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.
Mentoring as affective governmentality: Shame, (un)happiness, and the (re)production of masculine leadership
Autor/in:
Sandager, Jette
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: This article contributes to current discussions on the effectiveness of mentoring as a gender equality tool, but also focuses on the emotions and bodily (dis)comforts mentoring produces in addition to linguistic discourses, thus offering a novel take on how the tool operates. Drawing on a case study of a Danish mentoring program aimed at establishing the organizational space of leadership as more gender equal, the article demonstrates how, in producing shame and (un)happiness, mentoring (re)produces leadership as an organizational space dominated by masculine norms and work practices. The findings of the article support literature arguing that mentoring is an ineffective gender equality tool. However, the article does not entirely discard mentoring for this purpose, instead suggesting that scholars and practitioners look to literature on queered forms of mentoring for inspiration on how to use mentoring as a tool that carries the potential of truly promoting gender equality.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), 28 (2021) S1, S 39–57
Inhalt: In this article, as have many Black women scholars in the past, we again call for collective action against anti‐blackness and White supremacy in the academy. Drawing from black feminist theory, we discuss the long history of Black women academics' activism against anti‐black racism and introduce the current movement: Black Lives Matter (BLM). Although BLM is often construed as resisting anti‐black violence outside the academy, it is also relevant for within the academy wherein anti‐blackness is likely to be manifested as disdain, disregard, and disgust for Black faculty and students. We discuss some of the ways in which anti‐blackness and liberal White supremacy are manifested in the lives of Black faculty and students, and propose that non‐Black allies have key roles to play in resisting them. Like second‐hand cigarette smoke that harms everyone in proximity, anti‐blackness and White supremacy harm us all, and a shared movement is needed to dismantle them.
Schlagwörter:academia; black feminism; black women; Hochschule; racism; Rassismus; Schwarze Frauen; Schwarzer Feminismus; white supremacy
“How did they protect you?” The lived experience of race and gender in the post‐colonial English university
Autor/in:
Salmon, Udeni
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: With this article, I seek to contribute to understandings of how racial and gender hierarchies are reproduced through organizational processes. Using an autoethnographic method, I seek to demonstrate the workings of Mill's Racial Contract Theory and Ahmed's concepts of raced and gendered encounters through the implementation of a university diversity initiative: the Race Equality Charter. My findings demonstrate how the “doing” of diversity work results “undoing” the non-white diversity worker, as their lived experiences catastrophically diverge from the sunny promise of the diversity project. Furthermore, the Race Equality Charter's is revealed that the Charter is a factual, rather than normative type of contract, which enshrines a socio-political reality in which colonialism continues to shape white over non-white domination. Scholars and activists have long been naming the secret weapons of white supremacy in order to expose how anti-racist practice is co-opted by institutions. In this article, I theorize my lived experience to expose how policy and organizational processes fail to protect me, a non-white woman early career academic. I conclude that the Race Equality Charter, far from being a tool of social justice, enforces raced and gendered privileges in academic settings.
Athena SWAN gender equality plans and the gendered impact of COVID‐19
Autor/in:
Aguiar, Thereza Raquel Sales; Haque, Shamima; Bender, Keith A.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: This study explores Athena SWAN as a mechanism to govern gender equality and diversity in the context of the UK Business and Management Schools during COVID-19. More specifically, this study reports on the struggles that UK Business Schools are now facing in projecting themselves as equal and diverse as well as efficient and viable. Using governmentality theory, a thematic analysis is applied to Athena SWAN applications and face-to-face interviews conducted with a number of leaders of Athena SWAN-awarded UK Business Schools. The results suggest that Athena SWAN opens a space for self-governing gender equality and diversity with some progress on this agenda. However, the Athena SWAN framework calls our attention to invisibilities of inequalities in times of crisis such as COVID-19, when governamentality of gender issues can become limited and when targets on efficiency are set as a priority.
Delivering gender justice in academia through gender equality plans? Normative and practical challenges
Autor/in:
Clavero, Sara; Galligan, Yvonne
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: This paper employs the concept of epistemic justice to examine the potential for gender equality plans (GEPs) to bring about sustainable transformative change towards gender equality in higher education. Mindful of both the limitations and opportunities of gender policy interventions, the paper highlights the importance of approaching gender inequality as a problem of justice and power rather than as an issue of ‘loss of talent’. The paper draws on Fricker’s account of epistemic justice as well as on Bourdieu’s analysis of power in the academic field, to evaluate seven gender equality plans in European universities for their potential to transform gender‐power relations in academia. The analysis reveals that insufficient attention is paid to the role of academic power in creating gender injustice at all institutional levels and to the role of organisational culture in the perpetuation of gender inequalities in those settings. The study suggests that the incorporation of an epistemic justice lens in the creation of GEPs would address gendered power relationships and lead to sustainable equitable outcomes.
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
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
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.