Overcoming the Glass Barriers: Reflection and Action in the ‘Women to the Top’ Programme

Numerous equality programmes have been launched with the aim of promoting a more gender equal work life, yet little substantial action has been reported. This article presents a study of the Women to the Top programme in Sweden, supported by the European Union (EU) and aimed at promoting more women into top management positions. The research suggests that large‐scale projects assembling such heterogeneous actors as industry representatives, politicians and scholars tend to generate further reflection and discussion rather than promoting adequate and highly needed action. Drawing upon Brunsson's distinction between action rationality and decision rationality, the relatively modest effects of large‐scale equality programmes are examined, not in terms of a lack of commitment or competence on the part of the participants but as a matter of the disjunction between reflection and action. Reconciling reflection and action, that is, emphasizing not only reflection on gender inequality but also privileging various forms of practical action (such as new policies, the appointment of female managers, restructuring gendered wage inequalities or new recruitment procedures), is therefore a top priority for policymakers desiring more substantial changes in the gendered outline of industry.     

‘Belonging’ and ‘Otherness’: Sex Equality in Banking in Turkey and Britain

The struggle for sex equality at work has largely been achieved in the developed world, it is claimed. The number of well‐qualified young women entering white‐collar employment and achieving promotion to first‐line and middle management positions now matches or exceeds their male peers. Many young women have high career aspirations and argue that sex discrimination no longer exists. However, this perception is over‐optimistic. Major sex inequalities persist at senior management level in the salaries and benefits offered to female and male staff and in access to certain favoured occupations and sectors of employment. Questionnaires, interviews and documentary evidence from three Turkish and six British banks and high street financial organizations showed that their claimed commitment to equal opportunities by sex was not matched by their practices. Members of managerial elites (who were almost exclusively male) held firm views about the characteristics of ‘the ideal worker’, which informed organizational ideologies, including human resource policies and practices concerning recruitment and promotion. They also permeated organizational cultures, which affected employees’ working practices and experiences. The outcome of these internal negotiation processes was to differentiate between a favoured group of staff seen as fully committed to the companies’ values, who were promoted and rewarded, and an ‘out’ group, whose members were denied these privileges. This distinction between ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ is gendered not only along the traditional lines of class, age, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability, but also along the new dimensions of marriage, networking, safety, mobility and space. Despite local and cross‐cultural differences in the significance of these factors, the cumulative disadvantage suffered by women staff seeking career development in the industry was remarkably similar.     

‘Over the Pond and Across the Water’: Developing the Field of ‘Gendered Organizations’

This article is concerned with the development of gendered organizations as a field of study. It begins by exploring some of the factors that militate against integrating organization studies and gender studies and gendered organizations scholarship over national/continental divides. Increasingly doubtful about whether traditional (mainstream and critical) organization theories will or can adequately address gender, we contend that scholars of gendered organizations should ‘strike out’ on our/their own, ‘boldly going’ into unfamiliar territory to create new, innovative theories, concepts and ideas. We make various suggestions about possible future directions for theorizing and research.     

Childlessness and Women Managers: ‘Choice’, Context and Discourses

Childlessness is increasing and might reflect acceptance of diversity, scope for individual choice and a creative ‘social imaginary’ about being feminine without being a mother. Childlessness also appears to have a contextual manifestation arising from the recognition that the long‐hours work culture in many organizations does not support appropriate parenting. A qualitative study of Australian managers reveals the contradictory discourses of childlessness around enlightened equality, maternalism, an elusive, ideal ‘work–life balance’ and individualism. The article explores a contextually nuanced, dynamic, generative theory of agency which does not hinge on the mother–child dyad, in explaining women managers’ choices to remain childless.     

