The literature on gender desegregation has documented the gendered nature of employment hierarchies and opportunities, but less work has examined how the influx of immigrants in the labour market might affect employment hierarchies and gender segregation. This study examines employers' perceptions of ‘the suitable cleaner' — a traditionally female‐dominated occupation that has received a substantial number of male immigrant workers. Departing from the notion that men in female‐dominated occupations are advantaged by a ‘glass escalator' effect, we analyse how employer preferences position different categories of workers as hireable. Building on interviews with employers in the Norwegian cleaning industry, the study demonstrates how three different but intertwined logics define employer preferences: effectivity demands, professionalization and devaluation. While the first logic favours men as workers and the second devalues ‘female' competence, opening the occupation for men, the third logic favours immigrants, combined positioning immigrant men on top of the hierarchy of suitability.

Scholars have described how neutral routines and ‘objective’ criteria in recruitment may result in an institutional preference for certain types of candidates. This article advances the literature on recruitment by conducting an in-depth study of how the criteria for assessing quality are applied in practice in the recruitment process. Through an in-depth study of 48 recruitment cases for permanent academic positions in Norway and 52 qualitative interviews with the recruiters involved, we stress the need to grasp how evaluation is embedded in the organisational process of recruitment. By constructing an ideal type of recruitment process comprising five different steps, we show that despite evaluators including diversity concerns in their search for talent during the first stages of the recruitment process, they end up deploying narrow criteria that tend to favour men in the crucial steps of the recruitment process, in which hiring outcomes are determined.

This article explores the impact of cultural resources on success and aspirations among secondgeneration immigrants in higher education in Norway. We investigate whether and how cultural resources are converted into advantages in higher education. The data consist of cross-sectional survey data and in-depth interviews with Norwegian students of immigrant origin. The quantitative analysis challenges the assumption that minority students receive extra support and encouragement from their social environment to guide them through higher education. However, regarding identity, cultural resources may provide a buffer from the exclusion and risks scholars have described as common among non-immigrant working-class students in higher education. We specify how culture works through two different frames of interpreting educational achievement: (1) a dual frame of reference, i.e. comparing their achievements with the poorer conditions in their parents' home countries fosters optimism and (2) a single frame of reference, i.e. comparing their achievements with their peers with ethnic majority background in Norway fosters pessimism. Yet, both frames generate high educational commitment. Whilst the first enables the students to view their place in higher education as almost given, the second enables the students to work harder in order to prove themselves and combat under-expectations.

A key insight from studies of gender segregation is that the allocation of different groups to different positions in the labour market is strongly related to ascribed status. Shared gendered cultural beliefs generally portray men as more competent and of a higher status than women, and position some workers as more suited than others to perform different types of work and tasks. Yet, although much work has been done on status and gender segregation, this research tends to overlook the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. This study contributes to the literature by examining how skills and competence are valued in traditionally gender-segregated professions that have seen an increased influx of immigrants and ethnic minorities. Drawing on 66 qualitative interviews with Norwegian students, the study analyses, first, how gender, racial, and ethnic stereotyping of tasks and competencies affect the students' aspirations in transition from education to work, and second, how the intersection between race, ethnicity, and gender plays out quite differently in different professions. Theoretically, I develop the concept of 'professional self-socialisation' , which points to the process whereby individuals adapt and redefine their aspirations to the gendered, ethnic, and racial hierarchy of suitability within their profession. ARTICLE HISTORY

Scholars have described how care cannot be completely commodified or withdrawn because it is a disposition anchored in the commitment to the needs of others. This article advances the literature on care ethics and inequality by examining how care workers resist and negotiate the rationalisation of care work. Building on ethnographic fieldwork on auxiliary nurses in Norwegian nursing homes, the study shows that despite care workers facing increasingly rationalised forms of control, they continue to act out of the caring self, which centres on the desire to give meaningful care. However, by addressing how power differences and ethnic stratification between workers influence their strategies of coping and resistance, the findings also illustrate how the most vulnerable care workers respond to rationalisation by providing efficient care – that is, careless care – to their patients. Drawing from alternative perspectives on care work as ambivalent work, the study’s main theoretical contribution is to offer insight into how precarious work contexts may pose a threat to the caring self, especially when inequalities exist between care workers.