Gendered Projects of Solidarity: Workplace Organizing among Immigrant Women and Men

Drawing on an ethnography of organizing among Latina/o immigrant janitors in Los Angeles, I argue that constructing workplace solidarity between women and men is a dynamic, gendered project. I demonstrate both how this project unfolds and how it can be halted, with varying implications for gender and class inequality at work. Organizational restructuring upsets gender‐segregated divisions of labour making solidarity between women and men possible but restructuring also allows workers to reinforce gendered divisions and cultural distinctions. The mechanism pushing workers one way or the other is the degree to which the process of organizing recognizes gender inequalities.     

Economic Well‐Being in Salvadoran Transnational Families: How Gender Affects Remittance Practices

This article examines how migrant parents' gender affects transnational families' economic well‐being. Drawing on 130 in‐depth interviews with Salvadoran immigrants in the United States and adolescent and young adult children of migrants in El Salvador, I demonstrate that the gender of migrant parents centrally affects how well their families are faring. Gender structurally differentiates immigrant parents' experiences through labor market opportunities in the United States. Simultaneously, gendered social expectations inform immigrants' approaches to parental responsibilities and remitting behaviors. Remittances—the monies parents send—directly shape children's economic well‐being in El Salvador. I find that even though immigrant mothers are structurally more disadvantaged than immigrant fathers, mother‐away families are often thriving economically because of mothers' extreme sacrifices.     

‘The Women Can Be Moved to Fill in the Gaps’: New Production Concepts,Gender and Suppliers

This article wishes to extend our understanding of New Production Concepts (hereafter NPC) induced restructuring in two areas. Firstly, it wishes to further explore the gender distinctions to be made when considering the impact of NPC on the labour process. In turn, this calls for a consideration of the extent to which NPC restructuring perpetuates, recasts and fortifies gendered divisions of labour within organizations. It will indicate how the introduction of NPC within a buyer and two supply organizations intensified prevailing gendered divisions of labour and disproportionately impacted upon women workers. It will also stress that women workers appeared to be more exposed to the implementation of policies designed to secure responsiveness to the satisfaction of customer requirements. However, while the evidence will reveal the importance of exploring distinctions within labour as part of a process of restructuring, it also highlights the linkages between these organizations. Secondly, therefore it aims to extend the territory of existing debates by highlighting a gender distinction across and between organizations. It will conclude by highlighting the importance of constructing an analysis of NPC‐induced restructuring which not only embraces a gendered analysis of change but simultaneously does not privilege research attention to particular ‘hermetically sealed’ workplaces, dislocated from a wider process of inter‐firm restructuring.     

How are Work–Family Policies Related to the Gendered Division of Domestic Labor?

Work–family policies are commonly thought to aid parents in attending to their conflicting work and family responsibilities. Some scholars postulate that policies might detract from the gendered division of domestic labor, in which women take a greater responsibility for housework and childcare than men, while others expect that policies encourage women to maintain traditional family roles even while employed. A review of cross‐national research in market economies shows that policies are not uniformly related to the gendered division of domestic labor, although parental leave offers the most promising avenue through which the gendered division of domestic labor may be diminished.     

Gender and Children's Housework Time in China: Examining Behavior Modeling in Context

Differentiated gender roles in adulthood are rooted in one's gender role socialization. In order to understand the persistence of gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, we need to examine the gendered patterns of children's housework time. Although researchers have identified behavior modeling as a major mechanism of gender role reproduction and characterized gender socialization as a contextually embedded process, few have investigated contextual variation in behavior modeling, particularly in non‐Western developing countries. Analyzing data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010, the author examined the differences in behavior modeling between boys and girls age 10–15 from 2‐parent families (N = 1,903) in rural and urban China. The results revealed distinctive gendered interplays in the way parental housework and employment behavior helps shape children's housework time. This analysis is a crucial illustration of how the distinctive sociocultural contexts of rural and urban China moderate the effects of housework‐behavior modeling on intergenerational gender role socialization.     

Cultural Integration in the Muslim Second Generation in the Netherlands: The Case of Gender Ideology

In the Netherlands, relations between Muslims and non‐Muslims have become polarized around issues of religion and gender. On the basis of a dataset with 669 parent–child dyads, we assess attitudes among the second generation concerning the gendered division of paid work and family responsibilities, that is, gender ideology, as compared to their parents. The aggregate picture indicates movement toward more egalitarian attitudes, indicating mainstream assimilation. At the same time, a sizable subgroup turns out to be more traditional than their parents, indicative of reactive ethnicity. Embeddedness in the ethnic community and education are shown to explain part of these divergent patterns.     

