In a gender studies class Jule Hauf took during her master's, the professor showed the room a picture of a baby and asked what they saw. The students learnt that people who thought it was a boy were more likely to interpret its facial expression as angry and active, while people identifying the baby as a girl tended to see the exact same baby as needy and fearful. "I used to think gender wasn't such a big problem nowadays," Jule says. "I was naive."
That class, taken more or less by accident as an elective outside her economic policy degree, set off a sequence of choices that would eventually bring her to the EUI. She spent time at the OECD and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, working on gender policy, before deciding she needed to go deeper. "We were recommending gender-based policies, but I was looking for more depth and really wanted to learn more," she says. So, she enrolled in a PhD at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, without a sociology degree, without the vocabulary, and without the theoretical frameworks some of her peers had spent years building. "I remember really drowning in the beginning," she says.
Four years later, she is finishing a thesis that looks at both sides of occupational segregation: why women are underrepresented in STEM, and why men are almost entirely absent from nursing, care, and education. For Jule, they are two faces of the same problem.
Her thesis is based on three papers into occupational segregation, and its central finding is that the barriers keeping men and women in separate professional worlds are not simply structural. They live, as much as anything, in the imagination.
The first paper emerged from a large study conducted by Jule in Switzerland, targeting students between 16 and 20 who were on an academic track and planning to go to university. They were shown pairs of hypothetical fields of study and asked which they would consider. The researchers varied the characteristics of those fields systematically: the gender composition of the student body, whether the work involved programming or technical tools, whether the atmosphere was competitive or respectful, and what kind of salary or social meaning the career would eventually offer.
The findings were not what the researcher had expected, at least not entirely. Both men and women ranked a respectful atmosphere as highly desirable. Both were drawn to intellectually challenging tasks and to work that felt useful to society. "Women like usefulness the same as the salary; they think both are important," Jule explains. "Men value salary even more. But, when you just compare preferences for meaningful work, we find no gender difference." The image of men as single-mindedly competitive, indifferent to meaning, turns out to be one more stereotype that is not backed up by their findings.
What they did find was something harder to fix. Women showed a strong and consistent aversion to programming and technical content. Men, meanwhile, showed no particular aversion to arts, languages, or creative work; they just didn't end up there. The one thing men actively recoiled from was emotionally supportive work, and even that aversion, Jule's research found, was not immovable. When salaries were higher and the gender composition of a field more balanced, the aversion softened. Not into enthusiasm, but into indifference. "They still cannot be incentivised to consider it," she says, "but at least it’s not a negative reaction."
This asymmetry is where Jule's work gets interesting. Men and women are pushed away from different fields by different forces, and the consequences run in both directions. The underrepresentation of women in STEM is well-documented in its consequences: a gender pay gap that widens with seniority, industries less innovative than they could be, and leadership that remains overwhelmingly male. Less discussed is what happens when men stay out of nursing, care and education – to those services, to the men themselves, and to the assumptions that make their absence seem natural in the first place.
Her second paper turns to nursing specifically, and to Poland, where the gender culture is among the most conservative in Europe. The premise is straightforward: Nursing has been so thoroughly coded as female that most people, when they picture the job, picture emotional labour. Sitting by bedsides, offering comfort. What they don't picture is the physical demand, the clinical decision-making, the sustained attention to complex medical situations that nurses actually perform. "Most of the attention on patients is actually from nurses," she says.
The question her paper investigates is whether broadening that image, making visible what nursing actually involves, increases the acceptance of men in the profession. The stereotypes men face when they enter nursing are not merely social awkwardness. "There are horrible stereotypes," Jule says, not hesitating. "That they're sexually deviant, paedophiles. Their sexuality is questioned. They're seen as lazy, because everyone assumes: Why aren't you a doctor?"
That last point opens into something deeper in her analysis. In sociology, the relationship between gender and status is well documented: Male-coded activities carry higher status, which means it is broadly legible for women to aspire to them, but for men to move in the other direction is to appear to be giving something up. "Women have more leeway in what they can do," Jule says. "Because it's clear to everyone that women would, of course, ‘want’ to be like men." The sarcasm is deliberate. "But there's really no acceptance for men behaving in a feminine way."
This is where the research touches something that goes beyond policy levers. The stereotypes are not random; they are load-bearing. They hold up structures of status and expectation that have been stable for a very long time. Jule is clear-eyed about the difficulty of changing them. "It's not like policy can suddenly change a culture of self-expression," she says, speaking about her third paper, a cross-country study linking self-realisation values to occupationally gendered choices. But, she also resists the conclusion that culture is immovable.
She points to Scandinavian paternity leave as evidence. When fathers are incentivised by policy to take longer leaves, research now shows, gender norms shift. The act of caring, when it becomes common enough to be visible, stops reading as aberrant. "We do see that policies can impact norms," she says.
The thread connecting all three papers is a concern with inaccurate perceptions: not just stereotypes about people, but stereotypes about jobs themselves. Those stereotypes take root early. "Already when children grow up, there are different expectations about what girls and boys are good at," Jule says. "And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy." Women avoid programming not only because of who is in those rooms, but because of what those rooms are imagined to look like. The lone coder, romantically unsuccessful, socially isolated, compulsively technical. It’s an image that accumulated culturally, not inevitably. "Women were over-represented in programming when it first started," she notes, "and it was seen as a relatively trivial job." The masculinisation came later, as the field's prestige rose.
The practical implications are more modest than the problem might demand. If jobs are misunderstood, they can be better described. Study programmes can highlight the parts of a career that get lost in the stereotype – the collaborative side of programming, the clinical complexity of nursing. "You can highlight those things," Jule says. "Very easy fixes. Already in the study description, you can have those things." But she is careful not to overstate what that achieves. "Policy wants this sort of causal effect. This leads to that. And often in research, we just can't give that sort of answer. We can say: In this study, in this context, this is what we found."
What Jule has found, in essence, is that the barriers to gender integration in the labour market are not simply about prejudice or preference, though both play a role. They are also about imagination: about the stories that attach to jobs, the images that define who belongs in which room, and the assumptions that travel, unchecked, from one generation to the next.
Jule Hauf is a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences. Her thesis, ‘Gender segregation in higher education and occupations’, is supervised by Prof. Herman van de Werfhorst.