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Summary of Gender in Organizations
- Instelling
- Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (RU)
Articles of the reader and the internet and the chapters of the book that are part of the course.
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Samenvatting Oxford Handbook of Gender in Organizations en Artikelen.Chapter 1: Theorizing Gender-and-Organization: Changing Times .. Changing
Theories?
It is necessary motivating condition for the continued existence of this literature is the
persistence of sex/gender inequality in organizations and society. This persistence is
an outcome – a manifestation – of various social dynamics and social processes
changing over time, which requires understanding the changing conditions of its
reproduction.
The initial turn to gender within organization and management studies occurred
during the 1960s and 1970s when feminist and other social movements brought
about heightened attention to sex/gender inequality in public life.
Some facts are worth considering. For instance, the ‘gender gap’, a catch-all phrase
now circulating widely to signify sex/gender inequality, refers to both systematic sex
differences in economic rewards.
At the most general level we can identify two main meta-theoretical approaches in
the gender and organization literature. The first and older approach – theorizing
gender in organizations – follows a more ‘naturalistic’ or ‘common-sense’ orientation
toward gender; understands sex as biological characteristics – male and female –
and gender as social or cultural categorization usually associated with a person’s
sex, i.e. masculinity and femininity, often conceived as stable traits or roles. Issues of
gender and organizations are typically framed as having to do with conditions for
women, often in comparison to men.
The second approach – gendering organizations – ‘de-naturalizes’ the common
sense of gender using processual, social constructionist theoretical approaches.
Rather than positioning individuals at the centre of inquiry and assuming binary
notions of ‘women’ and ‘men’, or ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ roles, the focus instead is
on gender as a social institution which is socially accomplished through gender
relations. In contrast to thinking of gender as a possession or attribute of people
working in organizations, social constructionist accounts consider the ways
gender(ing) is an outcome or a co-production of organizing processes.
Glass ceiling = a situation presumed to be responsible for women being blocked form
advancement.
Glass escalator = men who entered female-dominated professions often benefit from
this escalator on which they could ascend to the higher ranks.
Some researchers observe that women who do ‘break through’ are over-represented
in situations of precarious leadership, a situation dubbed the ‘glass cliff’ where female
leaders are ‘more likely to be appointed in a time of poor performance or when there
is an increased risk of failure’. Under such contextual conditions the ‘think manager –
think male’ association becomes a ‘think crisis – think female’ association.
Gender roles are understood to be descriptive of the ways people act and
prescriptive of the ways they should act. In practice, researchers note that women
are disadvantaged because stereotypes suggest they ‘don’t fit’.
In contrast, sociological research identified ‘status generalization’ as an alternate
mechanism behind the creation and recreation of gender inequality. Their
,‘expectation states’ indicated that when people interact in goal centred situations,
such as in the workplace, their beliefs about status shape their interaction and the
enactment of social hierarchies. Within this formulation gender, as well as age and
race, is understood to function as a diffuse status characteristic, carrying cultural
beliefs about the relative competence of group members in terms of knowledge,
ability, or influence, with more status being attributed to men. Status beliefs thus
explicitly imply both difference and inequality, with inequality being grounded in group
membership itself.
The research evidence clearly points to negative consequences for female agency.
The implicit stance in the literature is ‘too bad for the women’. They confront a ‘catch
22’ or ‘double bind’. In order to be seen as a ‘proper leader’ they must act in ways to
disconfirm female gender stereotypes, but in so doing they risk coming across as
socially deficient, and not as a ‘proper women’.
When it comes to theorizing gender in organizations with a concern for reducing
sex/gender inequality we see more promise in the approaches. Instead of offering
social or cognitive psychological explanation articulating gender differences, this
literature focuses on the non-neutrality of organizational decision making and
organizational practices, and goes to the heart of organizational conditions creating
inequality.
The social constructionist understanding of gender/sex understood these as discrete
variables. That is, ontologically, gender is an emergent feature of social situations,
not something one ‘has’ as an individual, but something humans ‘do’ in relation to
each other as an ongoing accomplishment in social life. Sex is not ‘naturally’
meaningful as a relevant social category; it is produced as socially relevant by
agreeing.
Processual understandings assume the mutually constitutive outcomes of social
practices: humans as social beings who produce and reproduce what then is reified
as social structure and experiences as resources or constraints for human actions. A
such ‘structures’ are precarious, contingent, and potentially ephemeral; maintaining
their appearance of durability relies on much social effort, but it also means they can
be changed.