Cleaning the ‘People's Home’: The Politics of the Domestic Service Market in Sweden

While there is a substantial scholarly literature depicting the abuses and exploitation of domestic workers in the informal cleaning sector, there is virtually no work that examines conditions in the formal market. This is not an oversight. For many, commodifying domestic labour entrenches gender and economic inequalities; we all should simply clean up after ourselves. We seek to offer a fresh approach: the vital question for those concerned with the women performing this work for pay is not whether to commodify reproductive labour, but rather what form the market will take and what conditions might render it a decent job. In order to make such an assessment, we need to look beyond worst‐case scenarios in the informal sector, and study instead the evolution of the formal market. Only by also examining the content and terms of the work can we address how not to perpetuate inequalities such as the gendered division of labour and its intersection with nationality, race and class. In this article, we analyse the market for household services in Sweden's gender egalitarian social democracy, where a recent tax policy fostered the rapid expansion of a formal market for domestic cleaning. We conclude that domestic cleaning can be a decent job and that there is no inherent contradiction between a market for household services and a social democratic political economy.     

Metamorphosis: From ‘Nice Girls’ to ‘Nice Bitches’: Resisting Patriarchal Articulations of Professional Identity

This article explores the random strategies women adopt in resisting patriarchal articulations of their professional identity and the kind of organizational discourses women’s resistance brings about. The focus is on describing the context, dynamics of contradictory tensions and ambivalence inherent in situations of resisting. The article draws upon the authors’ own experiences in academia. In addition to participatory observation, the authors are using themselves as research instruments that enable them to highlight the emotions and ambivalent dynamics in the construction of gendered identities and power relations in organizations. The study indicates that there are several sets of rules in motion in one and the same social situation, such as the rules of organizational behaviour, rules of friendship and the rules of gender relations in public places. By describing two overtly sexualized discourses that women’s resistance brought about, the article highlights that organizational sexuality does not necessarily differ in kind or in degree from ‘street sexuality’ or sexuality in semi‐public places. The study’s findings argue that it is important to extend research to both informal and semi‐formal organizational gatherings. These liminal spaces are important sites of communicative struggles over organizational meanings and identities.     

Beyond ‘Gender Differences’: A Canadian Study of Women's and Men's Careers in Engineering

This article explores the relationship between gender and career paths for a group of women and men who graduated as engineers during a period of labour market turbulence in western Canada during the 1980s. Using a model adapted from Brown (1982 ), the article uses ‘career path’ as a device to organize data drawn primarily from telephone and face‐to‐face interviews with 317 graduates. Three career paths provide the focus for the study: the ‘organizational’, characterized by stable employment with one employer; the ‘occupational’, characterized by mobility between employers; and the entrepreneurial, characterized by self‐employment. The use of the career path framework moves the study beyond global comparisons (of the dichotomized ‘gender differences’ kind) between ‘the women’ and ‘the men’. As well as allowing for comparison between the paths, it allows more refined and contextualized comparisons within each path. Such comparisons produce patterns of similarity and difference that sometimes transcend gender.     

The ‘Feminine Advantage’: A Discursive Analysis of the Invisibility of Older Women Workers

This article discusses the overlap of gender and age identity and its implications in a specific political context — a public inquiry into the problems facing the older unemployed. Using discourse analysis, it examines how ‘older worker’ identity is socially constructed in this setting. At the beginning of the inquiry, fundamentally gendered versions of ‘older worker’ identity were initially constructed, yet by its conclusion, female versions had disappeared. The analysis shows that this ‘invisibility’ of female ‘older worker’ identity is the outcome of a central discursive struggle for recognition of older male workers as a disadvantaged group in the labour market. This ‘disadvantaged’ status is achieved by constructing a companion version of ‘feminine advantage’ in the search for employment. The article discusses the complexity of discursive processes through which this invisibility is accomplished and its implications for those targeted by female and male older worker identity.     

Doing gender in the ‘new office’

This paper investigates how gender is performed in the context of an office setting designed to promote intensive, fluid networking. We draw on an ethnographically oriented study of the move of staff into a new office building constructed primarily from glass, and incorporating open plan offices, diverse collective areas and walking routes. Although the designers aimed to invoke changes in the behaviour of all staff, they conceptualized these changes in masculine terms. We therefore analyse the gender norms materialized by the workspaces of the ‘new office’ and how women responded to these. We suggest that the new office encourages an image of the ideal worker which brings together ways of acting and interacting that have been characterized as both masculine and feminine — active movement and spontaneous encounters, but also intensive face‐to‐face interaction and deep relationship‐building. Women are driven into this mode of working in an uncompromising, almost aggressive way, but a straightforward gender‐based dynamic does not emerge in their responses, with conventional gender characteristics being reshuffled and recombined.     

