How Women Engineers Do and Undo Gender: Consequences for Gender Equality

The image of engineering as a masculine profession has reproduced the perception that engineering is unsuitable for women. While various strategies have been used to try to increase the number of women entering engineering education and employment, their success has been limited. At the same time it has been argued that the way gender is ‘done’ in work can help diminish or increase inequality between the sexes. Using empirical research exploring women engineering students’ workplace experiences, this article considers how gender performance explains their behaviour and attitudes. Butler implied that doing gender can result in our being ‘undone’. This was specifically found to be the case for the women students in this study, who performed their gender in a particular way in order to gain male acceptance. In doing this they utilized certain coping strategies: acting like one of the boys, accepting gender discrimination, achieving a reputation, seeing the advantages over the disadvantages and adopting an ‘anti‐woman’ approach. These strategies are part of women's enculturation and professionalization in engineering, yet they also fail to value femaleness. In ‘doing’ engineering, women often ‘undo’ their gender. Such gender performance does nothing to challenge the gendered culture of engineering, and in many ways contributes to maintaining an environment that is hostile to women.     

Doing Gender in Academic Education: The Paradox of Visibility

Recent contributions in the field of gender and organization point to the notion of paradox to unveil the persistence of gender inequality in organizations. This article seeks to contribute to this growing body of knowledge. We used the notion of paradox to reveal the processes of doing gender at an earth science department of a Dutch university in order to find out whether gender segregation in academic and professional careers has already started during academic education. We focused on the study choices of female students in earth sciences and discovered the paradox of visibility, which enabled us to show the contradictory and ambiguous nature of how gender is done at this department. In this article we discuss the relationship between doing gender and paradox on a theoretical as well as an empirical level. We argue that paradoxes could be very useful when analysing doing gender in organizations, because paradoxes focus on the social process in which individual agency and social structures come together. We even suggest that paradoxes might help us to disrupt the hierarchical nature of the gender binary, because they allow for a constant reflection on ambiguity and contradictions in theorizing as well as in practice.     

Doing Gender Well and Differently in Dirty Work: The Case of Exotic Dancing

This article explores how a group of exotic dancers do gender and manage the stigma associated with their work and identities. We draw upon stigma management strategies from the dirty work literature and illuminate the doing of gender in these strategies. We also contribute to the debate that gender can be done well and differently through simultaneous, multiple enactments of femininity and masculinity. We consider the experiences of 21 exotic dancers working in a chain of UK exotic dancing clubs and conclude that in order to be good at their job, exotic dancers are expected to do gender well, that is, perform exaggerated expressions of femininity. However, we also theorize that for some dirty workers, specifically exotic dancers as sex workers, doing gender well will not be enough to reposition bad girls (bad, dirty work) into good girls (good, clean work). Finally, we propose that doing gender well will have different consequences in different types of work, thereby extending our findings to other dirty work occupations and organizations in general.     

Negotiating Gender Relations: Muslim Women and Formal Employment in Pakistan's Rural Development Sector

Drawing on evidence from qualitative field research, this article explores how Pakistani female development practitioners experience their work situations as they are shaped both by local sociocultural norms and globalized development agendas. In this context, policies at global and national levels demand that more female development practitioners work in remote rural places in Pakistan, thus creating new employment opportunities for some Pakistani women. This article argues that, in this work environment, these women are exposed to different expectations about their gender behaviour and that they therefore develop physical strategies on the one hand and discursive strategies on the other in order to negotiate gender relations in a way that allows them to engage in formal employment. This article adds to under‐researched debates on gender and work in Muslim countries as well as to debates in critical development and gender studies.     

Doing Gender,Paying Low: Gender,Class and Work–Life Balance in Aged Care

This article examines how interactions between the doing of gender and class at institutional and organizational levels perpetuate inequality for aged care workers. In particular, it investigates how managers ‘do gender’ and class in relation to their care workers' work–life balance and the unintended consequences of this for aged care workers. The research data comprised interviews with female managers and aged care workers from four case studies in residential aged care in New Zealand. We argue that despite best intentions, the consequences of managers' doing gender and class results in continuing low wages, poor work–life balance and disempowerment at work for aged care workers.     

