The Truly Creative Floral Designers? When Gender intersects with Vocational Work

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Female-Dominated Occupations

Abstract

This paper tackles the question of how creativity is displayed among floral designers working in Switzerland, and how exactly gender plays out. The tasks florists undertake are associated with specific skills that are considered to be important: business acumen, creativity, an artistic flair and manual abilities. The most successful florists are presumed to be those with an “artistic flair” and with the social skills required to achieve recognition for this from their clients, in the form of customer loyalty.
If the artistic flair is often routinely associated with femininity, the florists tend to consider the skills they unanimously define as being important to their success to be gender-neutral. If creativity is, at first sight, not seen as something that is associated with sex category membership, it is clearly seen as a given, rather than an acquired skill. This naturalization of creativity is linked with the idea that being a florist is not a simple job but a vocation. The low wage levels within the occupation thus often become a proof of evidence that one does not make this job for economical reasons but rather in response to a “calling”. This paper, based on ethnographic data such as participant observation and interviews, will explore how “creative identities” are allocated and more particularly how gender intersects with vocation in order to justify men’s entrance into this highly feminized occupation. We will also tease out how and when the sexual orientation is playing out and when gender is made salient at work.

Author

• Isabelle Zinn, Université de Lausanne