‘Domestic friends’: women's friendships,motherhood and inclusive intimacy

Based on a qualitative, interview‐based study of friendship, this article examines the specificity of ‘domestic friendships’ between women. Forged from the particular experiences, emotions and challenges of motherhood, they are qualitatively different from most friendships which tend to be based on individualistic connection and self‐expression. Domestic friendships facilitate a specific form of ‘inclusive intimacy’ and shape an expansive experience of domestic life beyond the family or household. They help shape mothers’ sense of self as profoundly relational and interconnected with others, and channel a sense of biographical selfhood whose form and temporality is tied firmly to others’ lives.     

‘I Just Couldn’t Fit It In’: Gender and Unequal Outcomes in Academic Careers

This article reports on the findings of two pieces of research that were designed to test and challenge widely accepted theories about the causes of gender inequity in academic employment at the national level, and subsequently in a more detailed case study of one of Australia's largest and most prestigious universities. Both research projects used large‐scale surveys to capture information about levels of human capital, family responsibilities, career preferences, workloads and objective experiences of appointment and promotion. The case study, conducted in 2002, also utilized focus group discussions with particular groups of women who seemed, from the survey data, to be located just under the glass ceiling. The case study research confirmed the earlier national survey research which concluded that discrimination or bias in appointments, promotions and workloads were not significant in explaining men's domination of the senior levels. It also confirmed the significant gender differences in some kinds of human capital (particularly possession of a Ph.D.). But it also pointed to a quite particular explanation for the failure of women to progress to Level D (associate professor/reader) which involved other more general demographic changes — particularly, high rates of separation and divorce, far higher rates of partnering among men than women and the impact of older children's needs.     

The Politics of Gender in the NHS: Impression Management and ‘Getting Things Done’

This article is concerned with gendered differences in managerial repertoires in the National Health Service. Interviews carried out with senior NHS managers across several geographical areas suggest that, from an impression management perspective, where they are able to occupy senior management positions, a different management style begins to emerge amongst women, with a separation between their ‘front‐stage, ‘backstage’ and ‘outside’ stage activities. Women managers appeared to acknowledge that they could not behave front stage in the same way with doctors as they often did in their outside stage encounters with them, but that the additional strategies they utilized whilst outside stage were key elements to their repertoire for getting things done. This view of management is contrasted with a very different one exhibited by male managers. The implications of the analysis are explored in the article's conclusion.     

‘In the Company of Men’: A Reflexive Tale of Cultural Organizing in a Small Organization

A tale of fieldwork in a small organization is discussed in this article with a view to highlighting how social processes, cultural understandings and expressions of gender are produced during fieldwork interaction. The tale is told reflexively and retrospectively, recording an ongoing conversation about fieldwork experience. Central to the tale is discussion of how the researcher is drawn into ‘culture–making’ within the organization and the ways in which fieldwork interaction creates a ‘space’ through which organizational members engage with, work through and realize work–place values. In this article there are multiple levels of reflection. At one level it is examined how the organizational–researcher role of ‘emotional nurturer’ was constructed during fieldwork. At the same time some cultural insights drawn from ethnographic inquiry and intensive interviewing within the small organization are presented. The analysis is also shaped by a further layer of post–fieldwork reflection and interpretation which draws in emotional issues and expressions of gender. It is argued that a close scrutiny of fieldwork roles is important to organizational research in that it makes explicit how the researcher–‘native’ interaction is central to the theorizing process and how the researcher can become a participant in organizational culture–making.     

