Gender Work and Organization最新文献

Feminist scholars have long recognized the gender-based challenges that women in academia face relative to men. Although numerous strategies have been designed and implemented to tackle this problem, the attainment of gender equality in academia has proved futile globally. Integrating Acker's notion of the ideal worker with Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and capital, we undertake a qualitative study of how women in African universities navigate the masculinized ideal academic norm, and how their efforts to break free from this symbolic image reproduces and legitimizes gender inequality. Drawing on the narratives of 36 women researchers in Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia, our analysis reveals how the perpetual struggle for power, positions, and resources in academia influences women researchers within these contexts to enact three strategies for legitimacy―(1) ‘Engage the patriarchal order,’ (2) ‘Contest normative femininity,’ and (3) ‘Appropriate normative femininity.’ In contributing to the ongoing efforts to achieve sustainable development goals 5 and 8, we develop a theoretical framework that illuminates the subtle and sophisticated mechanisms that (re)produce, sustain, and legitimize the gendered structures and cultures in academia that serve to disadvantage women. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are outlined.

Previous studies have shown that middle- and upper-class, primarily white, women can relieve their workload and resolve family conflicts by relying on the labor of poor and/or racialized women or accessing services that facilitate their foodwork. However, the spreading of COVID-19 and the necessity of social distancing have temporarily made the access of these facilitators difficult or impossible. Since women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic consequences on the sexual division of labor, this paper examines how the pandemic affects women's emotional experience with domestic foodwork in Brazil. Drawing from the 588 upper- and middle-class women's responses to an online survey, we have identified six emotional experiences influenced by the pandemic: (1) obligation, (2) overload, (3) fear, (4) safety, (5) relaxation, and (6) family time appreciation. However, the changes caused by the sanitary crises do not explain alone the new emotions experienced with domestic foodwork. Class and gender can interfere or potentialize how women feel about it during the pandemic. Obligation, overload, and fear were enhanced when the participants could not access services that were used to relieve their foodwork burden, especially when faced with an unequal sexual division of labor. In turn, safety, relaxation, and family time appreciation were facilitated by a better dynamic of domestic tasks sharing alongside the certainty to access good quality food. By analyzing these factors, this paper enhances the theoretical understanding of contextual and situational domestic foodwork emotional experience because it observes the outcomes of critical reduction of networks that used to sustain this practice involvement.

Minoritized mother politicians that include ethnic racialized minority Traveller (an Irish indigenous community), racialized ethnic minority women, and migrant women face considerable disadvantages as workers arising from the intersection of their maternal status, gender, racialized or migrant and class position. The experiences of minoritized mother candidates and politicians in Ireland are viewed through the lens of subjectivities providing insight into how these mother-workers mediate identities and status positions that place them outside of, or in tension with, a predominantly white masculinist workplace. Empirical data analysis reveals how minoritized mother candidates and politicians respond in strategic ways to forces of subjectivation that may risk affirming idealized motherhood, while obscuring gendered and racialized inequalities in the political workplace. Paradoxically, motherhood seeds political ambition while acting as a material, temporal, and affective constraint, a source of invisible labor and violence in gendered and racialized ways. However, minoritized mothers' presence and representations also offer an important challenge to this white masculinist workplace.

This paper contributes to debates on gender and competition by drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism to explore how competition operates as gendered technologies of the self. Our findings are based on interviews and observations with women who work in a bank and a network marketing company. We unfold different modalities of competition that are in operation: competition has either an outward focus where women compete with other women or an inward focus where women compete with oneself. The study expands the theoretical understanding of gender and competition by exploring how different modalities of competition operate as gendered technologies of the self under neoliberalism. We conclude that while different modalities exist, they fulfill the same purpose in that they individualise women while making structural inequalities invisible.

This paper explores how mothers who are creative workers articulate their subjectivities and examines how their interdependent identities as both mothers and creatives lead to a constant and unresolved negotiation of subjectivity. This constitutes an additional cognitive work burden or a “subjectivity load” for mother-creatives. The study is based on a small-scale qualitative study of 40 mothers working in Creative Industries in Ireland. Venn's framework on subjectivity is used to explore the attitudes, values, expectations, and dispositions that respondents articulated when questioned about how they saw the self in relation to the identities of mother and worker. Key findings note that mother workers held ambivalent attitudes about the combination of mothering with work. In terms of their values, respondents internalized a negative and irresolute sense of self if they did not live up to social values on motherhood. With regard to expectations of themselves, mothers felt that they were always having to choose between conflicting demands and that there was an internalized expectation that motherhood should be prioritized over work. Finally, in terms of their disposition, respondents explained they felt that society refused to understand mothers as artists and so they could not easily achieve a settled subjectivity in light of the invisibility of mothers who were also creative workers. Consequently, mother-creatives are always engaged in a process of negotiation across identity contradictions to form their own subjectivities. This ongoing ambivalence creates another cognitive or subjectivity load around the making and remaking of the internalized self.

