Gender and the Artist Archetype: Understanding Gender Inequality in Artistic Careers

Women artists are systematically disadvantaged across cultural fields. Although some of these disadvantages resemble gender inequalities in non‐artistic work, such as lower pay, underrepresentation, work–family conflict, and symbolic devaluation, others are unique to artistic careers. In this essay, I extend Acker's work on the implicit gendering of the ideal‐typical worker to show how gender implicitly organizes social expectations around artists and artistic work. I highlight themes emerging from past research on gender relations in artistic careers, which suggest that the ideal‐typical artist builds on a masculine model in at least three ways. First, collective understandings of creative genius center a masculine subject. Second, bias in aesthetic evaluations systematically favors men over women. Third, the structure of artistic careers, particularly the need for entrepreneurial labor and self‐promotion, requires artists to engage in behaviors that are more socially acceptable in men than in women.     

Equality and Illusion: Gender and Tenure in Art History Careers

Using a national survey of 508 art history Ph.D.s including data on graduate school performance and careers 10 – 15 years post‐Ph.D., this study investigates gender, family, and academic tenure in art history, the humanities field with the highest proportion of women. Alternative hypotheses derived from three perspectives—termed here clockwork, two‐body, and synergy—are evaluated with multivariate logistic regression. Analysis finds that marriage increases men’s tenure odds and decreases women’s, but that some types of marriages do not decrease women’s odds, and some types dramatically increase men’s. This study calls attention to male advantage in female‐dominated academic disciplines and demonstrates the potential to better understand the interactions of gender, marriage, and careers by conceptualizing different types of marriages.     

Effect of Gender Composition on Group Performance

The effect of gender composition on group performance was investigated over three years using the MARKSTRAT 2 simulation. Senior undergraduates formed groups and competed within five‐firm (group) industries over 10 weeks, as well as submitting group reports on their performances. Performance and report marks were independent of group size and individual performance in other course assessment. Women per group (numbers, percentage, gender ratio) was positively related to simulation performance, with few women‐dominated groups ranking lower than first or second within each industry. Very few all‐men groups achieved first or second rankings. There were no significant correlations between group gender compositions and marks for the group written report. Women's more interactive, people‐oriented and co‐operative work styles apparently facilitate the MARKSTRAT 2 group process and, when combined with men's more analytical decision‐making tendencies and competitive orientation, appear to explain the superior performances of mixed groups. The emergence and utilization of these tendencies within groups are discussed in terms of Social Contact Theory and Competition Theory. Although generalizations from student‐based studies to the workplace is problematic, the results indicate that groups may be more effective when women outnumber or equal men, especially in complex management activities requiring extensive information management and processing, planning and decision‐making over protracted periods.     

Flawed Policy,Failed Politics? Challenging the Sexual Politics of Managing Diversity in Engineering Organizations

In Australia, as in most other developed countries, women constitute less than 10 per cent of engineers and they are leaving the profession faster than men. Engineering organizations have taken up managing diversity as a key policy to improve the recruitment and retention rates of women engineers. This article contributes to the developing literature of critical approaches to diversity by drawing on data from three large engineering companies to argue that this policy fails to challenge the prevailing sexual politics in engineering. We propose the concept of ‘sexual politics’ in order to stress that gender is relational, contested and always political. In failing to engage with the sexual politics in engineering organizations, managing diversity obscures the systematic nature of women's disadvantage and men's advantage in the workplace. Only when these politics are recognized, confronted and transformed will engineering careers be more equitable.     

Men Discussing Women and Women Discussing Men: Reflexivity,Transformation and Gendered Practice in the Context of Nursing Care

This article explores gender reflexivity through the accounts of men discussing women and of women discussing men as professional nurses. Drawing on data from an Australian‐based study, and with an orientation to gender as practice, it investigates the skills and aptitudes that each is seen to bring to the job, how men and women view the other's performance as caregivers and the experiences and challenges of working with the other group. Previous work has suggested there is a link between reflexivity and transformation as individuals self‐consciously shape identities and as they reflect critically on their social conditions. The results from this study question the nature and extent of these transformative powers and suggest different levels of reflexivity based on the extent to which individuals challenge gender norms. These levels are linked to experiences of dissonance as men and women work with each other in a ‘feminized’ context of nursing care.     

Doing Gender in the Conference Hall: Do Men and Women Behave Differently in Engineering Scientific Environments?

