{"title":"Negotiating work, family, and traffic: Articulations of married women's employment decisions in Greater Jakarta","authors":"Diahhadi Setyonaluri, Ariane Utomo","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13069","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13069","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The international literature on women and work calls on scholars to consider geographical, sociocultural, and institutional contexts governing women's employment dynamics over their life course. In Indonesia (and other lower middle-income regions in Southeast Asia), female labor force participation is lower in urban areas than rural areas. The largest drop-off occurs after marriage and childbearing. In this article, we argue that class and spatial context matters in examining the relationship between gender norms, gendered mobilities, and employment outcomes in mega-urban settings. Using qualitative research, we probe beyond conventional demographic studies to explore the dynamics of married women's (decisions to stay, leave, change, or return to) employment in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia's largest urban core. Our participants were discouraged from employment participation by norms that prioritize married women's role as primary caregivers, and spatial and workplace/regulatory constraints. Our analysis underscores how the participants' employment-related decisions consistently revolve around the concept of opportunity costs, defined as conflicts and tensions arise from mother's time away from children due to gender norms, lack of childcare and flexible formal employment options, and the long working and commuting hours in Greater Jakarta. Economic pressures for women to participate in the labor market are not matched by work–family policies, which are still rooted in entrenched ideals of women as wives and mothers.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 6","pages":"2423-2445"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2023-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135967315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stigmatizing commoning: How neoliberal hegemony eroded collective ability to deal with scarcity in Lebanon","authors":"Dima Younes","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13070","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13070","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines how neoliberalism impedes the emergence of alternative organizations. Via a mix of (auto-)ethnography and memory work, it explains how neoliberal values replacing more traditional ones eroded the collective capacity to bring solutions to scarcity problems in today's Lebanon. It points to the stigmatization of the role of mothers, who once were the “guardians” of organizing around commons, and the alternative values necessary for that. It shows how neoliberal values undermined relationships and decisions based on affect, and promoted individualization and market-based expertise, thereby destroying the authority of traditional motherhood. Also, neoliberalism introduced the importance of branding and accumulation in a manner that made sharing very difficult. These changes in values prevented people who embraced neoliberal culture from benefiting from commoning practices in a context of scarcity. This happens at a time where scholars predict the end of the age of abundance and the importance of commoning as a social arrangement capable of ensuring overall well-being. The paper concludes with a discussion of the necessity of de-stigmatizing values that are not compatible with the neoliberal ideology for the sake of leaving open the possibility of organizing differently and adapting to a changing environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 1","pages":"245-263"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.13070","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136058979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gendered executive headhunting with Chinese characteristics","authors":"Li Yan, Geoff Plimmer, Ao Zhou","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13067","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13067","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Women executives face many barriers to career advancement, which then limits the advancement of women lower down the hierarchy. This study looks at the secretive and elite world of executive search (headhunting) as a gatekeeping system that hinders women's career advancement in China. Interviews were carried out with headhunters in China, including two in Taiwan to test transferability. Findings of this study show that executive women in China face more stark barriers than their western peers. Headhunters report little influence over clients, but they help profile jobs that emphasize technical and masculine views of leadership, ‘fit’ and ‘chemistry’ in hiring decisions, reinforce stereotypes, and do not support candidates. Our findings reflect the convergence of Confucianism, a highly competitive economic model, and a closed political system with limited space to promote women's interests. Headhunting, an imported practice, illuminates western individualist models of feminism rather than China's traditional collectivism and local models of feminism.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 2","pages":"353-377"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.13067","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Set in motion. Paradoxical narratives of becoming Swedish digital media influencers","authors":"Gabriella Nilsson","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13068","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13068","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyzes how Swedish digital media influencers make sense of their careers in print media interviews and autobiographical books. I explore how influencers use metaphors involving motion, speed and acceleration to describe, explain and legitimate the various circumstances and phases of their career development, and how these metaphors may be viewed in the wider context of social acceleration and conflicting gender norms. I show that the valorization of neoliberal ideals that promote individuality, flexibility, entrepreneurship, and passion as the basis for career choices is facilitated by the rapidly changing technology that influencers use. This does not imply, however, that female influencers are empowered or breaking norms. Instead, their narratives reflect traditional gender norms, such as assigning themselves passive roles in their career development. This analysis illustrates a paradox in the work of influencers: it is fast-paced and ever-changing, dependent on algorithms and platforms run by multinational companies, but at the same time, it must be slow, static, and authentic, organically growing through listening, sensing and the building of relationships. I show that neoliberal ideals around work are intertwined with traditional notions of femininity, and that these ideals reinforce a normative view of women's work—including notions of never-idle hands and a perpetual availability to serve the needs of others—as “non-work.”</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 2","pages":"337-352"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.13068","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135740156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anticipating resistance: Teaching gender and management to business school students","authors":"Micaela Stierncreutz, Janne Tienari","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13066","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13066","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Gender perspectives and feminism are rarely considered legitimate in business school education. Existing research tells us that those who teach in business schools do so in conditions where feminist theories and pedagogy evoke resistance and where their work is paved with discomfort caused by tensions between feminist and neoliberal idea(l)s. We argue that for those challenging the status quo in the business school through teaching, the impact of the threat of resistance can be as “real” as that of realized resistance. In this paper, we engage with collaborative autoethnography and elucidate how our anticipation of resistance shapes the way we teach, even when resistance does not materialize in the classroom. Building on reflections of our shared experiences, we theorize anticipated resistance as productive in and of itself, challenging the conventional view of resistance as brought into being through resisting practices at a specific time and place.