Disciplined discourses: The logic of appropriateness in discourses on organizational gender equality policies
Autor/in:
Amstutz, Nathalie; Nussbaumer, Melanie; Vöhringer, Hanna
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: Organizational gender equality policies must address critical issues in organizations, as well as challenge hierarchies and the unequal distribution of power and resources. At the same time, they are reliant on acceptance by organizations when developing an official course of action. On the basis of a neo‐institutional perspective, this study investigates how gender equality discourses are disciplined so that they fit organizational expectations by maintaining the rationality myth of the organization. The empirical analysis of four Swiss organizations demonstrates that, although they intend to reduce gender inequalities, their gender equality policies are shaped by a logic of appropriateness that leads to a continuous reproduction of heteronormativity within gender equality policies. This study thus contributes to the understanding of how the logic of appropriateness protects the heteronormative matrix in organizations by disciplining gender equality discourses.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: Experiences from individualized gender equality funding programs, as the ones used in Denmark, demonstrate that one‐off policy interventions, although a small step in the right direction, cannot stand alone in the fight against gender imbalances in academia. Closing the gender gap is a complex, multi‐level undertaking that needs constant rethinking of policies and the dedication of adequate financial resources. The need of rethinking policy is in particular urgent during Covid‐19, which has further amplified imbalances due to a drop in the productivity of women researchers. Funding bodies should therefore reconsider traditional approaches heavily rewarding publications in the distribution of research funds. They ought to respond to the gendered impact of the pandemic by engaging institutions in structural and cultural change, setting up requirements for institutions to have achieved a certain level of gender equality outcomes, and thus link institutional progress to research funding.
Schlagwörter:COVID-19; cultural change; Forschungsförderung; gender gap; gender inequality; Geschlechterungleichheit; Gleichstellungspolitik; Kulturwandel; productivity; Produktivität; research funding; structural change
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: Gender, Work and Organization (GWO) is a highly reputed journal specializing in gender and development‐based research. In 2018, the journal celebrated its 25th anniversary, presenting the perfect opportunity to conduct a retrospective analysis of its content. Using bibliometric analysis on the GWO documents retrieved from the Scopus database, this study documents evidence of the research activities of the journal between 1994 and 2018. The article reports its publication and citation structure, leading trends and its increasing drive towards co‐authorship. It also identifies the most prominent topics, prolific articles and authors, and discusses the impact of the state of collaboration among the various GWO scholars. The study also maps the intellectual structure of the scholar network in the journal and finds the most influential scholars and leading institutions to be the most central in the collaboration network. The findings of the research include implications for researchers, practitioners and policymakers.
Dirty Body Politics: Habitus, Gendered Embodiment, and the Resistance to Women's Agency in Transforming South African Higher Education
Autor/in:
Idahosa, Grace Ese‐osa
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), 27 (2020) 6, S 988–1003
Inhalt: In discussing the difficulty with transformation, research notes that women and Blacks are excluded and marginalised by the cultures and practices within universities in South Africa. While the literature highlights the invisibility of these minorities in universities, with their bodies only becoming visible as tokens, or when representing minority issues, it is silent on how this plays out in interchanges in the transformation process, the embodiment of gender, and the resistance to women's agency within the field of higher education transformation. Adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological lens and Bourdieu's concept of field and habitus, this study examines ten academics' experiences of having agency to effect transformation. In particular, it explores women's narratives of body‐centered attacks in expressions of resistance to their transformation strategies, revealing the normalisation of the White, male body. This normalisation obscures the gendered processes of transformation and the bodily resistance to women's agency, revealed in tugging, pulling, shutting doors and having metaphorical knives pulled from their backs. The study argues that this not only prevents women from exercising their agency, but also ensures the reproduction of oppressive relations within the university and should be directly addressed in the struggle for transformation.
