Business schools and faculty experiences of sexism: Gender structure tensions within and outside these schools
Autor/in:
Hughes, Emma; Donnelly, Rory
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: In this paper, we advance knowledge and theorization on the sexism experienced by faculty not only inside but also outside the physical boundaries of business schools. We enrich existing knowledge of gender and sexism by applying Gender Structure Theory (GST) to provide a more multi-dimensional analysis of the role of individuals, interactions, and institutions in shaping gender structures. Engaging with this theoretical framework, we use mixed-methods and data, integrating statistical data on gender in UK business schools with qualitative data from interviews with 52 academics from 15 schools to provide a nuanced insight into sexism at business schools. The framework developed from the findings extends GST by adding a specific “organizational” dimension, which is needed to examine interorganizational differences and how cultural and material organizational processes are influenced by wider national/international processes. We also identify three key interactional tensions cutting across the dimensions examined: organizational versus interorganizational relations, agency versus dependency, and employment relationships versus stakeholder relationships. The findings generate pressing implications for policy and practice in business schools and academia more broadly.
Women's leadership gamut in Saudi Arabia's higher education sector
Autor/in:
Akbar, Hammad; Al‐Dajani, Haya; Ayub, Nailah; Adeinat, Iman
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: This paper explores women's leadership in Saudi Arabia's three university settings—gender segregated (women or men-only), unsegregated (co-educational) and the majority of partially segregated universities where women's campuses exist within male-dominated universities. While Saudi Arabia's accelerated reforms are creating new opportunities for women's leadership, these are not reflected in the higher education sector yet. In adopting a feminist institutional theory perspective, this study employed a feminist qualitative approach, including 14 semi-structured interviews in Saudi Arabia's three university settings. The findings revealed that the barriers to women's leadership were most significant within the partially segregated universities, rendering women leaders as effectively powerless. In contrast, women's leadership flourished in the women-only university setting. As such, the findings suggest that the dominating partially segregated model is ineffective and problematic for women's leadership, and contradict the dominant view that gender segregation disempowers women. These insights have implications for the transformation of Saudi Arabia's higher education sector, aligned with the Kingdom's Vision 2030 policy.
At the intersection of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and business management in Canadian higher education: An intentional equity, diversity, and inclusion framework
Autor/in:
Ruel, Stefanie; Tajmel, Tanja
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: In this study, the authors address the persistent discrimination cis women face in the Canadian science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) higher education context. Pulling on the notion of interrelationships that cross educational faculty boundaries and on intersectionality scholarship to unsettle the structural and disciplinary domains of power, the authors ask, “How can business education and STEM education work together with respect to social considerations, such as gender/race/ethnicity/etc., and social equity and inclusivity, within the Canadian higher education system?” This study aims to build on these interrelationships among diverse, complex individuals who participated in a graduate-level STEM and business management summer institute to provide an evidence-based and intentional equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) framework for STEM higher education contexts. Using a mixed-methods approach, which saw data collection via a survey instrument and semi-structured interviews, the subsequent quantitative analysis points to expanding interrelationships to broader areas beyond STEM and business management programs. The close reading of the collected qualitative data, via antenarrative spirals, elevates the participants' complexities beyond focusing “just” on their intersecting identities to looking at their perceptions of STEM fields, the order that ensues and the potential for the undoing of that order. The findings, results, and analyses of these collected data led to an intentional EDI framework, the main contribution of this study, constructed into three main pillars represented by the figure of a tree: the foundational elements (roots) built on individuals' complexities and experiences of Othering, the interrelationships (trunk) possible across various educational and professional dimensions, and a call to structural change initiatives (branches) with the possibility for growth in other areas. This work then contributes to not only filling a significant literature gap and building awareness regarding EDI concerns in STEM contexts via active interrelationship-building activities but also to unsettling the structural and disciplinary domains of power by embracing a holistic strategy to address systemic discriminatory practices in the Canadian STEM higher education context.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: In response to persistent systemic gendered and racial exclusions in the sciences, unconscious or implicit bias training is now widely established as an organizational intervention in Higher Education (HE). Recent systematic reviews have considered the efficacy of unconscious bias training (UBT) but not the wider characteristics and effects of the interventions themselves. Guided by feminist scholarship in critical psychology and post-structuralist discourse theory, this article critically examines UBT across STEMM and in HE institutions with a discursive analysis of published studies. Drawn from systematic searches in 4 databases, we identify three types of UBT reported in 22 studies with considerable variation in intervention types, target groups, and evaluation methods. Guided by limited cognitive problematizations of unconscious bias as a problem located inside individual minds, interventions follow established patterns in neoliberal governmentality and make available specific feeling rules and subject positions. These current Equality, Diversity & Inclusion practices present a new technology of power through which organizations may regulate affect and behavior but leave structural inequalities and barriers to inclusion intact.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: The article illuminates how gender inequality in Ireland's higher education sector continues to be constituted at policy and at local institutional levels as a problem that requires ‘fixing the women”. It analyses two gender equality projects' discursive materials targeting female academics in Irish universities, showing that while these projects embrace elements of feminist praxis and critique, they ultimately propagate “cruel optimism”. They do this by exhorting women academics' subjectification to burdensome practices of strategizing, self-auditing and self-promotion, lured by the promise of awards that only a few will attain. Presented are two cases of what we call “promising promotional projects” that we have encountered in our work in our university. We use the term “projects” to refer to time-limited, bounded interventions that respond to “gender equality” as a field of government, where problems have been diagnosed and where practicable and pragmatic solutions are seen to be required. Our discursive-deconstructive reading of these projects' discursive materials highlights how gender equality projects target women for “promotion” through mobilizing gendered technologies of the self.
