Mothering or smothering? Pastoral power and discourses of protection in Scottish school-age-childcare
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Childcare has historically been constructed as ‘women’s work’, undertaken predominately by unpaid caregivers such as mothers (Huppatz, K. [2023. Gender, work and social theory: The critical consequences of the cultural turn. London: Bloomsbury Academic].). Caring responsibilities have been discursively constructed with perceived expectations of being the good mother (Paechter, C. [1998. Educating the other: Gender, power and schooling. London: Falmer Press].) and a pastoral charge to protect the child (Brydon, S. [2009. “Men at the heart of mothering: Finding mother in Finding Nemo.” Journal of Gender Studies 18 (2): 131–146].). In this paper, I consider how pastoral power constructed through discourses of protection is reflected in both policy and expectations of good mothering, informing safeguarding behaviours known as maternal gatekeeping (Doucet, A. [2006. Do men mother? Toronto: University of Toronto Press].; Gaunt, R. [2008. “Maternal gatekeeping: Antecedents and consequences.” Journal of Family Issues 29 (3): 373–395].). This interpretative paper is guided by theoretical principles of feminism and poststructuralism and employs a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) as a lens to analyse powers reflected in everyday behaviours. The findings arguably indicate how protective maternal behaviours drawn from private spaces unknowingly may create gendered barriers to the recruitment and retention of men within childcare professions, informed by childcaring expectations historically placed unequally on women (Evans, M. [2017. The persistence of gender inequality. Cambridge: Polity Press].).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".