Producing and Reducing Gender Inequality in A Worker‐Recovered Cooperative

Decades of feminist scholarship documents the persistence of gender inequality in work organizations. Yet few studies explicitly examine gender inequality in collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives. This article draws on the “theory of gendered organizations” to consider how gender operates in a worker‐recovered cooperative in contemporary Argentina. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Hotel B.A.U.E.N., this article finds that although gender remains a salient feature of the workplace, the cooperative has also adopted policies that take steps toward addressing gender inequality. It concludes by offering an updated theoretical framework for the future study of “gendered organizations.”     

Towards a Topology of ‘Doing Gender’: An Analysis of Empirical Research and Its Challenges

‘Doing gender’ is a much used term in research on gender, work and organizations. However, translating theoretical insight into empirical research is often a challenging endeavour. A lack of clarity with regard to the conceptualization and operationalization of key terms in turn often limits the theoretical and empirical purchase of a concept. The aim of this article is therefore to provide a systematization of empirical approaches to ‘doing gender’. This systematization leads to a topology of five themes that is derived from empirical research in the field. The five themes identified are structures, hierarchies, identity, flexibility and context specificity, and gradual relevance/subversion. Each theme explores a different facet of ‘doing gender’. This topology helps empirical researchers to be more specific about which aspects of ‘doing gender’ they are referring to. This in turn can help to unfold the theoretical potential of the concept of ‘doing gender’.     

Conforming to and Resisting Dominant Gender Norms: How Male and Female Nursing Students Do and Undo Gender

Much existing research has shown that men are able to construct and enact masculine identities in female‐dominated occupational contexts. However, few studies have examined the experiences of both men and women in these occupations. Furthermore, few studies attend to how men and women in these occupations both conform to and resist gender norms. In this study, I draw on the undoing gender frameworks developed by Deutsch and Butler to address the limitations mentioned above. Most notably, this study attends to the ways in which male and female nursing students do gender by conforming to dominant gender norms, as well as undo gender by resisting these norms. The main contribution of this study is thus to show the multiple ways through which gender can be done and undone in the professional training of both male and female nurses. The results of this study demonstrate the importance of attending to both women and men in research on female‐dominated occupations and of examining both similarities and differences in the gender performances of men and women.     

Gender and Disability: Feminizing Male Employees with Visible Impairments in Danish Work Organizations

The purpose of this article is to examine how stereotypical gender perceptions relate to employees with physical impairments. This is done by investigating how employees and managers in 13 Danish work organizations draw on stereotypical perceptions of femininity when they talk about their colleague with cerebral palsy, and by examining how these stereotypical perceptions influence the work lives of the participating employees with cerebral palsy — as seen from their own perspective. The empirical point of departure is an interview study conducted in 2013 with 13 employees with cerebral palsy, 44 colleagues and 19 managers. In contrast to the findings of much research on gender and work, this study finds that stereotypically feminized perceptions of employees with cerebral palsy as weak, in need of help, etc., are linked to the impairments of the employee rather than his or her biological sex or the specific gender norms of the particular industry. The analysis of this article thus contributes to increase our understanding of gender processes in work organizations. More specifically, the article shows how impairments intersect with gender perceptions; in this case how the study participants with cerebral palsy are expected to relate to and reproduce stereotypically female behaviour — regardless of their biological sex.     

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender and interaction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empirically via its categorial reference in talk‐in‐interaction. I begin by charting the history of ethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel's groundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a more general discussion of feminism's relationship to ethnomethodology. I then consider two related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other in membership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication of gender's relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise different problems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how ‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequential organization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conversation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members' categories in their sequential environment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ ( Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).     

Redoing Gender: How Women in the Funeral Industry Use Essentialism for Equality

Although some research considers women's participation in traditionally male‐dominated jobs as an ‘undoing’ of the gender system, other scholars argue that women's participation in non‐traditional roles can actually maintain hegemonic masculinity. Because women have recently entered the funeral industry in unprecedented numbers, the profession offers a unique context to study how women negotiate a sense of belonging in male‐dominated fields. I draw on 22 interviews with women in the funeral industry to reveal how gender is done and undone in an occupational context. In what Hughey ( 2010 . Social Problems, 57, 653–679) refers to as a ‘paradox of participation’, I argue that women in the funeral industry redefine the image of the ideal funeral director by using gender essentialist logic, which originally acted as a barrier to their entry to the field, to justify their participation. By showing how gender essentialism and egalitarianism can constitute reinforcing logics instead of an opposing binary, this research contributes to the literature concerning women in non‐traditional roles.     