Quite an encumbrance? Work-related obstacles to Finnish fathers’ take-up of parental leave

ABSTRACT

An ideal of involved fatherhood has become popular in the developed countries, but even countries like Finland that have introduced an individual father’s quota to parental leave are far from gender equality in parents’ leave practices. Lack of support and negative attitudes at workplaces or pressure at work are among the obstacles to fathers’ leave take-up. The study used survey data from fathers and interviews at workplaces to explore the role of work and workplaces among the many aspects related to fathers’ possibilities of taking leave. The results showed that fathers’ income and workplace characteristics were associated with taking leave. Few fathers mentioned employers’ objection as a hinder. Father’s recent unemployment and anticipated difficulty of taking a long time off played a more important role. At workplaces, the obstacles to taking long leave were related to fathers’ ideals about a committed worker and to the nature and organizing of work. Additionally, the leave exceeding fathers’ quota might not be understood as ‘for fathers’. The spouse’s situation and fathers’ gendered perceptions about parental responsibilities were also important for leave practices. The findings suggest that policy development towards a longer father’s quota could make fathers’ care responsibilities visible also at workplaces.     

Organizational Commitment over the Gendered Life Course at a Mexican Company

Mexican workplaces have changed significantly in response to the global marketplace by restructuring, downsizing, and implementing new production and administrative processes. This case study analyzes organizational commitment at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation within the context of workplace transformation. Based on in‐depth interviews with 83 women and men, I identify two sources of commitment—family‐friendly and career‐friendly employment practices. Using the framework of the gendered life course, I show commitment fluctuated given the employees' stage in the life course. This study builds on the gender and work research by exploring how individual attributes of gender and parental status contribute to organizational commitment, but are underscored by the complexity of workplace context.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TIME IN THE INTERNET ERA: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES AND CHALLENGES

This paper examines the gender matrix of time, arguing for cross-disciplinary consideration of political economy, globalization and technology to achieve a detailed understanding of gendered hierarchies of time and the ways in which public/private identifications of social space and time have variously constructed and maintained them. It is argued that women are alienated from their own time, which is identified as most legitimately allocated to the service of others both in the home and at work. The inter-relationship of technologies and gendered identities is explored in relation to public/private divisions and the political-economic and scientific-technological knowledge processes that contribute to upholding them. ICTs reflect these historically established gendered patterns, but international projects such as 'Women on the Net' also demonstrate the capacities of these technologies for disrupting the gender matrix of time through their use by women for women.     

‘Are we to become a gender university?’ Facets of resistance to a gender equality project

Gender equality (GE) is something ‘we cannot not want’. Indeed, the pursuit of equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities for all women and men throughout a society freed from gendered oppression is widely visible in recent organizational GE initiatives. In practice, however, GE initiatives often fail in challenging gendered norms and at effecting deep‐seated change. In fact, GE measures tend to encounter resistance, with a gap between saying and doing. Using a GE project at a Swedish university, we examined the changing nature of reactions to GE objectives seeking to understand why gender inequality persists in academia. We used ‘resistance’ to identify multiple, complex reactions to the project, focusing on the discursive practices of GE. Focusing our contextual analysis on change and changes in reactions enabled a process‐oriented analysis that revealed gaps where change is possible. Thus, we argue that studying change makes it possible to identify points in time where gendered discriminatory norms are more likely to occur. However, analysing discursive practices does not itself lead to change nor to action. Rather, demands for change must start with answering, in a collaborative way, what problem we are trying to solve when we start a new GE project, in order to be relevant to the specific context. Otherwise, GE risks being the captive of consensus politics and gender inequality will persist.     

