Gender Work and Organization最新文献

The paper examines why despite many inquiries and government reforms, the working conditions of aged care workers have remained precarious. The study draws on an analysis of Australian workforce survey data, government documents, and hearing transcripts from a recent Royal Commission into the sector's workforce and care practices. The results paint a complex and nuanced picture of how the government and providers rely on older or culturally and linguistically diverse women to carry out high standards of quality care with minimal worker benefits and protection while devaluing their work as unprofessional. The analysis also highlights the coexistence of four types of precariousness in aged care work: precariousness as a social category, a shared experience, a set of work practices, and management. Further, I find that a series of paradoxes rooted in cultural perceptions of care and older and/or diverse women maintain precariousness at work by constructing workers as the problem, entrenching disadvantage borne from intersectionality and shifting the burden of responsibility and part of the cost of caring for older people onto workers. I suggest that little improvement is possible until the systemic and sociocultural issues around care and the workers engaged in the transaction of care are tackled together as a whole.

This qualitative study explores the perspectives of senior leadership on gender equality within higher education institutions (HEIs) in Kazakhstan, addressing a gap in the literature on the agency of senior leaders in mainstreaming gender equality in post-Soviet contexts. Kazakhstan is a significant case due to its high ranking on gender indicators in Central Asia and its unique blend of modernization and traditional gender discourses. We interviewed 13 leaders across 10 universities to analyze how they perceive the relationship between gender and education and their potential role in advancing gender equality. Utilizing Butler's theory of performativity, our analysis reveals that senior leaders disregard structural or institutional gender-related concerns. They tend to uphold and embody traditional gender norms and attribute existing gender inequalities to cultural norms which limit their agency. While leaders acknowledge the role of higher education in promoting gender equality, they perceive gender issues as resistant to change, which creates obstacles to effective gender mainstreaming. The findings provide insights into reimagining gender mainstreaming strategies in HEIs in post-Soviet contexts and beyond.

This paper presents the lived experience of white working-class women in the UK experiencing in-work poverty and dependent on food banks to survive. Although the precarious labor market emerges as a significant driver in the women's need for food charity, in-depth investigations into the lives that precarity produces and reinforces remain scarce. Contributing to this gap, our paper uses an ethnographic qualitative approach drawing on feminist research methods to identify women's experiences of in-work poverty and being in precarious work. Across 2 food banks, 10 women and 6 volunteers were interviewed, complemented by 24 months of comprehensive field notes where the lead author was a regular volunteer with the charities. The paper revisits “The Hidden Injuries of Class” from Sennett and Cobb's (1972) classic study to use as a theoretical lens to draw out the internalized impacts that the participants experienced. We complement the theoretical framing with an intersectional sensitivity, finding that both gender and class were prevailing identities that influenced the women's lived experiences of the explored themes. The combination of these frameworks helped us to discover how the women face a complex internalized struggle in accessing food banks whilst being employed, heavily characterized by classed and gendered constraints associated with precarious work and other external structural disadvantages. The women experienced guilt, shame, the suppression of emotion, and a struggle for self-validation. Interactions at the food bank were additionally found to be intersubjectively negotiated between the women and the present volunteers. The intersection of both classed and gendered identities exposes these women to ever greater inequalities both within and beyond the workplace.

While existing research shows that accelerators play an important role in closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship, our study aims to critically assess the role of accelerators in relation to gender-related structural inequalities, rather than individual-level barriers, that women entrepreneurs face in the neoliberal entrepreneurial ecosystem. Drawing on Butler's (1990) work on gender performativity in which performativity is understood as citational practices, we examine the everyday discourses of six highly regarded Swedish accelerators on the entrepreneurial projects they support and the entrepreneurs they work with. Our Critical Discourse Analysis indicates that even in countries where gender equality policies are promoted, such as Sweden, accelerators' communicative acts “cite” and “reiterate” the gender and cultural norms of the Swedish entrepreneurial system, which is characterized by long-standing disparities in gender-based sectoral segregation and rooted in a strong individualistic culture under the influence of neoliberal policies and practices. In doing so, we question the readiness of accelerators to facilitate women entrepreneurship and suggest that they should instead work with key stakeholders, including feminist activists and policymakers, to confront and mediate systemic and structural gender inequalities.

How can we, as women university workers, assert collective writing as a form of resistance to embody our collective and individual struggles and convert them into words? We are a collective of five professional service and three academic women workers who came together to answer this question through writing about our performance of office housework and the gendered invisibility we experienced. We share our collective writing practices as a methodology to create connections and healing between workers divided along neoliberal and patriarchal university structures. Our work offers feminist epistemic resistance through the intentional joining of women university workers as co-producers of knowledge, following the tradition of feminist consciousness-raising groups. Our analysis problematizes the individualization of office housework. It illustrates how saying “no” individualistically is often elusive, because doing so displaces the work onto colleagues with less structural power; nor enough if we are to advance the goal of collectively reimagining how this crucial, yet invisible work can be redistributed more equally amongst all workers. Our collective writing affirms the need for office housework to be recognized and revalued as important and indispensable work that sustains the functioning of our higher education institutions, especially in times of uncertainty and crisis.