Heartless roughneck accepted by female labourer (7)
I believe the answer is:
workman
'labourer' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'heartless roughneck accepted by female' is the wordplay.
'heartless' means to remove the middle letters.
'accepted by' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'female' becomes 'woman' (woman is a kind of female**).
'roughneck' with its middle removed is 'rk'.
'rk' inserted inside 'woman' is 'WORKMAN'.
(Other definitions for workman that I've seen before include "employee" , "Artisan" , "Manual labourer" .)