The literature on women in STEM areas displays the barriers that women face at scientific workplaces, showing important interaction where they do and undo gender. However, there is a lack of research about the extent men and women do and undo gender in networking environments. This is a participant observation at Human-Computer Interactions annual conferences in a mainly male-dominated environment. It explored how researchers are ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ gender focusing on two main dimensions: the gender roles adopted by men and women during the presentations and social activities, and the gender contents exposed in their research talks. A first result shows that sex and gender issues are trivialized in research contents by both men and women researchers. A second result reveals that men and women unintentionally and successively ‘do’ and ‘undo’ gender as a strategy to fit into a neutral and accepted identity of engineering and computer scientists.     

Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women‐only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace

Mentoring is widely acknowledged to be an important contributor to women's career success and progression, but women often struggle to access mentoring networks that can help sponsor and develop their careers. Formal mentoring programmes designed specifically for women help overcome this challenge, but such schemes may at the same time reinforce masculine discourses which position women as deficient in relation to the invisibly male norm that is implicit within contemporary working practices. Drawing on a formal women‐only mentoring programme built on gender‐positive goals to empower women to ‘be the best they can be’ within the events industry, this article considers the extent to which such programmes can both challenge and reproduce gendered discourses of business and success. Interviews with mentors and mentees illustrate how such programmes make gender visible within business and individual careers, but masculinist underpinnings of organizational discourses remain invisible, unacknowledged and thus largely unchallenged.     

“If You Talk Badly about Drilling,You're a Pariah”: Challenging a Capitalist Patriarchy in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale Region

Research on energy development is largely gender neutral, creating a need to illuminate how gender structures life in contemporary energy boomtowns. This study demonstrates how gender and the local economy are intertwined to perpetuate a capitalist patriarchy, which structures life for residents in these communities. The purpose of this article is to show that this economic‐gender structure creates tensions between those men and women whose gender performances reinforce hegemony and those who perform gender in direct opposition to resource extraction. I argue that men and women unconstrained by the capitalist patriarchy are better able to challenge its dominance than residents employed in the local economy. I use qualitative interviews (N = 39) with community residents and observations of community events in northeastern Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region as the primary methods of data collection. This study complements previous research by demonstrating the relationship between masculinity and femininity, showing the variability of gender in natural‐resource‐based settings and defining the hierarchal relationship among masculinities and femininities during periods of rapid energy development.     

Labor Migration,Remittances and Household Income: A Comparison between Filipino and Filipina Overseas Workers1

The major purpose of the research is to examine gender differences in patterns of labor market activity, economic behavior and economic outcomes among labor migrants. While focusing on Filipina and Filipino overseas workers, the article addresses the following questions: whether and to what extent earnings and remittances of overseas workers differ by gender; and whether and to what extent the gender of overseas workers differentially affects household income in the Philippines. Data for the analysis were obtained from the Survey of Households and Children of Overseas Workers (a representative sample of households drawn in 1999–2000 from four major “labor sending” areas in the Philippines). The analysis focuses on 1,128 households with overseas workers. The findings reveal that men and women are likely to take different jobs and to migrate to different destinations. The analysis also reveals that many more women were unemployed prior to migration and that the earnings of women are, on average, lower than those of men, even after controlling for variations in occupational distributions, country of destination, and sociodemographic attributes. Contrary to popular belief, men send more money back home than do women, even when taking into consideration earnings differentials between the genders. Further analysis demonstrates that income of households with men working overseas is significantly higher than income of households with women working overseas and that this difference can be fully attributed to the earnings disparities and to differences in amount of remittances sent home by overseas workers. The results suggest that gender inequal‐     

Constructing Masculinity in the Building Trades: ‘Most Jobs in the Construction Industry Can Be Done by Women’

Construction is one of the most gender‐segregated sectors of the UK economy; men constitute over 99 per cent of the employees in the building trades. This article focuses on the role of discourse in reflecting and reproducing the absence of women in the construction trades. A small excerpt from an industry report is described, interpreted and explained using critical discourse analysis. The analysis takes as its starting point one phrase, ‘most jobs in the construction industry can be done by women’ and places it in its structural, institutional and historic context, showing its dependence on presuppositions about women's abilities, and the ideological basis of those assumptions. Male construction workers' masculine identity is defined in relation to their ‘tough’ job. The culture of taking safety risks, and working long hours in primitive working conditions suits some employers very well. The report's assertion that women can do ‘most jobs’ in construction appears to challenge the dominant ideology but it actually reproduces it, helping to maintain gender segregation. Thus it contributes in a small way to sustaining existing power relations by containing potentially transformative movements.     

Gender Quotas for Agricultural Boards: Changing Constructions of Gender?

