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Occupation Paper & Presentation
Occupation Paper & Presentation
Each student will write an 8-10 page paper on an occupation you are interested in for yourself, and do a class presentation.
You will interview a Wellesley alum in your selected occupation, or one similar to it, and conduct Bureau of Labor Statistics data and library research on this occupation. I must approve your project before you begin work on it. You will become the expert on this occupation. Full assignment here. Visualization of Wellesley majors and occupations here.
Deadlines
Deadlines
- September 13th. Select an occupation and research wages. Identify and contact an alum in that occupation.
- Set up an interview with the alum before October 1st.
- Email me what occupation you plan to study and whom you will interview by September 20th.
- Bring completed wages worksheet to class September 27th
- Your annotated bibliography for the literature review portion of your paper (see below) is due October 11th.
- During class on October 25th, each student will do a poster presentation on their Occupation Project.
- Occupation Papers are due by 4pm on December 20th. Please e-mail your papers to me.
On September 20th, we will learn to use Bureau of Labor Statistics data to learn more about your selected occupation.
On September 27th, we'll work on using worksheet data to create graphs.
The Interview
The Interview
The goal of the interview is to learn more about your selected occupation, and explore one or more topics we are discussing in this class (e.g., occupation choice, experiences with gendered expectations at work, job assignments, promotions, sexual harassment, managing work and family). See handout, Strategies for qualitative interviews for how to ask good questions. Enter your sample interview questions here.
See The Hive handout for how to contact an alum.
Library Research
Library Research
Your paper will include a literature review (2-3 pages) of relevant readings from the course, plus other sources from the library, on-line databases and government reports or data. See below for guidelines. You will submit an annotated bibliography of possible sources by Oct 11th.
Paper and Presentation
Paper and Presentation
Paper Format. Papers should be 8-10 pages long (not including references), double-spaced, with no more than 1-inch margins all around. Do not include an Appendix of any kind – describe in your paper anything that is relevant to your paper. All papers must use full and correct citations of sources, and include a references section at the end with all sources used in your paper. See below for outline and content.
Presentation Format. I recommend using PowerPoint or Google slides for your presentation. Your presentation should follow the general organization of your paper. We will do presentations as posters - see these guidelines.
How to write an occupation paper
How to write an occupation paper
The content of the paper will be shaped by your interview and your library research, so each paper will be different. However, all papers have in common that the reader will learn about the occupation, about how this occupation is gendered, and about the experiences of women in this occupation.
Each paper should follow a general outline that includes:
(1) an introduction – e.g., what occupation does your paper address, general information about that occupation, and the questions studying that occupation raises about women and/or gender in the workplace. Use the Occupation Outlook Handbook for background.[1]
(2) a literature review (2-3 pages) of relevant readings from the course, plus other sources from the library, on-line databases and government reports or data. These sources may be specific to the occupation (some must be), or they may address issues of gender in the workplace broadly. For example, if your interviewee said that, at her workplace, men do one type of work and women do another type of work, what do our readings or other journal articles say about why this happens, and about the consequences of this gender segregation?
(3) ) a description of the project (methods) – For the interview, who did you interview (no names, just description), did you observe or shadow this person or do you have other first-hand knowledge about this occupation? For the analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data on earnings, where did the data come from, how did you analyze it?[2]
(4) what you learned from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data and the interview, your results. The Bureau of labor Statistics data section should include both text and charts/graphs. The interview results should be organize by themes, not in chronological order of what you learned first, what you learned second, etc.
(5) an analysis of your results/observations/experiences – this may be a separate section or interwoven with section 4. The purpose of analysis is to make sense of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data and the interview – what does it mean? How is it related to the readings and sources in your review of the literature at the beginning of your paper? Does it provide examples of the ideas in readings, or do the readings help you, the author, in making sense of your interview or the Bureau of Labor Statistics data?
(6) a conclusion or discussion section. What is the take-away message from your paper? What do you want the reader to remember? What are the implications of what you learned to our understanding of women or gender in this occupation, or in the workplace?
Guidelines for your interview results and analysis (sections 4 and 5):
- you don’t have to include everything you heard/saw/learned;
- analyze patterns or themes in your data/interview and illustrate them with examples from your interview/data;
- reflect on the meanings and significance of your findings;
- connect the information you gathered with specific ideas, readings or discussions in this course;
- refer to specific authors/sources, cite them properly and include them in a bibliography at the end of the paper;
- be a critical thinker, go beyond the readings and include your own ideas, supported by evidence.
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