Male Social Workers In a Female Majority Profession

Abstract

Social work is long established as a female majority profession, with the ratio of male to female practitioners continuing to widen. There are campaigns to broaden recruitment to better represent the communities' social workers serve, and historically and contemporarily this has included targeting men. A scoping review was undertaken, the themes of which are discussed, establishing how existing research around gender and masculinity in the social work workforce has focussed on students. However, where recruitment campaigns aim to get more men into the workforce, how do qualified practitioners experience and make sense of masculinity? This paper introduces an ongoing doctoral research study, using interpretative phenomenological analysis to address the research question ‘how do statutory children and families social workers make sense of expressions of masculinity?’