in process is the context for gender as an interactional
accomplishment-with each of these serving as the daily domain for individual
social actors. Examining gender at any one of these levels elucidates the other two.
CHILD CARE AS A GENDERED OCCUPATION
It is from the standpoint of the analytic construction of gender as

structure in process that I make the claim that child care is a gendered o
Gendered occupations are those occupations that are structured on the a
that they will be occupied predominantly by workers in a single sex catego
women and men bring gender to child care (both interactionally and as
attributes), but the occupation itself is gendered so that "job tasks and duti
workers to construct and display gender as an integral part of doing th
(Hall 1993, 454). Acker (1990, 146) contends, and I concur, that
To say an organization, or any other analytic unit, is gendered means that adv
and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and id
are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and fe
masculine and feminine. Gender is not an addition to ongoing processes, co
as gender neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of those processes, which can
properly understood without an analysis of gender.
The development of center-based child care is predicated on the assumpt

women are the workers. Moreover, this assumption is made explicit by m
workers I talked with. For example, Meghan2 said,
I think how child care is looked at has to do with this being a women-dominated
I think that if men dominated this field we would not have the conditions w
we would not have the low pay, the back breaking work, it wouldn't be that w
think a lot of the weakness comes from it being a woman-dominated professio
just don't get the respect, we don't get the recognition. It's more seen as the
thing for us to do.
Elsewhere, I have described and analyzed the myriad ways that child ca
as an appropriate occupation for women (Murray 1995). Women wo
expected in this field, and women workers are socially rewarded (if not
cally rewarded) for doing child care work. What is more, the gendered
labor in families disproportionately burdens women with child-rearing
bilities-responsibilities that provide an avenue into paid child care
women. The gendered division of labor in families seems to be mirrored
child care extends the emotional and physical labor of families. In their
responsibilities, women workers are often called upon to do things tra
associated with wife and mother roles. This, in turn, underlies the rewa
that structures child care work. The gendered reward system (which assumes that
women's earnings provide supplementary, not primary, family income) encourages
workers to accept emotional compensation in lieu of financial compensation and
thus perpetuates the continued devaluation of this work and its workers.
In my analysis of the experiences of women workers, however, it was difficult
to discern the line between gender as an interactional process (West and
Zimmerman 1987) and gender as a component of organizational structure that shapes
the experience of individual workers. In the world of child care, women's experience
exists as an unmarked case. It is difficult to see just how much notions of essential
femininity have to do with the work because femininity is intrinsic to the doing of
child care (see, for example, Coltrane 1989). Moreover, it is difficult to see the
workings of the gender system when only one gender is present (Acker 1990, 142).
Men workers make up between 3 and 6 percent of all child care workers; they
represent the deviant case. When men enter child care settings, their experiences
become marked as men's experiences. They are singled out as being something
other than child care workers. The marking of men workers and their experiences
doing child care work show how deeply feminized the work of child care is. The
remainder of this article, therefore, focuses on the work experiences of the men I
encountered doing child care work and how these experiences illuminate the
gendered structure of child care work. As my analysis shifts from structure to
interaction to individuals, my intention is to elucidate their connection.
MEN AS CAREGIVERS
I encountered men in every child care arena in which I participated d

