I would take any job, but…: Biographies of low-educated women at the intersection of class and gender

The paper analyses the biographies of women at the intersection of class and gender in the Czech Republic. With the transition towards a market-based economy and a decrease in the symbolic capital of workers in the blue-collar and service fields, and in the context of a familialist social policy and a labour market that discourages a combination of paid employment and care responsibilities, women with low education find themselves in the secondary labour market and exposed to gender discrimination. We illustrate how an intersectional approach (Brah – Phoenix 2004) can be used in sociology to analyze the ways in which class, gender and other social categories, such as care responsibility, interact and mutually constitute each other in the lives of women.