Schlagwörter:body; Bourdieu; Feldtheorie; Gender; Gewalt; Habitus; higher education; Hochschule; Körper; minority; Organisationswandel; people of color; racism; Rassismus; resistance; sexism; Sexismus; South Africa; Südafrika; Transformation; violence; Widerstand
CEWS Kategorie:Diversity, Europa und Internationales, Hochschulen, Geschlechterverhältnis
Context matters: Problematizing the policy‐practice interface in the enactment of gender equality action plans in universities
Autor/in:
Ní Laoire, Caitríona; Linehan, Carol; Archibong, Uduak; Picardi, Ilenia; Udén, Maria
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: This study argues for recognition of the constitutive role of context in shaping the dynamics of the policy‐practice interface in the field of gender equality in universities. Using a comparative and reflective case‐study approach, we draw on our experiences, as action‐researchers, of developing and implementing Gender Equality Action Plans (GEAPs) in four universities in four different European countries and we explore the role of national and local context in the mediation and translation of the GEAP model. Drawing on the concepts of gendered organizations, dialogic organizational change, and policy mobilities, we argue for the need to be critical of approaches to gender equality in higher education (HE) that presume policy measures and good practice models transfer unproblematically to different HE organizations in different international contexts; instead, we draw attention to the contingent ways in which uneven gender relations articulate and manifest in different contexts, shaping possibilities for, and obstacles to, gender equality intervention. Thus, we argue that context plays a crucial constitutive role in the interpretation, enactment, and impact of gender equality policy in HE.
Schlagwörter:action research; case study; gender equality plan; gendered organization; Gleichstellungsmaßnahmen; Gleichstellungsplan; good practice; Hochschule; internationaler Vergleich; Organisational Change; Organisationswandel; translation
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Hochschulen, Gleichstellungspolitik
Everyday sexism and racism in the ivory tower: The experiences of early career researchers on the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the academic workplace
Autor/in:
Bourabain, Dounia
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: The academic workplace is often described as a place of merit and equal opportunities. However, research shows a leaky pipeline where the share of women and people of color decreases in the higher echelons of academia. Explanations are often structural, referring to the access barriers women are confronted with, such as hiring and recruitment. This research investigates what goes wrong in the early phases of a female academic's career. From an intersectional perspective, I study the experiences with everyday sexism and racism of PhD and postdoctoral researchers across disciplines. After conducting 50 in‐depth interviews, four processes are discovered: smokescreen of equality, everyday cloning, patronization, and paternalism.
Maneuvering within postfeminism: A study of gender equality practitioners in Danish academia
Autor/in:
Utoft, Ea Høg
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2020)
Inhalt: In Denmark, gender equality in academia has seen limited progress during the past 30 years. To improve our understanding of this persistent problem, this article examines gender equality practitioners in relation to the wider discursive context of Danish society. Theorizing Denmark as a “postfeminist gender regime,” I analyze how practitioners negotiate a space for action in a context which generally opposes gender equality initiatives. I introduce the notion of “maneuvering” as a way to understand this negotiation between hegemonic, postfeminist discourses, on the one hand, and marginal and potentially subversive discourses on the other. Practitioners may maneuver in how they understand inequality and potential solutions, and in the meetings between them, their work and the postfeminist gender regime. Successful maneuvering enables the use of more radical change strategies than postfeminism otherwise allows. Practitioners' ability to maneuver rests on their critical reflexivity, which in turn is conditioned by their knowledge of gender and power dynamics. The study thus points to the centrality of selecting highly qualified individuals as gender equality practitioners.
Moving beyond the gender binary: Examining workplace perceptions of nonbinary and transgender employees
Autor/in:
Dray, Kelly K.; Smith, Vaughn R.E.; et.al.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), 27 (2020) , S 1181–1191
Inhalt: This study is one of the first to experimentally examine the workplace prejudice faced by nonbinary employees, or those who identify outside of the man/woman gender binary. Participants (N = 249) were presented with a vignette which included a description of a fictitious co-worker’s sex and gender identity, and asked to rate the co-worker’s likeability and perceived job performance.
Results revealed that the assigned sex and the gender of hypothetical employees interactively impacted interper1sonal and workplace perceptions. For individuals assigned male at birth, identifying as a man led to the most positive ratings, followed by identifying as a transgender woman, followed by identifying as a nonbinary person. This work expands upon gender schema theory and highlights some of the unexplored challenges faced by nonbinary and trans2gender employees. We end with suggestions for future research, such as incorporating qualitative data to highlight
the unique experiences of these gender minorities in
organizations.