Gender Work and Organization最新文献

Inequality experiences are strongly gendered and context-specific. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with technology industry employees in Egypt and the United Kingdom, this article explores intersectionality and the contextuality of gendered inequalities. It investigates how context shapes gendered experiences of inequality and how this plays out at the workplace. The paper offers a cross-cultural comparison which shows that the experiences of women in tech reflect the cultural construction of gender roles and the sectoral dynamics. By contrasting the Middle Eastern context of Egypt and the Western context of the United Kingdom, the article unpacks the complicated influence of cultural contexts on the experiences of women in tech and shows that inequality is individually unique, complex, and contextual. The study reveals the mechanisms by which contextual gender dynamics shape the workplace experiences of inequality, and the relational and complex nature of intersectionality.

This paper examines women's responsibility for social reproduction in South Africa. Drawing from a range of studies that analyze quantitative data, it considers how distinctive characteristics of South Africa's socio-economic landscape shape the nature of this responsibility. These characteristics include rates of paternal coresidence and marriage that are amongst the lowest in the world, unemployment and inequality rates that are amongst the highest, and continuing patterns of individual labor migration with race remaining a significant socio-economic stratifier. Given these features, women are not only most often the providers of caring labor in the household they are often also the financial providers. Women are responsible for social reproduction even when they are not wives or mothers, and this responsibility limits their access and returns to paid work. Gender asymmetries in who carries the economic costs of social reproduction are highlighted by evidence of both a motherhood earnings penalty and a male marital earnings premium in the South African labor market. In addition to economic measures, the paper reviews research on the noneconomic costs of social reproduction including life satisfaction and depression, and it highlights the importance of recognizing intersectionality in the well-being of women.

Sexual harassment and gender-based violence are longstanding concerns in studies of service work, but are typically analyzed in terms of interactions between workers and consumers within gendered definitions of “good service,” neglecting the role of relationships amongst workers as a critical context that facilitates or constrains how workers can respond. However, literature on young women and harassment in leisure settings shows that women's safety is an ongoing relational construction—something that women achieve together through relational work. Inspired by these insights and drawing on interviews with service workers, this paper explores how workers respond to sexual harassment from customers, managers and co-workers, and shows how workers—primarily women but also sometimes men as well—collaborate in managing sexual harassment at work. The paper therefore argues for a relational analysis of the way that women negotiate the gendered and heterosexualized power relationships of service labor.

In our paper, we draw on 14 in-depth interviews with 11 self-identified gay men aged 50–74 years who host on LGBTQ+ homestay platforms. We examine how they navigate the interplay of age, gender, and sexuality through claims of authenticity, highlighting how these hosts manage authenticity amid normative expectations and shedding light on identity dynamics for marginalized groups. Our analysis reveals the complexities of authenticity in self-presentation, highlighting tensions between personal identity and societal, gendered, and age-related expectations, as well as the perceived gap between inclusivity claims and actual experiences. We also explore the intersection of economic necessity and identity negotiation. We find that older hosts may adjust their presentation to align with beauty norms or market pressures, prioritizing affected authenticity to increase their chances of securing bookings. We distinguish between affected and intrinsic authenticity, showing how hosts adapt their presentation to external demands in specific contexts, while potentially maintaining intrinsic authenticity elsewhere. This framework offers insights for future research on how societal pressures and economic factors influence authenticity claims, exploring the balance between affected and intrinsic authenticity and its implications for individual agency and organizational dynamics.

Surveys of involuntary celibates (“incels”) suggest that they tend to be not in education, employment or training (NEET) at disproportionately high rates. However, it remains unclear whether and how being NEET is connected to incels' ideology and life circumstances. To investigate this, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of over a thousand comments posted on the main incel forum, incels.is. We found that many users promoted unemployment and social disengagement as a form of retaliation against a society they feel has harmed them. These users often encouraged other incels to embrace a life of isolation and used employment status as an assessment of commitment to the incel identity. Users also reported experiences of discrimination, bullying, and feeling incompetent at workplaces and educational institutions. We conclude that, for incels, being unemployed can be both an ideological stance and a consequence of their experienced or perceived marginalization.

The Athena SWAN initiative proposes to address gender equality and diversity (E&D) in higher education settings. This research examines how Athena SWAN is organized as a means of controlling gender E&D in the context of UK Business Schools. It involves deductive thematic analysis of secondary (Athena SWAN applications) and primary data (semi-structured interviews). Through the lens of dispositional analysis, we explore the interplay between Foucault's dispositive modalities of law, discipline and dispositives of security involved in the Athena SWAN initiative. We find significant problems in the way these modalities interact with Athena SWAN. There is often a disconnection between the individual, departmental and institutional motivations that affect disciplinary mechanisms, such as the self-evaluation conducted by the self-assessment team (SAT). Strategic decisions are typically centralized at the university level, emphasizing achieving optimal levels of inequality comparable with the sector which is in line with accreditations, rankings and funding requirements. This often leads to problems related to a lack of control and clear accountability procedures. The results of this study suggest that Athena SWAN creates a space for self-governing and visibility of gender E&D practices. However, without legal structures there has been limited progress in advancing this agenda because discipline and security take over by establishing a new “normative” level based on optimization. Legal structures can destabilize the “normative” optimum level of current E&D practices, opening new possibilities for discipline to prevent the unwanted.