four years of my research. Most of these men were directors, adminis
board members; very few of them were caregivers. In fact, in each of the t
where I conducted my participant-observation research, there was only
employed as a full-time caregiver. Each center did, however, employ se
on a part-time basis as substitute teachers. Still, none of these substitu
into regular positions or expressed an interest in doing so while I was
these two centers. Outside of these centers, I did encounter other men
caregivers: in early childhood education classes at the local community
professional conferences, in union meetings, at child care demonstratio
political roundtable sessions. The analysis that follows is based on my in
with men in the settings listed above, the focused interviews and
conducted, and the scant literature available on men in child care (e.g
Stewart 1993, 100; Hartmann and Pearce 1989, 26-8).3
Focusing on the experiences of men illuminates the gendered structur
care in three primary ways. First, the roles that men are expected to fill in t
for children and for their colleagues, often mirror those available to m
family. In their position as child care workers who extend the emotion
families, the contributions of men appear to be limited to that labor pr
fathers. Second, in line with Acker's (1990, 146) contention that gende
zations are characterized by divisions along lines of gender, examining the occu-
pation of child care reveals a gendered division in wages and in the positions held
by men and women. Consistent with the experiences of men in other women-
dominated professions (e.g., Allen 1993; England and Herbert 1993; Williams
1992), it appears that in child care, "men's advantages in the work place are
sustained even when they cross over [to women's jobs]" (Williams 1993, 6). Third,
examining the day-to-day experiences of men that do child care uncovers some of
the implicit norms that indicate who should be doing this work and what constitutes
a breech of these norms. I will analyze each of these gendering processes in the
discussion that follows.
What Men Bring to Child Care: Masculinity
In this women-dominated field, gender becomes a master status for men workers.
Perceptions about what men bring to child care are filtered through normative
conceptions of "manly" qualities, attributes, and roles. The men workers I studied
likened their relationships with the children under their care to fathers' relationships
with children. Mark, a head teacher at a preschool, commented, "some of the kids
really take to me. It's like they don't get enough male attention at home." Frank, a
teacher at a college-based preschool, characterized his relationships with the
children at the center in a similar way:
I think some of the kids here just look at me and see daddy. The boys especially seem
to really thrive on my attention. I think about all the kids that don't have fathers, and
I wish there were more men doing this work.
Frank sees himself as cast in the role of father by the children in his center. In short,
men in child care perceive themselves as extending the emotional labor of men in
families.
It is not, however, only the men that hold themselves accountable to normative
conceptions of essential manly natures in the child care environment. It was not un-
common to hear women workers attributing the benefits of having male coworkers
to the masculine roles they play within the family. The following conversation
illustrates how this expectation can shape child care practice and, ultimately, the
gendered division of labor in child care. Neighborhood School needed a new
afternoon head teacher to replace Charles who was leaving. We interviewed three
teachers for this position, two women and one man. The following excerpt is taken
from the conversation that took place between the two board members, two
teachers, and myself (all women) following our interview with Bill.
Madaline [Board member/parent]: I liked him, I mean I like Sandra [one of the other
candidates] better, but I think we need to keep a balance around here.
Sarah [Board member/parent]: I think it is good for kids to be around male energy, to
have male models for kids to look up to.
Robin [Head teacher]: I know, some of the kids are really drawn to Charles.
Mandy [Assistant teacher]: I know, I watch him with the kids and I think about what I
missed not having a father around.
While in this particular instance, Bill was not offered a position at Neighbor-
hood School (the two other candidates had more experience), all other things being
equal, Bill would have been offered the job. In the child care environment, men are
often sought after as workers because of the perceived need to have male role
models for children. For example, on Jeff's first day on the job, a coworker
commented, "Oh good, now we'll have someone to do truck play with the boys."
To the extent that manly qualities are sought in the women-dominated environment
of child care, men, by virtue of their sex category, will be given opportunities over
and above those given women.
Perceiving men in this setting as simply "fathers," or as role models for
childhood socialization, however, tends to obscure what else might be going on in
this setting. While men see themselves as being called upon to do gender in the
child care setting, they view their contributions to child care differently. When they
talked about what they see themselves as bringing to child care (outside of the
perceptions of others), all of the men interviewed framed their contributions as
intellectual and academic in nature. For example, while Frank perceives that the
children put him in a "daddy" role, he sees his role differently:
[My role is] to set up an environment where children can discover the physical world
and the social world.... We also set up a classic nursery school environment; we do
the corny stuff with turkeys and Halloween. But really my role is to set up an
environment and social climate so they can learn to manage their own world.
Other men talked about their "fascination with large motor development," the
"challenge of creating multicultural curriculums," and the "responsibility of iden-
tifying speech problems." Although one might contend that even these conceptions
are very gendered in that they emphasize intellectual (masculinized) contributions
over emotional (feminized) ones, men did not perceive them that way. Develop-
mental analyses are not seen as something that men, in particular, bring to child
care. Being marked by their sex category in the child care setting masks other
contributions men make in that setting. In our culture, normative conceptions of
appropriate manly behaviors in interaction with young children are very restricted.
In child care work, these restrictions constrain men and narrow the vision of the
people they work with about the possible contributions they make to children's
lives.
What Men Find When They Get There: Gendered Hierarchy
When men enter the field of child care, what they find is a hierarchical structure
that promotes their interests.4 Within the occupation of child care, my research, and
the research of others suggests that earning potential is divided along gender lines.
Women workers earn wages that average 69 percent of those earned by men;
full-time women workers earn even less (Hartmann and Pearce 1989). These
differences in wages, Hartmann and Pearce (1989, 27) conclude, "could reflect dif-
ference in experience and education, but more likely [they reflect] differences in the
types of jobs held, with men able to secure the better positions within child care."
Although the occupation is numerically dominated by women, the men who