Gender,visuality and violence: visual securitization and the 2001 war in Afghanistan

Visual securitization (the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications) is integral to understanding how war and political violence is made possible. However, its insights have yet to be coupled with feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, which is alert to the connections between gender and (in)security. This article synthesizes these two research areas through Lene Hansen’s (2011) framework of visual securitization to investigate the gendered logics that underpinned the 2001 war in Afghanistan. By analyzing 123 photojournalistic images alongside American media texts and foreign policy discourse, I argue western images of Afghan women enacted a specific visuality through which they became constructed as a legitimate matter of security. The article makes two important contributions through this analysis. Firstly, it extends feminist understanding of the war in Afghanistan by demonstrating how the interplay between the visual and textual, and the gendered and racial logics operating within such interplay, visually produced Afghan women as a referent object of security. Secondly, this argument illustrates how gender can be critical in enabling the acceptance of visual securitizations, and how such securitizations can be enacted through gendered representations of insecurity and threat.     

Un/doing Gender and the Aesthetics of Organizational Performance

In the age of the so‐called ‘expressive organization’ and the ‘aesthetic economy’, for an organization to compete in the global marketplace it would appear that it must perform. This does not refer simply to economic performance, but rather to the idea of performance as a means of affecting both people's impressions and definitions of reality. In this article we argue that such performativity is achieved, in part, through the power of symbolism and aesthetics, as well as the capacity to bring oneself into being in an environment in which successful management of the aesthetic has increasingly become a prerequisite for the conferment of recognition. Central to this process are the ways in which the aesthetics of gender are mobilized and indeed simultaneously ‘done’ and ‘undone’ in order to affirm particular, but often unstable, regimes of managerially desired meaning. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, and informed by a critical or hermeneutic structuralism, we are concerned here to think through the relationship between performativity and the gendered organization of the desire for recognition as it is materialized in, and mediated by, the landscaping of corporate artefacts and organizationally compelled ways of un/doing gender. With this in mind, we consider a series of images taken from a sample of recruitment documents that, as cultural configurations that organize and compel particular versions of gender, we argue, are concerned with the production of organizationally legible and therefore viable gendered subjects.     

Can Changes to Gender Equality Be Sustained?

The aim of this paper is to discuss how changes to gender equality in organizing can be made sustainable. Numerous studies have reported on projects which have not succeeded in their efforts to implement gender equality. In this paper, we analyse the results from two programmes which aimed to increase equal opportunities among private and public sector organizations. Theoretically, the study is based on the framework of doing gender, which is combined with insights from studies using the translation model of organizational change. The translation model of organizational change enables investigation of formal and informal processes within an institutionalized setting. By studying those aspects that were stabilized into an institution within these two programmes, as well as those which were not, the approaches that had become sustainable for the programmes in the long term could be discerned. When comparing the two programmes, it became apparent that complications arose at the point at which the theoretical aims of gender equality were translated into actions. The analysis of the outcomes of these programmes indicates, however, that, even though the formal goals were not reached, equal opportunities within the participating organizations did benefit from these programmes.     

‘A Blinding Lack of Progress’: Management Rhetoric and Affirmative Action

In this study we explore how versions of organizational reality and gender are constructed in management discourse and whether such patterns change over time. Specifically, we examine management explanations and accounts of the gendered nature of their organizations through their commentaries on their affirmative action programmes. In Australia private sector organizations with 100 or more employees are required to report to government on their affirmative action programmes for women. In these documents, management representatives outline objectives for the coming year and report on their progress in reducing employment‐related barriers for women. In doing so they account for the ‘problem’ of gender‐based discrimination that affirmative action is designed to address, justify their actions (or lack of action) and reproduce versions of gendered identity. Thus we use affirmative action reporting as cases of management rhetoric to explore how aspects of gender and organization are constructed, taken for granted, challenged or problematized. Comparing reports from the hospitality sector over a 14‐year period, we explore whether there is any evidence of discursive change in management accounts of the gendered nature of their organizations.     