The present study explores the relationship between individualization and gender-related disparities in teleworking. The research is part of a larger project evaluating a pilot program among administrative personnel at an Austrian university before implementing telework across the organization. It presents three key points about the intersection of teleworking and parental roles. First, telework interlinks with individualization in general, and organizations should play a proactive role in preventing the stress that can arise from such individualization. Challenges through individualization have eased due to the collective experiences in the pandemic-driven lockdowns. This overarching insight lays the groundwork for understanding the nuanced gender differences explored in the subsequent points. Second, this individualization process is gendered when it comes to parenting. The flexible nature of telework can ease the burden of juggling paid work with other responsibilities. At the same time, organizational telework initiatives can unintentionally reinforce traditional gender roles, placing women as primary caregivers. The findings indicate that when telework is solely a family-friendly benefit, it leads to a double invisibility of mothers' workload. However, the normalization of hybrid telework as an inner-organizational right might mitigate gendered hierarchies in the long term. Third, while all interviewed mothers felt responsible for parenting, fathers adopted different subject positions that did not disrupt the organizational normalization of mothers as primary caregivers. It sharpened during the pandemic. The study concludes that adopting hybrid telework models could challenge the prevailing “ideal worker” image and support mothers in advancing their careers. Collective experiences and ideas of flexibility as every employee's right can counteract individualization and gender inequalities.

In this paper I analyze 30 years of research on patriarchy in top management and organization studies (MOS) journals, and I map out an agenda for (re)igniting patriarchy as both a topic of study and lens for viewing key MOS issues in a new light. I organize my review (175 articles) around three themes: intersections, subjects, and contexts. By intersections I refer to the nuanced ways that scholars define patriarchy, adopting interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives to understand the diversity of women's experiences under patriarchal domination. By subjects I refer to the primary focus on women's experiences, and on the ways that women's subjectivities are socially constituted and negotiated within patriarchal discourses of work and organizational life. By contexts I refer to the sites where MOS research has investigated patriarchy, as well as the ways this research has framed patriarchy itself as a context. Based on this thematic review, I outline a future research agenda to further refine the concept in MOS in three key ways. I call for increased research approaches that center the structural/political forces of patriarchy and gender, increased focus on the experiences of men as agents and subjects of patriarchal domination, and increased attention on patriarchy in Western contexts to redress the overrepresentation of research on patriarchy in the Global South. I conclude that patriarchy is an important line of inquiry for MOS, and that further attention to the concept would enable MOS research to contribute more fully to contemporary debates on gender.

Research on gender-based violence highlights the need to engage men in prevention work through social change programs that present care as a powerful antidote to violence. Implementation of such programs worldwide provides many examples of how education and support for fathers and fathers-to-be can promote healthy masculinities and relationships with an intimate partner and their children. This article aims to explore the findings and lessons learned from the pilot of the European Union-funded Promotion, Awareness Raising and Engagement of men in Nurture Transformations (PARENT) project (PARENT) which sought to develop and pilot curricula adapted from the internationally tested Program P methodology. The PARENT pilot worked in four European countries to provide training activities for social, educational, and health professionals, as well as education groups for fathers and parents, with the overarching goal of preventing domestic violence through the promotion of engaged fatherhood. By reporting the results from mixed-methods impact evaluations of pilot programs conducted with professionals and parents, this article discusses how gender-synchronous father-focused training can contribute to a shift toward increased positive engagement of fathers during the first 1000 days of a child's life. The article conveys the pilot's promising impact on the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of professionals and parents, and it examines some of the key contextual factors, limitations, and implementation approaches that plausibly contributed to the PARENT pilot outcomes, with the aim to formulate useful considerations for future scale-up efforts or the future implementation of similar programs to engage fathers in nurturing care and violence prevention.

Although the U.S. Pregnancy Discrimination Act protects people from discrimination, there remain risks for individuals who become pregnant while working. Therefore, many choose to stay quiet about their pregnancies before beginning to show. Doing so, however, requires a constant management of appearance and behavior that feels necessary for employment. To investigate how pregnant people manage occupational settings while growing visibly pregnant, I draw on data from interviews with 54 women in the U.S. who were employed during their pregnancy. Findings reveal that efforts to manage the pregnant body are both aesthetic and emotional, and they constitute a form of unpaid labor that I term the “silent shift.” The silent shift encompasses two types of labor: the labor of concealing and the labor of dealing. Concealing—typically done during the first trimester—involves trying to strategically hide a pregnancy from co-workers through alterations to work attire (i.e., aesthetic labor) or behavioral changes, such as napping in the office or discretely running to the bathroom. When concealing was no longer an option, pregnant women had to deal with awkward comments from co-workers about their bodies. In these instances, women employed emotional labor to keep silent about how such remarks made them feel by suppressing negative emotions, rationalizing co-workers’ comments, or by laughing them off. These findings suggest that even though laws and institutional policies have created space for pregnant workers, there remains a tension between the professional and pregnant body—a tension that women themselves feel compelled to manage.