work in child care are often found in director and administrative positions and have
risen to those positions more rapidly than their women counterparts. They encoun-
ter what Williams (1992) characterizes as the glass escalator, which moves them
quickly up the occupational hierarchy. Each of the men I interviewed (except for
the substitute teacher) talked about their rapid movement into teaching positions.5
As Calvin recounted:
I'm chairman of our [local] Worthy Wage campaign, and I have a little trouble with
this because I was able to jump right into a head teaching job and I didn't quite follow
all the steps. On the other hand, I really put out in my Early Childhood Education
program, I did an internship, and I really made a name for myself. But, they were
looking for a man. If there were a man and a woman equally qualified for a [child
care] position, I would probably get the job.
Like other men I interviewed, this worker attributes his rapid rise in position to
the fact that he is a man. This can be explained in reference both to a systematic
gendered division of labor that enables men to assume positions of power more
rapidly than women and to the practice of tokenism, which gives individual men
an advantage when doing women's work.
As Acker (1990, 143) notes, "In contrast to the token woman, white men in
women-dominated work places are likely to be positively evaluated and to be
rapidly promoted to positions of greater authority" (see also Coltrane 1989). As
Tom, a white man6 and a substitute caregiver at an infant toddler center, notes:
I get all these strokes for just showing up at my job every day. They are built in. And
it has nothing to do with me. It's just because I'm a man showing up in this realm
where basically there aren't any. I know they call me [to sub], 'cause they like having
a man around.
This tokenism, which advantages white men in some ways, also seems to work
to their disadvantage in cases in which they perceive themselves to be stuck in
high-visibility positions in centers. Having a white man as a caregiver is often a
boon to centers. While these men are often rewarded for simply being men in a
women-dominated work environment, it is also the case that centers use these token
workers as a sign of their diversity. Thus, the men may feel on display and may feel
used by centers. This kind of experience is common to many minorities. What
makes the situation of the white men I worked with and interviewed different from
most people in token situations is that outside the child care setting, white men are
the ones who occupy positions of economic and political power. So while individual
white men may experience their sex category as working against them in particular
ways, it does not also mean they are denied advancement. White men benefit from
being white men in whatever profession or job they choose, thus reproducing
gender segregation and stratification wherever they go. And though "individual
men and particular groups of men do not always win in these processes, masculinity
always seems to symbolize self-respect for men at the bottom and power for men
at the top, confirming for both their gender's superiority" (Acker 1990, 145).
Part of the occupational success of men in child care can be explained by their
involvement in professional organizations affiliated with child care. The majority
of men in my study had outside professional affiliations in the child care community
in addition to their regular teaching positions. As chairman of the Worthy Wage
Campaign for his county, Calvin represents the interests of all the child care workers
in his county (91 percent of whom are women). Another of the men I interviewed
indicated that he held positions in the National Association for the Education of
Young Children, the County Children's Commission, the Child Care Administra-
tive Support Group, the Early Childhood Education Child Care Advisory Board,
and the Worthy Wage Campaign. Still another was secretary of his local chapter of
the California Association for the Education of Young Children, was on the advisory
board for the then Oakland-based Child Care Employee Project, and was an active
union organizer in the United Auto Workers' campaign to organize child care
workers. In other words, each of these white men held positions of power and
influence in the child care community, both local and national.
This is not to say that women do not also get involved in professional and
political organizations related to child care, because they do. However, of the
11 women (10 white women and 1 Latina) with whom I conducted focused
interviews, only 5 were members of the National Association for the Education of
Young Children, and of these, only 1 had other active affiliations in her child care
community. In the four years I worked in the child care community, I met and talked
with hundreds of women workers; only a handful of these women described having
a sustained commitment to participation in an outside organization, and only a few
of them repeatedly showed up at the conferences, political rallies, commission
meetings, or union events.
The difference between men and women workers regarding their outside pro-
fessional and political affiliations can be explained by their divergent interactional
experiences. What I suspect is going on here (and this is something that deserves
more systematic study) is that men's drive and energy to participate in the political
infrastructure of child care, and women's seeming lack thereof, can be attributed to
the differences in men's and women's daily working experience. In the child care
setting, men receive an inordinate amount of positive feedback in comparison to
women workers, and this feedback may well fuel their participation in outside
organizations. Women's presence in this women-dominated setting is taken for
granted (i.e., "only natural"), but men's presence there is highly valued. There are
numerous examples in my field notes when, in the course of casual conversation,
men were singled out and stroked for simply being present in child care (cf. Coltrane
1989). The following excerpt from my field notes on Neighborhood School
illustrates such a moment:
Lunch is ending, Robin and Jane (the two morning teachers), are discussing who will
clear the lunch dishes from the table, and who will start napping kids. Some of the
children are on the deck, and some have gone down into the yard. As Robin grabs the
milk pitcher off the table, she takes Gina's hand and they start walking inside. Mandy
and Charles (the afternoon teachers) arrive together at the side gate. As Charles enters
the gate, Gina lets go of Robin's hand and runs to Charles, as do two other kids on
the deck. Jane comments, "Boy are we glad to see you." Robin follows with, "We are
always glad to see Charles." And Mandy pipes in, "Yeah, we all love Charles."
These comments, although made casually and given no special attention, are
significant to the extent that they form the context in which Charles works. Woven
together, these comments and others like them form a supportive and collegial net
for this worker. This was not an isolated incident; similar interactions happened
regularly in situations on the classroom floor when one man and two or more
women workers were present. If this is indeed typical of men's coworker experi-
ences in child care (and I suspect it is), then this might explain their frequent
participation in outside groups and organizations related to child care. Their token
status and subsequent positive valuation may give these men workers the added
motivation to become active and involved in the political infrastructure of child
care. For women, the lack of this overt positive valuation in the daily work world
of women workers may explain their lack of extra energy to participate in other
child-care-related activities.7 In other words, differences in the daily interaction of
women and men in child care centers contribute to, and shape, their professional
affiliations and their subsequent status in the child care hierarchy.
What Men Find When They Get There: Gendered Rules and Restrictions
I think that being a man there is more curiosity, like, why are you in this field? And
it generally comes from the point of view of, what's wrong with you? Because,
basically you're not in it to make big bucks, and there is very little status, and virtually
no power. What I do know about the child care profession in general is that men
generally end up in positions of authority. I mean that's how the hierarchy works, if
you are a man and you are in child care, well, you at least better be the director.
The other side of men doing child care for a living has to do with the repercus-
sions they experience as a result of choosing to do "women's work." When men
cross the gender boundary into child care, they challenge assumptions about
heterosexual masculinity. In addition to the positive strokes men receive for their
child care work, there are also penalties. The occupational and personal sanctions
placed on them for choosing child care work reveal much about normative concep-
tions of this occupation as an "essentially" womanly pursuit.
There are few socially acceptable reasons for men choosing to involve them-
selves in lower-status "women's work." The choice to do child care means an almost
certain movement down the ladder of power and prestige (or, for those men who
have not yet achieved high status, a reduced potential for establishing it). Moreover,
The man who crosses over into a female-dominated occupation upsets the gender
assumptions embedded in the work. Almost immediately, he is suspected of not being
a "real man": There must be something wrong with him ("Is he gay? Effeminate?
Lazy?") for him to be interested in this work. (Williams 1993, 3)
When men chose child care, their motives for making such a choice are questioned.
In child care settings, this questioning occurs most often on those occasions when
men get judged negatively for engaging in the same behaviors as their caregiving
counterparts who are women-when they are suspect just for doing their jobs.
In my study, many workers, both men and women, talked about how the men
who are child care workers are subject to different unwritten rules regarding their
physical access to children. Specifically, in many centers, men are more restricted
in their freedom to touch, cuddle, nap, and change diapers for children. As one
worker I surveyed stated, "I have worked in centers that employ male caregivers.
Parents have on occasion been hesitant to accept them. One parent explicitly asked
that a male caregiver not rub her daughter's back at naptime." In my observations
of workers, I paid careful attention to those interactions focusing specifically on
men's caregiving. I noticed that some centers maintained a division of labor among
teachers that resulted in men having less access to certain moments in a child's day.
Such divisions centered around physically intimate routines, like napping.
The napping routine is often a very physically interactive process for teachers
and children. "Napping" children can involve changing their clothes (removing pants,
shoes, socks, jackets), changing diapers, assisting them in going to the toilet
(helping to pull on and off underwear, wiping them), laying down next to them,
rubbing their backs, holding them, rocking them, or employing other techniques
that might help them to relax and fall asleep. It can be a very intimate routine and
a rewarding one for teachers. It can be a place of connection between teachers and
the children they work with who are otherwise difficult and disruptive.8
In one example, at a Head Start program (which I observed several times over
a period of three months), I noticed a division in caregiving between the three
regular caregivers: Michell (head teacher), Michael (teacher), and Juanita (assistant
teacher). Each day as lunch was ending, Michael would leave the table to supervise
the children who finished first. Michael took these children into the yard so as not
to disturb those still eating. When most of the children had finished eating and were
outside, Juanita or Michell would begin napping them in groups of three or four.
These two women would continue napping groups of children until everyone was
laying quietly on their mats. When the last group of children left the yard, Michael
would go inside and begin cleaning up the lunch dishes. Although the teachers at
this Head Start program often rotated other duties (like greeting parents, doing
circle time, directing art projects), this napping routine did not vary; each time I
observed at this center, Michael never napped the kids. I asked Michell about this
one evening as she was closing the center after the children and the other teachers
