From providing intimate physical care to intensive pastoral support, female teachers face far greater expectations to take on largely invisible caring duties and emotional labour in their roles, the study led by QUT’s Anna Hogan, has revealed.
Drawing on the accounts of 42 teachers and school leaders from across three Brisbane schools, the research found the intensification of workload is not a gender-neutral phenomenon.
Hogan says while all teachers do experience time poverty during the school day – ‘it’s a structural problem in schools’ – this appears to be most severe for women, who absorb a greater amount of relational and relational responsibilities.
Many duties have simply become normalised as ‘women’s work’ within school cultures, she suggests.
Hogan highlights one telling example given by a male teacher.
“We’ve got a young boy here … he’s in a wheelchair and can’t toilet himself. Can’t clean himself. And that was a big thing for staff last year when we realised we’d have to help him. “Like, wow. Okay. Is this where my job is heading now?” There’s going to be resistance and a bit of self-preservation from staff.
“But luckily, there are beautiful ladies [teachers] here … they’re doing that for him. They’ve got a great relationship with that young person,” the teacher shared.
This account reveals a great deal about the implicit nature of gendered expectations within teaching, Hogan suggests.
“[That job] had become very much a women’s responsibility. It’s this idea that men, for numerous reasons, can kind of put (up) that distance, whereas the women, because of the historical kind of framing of teaching as a ‘mother teacher’, it’s caring, it’s relational, it’s seen that women are better suited to this kind of task.
“And so we could see these physical caring patterns, these welfare issues, all of that was predominantly falling to women...”
Anna Hogan warns women teachers are not only absorbing more emotional and caring work, but are facing rising misogyny in the classroom as well.
Teaching, as the study notes, has long been portrayed as a profession uniquely suited to women and particularly to mothers, because of its presumed alignment with caregiving and ‘family life’.
Yet this has only fortified expectations that teachers should be emotionally available, self-sacrificing, and willing to extend their labour beyond paid hours, the researchers argue.
They say the image of the ‘ideal teacher’ mirrors broader ideals of motherhood as one of unwavering commitment to the children in your care.
As the study found, this expectation extends well beyond discrete tasks to encompass a broader form of emotional and pastoral labour in schools.
One principal reported that many of his staff, most of whom were women, routinely went ‘above and beyond’ to support students.
He described one teacher who was ‘making ham and cheese sandwiches for six kids whose mum’s not doing great at the moment’.
Meanwhile, a teacher at the same school said she regularly used her own money to buy food for students at the tuckshop and found it ‘impossible to switch off at night’ because she was continually worrying about the children in her class – a common experience that emerged in interviews with female teachers.
“Andrea spoke of weeks when ‘the heaviness … weighs really heavy’ and Diana described being on ‘high alert all the time’ particularly around challenging students, explaining that ‘it’s my cortisol going crazy’,” the study explains.
While male teachers and school leaders also acknowledged they carried concerns about students beyond the school day, they appeared to have a greater capacity to establish emotional boundaries here.
“Aaron, for example, spoke of being able to ‘walk through the front door at home with a smile’, while Arthur commented that although his wife sometimes noticed when something was on his mind, he was ‘mostly … good at leaving it behind’,” the study notes.
There’s no doubt the ‘emotional residue’ of teaching seems to stick with female teachers more intensely, Hogan says.
“It’s not just the relational part of women’s work in schools, but it’s also the kind of rising misogyny that they’re dealing with as well.
“There was definitely a tension through women’s experiences of, ‘I’m being caring, but I’m also suffering this kind of gender-based violence in my classrooms as well’.
“It’s that double-edged sword or the double burden of being a female teacher,” Hogan says.
A growing body of research, including one recent study, has highlighted teachers’ alarming experiences with sexual harassment within their schools.
Researchers have warned that institutional gaslighting and a widespread downplaying of the problem at the school leadership level is failing to address a rise in misogyny and gender-based violence amongst boys.
In Hogan’s study, a deputy principal said she had a few female staff who have reported that they ‘felt very uncomfortable and very threatened by what the boys think is just joking around’.
Another male teacher similarly spoke of a culture of ‘toxic masculinity’ within the school, noting that students ‘don't give it to me because I’m male’.
“For women teachers, managing this hostility adds a further layer of labour, requiring emotional self-regulation, efforts to maintain professional authority and strategies to minimise the risk of psychological harm,” the study reports.
One teacher described how she broke down in front of a class and cried because she was so overwhelmed with their ‘horrible’ behaviour.
“[The class] … had so many kids who just wouldn’t listen, would swear, be out of their seats, pushing and shoving … And then one of them turned around to me … and I think the teacher aide that I had in there said, ‘Miss doesn’t deserve to be treated like that’.
“And he turned around and looked at me in the eye and went, ‘Yes. Yes, you do’.
“…I just cried in front of the kids … I just could not hold it in, and that was like, Period two. I had half a day left of work where you have to get it together to then go back into the classroom and you know you might have them the next day,” the teacher shared.
Another teacher outlined moments when ‘really traumatic incidents’ left her unable to continue teaching and forced her to take following days off, saying her lessons were frequently ‘overtaken’ by male students.
Change is clearly needed at the system level, Hogan says.
“If we’re going to ask teachers to do this work, we need to better resource it – it can’t be female teachers who are best placed to do relational care work, it needs to be allied health professionals in schools helping to provide this.
“So, it’s not just about making women teachers better prepared to do that work. It’s literally saying, ‘no, we need an external support structure in place that can actually structurally support the conditions or the complexity that now exists in schools’.”
