Gendered Attitudes or Structural Barriers? Men Front Line Workers' Perspectives on What Keeps Men out of Paid Care Work in Australia

Gender segregation in paid care work offers a critical lens for understanding how gender inequality is reproduced in contemporary societies. While much research has explained men's absence from paid care through cultural and identity-based accounts, less has been done to examine the structural mechanisms that sustain the feminisation of care. This paper addresses that gap by analysing men's experiences in frontline aged and disability care in Australia. Drawing on qualitative data from 41 men across 13 focus groups and 32 follow-up interviews, we find that anxiety around maintaining masculine identities is not a significant barrier. Gender operates primarily through structural and informational processes that make care work insecure, undervalued, and poorly understood. These challenges reflect the gendered devaluation of feminised labour, but are not primarily rooted in masculine identity conflict. We suggest that greater analytic attention to structural barriers is needed, alongside existing insights into identity and agency.