had gone home. Her reply: "It's safer this way. You just never know what the parents
might think, what kids might say. We really like Michael, and we've just always
done it this way."
The established routine at this center, although not written into center policy,
was to exclude men providers from an activity that might lead to parental accusa-
tions-regardless of whether there were any grounds for such accusations. In this
case, the head teacher was not questioning Michael's competence to nap kids, nor
was she concerned that kids might not be safe with him. Her concern was with
"what parents might think" about a man napping their child and "what kids might
say" and how parents might interpret this. Michell's concern was to protect Michael
from potential accusations of child sexual abuse. Excluding him from the napping
procedure lessened the opportunities for his behavior to be suspect. His sex category
(male) was the only variable that put him in the "suspect" category-that is,
subjected him to being held accountable as a man.
Child care centers also have very explicit policies about what men can and
cannot do with regard to caregiving activities. Restrictions on men caregivers are
quite blatant in some cases. As one survey respondent wrote: "When I first came
to work at my center the head teacher told me I shouldn't lay down next to the kids
while napping them. She said I needed to sit up while napping kids. This didn't
apply to the women." Other respondents similarly mentioned restrictions about
napping routines, diapering, and "unnecessary" or "excessive" touching of children.
Though centers develop unwritten policies to protect men workers from poten-
tial accusations from parents, there were also occasions on which men voluntarily
excluded themselves from their routine duties to avoid interactions with parents.
Such was the case with Tom, who intentionally refrained from the morning greeting
with one of his parents to avoid a potentially uncomfortable interaction. As he
explained:
I have been filling in for someone for almost a month, Robbie is one of my kids. He's
really grown fond of me, and I really grew fond of him. His mother is the one that I
have met a number of times. And she was a little edgy at first but has since gotten
friendlier. But when the father dropped him off, he was just like "who are you?" and
he was checking me out, I mean on so many levels. It was really uncomfortable. He
was holding his son in his arms and saying, "what do you think of this guy?" and
Robbie can barely talk. You know he [the father] was putting Robbie in a really
uncomfortable situation because Robbie loves his father and he's barely awake-it
takes Robbie a while to be awake anyway-so he's kind of looking at me and you
know being weird and stuff. And he finally hands Robbie over to me, but Robbie is
one of those kids who usually runs up to me in the morning. But in front of his dad.
I mean of course I'm nobody, because that's his dad, the ultimate. So it was weird.
So the next time he dropped Robbie off, normally I do the greetings in the morning,
I asked the head teacher to greet him because he was obviously so uncomfortable
with having to hand his kid over to another man.
In refraining from this caregiving routine, Tom has, in a sense, compromised his
ability to deliver quality care to this child, inasmuch as greeting parents is an
important component of quality. It is in the morning greeting that the parents let the
caregivers know what is happening with their children. Parents report on whether
the children slept well, ate breakfast, fell down, had a tantrum, or whatever else
might have occurred since they were last at the center. Continuity of care is
important to caregiver/parent rapport. Unfamiliar caregivers may miss important
cues in what the parents tell them about their children. Although the head teacher
can report to Tom about the greeting with Robbie's dad, she has not been privy to
Robbie's history in the same way that Tom has and, therefore, may overlook
information that she did not perceive as relevant.
Not all centers give in to pressures from parents and others to shape the
caregiving rules concerning men caregivers. For instance, the director of the Tiny
Tot Toddler Center told me about several situations involving David, a long-term
caregiver, in which parents asked that their children be given a different caregiver.
These parents, she recounted, were not comfortable with the idea of a man caring
for their children. She said she refused all such requests from parents concerning
"regular" caregivers when she felt they were grounded in concern over the care-
giver's sex category. As a result of these incidents, the board of directors at the
Tiny Tot Toddler Center drafted and implemented a nondiscrimination policy for
caregivers.
Responses to men caregivers and/or men caregiving can be organized along a
continuum of access to children. This continuum comprises no access at one pole,
partial access in the middle, and open access on the other pole. Regarding the
no-access pole, my data showed numerous cases in which parents clearly did not
want their children taken care of by a man at all. Sometimes parents requested
another caregiver for their children; at other times, parents refused to enroll their
children or withdrew them once they discovered a man was working at the center.
The following excerpt from my interview with Jeff, the afternoon head teacher at
a preschool, illustrates the no-access pole:
There have already been a couple of incidents here, where, as soon as parents find
out a man is working here, they decide not to enroll their child. The last one was really
weird. This parent spent two hours with the director, she had gone through the whole
admissions procedures and was signing her child up. She had come in the morning
to visit the center, but it was an all-day child, a girl child. Finally, the director had the
parent come in around noon to meet me. She introduced me saying, "this is Jeff, he
is the afternoon head teacher. He works with the younger children, and your child
will be with him in the afternoon." I knew right away just from looking at her face,
and when she shook my hand, that something was wrong. When the woman left and
the director came back in the center she said, "you won't believe this but she decided
against our center because she does not want to leave her child with a man."
While it is impossible to say for certain why this woman did not want to leave
her child, the outcome of her decision, and of the way she verbalized this decision,
is the same, regardless of her reasons. For Jeff and for his director, the line has been
drawn around his maleness as an undesirable quality of a caregiver. For other
parents, a phone call to the center was enough for them to decide not to enroll their
children in a center employing men.
Situations involving partial but limited access of men caregivers to children
abound in the child care setting. Any occasions on which men are asked to modify
their care routines, on which established routines have a gendered division of labor,
or on which men are warned against behaving in a certain way around children
constitute cases of partial access. Typical of such cases was the situation Tom
encountered during a substitute job, in which the head teacher explained to him that
men caregivers were not allowed to let the children sit on their laps; nor were they
allowed to nap them.
At the other end of the continuum are cases of open access, wherein men have
the same responsibilities, rights, and caregiving routines as women caregivers. In
the case of the Tiny Tot Toddler Center, in which the director upheld David's right
to care for children despite the pressure from parents, men caregivers' open access
to children was written into center policy by the board of directors. Open access,
in other words, had to be legislated by the center.
When normative expectations of appropriate attitudes and activities for a par-
ticular sex category are breached, as is the case of men doing child care, the
expectations, usually tacit, become explicit. The restrictions placed on the men who
work in child care regarding physical contact with the children they care for show
that their presence in this setting violates normative expectations. Doing child care
is "woman's work"; that men who work in child care are subject to a different set
of rules than women is further evidence of a gendered structure. What remains
unanswered is why this work is so laden with sex categorical expectations, and what
is threatened when men do child care.
Men Child Care Workers: Gendered Deviance
It is my contention that heterosexism lies at the core of the idea that white men
who do child care are suspect.9 Men, both gay and straight, who work in child ca
challenge our culture's dichotomous normative conceptions associated with "es-
sential" manly and womanly "natures" (West and Zimmerman 1987). The claim
that child care is "women's work" may appear an oversimplification of reality; ye
when that boundary is crossed, consequences-as I have just demonstrated-a
apparent.
When gender gets conflated with sexuality, then actions take on a heterosexist
flavor as well as a sexist one. In the case of men in child care, just the act of their
caring for children calls into question their heterosexuality. The fact of their
sexuality, whether gay or straight, need not ever be confirmed. It is their choice to
do child care that arouses suspicion and leaves them vulnerable to homophobic
reactions. Men's actions become suspect because they are choosing to do something
that women do and, even worse, because child care is undervalued employment for
women. Gay is a sexualized identity. When a man admits to being, is discovered to
be, or is suspected of being gay, his gay identity may come to define everything
else. He is, then, seen as someone who is guided by sexual practices, thoughts, and
feelings in all else he undertakes. Within the child care setting, anything having to
do with adult sexuality is strictly off-limits. So, when a person's identity as a gay
person is discovered or even suspected (as may be the case with straight men doing
"women's work"), that person's competence as a teacher/caregiver gets called into
question. To the extent that being gay is viewed as a perversion, it is linked with
other perversions, such as child sexual abuse.
Survey data I collected from members of the National Association for the
Education of Young Children's Gay and Lesbian Caucus affirmed that the equating
of being gay and being a child molester is not uncommon. In response to the
question "Have you ever seen or experienced instances of homophobia at your
center?" several people who answered in the affirmative described instances in
which people in child care settings equated being gay with being a child molester.
One woman responded, "I have often heard remarks about all 'homos' being
interested in molesting children." Another gay man who was "out" at his center
responded: "A couple of times I have worked in places where staff or parents were
blatantly anti-gay, refusing to leave a child alone with me." In several cases, survey
respondents brought up how ludicrous such accusations were by discussing in-
stances in which gay men were implicated in the molestation of young girls. One
worker wrote, "I was teaching in a center when all of a sudden my taking a little
girl to the bathroom became an issue. I think it was because an administrator at the
center thought I was gay. My head teacher defended me, but after that none of the
male workers were allowed to help kids in the bathroom." Such accusations (i.e.,
of gay men being sexual with girls) can be explained in light of the generalized
sexual connotations of gayness in U.S. society. The specifics, and the facts, are
irrelevant once sexuality comes to color everything else.
The final repercussion that deserves mention is the effect that being suspect has
on individual men who do child care. Working in a climate of suspicion causes men
to question themselves, their motives, and their behaviors. As Frank noted:
One particular time, there was an allegation about a fellow in the community. Men
came together, there were nine or ten of us and we had a meeting. And a lot of us
began thinking, the witch-hunt is on, and we should start looking at ourselves. So I
started looking at how physically close I was to children. I started thinking, well, "why
is she on my lap?" "Why did I bring her on to my lap?" "Is there something down
there, or whatever?" "Do I get any kick out of this?" I had to go through that soul
searching. I didn't come up with anything, but you know, you really start questioning
yourself.
CONCLUSION
Child care is a gendered occupation that reproduces institution