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 1","pages":"227-244"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.13066","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132374178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating a new pathway for change in the military using gender as process","authors":"Jessica Williams, Sophie Yates, James Connor","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13049","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Militaries have consistently struggled to integrate women into the profession of arms despite concerted, decades-long attempts at reform. We argue that this patchy progress is due in part to a conceptualization of gender as “category”, which has limited power to explain gendered inequalities. We propose that gender as process approaches must also be used to understand the current state of gender relations within militaries. A gender as process approach recognizes the dynamic, enduring, and complex set of gendered practices and systems that affect everyday interactions and social relations. Using this frame, militaries can develop an understanding of how these processes operate—particularly, as a form of resistance to gender equality in these “extremely gendered organizations”—and can develop improved strategies for change. We use the Australian Defence Force as our case study to illustrate how gender as category approaches dominate reform attempts and how the gender as process approach offers new insights on how to promote gender equality in the military.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 1","pages":"211-226"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.13049","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121659345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Finishing the “unfinished revolution”?: College-educated mothers' resistance to intensive mothering","authors":"Lake Lui, Adam Ka-lok Cheung","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13065","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13065","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Intensive mothering, a classed and gendered practice optimally performed by stay-at-home mothers, is a dominant parenting ideology, particularly in developed societies with wide disparities in wealth. Ironically, in these societies, women tend to be well educated and have good employment prospects that are expected to free them from domestic obligations. Facing competing expectations shaped by the institutions of work and the family, how do college-educated mothers consider ending or limiting their participation in the workforce or holding jobs while resolving the moral dilemma of being both a worker and a mother? We compared 33 college-educated Hong Kong mothers engaged in different professions and constructed typologies that describe how intersecting ideologies of mothering and work shape work-family arrangements. We paid special attention to mothers with strong commitment to their work, but with different ideologies about mothering. Some espouse the ideology of intensive mothering. Their belief in gender essentialism proved exhausting for them, both at work and at home. While away from home, these mothers supervised domestic helpers from their workplaces. Other women value their professions as emblematic of their identity as the perfect mother—an integrated form of mothering, thus feeling no guilt for delegating childcare responsibilities. We argue that given the entrenched gender inequality in workplaces and men's slow progress in doing their share of domestic work, the emergence of integrated mothering both rhetorically and in practice reflects women's striving to bring the “unfinished revolution” closer to the finish line.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 6","pages":"2405-2422"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133962639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why are conflicts about race a point of no return for feminist organizations?","authors":"Léa Dorion","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13062","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13062","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article seeks to advance scholarship on conflict in feminist organizations. Using the theoretical framework on agonistic conflict of Chantal Mouffe, it analyzes a conflict about racism that arose in a feminist lesbian, bi and trans social movement organization, located in Paris (France). The main contribution lies in offering a framework to analyze the mechanisms that prevented this conflict from constructively fostering the intersectional politics of the feminist organization. The ethnographic findings show that the organization's inability to challenge its racism and whiteness is linked to its post-political vision of feminism, which translates into attempts to suppress conflict related to multiple and competing identifications. Thus, this article contributes to existing research on conflict in feminist organizing by suggesting that the subduing of conflict associated with such a post-political vision of feminism prevents feminist organizing from being “anti-oppressive”.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 1","pages":"192-210"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127681406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Angela Rayner (Member of Parliament) and the “Basic Instinct Ploy”: Intersectional misrecognition of women leaders' legitimacy, productive resistance and flexing (patriarchal) discourse","authors":"Valerie Stead, Sharon Mavin, Carole Elliott","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13050","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13050","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper interrogates a shift in patriarchal media discourse related to women leaders' recognition and legitimation in the UK. We conduct a multimodal discourse analysis of an online newspaper article about the UK politician and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner, and analyzed public responses. Understanding the media as a means to distribute power and enable the challenging of norms, we contribute a theory of intersectional misrecognition in media's representation of women political leaders. This reveals an enduring and dynamic subordinate status of women leaders, shown specifically through the intersection of gender and class. We theorize that while women leaders continue to be misrecognized in the media, destabilizing their legitimacy, there is a demonstrable flexing of patriarchal discourse combined with stronger and accelerated resistance to ongoing sexism. We identify this resistance as productive in its call for consequences and a redistribution of cultural values, reflecting a discursive shift toward a productive resistance of resilient gender norms, evident in the intersection of gender with class. Intersectional misrecognition has value in making inequalities explicit for women leaders and where there may be productive tensions with potential to mobilize for change.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 1","pages":"152-170"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.13050","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126317206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The gender pay gap—What's the problem represented to be? Analyzing the discourses of Estonian employers, employees, and state officials on pay equality","authors":"Kadri Aavik, Pille Ubakivi-Hadachi, Maaris Raudsepp, Triin Roosalu","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13061","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gwao.13061","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The gender pay gap (GPG) remains significant in most countries and is a key indicator of gender inequality in society. Qualitative research on the GPG is scarce, yet, qualitative perspectives on the GPG are valuable as the ways in which the GPG is understood and talked about shape actions to tackle it. This article focuses on how the GPG is represented in the context of work and organizations, inspired by the “What's the Problem Represented to be?” approach, developed by Carol Bacchi. The analysis draws on qualitative data—63 interviews with employers, employees, and state officials—collected in Estonia which exhibits one of the largest GPGs in the European Union. Five dominant representations of the GPG were identified: the GPG as (a) consciously produced by employers, (b) different pay for the same work, (c) unmeasurable due to “unique” and “incomparable” jobs and workers, (d) produced by women's failure to ask for fair pay, and (e) impossible for employers to reduce because of market forces. Collectively, these representations render the GPG inevitable, downplaying its emergence as a result of specific gendered social practices. This has implications for the employers' and the state's willingness and strategies to reduce the GPG.</p>","PeriodicalId":48128,"journal":{"name":"Gender Work and Organization","volume":"31 1","pages":"171-191"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131503666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}