Power and the perception of pregnancy in the academy
Autor/in:
Percival Carter, Erin
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: Becoming pregnant as an academic is risky. Many who want to become or find themselves pregnant structure their lives and careers to try to mitigate the potential negative effects of pregnancy on their future careers. Yet research continues to suggest that having been pregnant or being a mother significantly reduces the likelihood of career success compared to either being child-free or a father. While in some cases success is defined as research productivity, in many cases, it is defined as simply remaining in academia. Governments, societies, and institutions bemoan the resulting “leaky pipelines” and speculate as to the causes of seemingly reinforced glass ceilings. Yet, underlying so many of the formal and informal conversations, norms, and policies surrounding pregnancy and academia is an implicit assumption that pregnancy and pregnant people are the problem to be solved and solutions thus require repairing some deficit created in the individual by pregnancy. In this article, I argue that pregnancy discrimination in academia is in large part a problem resulting from power and how it is wielded against pregnant people, both by institutions and by individuals. Using both a personal narrative account of the process, experience, and outcomes of pregnancy in the academy resulting in filing a formal Title IX complaint and a review of contemporary research on power, discrimination, and pregnancy, I explore how academic structures and systems nominally tasked with supporting equity can instead serve to exaggerate power differences and foster discrimination.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: This paper examines the establishment of a feminist academic organization, GENMAC (Gender, Markets, and Consumers; genmac.co), serving gender scholars in business schools and related fields. In so doing, it builds on the emerging literature of feminist academic organizations, as situated within feminist organizational studies (FOS). Through a feminist case study and by assessing the reflections of GENMAC's board members, we tell the story of the emergence of GENMAC and detail the tensions the organization encountered as it formally established itself as a feminist organization within the confines of a business school setting, a patriarchal system, and a neoliberal university paradigm. We build on the FOS literature by considering how our organization counters cultures of heightened individualism and builds collective action to challenge sexism through the nexus of research, support, and advocacy pillars of our organization. We demonstrate how, through these actions, our organization challenges hierarchies of knowledge, prioritizes the care and support needed for the day-to-day survival of gender scholars in business schools, and spotlights and challenges structural inequalities and injustices in the academy.
“The ethos expected from a management professor forces us to act straight”: Heterosexist harassment against gay professors in Brazil
Autor/in:
Freitas Oleto, Alice de; Palhares, José Vitor
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: This study aims to analyze how gay Brazilian professors experience heterosexist harassment and the implications of this type of violence for the interpersonal relationships of these professors and for the teaching-learning process in the academic environment. To this end, we conducted an exploratory study with a qualitative approach. The data were collected through an online survey using the Google Forms platform based on cases reported by 13 gay Brazilian professors working in a technological or higher education institution at the time of the harassment. Our data suggest that most respondents suffered heterosexist harassment in the workplace with violence being more explicit when the professor is more effeminate. Furthermore, we found that the naturalization of games considered harmless and homophobic jokes in the workplace can compromise the fight against heterosexist harassment in organizations. As a result, respondents report behavioral and workplace changes to fit into social norms and to be socially accepted, physical and psychological problems, professional and interpersonal relationships, adversely affecting educational experiences.
“Flying under the radar”: Postfeminism and teaching in academic science
Autor/in:
Doerr, Katherine
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: Neoliberal academia is marked by vertical and horizontal gender segregation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a particularly concerning case. Women with PhDs are underrepresented, and when they do participate, they are more likely than men to be in teaching-intensive roles. Beyond equality concerns, this is problematic because when women are interpreters rather than producers of disciplinary knowledge, the STEM enterprise remains gender-biased. Using data from a 2-year ethnography with physical science faculty in teaching-intensive roles, this paper argues that gender inequity is reproduced through postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. Participants who are mothers say they are flying under the radar at work. They self-surveille as they engage in both paid labor as university educators and unpaid carework at home. Importantly, when participants challenge hegemonic gender norms, they attract the radar's attention and are sanctioned. This study contributes to a growing understanding of how and why women are marginalized in STEM careers. Women with science PhDs fulfill their university's teaching mission with minimal support for the implied compensation of work-life balance, leaving the institutional structures which privilege men's participation in STEM research intact.
Are we failing female and racialized academics? A Canadian national survey examining the impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on tenure and tenure‐track faculty
Autor/in:
Davis, Jennifer C.; Li, Eric Ping Hung; Butterfield, Mary Stewart; DiLabio, Gino A.; Sangunthanam, Nithi; Marcolin, Barbara
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused the abrupt curtailment of on-campus research activities that amplified impacts experienced by female and racialized faculty. In this mixed-method study, we systematically and strategically unpack the impact of the shift of academic work environments to remote settings on tenured and tenure-track faculty in Canada. Our quantitative analysis demonstrated that female and racialized faculty experienced higher levels of stress, social isolation and lower well-being. Fewer women faculty felt support for health and wellness. Our qualitative data highlighted substantial gender inequities reported by female faculty such as increased caregiving burden that affected their research productivity. The most pronounced impacts were felt among pre-tenured female faculty. The present study urges university administration to take further action to support female and racialized faculty through substantial organizational change and reform. Given the disproportionate toll that female and racialized faculty experienced, we suggest a novel approach that include three dimensions of change: (1) establishing quantitative metrics to assess and evaluate pandemic-induced impact on research productivity, health and well-being, (2) coordinating collaborative responses with faculty unions across the nation to mitigate systemic inequities, and (3) strategically implementing a storytelling approach to amplify the experiences of marginalized populations such as women or racialized faculty and include those experiences as part of recommendations for change.