inequality in the ways it positions women and men as workers. Th
reproduced within the occupation of child care in each analytic a
gender is constructed. Moreover, these constructions sustain one a
each authenticates the existence of the other. Institutionalized ineq
a legitimating structure for doing gendered interactions. At the s
care workers as gendered men and women move through both in
institutions indicating to themselves and others the meanings tied to
At the institutional level-the level of economic, social, and cult
center-based child care contributes to gender inequality in the way
positions men and women workers, with men receiving, on average
and experiencing a more rapid rise through the child care hierarchy.
of child care provides a glass escalator (Williams 1992) for its men w
them quickly into upper-level positions. As an occupation that is be
ingly visible as more families move to this care option for their ch
based child care reinforces institutionalized gender inequality in the
At the interactional level, in extending the labor of families, the
of women and men workers seem to be confined to those paralleli
roles of mother and father. Workers may embrace these roles or resist their
imposition, but ultimately, accountability to sex categories colors other possible
contributions they might make. Perceiving women child care workers as mothers
and conceptualizing their work as mothering, for instance, overshadows other
possible perceptions of them as teachers and professionals. Similarly, perceiving
men as fathers (and fathers who cannot cuddle, kiss, or comfort, at that) reifies the
perception that there is very little that men have to offer children. Restricting men
workers' access to children (by comparison to the access of women workers)
implies that men's desire for access to children is pathological. In these and other
ways, the organization of child care and the accountability of persons to sex
category systematically push men away from nurturing responsibilities and bind
these responsibilities to women workers.
Finally, as an attribute of individuals, one's gender can become a key point for
self-assessment-particularly when it becomes grounds for suspicion by others. In
describing one of his experiences as a suspect, Jeff concludes:
I need to be really careful about getting in situations where I could be accused of child
abuse. One time a child told her mom that I hit her. It was in the last couple weeks of
the [nine month] program. It was one of the children that I had been the closest to. At
the time I didn't realize what was going on. I've since found out it had to do with
separation, this was how she was going to make it easier for herself to leave Jeff.
Anyway she told her mom that I hit her, and her mom believed her. She came over
and said to me, "my daughter said you hit her." I said, "I've never hit a child." She
replied, "Well she says you did and I believe her." I just said, "You need to talk to
Eric [the head teacher]," and I walked away. Eventually the three of us sat down and
talked about it, and cleared it up. But, you just need to be ultracareful. In San Francisco
the men Early Childhood Education teachers can't have a child on their lap, the
women can, but the men can't. I'm thinking, what kind of a message does this send
to the children?
What kind of a message does the gendering of child care send to the children?
While the answer to this question is beyond the scope of this research, I conclude
with the possibility that child care centers are becoming increasingly important sites
of childhood "recruitment to gender identities" (see Cahill 1987). The messages
about gender that children receive in these centers are carried beyond their child
care experiences. The gender relations modeled at these sites, therefore, shape
children's conceptions of what is appropriate for a woman or for a man and, thus,
afford children the conceptual apparatus for holding others accountable (and being
held accountable themselves) as gendered and unequal beings.
NOTES
1. See Acker (1990) for a discussion of gendered organizations. Although Acker

