The Glass Funnel: A Tool to Analyse the Gender Regime of Healthcare Education and Work

The concepts glass escalator and glass ceiling have been widely used in studies of gender and organisations. In this paper we propose a novel metaphor to describe and analyse gender segregation and discrimination, that of a glass funnel. This concept does not relate to men and women as groups in the sense of fixed collective entities, but rather shows how taken-for-granted distinctions between men and women are reiterated and promote men in a way that downgrades women. However, as gender intersects with other power structures, both men and women can be propelled downwards through the funnelling motion made up of a market-oriented devaluation of the healthcare profession. Through an empirical investigation of the community of practice and gender regime of an upper secondary healthcare education programme in Sweden, we develop the glass funnel concept, an analytical tool aiming to open up for intersectional analyses of healthcare education and work.