Gender Work and Organization最新文献

Militaries have consistently struggled to integrate women into the profession of arms despite concerted, decades-long attempts at reform. We argue that this patchy progress is due in part to a conceptualization of gender as “category”, which has limited power to explain gendered inequalities. We propose that gender as process approaches must also be used to understand the current state of gender relations within militaries. A gender as process approach recognizes the dynamic, enduring, and complex set of gendered practices and systems that affect everyday interactions and social relations. Using this frame, militaries can develop an understanding of how these processes operate—particularly, as a form of resistance to gender equality in these “extremely gendered organizations”—and can develop improved strategies for change. We use the Australian Defence Force as our case study to illustrate how gender as category approaches dominate reform attempts and how the gender as process approach offers new insights on how to promote gender equality in the military.

Intensive mothering, a classed and gendered practice optimally performed by stay-at-home mothers, is a dominant parenting ideology, particularly in developed societies with wide disparities in wealth. Ironically, in these societies, women tend to be well educated and have good employment prospects that are expected to free them from domestic obligations. Facing competing expectations shaped by the institutions of work and the family, how do college-educated mothers consider ending or limiting their participation in the workforce or holding jobs while resolving the moral dilemma of being both a worker and a mother? We compared 33 college-educated Hong Kong mothers engaged in different professions and constructed typologies that describe how intersecting ideologies of mothering and work shape work-family arrangements. We paid special attention to mothers with strong commitment to their work, but with different ideologies about mothering. Some espouse the ideology of intensive mothering. Their belief in gender essentialism proved exhausting for them, both at work and at home. While away from home, these mothers supervised domestic helpers from their workplaces. Other women value their professions as emblematic of their identity as the perfect mother—an integrated form of mothering, thus feeling no guilt for delegating childcare responsibilities. We argue that given the entrenched gender inequality in workplaces and men's slow progress in doing their share of domestic work, the emergence of integrated mothering both rhetorically and in practice reflects women's striving to bring the “unfinished revolution” closer to the finish line.

This article seeks to advance scholarship on conflict in feminist organizations. Using the theoretical framework on agonistic conflict of Chantal Mouffe, it analyzes a conflict about racism that arose in a feminist lesbian, bi and trans social movement organization, located in Paris (France). The main contribution lies in offering a framework to analyze the mechanisms that prevented this conflict from constructively fostering the intersectional politics of the feminist organization. The ethnographic findings show that the organization's inability to challenge its racism and whiteness is linked to its post-political vision of feminism, which translates into attempts to suppress conflict related to multiple and competing identifications. Thus, this article contributes to existing research on conflict in feminist organizing by suggesting that the subduing of conflict associated with such a post-political vision of feminism prevents feminist organizing from being “anti-oppressive”.

This paper interrogates a shift in patriarchal media discourse related to women leaders' recognition and legitimation in the UK. We conduct a multimodal discourse analysis of an online newspaper article about the UK politician and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner, and analyzed public responses. Understanding the media as a means to distribute power and enable the challenging of norms, we contribute a theory of intersectional misrecognition in media's representation of women political leaders. This reveals an enduring and dynamic subordinate status of women leaders, shown specifically through the intersection of gender and class. We theorize that while women leaders continue to be misrecognized in the media, destabilizing their legitimacy, there is a demonstrable flexing of patriarchal discourse combined with stronger and accelerated resistance to ongoing sexism. We identify this resistance as productive in its call for consequences and a redistribution of cultural values, reflecting a discursive shift toward a productive resistance of resilient gender norms, evident in the intersection of gender with class. Intersectional misrecognition has value in making inequalities explicit for women leaders and where there may be productive tensions with potential to mobilize for change.

The gender pay gap (GPG) remains significant in most countries and is a key indicator of gender inequality in society. Qualitative research on the GPG is scarce, yet, qualitative perspectives on the GPG are valuable as the ways in which the GPG is understood and talked about shape actions to tackle it. This article focuses on how the GPG is represented in the context of work and organizations, inspired by the “What's the Problem Represented to be?” approach, developed by Carol Bacchi. The analysis draws on qualitative data—63 interviews with employers, employees, and state officials—collected in Estonia which exhibits one of the largest GPGs in the European Union. Five dominant representations of the GPG were identified: the GPG as (a) consciously produced by employers, (b) different pay for the same work, (c) unmeasurable due to “unique” and “incomparable” jobs and workers, (d) produced by women's failure to ask for fair pay, and (e) impossible for employers to reduce because of market forces. Collectively, these representations render the GPG inevitable, downplaying its emergence as a result of specific gendered social practices. This has implications for the employers' and the state's willingness and strategies to reduce the GPG.