organizations being gendered, I have transposed her use of this concept and applied it to
of child care.
2. The names of both individuals and child care centers appearing in this article have b
to preserve the confidentiality of those involved.
3. There are few "legitimate" relationship roles available for men to have with young children; father,
physician, and priest are among the few that readily come to mind. This narrow vision of men and their
relationships with children is mirrored in social science research when one compares, for example, the
abundant literature available on men as fathers (e.g., Hewlett 1992; Lamb 1987) with the above-cited
literature on men as child care workers.
4. At the same time, men in child care, relative to other men not in child care, put themselves in a
position of inferior status by entering a women-dominated occupation.
5. Generally, workers enter the occupation of child care as aides or assistant teachers, then become
teachers, and only after spending time on the floor do they get promoted to the position of head teacher.
Head teachers still work on the floor with children, but they have the added responsibility of supervising
the assistant teachers and teachers on their shift.
6. Although the journal style is to capitalize White as a parallel to capitalizing Black, Latina, and so
on, I have used the lower case "w" intentionally because, as Collins and Andersen (1992, xiv) contend
and I concur, "white has not represented a marked historical experience in the same sense that Black
(or Latina) experience has."
7. This is not to say that women workers receive no positive and encouraging feedback from
coworkers. However, in my observations in different centers, it appeared that men received such
comments more frequently than did women workers. In fact, on any given day in a classroom when I
observed for more than two hours, if there was a man worker present, I heard at least one such comment
being directed at him. It was almost as if the women workers perceived men as needing additional
inducement to stay in this setting.
8. As a head teacher at Neighborhood School, Robin was given responsibility to nap three of the
most difficult children at the center. I often observed these children in the yard and in the classroom,
fighting with other kids, hitting them, screaming at teachers, yelling obscenities, and having tantrums.
Observing these same children in their nap room with Robin, I would often find the four of them lying
on the floor (on mats), side by side, with Robin in the middle rubbing two backs at once and telling
a story.
9. In my research, white men were the only men I found doing child care in the child care setting;
hence, I can only draw conclusions from those I studied. There is ample reason to avoid generalizing
from white men's experience to men of color's experience in existing research.
REFERENCES
Acker, Joan. 1990. Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. G