Crisis Management by Subjectivation: Toward a Feminist Neo-Gramscian Framework for the Analysis of Europe's Multiple Crisis

The ongoing global crisis not only poses challenges for critical empirical analyses, it also forces us to reconsider central analytical concepts. This paper takes the multiple crisis as a starting point to reconsider notions of (state) power, hegemony, and subjectivation in contemporary crisis management. We discuss recent analyses by feminist and neo-Gramscian scholars, highlight their valuable contributions to a richer understanding of current crisis politics, and argue for their mutual complementarity. Neo-Gramscian perspectives, which productively highlight the current conjuncture's increasing (lack of) hegemonic qualities, need to be confronted with feminist insights regarding the current transformations of gender orders. In combining these approaches, we develop the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’. To illustrate this we refer to the example of Greece: increasingly coercive and authoritarian modes of governance parallel the re-privatization of reproductive work and increasing reliance on gendered division of labor, traditional concepts of privacy, and gendered knowledge of care and the practices associated with it for the reproduction of social cohesion. With the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’ we hence refer to the fact that austerity policies draw on a gendered (re-)allocation and subjective incorporation of social responsibilities as hidden resources of stability and hegemony. The crisis, through its management, is displaced into the gendered subjects themselves.     

Gendered work culture in free/libre open source software development

This article adopts a feminist perspective to examine masculine work culture in the development of free/libre open source software. The authors draw on a case study of the ‘Heidi bug’ discovered during the development of the Mozilla Firefox web browser to examine how ‘gendered talk’ was (en)‐acted to facilitate ‘bricolage’ in an online work environment. Such gendered talks contain cultural references familiar to male developers. Though seemingly innocuous, such acts could be seen as a performance of gender that simply reflects the hegemonic heterosexual masculine culture manifested in an online virtual work space. The virtual work space therefore can be exclusive to those who shared the cultural references. Although it may not necessarily be ignorance or insensitivity of male developers, a more gender‐balanced, women‐friendly and inclusive workplace certainly would benefit from a more diverse environment. This article highlights the gendered aspect of software development through examining the language use and mainstream ‘bricolage’ practice, and establishes a compelling ground for enlarging the talent pool to include more women and integrating gender ethics (e.g., raising awareness of sensitive language and design approaches) into computer ethics education.     

The Quest for Invisibility: Female Entrepreneurs and the Masculine Norm of Entrepreneurship

The emphasis in research on female entrepreneurship remains focused on the impact of gender on women’s experience of business ownership, often demonstrated through comparisons of male and female entrepreneurs. By contrast, this article explores the differences and divisions between women business owners who are silent about gender issues and those who are not. The main data drawn on in the article are e‐mails conducted through a web‐based entrepreneurial network set up to promote and support women in business, supplemented with interview material derived from an interview study of 19 women business owners. By considering the way in which some women business owners not only treat entrepreneurship as gender‐neutral, but also seek to conceal its gendered nature, we can see how some female entrepreneurs are trying to avoid being identified as different from the masculine norm of entrepreneurship.     

Six of One and Half a Dozen of the Other: The Gender Subtext of Taylorism and Team-based Work

This article analyses gendering processes in two distinct models of work organization. It is a widespread belief that, compared to hierarchical (Tayloristic) organizations, team-based work offers opportunities for a high quality of working life to a broader range of employees, both men and women. Our research, however, suggests that gender inequality is (re)produced in both settings and results from the so-called gender subtext. The gender subtext is the set of often concealed power-based processes (re)producing gender distinction in social practices through organizational and individual arrangements. We draw a comparison between the gender subtext of Tayloristic and team-based work organizations through a theoretical analysis, illustrated by empirical data concerning the functioning of the gender subtext in organizations in the Dutch banking sector. Taylorism and team-based work differ in their conceptualization of organization and job design, but, when it comes to the gender subtext, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other. We argue that in both approaches a gender subtext contributes to the emergence of different but gendered notions of the ‘disembodied worker’. In both cases the notion of the abstract worker is implicitly loaded with masculine connotations. This gender bias is supported by two factors influencing the gendering of jobs: the gender connotations of care responsibilities and of qualification profiles. These implicit connotations produce and reinforce unequal opportunities for men and women to get highly qualified or management jobs. Our research, therefore, questions the self-evidence of stating that team-based work will offer opportunities for a higher quality of working life for women.     

Placing Gender in Social Work: The Local and National Dimensions of Gender Relations

This paper argues that as well as being sensitive to wider discourses of gender relations, social workers need to consider the ways in which gender is localised. It is argued that to some extent gender practices vary according to local culture, that gendered identities are often localised and that social workers tend to construct their clients according to images of local men and women. These images tend to be stereotypical but some do also reflect dominant local gendered practices. The paper draws on data from qualitative interviews with social workers and probation officers, as well as the experience of teaching social work students, to illustrate these arguments. Whilst it is argued that the localising of gender is of general relevance, the data come from Wales alone. The author's conclusion is that (amongst other things) anti‐oppressive practice involves recognising the important influence of local stereotypes and challenging them, whilst also acknowledging that gendered practices do vary from place to place.     