Nursing homes for older people are an integral part in most postindustrial welfare states. The strong formalization and regulation of the Swedish care sector have contributed to a comparatively large share of frontline workers being native-born Swedish women with a shorter educational background. Yet, an aging population in interplay with increased difficulties to recruit sufficient numbers of native-born care workers has led to Sweden following an internationally observed trend with an increased reliance on not only migrant women but also migrant men as care workers in residential care facilities. However, little is known about migrant men's experiences of care work and the challenges and obstacles they might face because of their gender and skin color, not least when it comes to experiences of being exposed to gendered racism from the residents. The study builds on interviews with 21 managers employed at Swedish elder care facilities in the Stockholm area. The results suggest that both Black women and men to a greater extent than other ethnic minority workers risk being exposed to racism. At the same time, the results suggest that Black men, due to their gender and skin color, constitute the group of staff that most of all risks encountering racism in the everyday life of caregiving. Taken together, this points to the need of highlighting how stereotypes of gender and race as well as gendered racism are given and gain meaning in elder care. This points to the importance of not considering “migrant care workers” an undifferentiated category of workers when working on creating nondiscriminatory and inclusive working conditions for all visibly racialized care workers.

In a patriarchal caste- and class-inflicted gendered work setting in an Indian state, Kerala, we explore the process of mobilizing neoliberal postfeminization and subsequent collectivization and collective acting of women from lower socioeconomic classes. We identify neoliberal postfeminism's structural contradictions and lingering individuating forces within a state-instituted yet bottom-up women empowerment collectivization program, enriching the emerging critique of neoliberal postfeminization, particularly within intersectionality conversations. Despite these impediments, the collective gradually developed a situational embodied relational collective feminist solidarity that facilitated possibilities for creating alternatives to neoliberal postfeminist patriarchal ways of organizing work and working bodies. By narratively mapping these processes, we hope to advance the emerging discussions on the development of feminist solidarity and solidaristic alternatives.

This article places a critical lens over one part of an empirical study to explore the political reasons for why (or why not) women on boards policies are effective (or not) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Political intersectionality is used as a heuristic tool to link the political agendas of macro level public policies to meso-level organizational processes and how these (re)shape the micro-level everyday politics of structural privilege and disadvantage. Interview data from 10 influential male directors show how the political agendas of powerful interest groups can shape the dialog and further embed the status quo by promoting a business case for gender diversity based on the inherent assumption that it incentivizes businesses to function as meritocracies. We argue that power and conflicting political interests must be addressed if diversity-related interventions are to achieve the desired gender equity and social justice outcomes in a board membership.

This paper explores how looming planetary crises become present in the lived experiences of future female workers, and how such experiences condition performances of viable subjectivity. Drawing on interview data from a longitudinal study of young women's education and career aspirations, the paper zooms in on moments where concerns about planetary crises were felt in informants' everyday lives. We augment Judith Butler's writings on loss with Karen Barad's concept of “intra-action” to theorize these moments as experiences of loss in which constitutive dependencies and entanglements—otherwise repressed and invisible—touch young women's lives. Against this theoretical backdrop, we trace how such experiences interrupt performances of neoliberal work subjectivity and thereby create a potential for alternative agencies grounded in an ethics of entanglement. The paper thus contributes new insights into young women's complex performances of viable work subjectivity, showing how more sustainable and collective ways of performing the self emerge. As such, we offer researchers and professionals working with and around young women a nuanced understanding of how young women contest and exceed notions of neoliberal individualism.

Decades of rights-based advocacy for people with disabilities have transitioned long-term care in the United States from institutional settings to home-based care provided by interdependent care networks. This paper argues that policies and practices within these home-based care systems unintentionally produce and often perpetuate unrecognized structural violence on the recipients of care and the caregivers. Understanding the caregivers' experiences through a case study of a Facebook feeding tube family support group exposes the geographic realities and ableist underpinnings of the home-based care model that undergird this violence. Further, I illustrate the contradictions of “home is best” ideology by focusing on three interwoven themes: structural dependency on unpaid mother-experts, spatio-temporal erasure through decentralization, and invasive surveillance structures. This research attends to how home-based care, as a practice and a place, reflects broader patriarchal, gendered, and neoliberal concepts of autonomy and individual rights as expressed through policies like “person-centered” care and the medical home model. While this analysis has theoretical, methodological, and policy implications, more important is the contextualization of family experiences that sometimes impacts life and death.