This article explores the processes by which gender is given meaning through social interaction in boardrooms. In Norway, alongside mandatory quotas regulating the composition of Public Limited Company boards, voluntary quotas were designed to increase women's membership on the boards of agricultural co‐operatives. This radical step to secure a minimum of 40 per cent women makes these boards an interesting site for investigating the construction of gender in a traditionally male‐dominated organization. In the debate, arguments in favour of a quota accentuated diversity and differences between women's and men's competences, opinions and values. The analysis of interview data from the boards of four agricultural co‐operatives suggests that equal representation is a muted, taken‐for‐granted value. Equality and diversity are not understood as incompatible ideas, and gender is produced dynamically through practice rather than constituted as an inherent, fixed attribute. Gender as difference is less pervasive than expected as women tend to be recognized as belonging to the gender‐neutral category of a board representative despite any recognized differences. The study demonstrates that voluntary quotas may change the context and both challenge old assumptions and promote new understandings of gender in local situations.     

Equal Opportunities Policies in English Schools: Towards Greater Gender Equality in the Teaching Workforce?

The under‐representation of women in promoted posts is one particular pattern of occupational segregation by gender across post‐industrial societies. This phenomenon also characterizes those professions which have been described as ‘women‐friendly’, such as teaching. The development of national and European legislation and recommendations on equal opportunities reflects this concern to address the gender imbalance among the workforce. But do schools identify women's under‐representation in promoted posts as an issue? To what extent do school's policies recognize and remedy the gender imbalance at managerial level? To answer these questions this article draws on a study of women teachers' careers in nursery, primary and secondary education in England. It shows that school equal opportunities policy statements widely ignore the under‐representation of women in school managerial positions. It suggests that the constructions of gender issues in schools by those in charge of designing and implementing school policies, that is, head‐teachers and governors, represent a key hindering factor for equal opportunities policies to contribute to greater gender equality. A major argument in the article is that because head‐teachers' and governors' discourses do not always fundamentally challenge the position of women in society, school policies and practices can offer only a limited contribution to gender equality.     

Choices and Challenges: A Qualitative Exploration of Professional Women's Career Patterns

With the rapid changes occurring in the role of work in women's lives, this research project was designed to examine the career planning, career decision making, and work history of women in both female‐dominated and gender‐neutral careers (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.‐a). A qualitative analysis of structured interviews identified 6 emerging themes: variations of career/family patterns, career encouragers, career obstacles, personal compromises, career changes, and career decision‐making patterns. Insights for strengthening the exploration process and strategies for supporting career management are presented based on the emerging themes.     

Narratives of Spousal Support for the Careers of Men in Managerial Posts

This article analyses the narratives of men managers to see how they perceive their wives' support in relation to their careers. Our aim is to focus on different forms of spousal support and explore how the support can evolve in the course of the men's careers. We are also interested in what kind of gender relations men produce when narrating their experiences of spousal support for their career. The research material comprises interviews with 29 managers who are fathers. In contrast to many previous studies, the results here suggest that spousal support is not a fixed or uncomplicated phenomenon but is constructed as various and flexible by men: negotiated, enriching and declining. The narrative analysis, in which we detected three different story‐lines — romance, ‘happily‐ever‐after’ and tragedy — shows that the most positive narratives in terms of life satisfaction and career success were those in which spousal support was constructed as negotiated and men were willing to be flexible and adaptable in their gender relations with their spouse. More attention to a father's work and family integration is needed in the field of management and organizations.     

Same job,different rewards: The gender pay gap among physicians in Italy

Women have made significant progress in the medical profession, but despite this trend towards equality, the gender pay gap persists. This study investigates the determinants of earning differentials among physicians in Italy. This analysis is based on a dataset of more than 1000 doctors working in five hospitals in the Lombardy region. Data were collected through an online survey with a response rate of 48.7 per cent. Women's concentration in the lower ranks of the career ladder, their lower propensity to work as private practitioners and their lower concentration in surgical specialties contribute to the gender income gap. Having children and a spouse or a cohabiting partner entails a premium on income for men, but no penalty for women, which suggests that positive discrimination towards fathers and husbands is stronger than negative discrimination towards mothers and wives. On the other hand, the gender gap associated with marital and parental status is stronger in public hospitals than in private hospitals, at least up to the second child. Once differences in characteristics are controlled, women earn 18 per cent less than men. This penalty should be ascribed to employer's discrimination and/or unobserved characteristics. These findings challenge the human capital perspective by calling for attention into the role of structural mechanisms in producing inequalities.     

