Catherine Hakim

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Catherine Hakim
Born	May 30, 1948
Occupation	sociologist
URL	catherinehakim.org

Catherine Hakim (born 1948) is a prominent British sociologist and expert on women's employment and women's issues. She has worked in British central government, and as a Senior Research Fellow in the London School of Economics. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies. She has published extensively on labour market topics, women's employment, sex discrimination, social and family policy, as well as social statistics and research design. She has published over 100 articles in academic journals and edited collections, and over a dozen textbooks and research monographs. She is best known for developing preference theory and her criticism of many feminist assumptions about women's employment. Her most recent books develop a new theory of "erotic capital". and its power in all social interaction, in the workplace, politics and in public life generally as well as in the invisible negotiations of private relationships.

She is a member of the editorial boards of the European Sociological Review and International Sociology.

She grew up in the Middle East and came to Britain for boarding school aged 16. She has previously been Principal Research Officer in the Department of Employment's Social Science Branch for ten years and Director of the ESRC Data Archive from 1989 to 1990. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics between 1990 and 2003, when she chose to resign from this position. However, she continued to be affiliated with the institution where she still had an office, and was listed both as a visiting scholar and as a senior research fellow at the institution's website until 2011.

"Women want rich husbands, not careers"

Preference theory

Preference theory as multidisciplinary (mainly sociological) theory seeks both to explain and predict women's choices regarding investment in productive or reproductive work. The theory sets out five socio-economic conditions which jointly create a new scenario:

1. The contraceptive revolution gives women reliable control over their own fertility for the first time in history.
2. The equal opportunities revolution gives women genuine access to all positions and occupations for the first time in history
3. The expansion of white-collar occupations, which are more attractive to women.
4. The creation of jobs for secondary earners, such as part-time jobs, working at home, teleworking, and annual hours contracts.
5. The increasing importance of attitudes and values in affluent modern societies, which gives everyone the freedom to choose their lifestyle.

Preference theory posits that in the rare countries that have fully achieved the new scenario for women (she cites only Britain and the Netherlands), women have genuine choices as to how they resolve the conflict between paid jobs and a major investment in family life. These choices fall into three main groups: women who prioritise their careers and espouse acheivement values (a work-centred lifestyle) and often remain childless by choice (about 20 %); women who prioritise family life and sharing values (a home-centred lifestyle) and often have many children and little paid work (about 20 %); and the majority of women who seek to combine paid jobs and family work in some way without giving absolute priority to either activity or the accompanying values (the adaptive lifestyle). Catherine Hakim carried out two national surveys, in Britain and Spain, to test the theory, and showed that questions eliciting personal preferences can strongly predict women's employment decisions and fertility. In contrast, women's behaviour did not predict their attitudes, showing that lifestyle preferences are not post hoc rationalisations. This study also showed that other sex-role attitudes do not have the same impact on women's behaviour; notably, the patriarchal values measured by most social surveys, including the European Social Survey, have virtually no impact on women's personal choices and behaviour.

Hakim's preference theory has attracted great interest in the literature, but also considerable criticism. The main criticism being that it does not demonstrate causality, that the observed preferences causes changes in fertility patterns, and that it has been suggested that actual fertility may change values and preferences. It has also been suggested that the observed effect of lifestyle preferences on achieved fertility may absorbed by other factors when controlled for. A follow up study "found that Hakim's typology does not work well in the Czech Republic", that there were no important differences in fertility between the three groups in that country. A second follow up study, surveying eleven European countries, found support for the theory in only two countries (Britain and Denmark).

Publications

Selected books

• Secondary analysis in social research, London: Allen & Unwin, 1982, ISBN 0-04-312015-6, ISBN 0-04-312016-4
• Social Change and Innovation in the Labour Market: Evidence from the Census SARs on Occupational Segregation and Labour Mobility, Part-Time Work and Student Jobs, Homework and Self-Employment (Oxford University Press, 1998). ISBN 0-19-829381-X
• Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory (Oxford University Press, 2000). With a Preface by Anthony Giddens. ISBN 0-19-924210-0
• Research Design: Successful Designs for Social and Economic Research (Routledge, 2000). ISBN 978-0-415-22312-6
• Models of the Family in Modern Societies: Ideals and Realities (Ashgate Publishers|Ashgate, 2003). ISBN 0-7546-4406-5
• Key Issues in Women's Work (Glasshouse Press, 1996, 2004). ISBN 1-904385-16-8
• Modelos de Familia en las Sociedades Modernas: Ideales y Realidades (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2005). ISBN 978-84-7476-378-2
• Little Britons: Financing Childcare Choice (Policy Exchange, 2008), with Karen Bradley, Emily Price and Louisa Mitchell. ISBN 978-1-906097-21-9
• Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, 2011
• Feminist myths and magic medicine: The flawed thinking behind calls for further equality legislation (Centre for Policy Studies, 2011). ISBN 978-1-90699631-4

Selected articles

• "Developing a sociology for the twenty-first century: Preference Theory". British Journal of Sociology 49 (1998): 137-43.
• "A New Approach to Explaining Fertility Patterns: Preference Theory". Population and Development Review 29 (2004): 349-374.
• Women, careers, and work-life preferences, British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 34: 279-294, August 2006.
• Public morality versus personal choice: the failure of social attitude surveys, British Journal of Sociology, 54: 339-45, September 2003.
• Lifestyle preferences as determinants of women's differentiated labour market careers, Work and Occupations, 29: 428-459, November 2002.
• The politics of female diversity in the 21st century, pp. 191-227 in The Future of Gender (ed) J Browne, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Sex differences in work-life balance goals, pp 55-79 in Work-Life Balance in the Twenty-First Century (ed) D Houston, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
• Lifestyle preferences versus patriarchal values: causal and non-causal attitudes, pp. 69-91 in Changing Life Patterns in Western Industrial Societies (eds) J Z Giele and E Holst, Oxford: Elsevier, January 2004.
• "Erotic Capital". European Sociological Review, 26:499-518, 2010
• Women's lifestyle preferences in the 21st century: Implications for family policy in The Future of Motherhood in Europe (eds) J Schippers, G Beets and E te Velde, Dordrecht NL and Hingham MA: Springer, April 2011.

See also

• Wikipedia: Decision theory
• Wikipedia: Liquidity preference
• Wikipedia: Revealed preference
• Wikipedia: Time preference

External links

• Website: catherinehakim.org
• Dr. Gérard Bökenkamp: Catherine Hakims Präferenztheorie: Was Frauen wollen (Ein alternativer Ansatz zur Diskriminierungsthese), Cuncti - Streitbar on 18 August 2012
• Erotisches Kapital: Auf High Heels weiter nach oben, Focus on 10 June 2010 (Catherine Hakim im Interview mit Alina Fichter)
• The Best of Both Worlds (Interview mit Linda Tischler), 1 January 2004
• Women can't have it all: Female academic says those with top jobs only end up with 'nominal families', Daily Mail on 20 December 2010
• What women really want: to marry a rich man, The Telegraph on 4 January 2011
• Are increasing numbers of women marrying men for their money?, BBC News UK on 4 January 2011
• Cristina Odone: So the feminist man-haters and victim-mongers were wrong all along, Telegraph Blogs on 4 January 2011
• Women want rich husbands, Times of India on 5 January 2011
• Arne Hoffmann: Neue britische Studie: Frauen wollen noch immer vor allem reichen Mann heiraten, "Also hatten die feministischen Männerhasser die ganze Zeit über Unrecht", Genderama on 6 January 2011