Social Work

“Thus, some recent gender scholarship understands professionalism as a tentative source of power for social workers, and this power has mixed implications for its female clientele. The profession’s embrace of a scientific framework, and the respect that society afforded social workers as a result of this change, permitted this predominantly female profession to push issues affecting low-income women and children to the forefront of public concern. Yet, according to some gender scholars, professionalism simultaneously created greater distance between workers and clients while granting workers the authority to diminish clients’ representations of themselves and suppress clients’ attempts to solve their own problems” (Abrams & Curran, 434).