Edinburgh

Interview with Janet Siltanen
Helin Burkay and Amanda Wilson

Part 2 – PhD research and Employment at Edinburgh University

JS: So, I tried to get away from a quantitative research focus. It was challenging, but you come back to it from different angles. I came back to it in a way that I felt somewhat reconciled. And I was very pleased that my doctoral thesis was a piece of qualitative work. It has some quantitative stuff in it, because I was trying to identify a kind of minimum wage for a person working and supporting a family and that involved a little bit of quantitative calculation, but by and large my PhD thesis is a qualitative piece of work. So I was really happy. Cathy Marsh, who was in SPS, told me about this case. The Equality Act was introduced in the UK and it impacted a union called the Union of Postal Workers (UPW). The UPW organized postal workers and telephonists, and there was an official occupational segregation in place with these two jobs. In the postal job, men were hired on permanent contracts, got first choice of holidays, etc. Women were only hired as temporary workers, they got all the shift changes that nobody wanted, all the holidays that nobody wanted, etc. And in the telephony job, women worked primarily during the day. A couple guys were working during the day, but that was primarily a women’s job, and in the evening it was a men’s job, no women working nights at all. It was like a little men’s club, they made their own tea, they had their coffee and smoking breaks together. Both jobs were represented by the same union, and the gender segregation was clearly discriminatory. I was interested in talking to people about how they felt about that, and if anybody had any intention to do anything further about it. So I did 144 interviews. I interviewed postal workers on all shifts, including the night shift. They gave me an office, which was very nice of them. I interviewed during all shift hours and did have a little nap sometimes in my office on the floor, leaning against a chair. Then I did both the day shift and the night shift in the telephony. One of the things that really became clear to me was, and in some ways it should have been clear to me before, but it just sort of struck home very hard as to how domestic responsibilities were so profoundly structured by where people could find work, and what sort of work they could find. So the women who were in the telephonist day job did not have a lot of family responsibility. The women who were doing the higher paid postal work were supporting their families. When we think about it, it maybe sounds a bit obvious, you need an income in order to support a family, but you need to find those jobs with sufficient wages and get access to those jobs even when your skill set is pretty limited. And quite a few of those postal women were also Black. That’s one thing that I regret – I didn’t deal with race as thoroughly as I should have. I didn’t quite have the tools at the time to think it through in a way that I felt was honouring the experiences that were being shared with me. But the Post Office work was a distribution across employment positions patterned by race as well as a distribution by gender.

AW: 144 interviews – was that what was required? Was representation an issue? Was it a hangover from the quantitative?

JS: Possibly. I mean, there were two telephonist groups in the morning and one group in the evening. So there were 3 telephony groups I wanted to interview. I did an early shift, not sure if I did an afternoon shift, but I definitely did the evening shift evening and night shift. So there are six groups there, potentially I wanted to interview. So the 144 gets kind of small when you start breaking it up. Their experiences were quite different, working the evening shift had a different flavor to working like the day shift.

I am happy that I was able to publish my PhD as a book but that did take awhile. It came out in ‘94. I got my PhD in ’85 after I started teaching at Edinburgh. So it took me almost 10 years to go from PhD to book.

HB: You worked for Status of Women, and then you started teaching at University of Edinburgh, and then at Carleton. How did that period shape up?

JS: My PhD wasn’t finished, it was in progress, and the job came up in Ottawa at Status of Women to put together a document that would support bargaining on gender issues in employment. This was maybe ‘82-’83, I interviewed for that position, and I got it, and then the job at Edinburgh came up, and I interviewed for that, too. And I got that. Two jobs – a really nice problem to have! I didn’t want to leave the Status of Women in a lurch, but I had to tell them that I was going to take the Edinburgh job because it was a 4 year job to start. They were very great about it and said, Okay, we’ll hire somebody you can work with, and then you go away and they’ll complete the project. And ‘the somebody’ was Julie White, who eventually worked in the research office for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. So I met Julie and had a great time working with her. I thought we did an excellent job, we identified issues, collective agreement circumstances where things could be improved, what arguments could be used for those improvements, etc. The thing never saw the light of day.

HB: Was that a political decision?

JS: It was. I was no longer in Canada and at this point Julie had to manage the situation on her own. But, what she reported was that it was deemed to be too prolabor. So that was disappointing, but my friendship with Julie has carried on, so that’s a nice outcome.

I started at Edinburgh in ‘84. And interestingly, the gender parts of sociology, anthropology, and broader units within Edinburgh were still in development. And one of the things that got going shortly after I arrived, was to set up an MA in gender studies. Trisha Jeffrey, my colleague, an anthropologist, was in charge of that, but I got involved as well. We started a women’s group, faculty, and students. A few of the students that I supervised while at Edinburgh were co-supervisions with someone from another department, it was the norm for a while, so I supervised with someone from social policy, someone from education, which created bonds across the university and introduced us to other people working in other units in a very collegial way. Our women’s group lasted for 4 or 5 years, it went on for quite a while. We didn’t aim to produce anything like a book or write together. It was just a very great, supportive, nurturing kind of network. Both Judith Fewell and Wendy Bottero were part of that group (two contributors in the festschrift). And those friendships with colleagues and grad students have lasted a lifetime.

HB: What types of questions were feminist scholars asking then?

JS: In the eighties psychoanalysis came on board as an avenue into understanding gender politics and gender relations. So Juliet Mitchell wrote Psychoanalysis and Feminism; it had a huge impact, not only in understanding of gender relations and power relations in particular, but women, including some from our women’s group, decided to train as psychoanalysts. That was a major new tangent that lasted for quite a while.

I hardly ever supervised anyone who did anything remotely related to what I worked on, but Wendy Bottero was probably the closest, and she was interested in how gender profiles of professions became established as part of the professional identity. Wendy tried to work with the full wage-component wage dichotomy (set out in my 1994 book “Locating Gender”) and so did Jane Pulkingham. But there was no pressure for anybody to be working in anybody else’s area or to adopt their approach. The women’s group tended to be not so much a supervisory group, even though quite a few of us were supervising, but more about reading and discussing new stuff that was coming out.