Gender bias in performance evaluations: The impact of gender quotas

The intention behind imposing quotas for women on corporate boards is to close the gender gap in economic participation and help women to be promoted within organizations. However, the broader social psychological literature lends support to ideas that affirmative action policies, such as quotas, may do more harm than good for the beneficiaries. We extend this idea beyond the affected beneficiaries and ask whether this unintended negative effect spills over to women who are not immediate targets of the quota, by signaling incompetence. We develop an experimental design to investigate whether the announcement (study 1) and the implementation (study 2) of a quota for women have a direct negative effect on performance evaluations and hence reinforce the existing gender bias in evaluation. We observed that the performance of women was evaluated significantly lower than that of men. However, this gender bias was limited to sequential (rating) evaluations and was not evident in joint (ranking) evaluations. The quota did not significantly influence the amount of this bias. In addition, we observed more pronounced sexism in males compared to females. Results of study 2 gave a hint to an association between higher sexism and lower evaluations of women’s performance. We also found some evidence for a stronger evaluation bias in females when controlling for sexist attitudes. Hence, our results imply that the bias, which is overall quite robust and strongly pronounced, is still affected by individual gender-related characteristics.     

Preferences,constraints or schemas of devotion? Exploring Norwegian mothers' withdrawals from high‐commitment careers1

Despite decades of focus on gender equality and work–family balance, parenthood still affects mothers' and fathers' careers differently. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Norwegian mothers who are relinquishing high‐commitment careers of law and consultancy, this paper questions the adequacy of established explanations emphasizing constraints vs. individual preferences. Our sample of female professionals living in a well‐developed welfare state is particularly apt to explore the processes and mechanisms upholding the statistically gendered pattern of women reducing their work commitment after childbirth. These doubly privileged mothers might be considered to have the best odds for combining career and work commitment with motherhood. Thus, we argue that the approach emphasizing practical constraints does not sufficiently account for the withdrawal from high‐commitment careers among these female professionals. Nevertheless, we are not content with the claim of Preference Theory that this shift in commitment is merely a matter of ‘not‐so‐dedicated’ women discovering their ‘genuine’ preferences. Rather, in order to understand why and how this shift occurs, we explore the culturally constructed rationalities and schemas of both work and family devotions. We specifically examine the circumstances, mechanisms and steps in a seemingly individual process of making the shift in commitment from a promising career to a family‐friendly job. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how generous parental leave arrangements designed to enhance gender equality and work–family balance by simply reducing practical constraints may have limited – or even counterproductive – impact within high‐commitment occupations where the ‘irreplaceability’ of workers is taken for granted. Our findings indicate that unless the culturally (re)produced discourses, demands and expectations of both work and family are exposed and challenged, even intentionally gender neutral work–family policies will continue to facilitate mothers' career withdrawals, expressed as modified individual preferences.     

Engendering Inequality: Processes of Sex-Segregation on Wall Street

Women's numbers in high-paying, male-dominated occupations have risen in the past three decades, but they disproportionately hold lower-paying jobs within those occupations. A cohort sample of Wall Street securities professionals shows how sex segregation occurs over time, as men's and women's different experiences lead them to change functions, to change firms, or to leave the securities industry. While seemingly similar processes impinge on the careers of everyone in this exceptionally high-paid occupation, family constraints and gender discrimination produce differential results for similarly qualified men and women. Over time men disproportionately gain the very highest paying Wall Street jobs.     

Leadership,Gender and Sense‐making

This article examines the nature of sense‐making processes in teams and considers the extent to which leadership as a sense‐making process is impacted by gender. We conducted an in‐depth inquiry into the decision‐making behaviour of two single‐gender teams and a third, mixed gender team, as they worked together to produce gender‐specific leadership schema in an experimental setting. Our research question was, ‘To what extent is leadership as a sense‐making process impacted by gender?’ The article reports on the design, conduct and outcomes of this research project. We found that using a meeting as part of the research method created a specific instance of a gendered organizational context exerting a dominant and directive influence on individual and collective behaviour. The current trend toward team‐based leadership is likely to involve more meetings with increasing numbers of women in senior positions. This suggests to us that men and women need to be alert to the possibility that the gendered nature of meetings may be acting as a barrier to the expression of feminine forms of leadership.     

The glass ceiling – where is it? Women's and men's career prospects in the private vs. the public sector in Sweden 1979–2000

Previous research suggests that women have more limited career opportunities than men. Using Swedish longitudinal data, covering the period between 1979 and 2000, more light is shed on the association between hierarchical levels and differences between men's and women's career opportunities in terms of occupational transitions. The analyses indicate that women face the greatest hinderance to advancement at lower hierarchical levels and that these disadvantages attenuate with higher hierarchical levels. These results contradict the common idea of a glass ceiling, ie that problems for women accrue with increasing hierarchical levels. The findings point to the need for focusing more on gender inequalities at low hierarchical positions although the glass ceiling hypothesis cannot be dismissed altogether. Moreover, the results do not support the view that the gender penalty in careers is larger in the private sector as compared to the public sector.