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readings, edited by R. M. Emerson. Boston: Little, Brown.
Clarke-Stewart, Allison. 1993. Daycare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Collins, Patricia H. and Margaret A. Andersen. 1992. Race, class, and gender: An anthology. Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth.
Coltrane, Scott. 1989. Household labor and the routine production of gender. Social Problems 36:473-
90.
Connell, R. W. 1985. Theorizing gender. Sociology 19:260-72.
England, Paula, and Melissa S. Herbert. 1993. The pay of men in female occupations: Is comparable
worth only for women? In Doing "women's work": Men in non-traditional occupations, edited by
C. L. Williams. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Gerson, J., and K. Peiss. 1985. Boundaries, negotiation, consciousness: Reconceptualizing gender
relations. Social Problems 32:317-31.
Glaser, Barney, and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for
qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine.
Hall, Elaine. 1993. Smiling, deferring, and flirting: Doing gender by giving "good service." Work and
Occupations 20:452-71.
Hartmann, Heidi I., and Diana M. Pearce. 1989. High skill and low pay: The economics of child care
work. Washington, DC: Institute For Women's Policy Research.
Hewlett, Barry S., ed. 1992. Father-child relations: Cultural and biosocial contexts. New York: Aldine
de Gruyter.
Katz, J. 1983. A theory of qualitative methodology: The social system of analytic fieldwork. In
Contemporary field research: A collection of readings, edited by R. M. Emerson. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Lamb, Michael E., ed. 1987. The father's role: Cross-cultural perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Lorber, Judith. 1994. Paradoxes of gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Murray, Susan B. 1995. Child care work: The lived experience. Ph.D. diss., University of California,
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Oakley, Ann. 1972. Sex, gender & society. New York: Harper & Row.
West, C., and D. H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & Society 1:125-51.
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. 1993. Introduction. In Doing "women's work": Men in non-traditional occupations, edited by

