The “Truly Creative” Florists: When Creativity Becomes a Gendered Privilege

Abstract

This article addresses the question of how creativity is displayed among florists working in Switzerland, and how exactly gender plays out in this process. It investigates how the florists refer to creativity as a natural skill, according to which criteria these “creative identities” are allocated, and how gender intersects with this allocation process. Drawing on thirty-six months of ethnographic research in various occupational settings, I will examine the gendering of creativity and its unequal allocation among workers in a highly feminized occupation. This article brings to light that although the scope for creativity is first presented as equally distributed among women and men, it becomes gendered upon a closer look: male florists tend to be perceived as truly creative. The resulting inequality is important to understand in order to unveil certain underlying mechanisms at play: even in a highly feminized occupation, masculinity appears to be strongly associated with professional competence.