‘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 Experience of Academic Non‐Mothers in the Gendered University

In this article we report on data from an empirical study concerned to explore the experience of women academics managing non‐motherhood and work in the gendered university. Although there is a growing body of work on the gendered experience of higher education in general and the experience of mothers as academics in particular, as yet there is little on non‐mothers and work. Drawing on our data we suggest that non‐mothers as well as mothers are affected by the ideology of motherhood and this has consequences for non‐mothers as workers within the academy. In addition to being perceived by students and other staff as ‘natural’ carers because they are women, academic non‐mothers are expected to put in the time and energy that mothers can not. However, as our data demonstrate, non‐mothers often have caring responsibilities outside the institution too. Overall, we argue that non‐motherhood needs to be recognized for the complex identity that it is.     

Women's agency in living apart together: constraint,strategy and vulnerability

Recent research suggests that women can use living apart together (LAT) for a reflexive and strategic undoing of the gendered norms of cohabitation. In this article we examine this assertion empirically, using a representative survey from Britain in 2011 and follow‐up interviews. First, we find little gender differentiation in practices, expectations, or attitudes about LAT, or reasons for LAT. This does not fit in with ideas of undoing gender. Secondly, in examining how women talk about LAT in relation to gender, we distinguish three groups of ‘constrained’, ‘strategic’ and ‘vulnerable’ female interviewees. All valued the extra space and time that LAT could bring, many welcomed some release from traditional divisions of labour, and some were glad to escape unpleasant situations created by partnership with men. However, for the constrained and vulnerable groups LAT was second best, and any relaxation of gendered norms was seen as incidental and inconsequential to their major aim, or ideal, of the ‘proper family’ with cohabitation and marriage. Rather, their agency in achieving this was limited by more powerful agents, or was a reaction to perceived vulnerability. While the strategic group showed more purposeful behaviour in avoiding male authority, agency remained relational and bonded. Overall we find that women, at least in Britain, seldom use LAT to purposefully or reflexively undo gender. Equally, LAT sometimes involves a reaffirmation of gendered norms. LAT is a multi‐faceted adaption to circumstances where new autonomies can at the same time incorporate old subordinations, and new arrangements can herald conventional family forms.     

Governing through accountability: Gendered moral selves and the (im)possibilities of resistance in the neoliberal university

Drawing on Judith Butler's early work on gender as performance and her later work on the ethically accountable subject, this study examines the production of gendered moral subjects under neoliberal governance in contemporary academia. The analysis of 40 semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with postdoc researchers and assistant, associate and full professors in a Belgian university reveals how in academics’ narratives of their ethical relations of (non‐)accountability towards multiple stakeholders, gendered subjects are performed along the heterosexual matrix reproducing the gender binary. The conjunction of gendered and ethical demands imposed through relations of accountability further opens up distinctively gendered possibilities of consent and resistance under neoliberal governance. We advance the extant literature on gender in academia which largely focuses on women's symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. By locating power in the gendered relations of accountability towards multiple others, it re‐conceptualizes gender as an ontological struggle in the constitution of the self as moral along gendered norms. The study rejoins recent scholarship that calls for the recognition and elaboration of a relational ethics by showing how such ethics enables the emergence of open and responsive subjectivities in relations of accountability.     

“Stress That I Don't Need”: Gender Expectations and Relationship Struggles Among the Poor

Based on 55 qualitative interviews, this article looks in depth at the ways in which gendered expectations impact heterosexual romantic relationships among low‐income and poor adults in a small, western U.S. city. It finds that contradictory understandings regarding meanings and responsibilities associated with masculinity and femininity present challenges to the formation and sustaining of committed relationships. Although men desired to be providers and heads of household with limited household responsibilities, women wanted men with traditional work ethics but egalitarian perspectives on sharing both income generation and home and family responsibilities. Participants' unrealistic and conflicting gendered relationship expectations combined with economic concerns and social problems associated with economic strain to contribute to relationship tensions and wariness toward romantic involvements.