* Women's occupations

[Nick_Heard]

I thought it should be easy to run a report listing only occupations of females,ideally in frequency order with count, but I cant figure out how to do it. Ive looked for readymade reports here but cant find any.

Id be most grateful for any suggestions on how to do this.

Many thanks

Nick Heard

[Jane]

You have a couple of options, you could write a plugin to do this or simply do a fact query and then use an Excel pivot table on the results.

[Nick_Heard]

Duh.

No I couldn't. If I knew how to do any of that I probably wouldn't have asked the question.

Thanks

[LornaCraig]

There is a Plugin called 'Occupations per Census Year', written by Mike Tate, which produces a result set showing totals of each occupation as well as a breakdown by cesus year and 'other' (for those occupations not linked to a census year). I imagine it would be possible to add two further columns showing the breakdown of the totals into male and female.

However, if an individual has the same occupation listed several times at different dates then the result set will include every instance of the occupaton. Is this what you want? This is, of course, what is shown in Tools > Work with Data > Occupations, where males and females are all listed together. It is a useful list of occupation descriptions, but not a very reliable guide to how many individuals had a particular occupation, as it counts every instance.

I imagine that you may want to know how many different women ever had the occupation of 'dressmaker', for example, so that multiple instances of the same occupation for the same person would be counted only as one.

If a plugin were written to do this, it then raises a further problem: a woman may at different times have been recorded as servant, domestic servant, housemaid, maid, etc... where these all refer to what is essentially the same occupation (similarly 'dressmaker' and 'seamstress' etc). These would inevitably be counted as different occupations in the result set. So some people's occupations would be counted only once while others were counted as several different occupations.

[tatewise]

Nick, as Lorna has hinted at, you need to consider precisely what statistics you are looking for and why.

You need to clarify what you mean by different Occupations, and check that Tools > Work with Data > Occupations lists those Occupations consistently without any inadvertent typing mistakes.
Lorna has pointed out some synonymous Occupations that you may want to converge, but there may be many others, or perhaps you are not concerned with such anomalies.

Also, exactly what do you want to count? As Lorna has said, if every Occupation Fact is counted, and the same Occupation for the same Woman appears in several of her Occupations Facts, then they will each get counted.

What is the purpose of the statistic?

However, I have adapted my Occupations Per Census Year Plugin to include Gender counts.
You can download & install it via SkyDrive link Occupations Per Census Year V1.4 and double-clicking on popup box.
To get the Female counts in descending order, hold down Alt key and click on Female column heading.
Let me know if it does what you want.

[Nick_Heard]

Thanks Mike and Lorna for your help and helpful comments.

In the first instance I really only want to identify occupations recorded for females. With a database on 18500 individuals, for which earlier records only recorded occupations once and didn't specifically tie them to the census returns, or other sources, perhaps your plugin will return data for only part of the database? It is only in recent years that I have been using Ancestral Sources to ensure that occupations were linked to census returns. So you are quite right, some individuals will have multiple records of the same occupation and others only one, though it was recorded on several census returns. But the numbers will be useful indicators of where I have gaps, and with a database of that size will indicate trends. The figures are only for my own use. And it will be useful for example to see how many female agriculture labourers there are and will allow me to then interrogate FH to determine who they were.

Many thanks

[tatewise]

Nick - The updated plugin Occupation counts for Men & Women are entirely independent of the Census Occupation counts. Please give it try because it may give insights you had not considered.

Your example of Female Agricultural Labourers could fall foul of what Lorna and I were saying, depending how you entered the details.
This type of Occupation is often recorded as Ag.Lab. or Farm Worker, or variations on these themes.
Unless you have consolidated these into exactly the same form, then when you order the counts in descending order you may have several relatively low counts for each variant, instead of a large aggregate count.
Even when sorted into Occupation order, which will bring Ag.Lab near Agricultural Labourer, Farm Labourer will be very distant.

[Nick_Heard]

Hi Mike
I do consolidate variations on occupation titles into one version, annotating the fact if my standard could be perceived as different to the census or certificate version. So all my ag labs and farm labourer are agricultural labourers, and farm servant and general servant would both be domestic servant.

Nick

[tatewise]

Occupations Per Census Year and Gender Version 1.4 is in the Plugin Store.

Supersedes and improves Occupations Per Census Year by supporting Occupation Date Ranges & Periods and checking that the Individual has a Census Event in the relevant Year.

In addition it summarises Occupations against Male and Female and Unknown gender.