‘Little children are not for dad's?’ Challenging and undoing hegemonic masculinity

Studies on work and organizations state that traditional gendered cultures support hegemonic masculinity and obstruct an engaged form of ‘new’ fathering. Not only do employers hinder fathers in sharing equally in childcare, but the dynamics within the couple also matter. An examination of the negotiations within couples regarding paid and unpaid work reveals the need to revise conceptualizations of masculinity, with a focus on undoing masculinity. Based on in‐depth interviews with couples in Germany, I argue that social change at the interactional level encompasses at least the possibility that gender, as a resource of the differentiation and hierarchization of masculinities and femininities within the realm of paid and unpaid labour, can be fragile or can even be episodically undone. Hence, more empirical and theoretical work within and beyond the context of fathering is crucial to further theoretical approaches to undoing masculinity.     

Communicating equality through policy documents: On legitimacy,double logic and stable translations

This article discusses gender mainstreaming (GMS) as a strategy to implement gender equality in public work organizations by analysing discourse in terms of the theoretical notions of translation and circulation in organizations to shed light on how gender equality and the mainstreaming strategy are formulated in the documents which govern the Swedish fire and rescue services. More specifically, it looks at how the goals regarding gender equality are circulated and translated. The results show that gender equality as a practice is created in the translation of national goals in terms of the local context and its specific gender equality challenges. Furthermore, the article discusses how vague formulations in the documents are stabilized through circulation between the government and the public agency in question. The results indicate the central role played by maintaining stable translations over time and the presence of a double logic of change in the processes, as well as the importance of legitimizing gender equality initiatives.     

Gender,Occupation, and Promotion to Management in the Nonprofit Sector

Although one can assume the work values within nonprofit organizations promote gender equality in promotion decisions, there is preliminary evidence that in the nonprofit sector women are underrepresented in higher management positions. Whereas the mechanisms resulting in underrepresentation of women in management have been studied extensively in for‐profit organizations, little is known about these mechanisms in nonprofit organizations. Is gender in nonprofit organizations—even given the underlying values of these organizations—an impediment to attaining a management position? This article presents a case study of employment patterns within the Dutch section of the humanitarian INGO Médecins Sans Frontières and focuses particularly on the effects of gender and occupation on transitions to management. The case study organization represents a “critical case” because the nature of this organization's work environment can be expected to result in a relatively high percentage of women in management. Employee records (N = 2,247) were analyzed using event history models. We found that women made the transition to management less rapidly than men, even when controlling for factors like age, previous work experience, and nationality. However, gender differences were completely explained by occupation. Those employees in female‐dominated occupations (in this case, medical personnel such as nurses) had a lower promotion‐to‐management rate than those in male‐dominated occupations (in this case, nonmedical personnel such as financial officers), irrespective of their gender. This case study highlights the importance to nonprofit management research of studying the effects of occupational sex segregation on promotion.     

‘To Do Or Not To Do (Gender)’ and Changing the Sex‐Typing of British Theatre

Concepts of doing, and undoing, gender have become increasingly prevalent within studies of sex‐typed work. However, these concepts, as currently figured and applied, contain a significant analytical lacuna: they tend not to register changes in the sex‐typing of work. In this study we engage this research gap by addressing the changing sex‐typing of British theatre — specifically, the shift from female‐dominated amateur to male‐dominated professional theatre work. We draw upon and develop concepts of doing and undoing gender to understand changes in the sex‐typing of work. In so doing, we explain how spatially and temporally differentiated ways of doing ‘male’ and ‘female’ become implicated in how people make sense of, and enact, the changing spaces and times of ‘amateur/female’ ‘professional/male’ work. Our analysis of theatre work suggests that, despite recent criticisms of their wider significance, concepts of un/doing gender are useful to understand broader changes in the sex‐typing of work. Thus, it also appears possible to (un)change such sex‐typings by undoing gender. However, our analysis suggests that such subversive acts remain ineffective, unless those involved in such gendered undoings engage with, rather than renounce, the gendered doings that help enact the changing sex‐typing of work.