‘Live to Work’ or ‘Work to Live’? A Qualitative Study of Gender and Work–life Balance among Men and Women in Mid‐life

Many contemporary studies of ‘work–life balance’ either ignore gender or take it for granted. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with men and women in mid‐life (aged 50 to 52 years) in order to compare their experiences of work–life balance. Our data suggest that gender remains embedded in the ways that respondents negotiate home and work life. The women discussed their current problems juggling a variety of roles (despite having no young children at home), while men confined their discussion of such conflicts to the past, when their children were young. However, diversity among men (some of whom ‘worked to live’ while others ‘lived to work’) and women (some of whom constructed themselves in relation to their families, while others positioned themselves as ‘independent women’) was apparent, as were some commonalities between men and women (both men and women constructed themselves as ‘pragmatic workers’). We suggest ways in which gender‐neutral theories of work–life balance may be extended.     

‘Doing Something Meaningful’: Gender and Public Service during Municipal Government Restructuring

Research on the gendered dimensions of workplace restructuring often focuses on management strategies and their structural consequences. Less attention is paid to employees’ gendered practices. In this article, we analyse material from in‐depth interviews with front‐line public‐sector employees following a major reorganization of their jobs and workplaces. Our study makes three contributions to theory and research on gender and organizational change. Firstly, it highlights the micro‐level dynamics at the heart of restructuring by showing how workers engaged with an ideal that was central to their understanding of public‐sector work — the public‐service ethic — which they believed was threatened. Secondly, it highlights the importance of gendered meanings and identities in shaping how workers engaged with the public service ethic. Thirdly, the study shows that front‐line employees did not passively accept management plans for change but struggled to resist or transform them in gendered strategies for dealing with organizational change.     

The ‘Feminization’ of Management? Issues of ‘Sameness’ and ‘Difference’ in the Roles and Experiences of Female and Male Retail Managers

Explanations of women’s poor representation in senior management usually emphasize differences between women and men managers’ experiences, circumstances and aspirations, and the gendered character of organizational structures and processes. Whilst these may all disadvantage women, some writers have suggested recently that women managers may differ in style and orientation in ways particularly appropriate for today’s developing organizations. This paper explores issues of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ between women and men managers in retailing. Whilst both male and female store managers wanted to downplay gender differences and adopt a ‘gender neutral’ approach, they also associated a number of advantages and disadvantages with being a woman manager in certain contexts. Rapid sectoral change had caused companies to reassess the desired attributes and competences of managers; associated both with an enhanced valuing of ‘feminine’ qualities and with a more ‘objective’ and ‘clinical’ approach to assessment. Despite their equal numbers at entry points women remained poorly represented at senior levels, suggesting that subjective and informal processes were important determinants of women and men’s progress. Given management is inherently a process enacted by individual managers within a social context the extent to which it can be conceived in gender neutral terms is questioned since individuals are inevitably discussed and identified in terms of their gender.     

‘Who was the best?’: Power,knowledge and rationality in bilingual girls’ code choices1

This paper examines how pre‐adolescent bilingual girls employ linguistic choices to construct relations of dominance and subordination in a competitive exchange of knowledge and expertise in a pretend‐school activity. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that code choices used by the girls to constitute and exploit different sources of power are systematically related to the construction of currently salient identities, prevailing structural constraints, and individual goals and desires. It is argued that even young children act as rational, social actors who actively make strategic and meaningful linguistic choices with the overall aim to achieve optimal outcomes in a given interaction.     

‘Dirty Work?’ Gender,Race and the Union in Industrial Cleaning

The study uses an eclectic framework and through an intersectional analysis and use of narratives explores the meaning of janitorial work, the gender division of labour (GDL), the unions and organizing for janitors engaged in industrial cleaning for a big cleaning company, Pluto, in Toronto. Pluto was organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 2006. The study is based on the organizing drive for Pluto and uses participant observation and interview methods. Intersectional analysis is useful in understanding the worker's perceptions of the racialized, gendered and classed constitution of cleaning work as ‘dirty’ and their resistance to these constructs. We explore GDL in industrial cleaning and the construction of women's work as ‘light duty’ and men's work as ‘heavy duty’. We conclude that union membership is important not only for material benefits of the janitors but also for their alternative identity construction. However, there is a persistence of GDL and gender pay equity is not addressed seriously in the organizing drive or upon organizing.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.