C. L. Williams. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Susan B. Murray is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Redlands. She
has written several articles on child care, including "Center-Based Child Care: New Growth
on the Post-Modem Family Tree" and " 'It's Safer This Way': The Subtle and Not-So-Subtle
Exclusion of Men in Child Care, "forthcoming in Subtle Sexism: Current Practices and Prospects
for Change, edited by N. V Benokraitis and J. R. Feagin, New York: Russell Sage.

We All Love Charles

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"We All Love Charles": Men in Child Care and the Social Construction of Gender

Author(s): Susan B. Murray

[T]he conception of gender as a set of socially constructed relationships which are

REPRINT REQUESTS: Susan B. Murray, University of Redlands, Department of Sociology an

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 10 No. 4, August 1996 368-385

Data for this article were collected as part of my dissertation proje

Becker's (1970) suggestion of using quasi-statistics to count frequency of recurring

ANALYTIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDER

A substantial body of feminist research indicates that gender is co

The constraining power of gender as a social structure is not found in its ge

Second, at the interactional level, gender is an accomplishment: the

Gender is constantly being constructed at all three levels: structurally, interac-

CHILD CARE AS A GENDERED OCCUPATION

It is from the standpoint of the analytic construction of gender as

The development of center-based child care is predicated on the assumpt

I encountered men in every child care arena in which I participated d

What Men Bring to Child Care: Masculinity

What Men Find When They Get There: Gendered Hierarchy

Although the occupation is numerically dominated by women, the men who

Men Child Care Workers: Gendered Deviance

Child care is a gendered occupation that reproduces institution

1. See Acker (1990) for a discussion of gendered organizations. Although Acker

Acker, Joan. 1990. Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. G

. 1993. Introduction. In Doing "women's work": Men in non-traditional occupations, edited by

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