Rather than assuming the existence of gender mechanisms, be they pshychological
and/or sociological, with an aim towards obtaining generalizable and predictable
understandings of gender inequality in organizations, the question of inequality is
turned around toward understating its production and reproduction in situated
circumstances where gender is done as power relations.
Most gender in organization theorizing is framed through liberal humanist
assumptions, where abstract individualism sustains the possibility of a meritocratic
society, and where gender neutrality and just outcomes are assumed to be the norm.
In contrast, gendering organization theorizing is framed through critical, mostly
feminist philosophies, including socialist and poststructuralist theorizations often
addressing the historical and cultural reproduction of a patriarchal system where
domination and inequality are the norm.
Assuming gendering processes, in contrast, leads to addressing how humans’
relational practices may produce different outcomes for men and women, opening a
,way for observing the production and reproduction of socially systemic inequalities as
they thicken into hierarchical institutional forms. Gendering is constitutive of social
and organizational processes where practices, images, and ideologies, as well as
distribution of power, contribute to the production and maintenance of gender
inequality. This inequality is based on a historically located but persistent gendered
substructure of society – the division of production and reproduction into different
spheres of social life and belonging to different people.
As two different approaches to theorizing gender-and-organization start from
fundamentally different ontological and epistemological assumptions about sex and
gender, organizational research on sex/gender inequalities would also be framed
through substantially different methodologies.
Different understandings would lead to different research design and methods.
Research from the gendering organizations perspective would proceed by
scrutinizing how ‘gender’ and ‘difference’ are done, how organizations become
gendered under these processes, and what are their power effects. This requires
closeness to the actual happening for it is there that gendering is done.
Observing who the subjects of the research are is also revealing of the different
orientations in these two approaches for theorizing gender-and-organization. The
literature on gender in organizations focuses primarily on subjects deemed likely to
occupy management positions. It ignores the existence of other members of the
organization as relevant for understanding the production and consequences of
sex/gender inequality.
Gendering organization approaches address a range of subjects as they ‘do’ gender.
The focus is on how gender differences and inequalities may be produced and
reproduced in many different contexts by various people engaged in everyday
relational processes occurring through organizing practices. Mostly the interest is to
observe relationships, but not necessarily those predefined by formal hierarchical
structural positions.
‘Doing gender’ at work produced an organizational culture governing what is fair in
the relationship between the sexes.
Sex/gender inequality as the outcome of ‘practicing gender’ in everyday life, i.e. the
micro-practices of ‘doing gender’, has also received much attention in these
literatures.
Some literature addresses how linguistic categories, used in scholarship and actual
organizational practices, reflect and produce gendering effects. Most of these works
attest to the reproduction in workplaces of the gender substructure of society and to
its persistence over time.
Not only gender done through practices and linguistic categories; this second
theoretical theme brings in aspects of gendering processes where the materiality and
materialization of the human body as gendered play an important part in the
production of sex/gender inequalities in society and organizations. The body is both a
visible cultural signifier for ‘gender differences’ and implicated in practices and
processes that produce, reproduce, and naturalize those ‘differences’. This theme is
amply theorized in what is known as corporeal feminist scholarship, which has also
influenced the gender-and-organization literatures.
Sexuality and embodiment come together in Warhust and Nickson (2009), who
examine interactive services, such as bartending. They observed that employees’
, interactions with customers may include some sexual connotations personally
initiated by the employees but that these modes of interacting may then become
appropriated by their organizations.
There are contrasted two approaches to theorizing gender and organization, focusing
on their potential contributions for addressing the persistence of sex/gender
inequality: ‘gender in organizations’ and ‘gendering organizations’. The starting
argument was that these approaches are not necessarily of equal value for
addressing such persistence today.
We see much of the sex/gender differences literature based on cognitions within
gender in organizations as fairly exhausted. It is as if the original focus of the
research – a contribution to noting organizational conditions predominantly affecting
women – has been forgotten and researchers have become content with repeating
what we already know: women face difficulties in organizations and they are judged
as inferior to men.
Gendering organizations literature holds the most potential for intervening on gender
inequality in organizations and society at present, even with several caveats. In this
work gender stratification in organizations would serve as the evidence for then
observing everyday struggles holding together apparently neutral organizations,
benefiting some members at the expense of others.
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