Tolerance of the Intolerant?
The value of seeing gender as a ‘doing’ 137
and Wright, 2000; Wirth, 2001; Cornelius and Skinner, 2005 as have social psychological research approaches on stereotypes which aim at
explaining the discrimination of women at work Heilman, 2001; Kray et al., 2001, 2002; Schein, 2001; Roberson and Kulik, 2007.
The aim of most studies is thus to identify dif erences and some- times also similarities between groups of men and women. Researching
‘gender’ is often equated with researching ‘women’ and sometimes, but less frequently, ‘men’ as pre-established groups. Researchers split their
samples based on gender, and gender then becomes a variable that is used in models to test what impact it has on other elements under research
Harding, 1986; Alvesson and Billing, 2002. Such a perspective certainly has value in that it highlights gender dif erences and is a leap forward from
earlier studies in which gender was not deemed important at all compare Acker and Houten, 1992. However, such an approach does not allow
testing for similarities, which means that gender is always conceptualised as dif erence Hyde, 2005.
While such a perspective can be important to describe today’s situation of women and, to a lesser extent, men at work, this research is problematic
as it may lead to essentialism. Essentialism would mean in this case to reproduce gender dif erence which is the expected outcome of research.
In other words, we might i nd what we were looking for Gof man, 1977; see also Ofori-Dankwa and Ricks, 2000. Only a few studies question
the assumption that there are things like a ‘female’ management style Wajcman, 1996 or something like ‘feminine leadership’ Billing and
Alvesson, 2000; Fletcher, 2004. The idea of a ‘female management style’ is often based on the assumption that a generic woman enacts this style.
Thereby any dif erences among women are disallowed Marecek, 1995, p. 163. If there is a generic woman enacting a certain type of management
style, potential individual dif erences between women are glossed over as preference is given to seeing women as a group. Second, talking about
gender is very often simply equated with women while men are rarely talked about or analysed. Women are thus constructed as a problematic
group, while men in management tend to remain the unquestioned taken- for-granted norm Calás and Smircich, 1992a, 1992b, 1993; Collinson,
1992; Kerfoot and Knights, 1993, 1996; Collinson and Hearn, 1996; Martin and Collinson, 2002.
From a gender studies perspective, the understanding of gender predom- inant in management research is built to a large degree on early feminist
work in which it was central to make women’s voices heard and to make political claims on behalf of women Gilligan, 1982; Hartsock, 1987.
However, within feminist theory this understanding has been widely criti- cised as essentialist. The ‘woman’ constructed through these approaches
138 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work
was a white, heterosexual, middle-class woman. Other women’s interests and dif erences between women were glossed over Amos and Parmar,
1984; Mohanty, 1986, 2003; Spelman, 1988; Ramazanoglu, 1989. This has led to many critiques from writers on class and ‘race’ but most notably
meant that the notion of ‘woman’ became increasingly questioned and put under scrutiny. For example, Judith Butler argues in her inl uential
book Gender Trouble 1990 that feminism constructs the subject of which it speaks, women, and rather than liberating women it constrains who
counts as a woman. In the wake of these groundbreaking theories, an attempt has been made to research women in a non-essentialising way.
GENDER AS A SOCIAL PROCESS
Based on these theories of gender as a social process West and Zimmerman, 1987; Butler, 1990, 2004; Bruni et al., 2005, gender became conceptualised
as something l exible and l uid and something one does rather than one is. Like the famous statement of de Beauvoir 1949 [1993] suggests, one is
not born a woman but becomes a woman. Recent gender theorists have worked with this assumption and have started to show how gender is
created as a continual practice. People enact gender and thereby become gendered beings. It is argued in this chapter that such a perspective of
gender as a ‘doing’ not only reduces essentialist views of gender but might also be a vital research perspective.
Two of these bodies of work treating gender as a social process have been predominant in gender theories. First, the ethnomethodological approach
developed by West and Zimmerman 1987, who conceptualise gender as a routine accomplishment in social interactions. They analyse why gender
is perceived as being constructed outside the situation and people operate on the understanding that two distinct categories, women and men, exist.
However, the central point of the analysis is to show how gender is created in the situation rather than existing a priori. In order to be categorised as
a man or a woman, interactional work has to be done. This interactional work is under constant risk of gender assessment as one is accountable for
‘doing’ gender. According to West and Zimmerman, one can never not do gender as long as it is such an integral part of a society.
The second theory of gender as a process derives from Butler’s 1990, 1993, 2004 work. In her critique of the feminist construction of the stable
subject ‘woman’, Butler develops a critical genealogy of gender categories in which she explores why gender is perceived as something stable even
though it is enacted in the situation. Although her aims appear similar to those of West and Zimmerman’s, she draws mainly on post-structuralist
The value of seeing gender as a ‘doing’ 139
theories. A central concept in her work is that of ‘performativity’. There is much debate about what performativity means Lloyd, 1999; McIlvenny,
2002; Brickell, 2005, but in a nutshell one may summarise it as the process of how gendered subjects are constituted by regulatory notions within a
heterosexual matrix.
For Butler, subjects are constructed by which positions the discourse allows. Some of these positions speak to or ‘interpellate’ persons and in
orientating towards these discourses, subjects are reinstated. Butler, for instance, refers to ‘girling the girl’ as a gendering moment. When a baby is
born the label ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ is assigned to the baby and this calls the baby as gendered into being. The baby girl thus is interpellated and in respond-
ing to this hailing, the person starts to create herself as a woman. In citing these gendered subject positions, people render themselves legible but at
the same time what is legible as a human being is dei ned on a narrow band. Which subjects can be formed depends on the restrictive and pro-
foundly heterosexual gender norms.
EMPIRICAL APPLICATION
Both approaches to seeing gender as a social process conceptualise gender as an ongoing activity or a ‘doing’ within everyday life. Organisational
researchers have been at the forefront of adopting such ‘doing gender’ concepts and developing them further for research on gender at work.
Approaches to gender at work which see gender as a process have l our- ished in recent years with the insight that research of gender at work
should go beyond ‘counting bodies’ Alvesson and Billing, 2002. They are part of approaches which see gender as socially constructed.
Gherardi 1994 theorised gender as a social practice that functions to create gender dif erence. She outlines two practices: symbolic work, which
is the unquestioned gender order, and remedial work, through which the gender hierarchy is re-established when it has been challenged. Symbolic
and remedial work are practised together in organisations and lead to the gender segregation remaining stable through situational enactments.
Martin 2003 analysed this phenomenon based on the fact that people practise gender at work, but also that organisational structure dictates a
certain way in which gender is done. Research focused on how, through the way in which gender is done at work, similar jobs get gendered dif er-
ently Leidner, 1991; Hall, 1993. Leidner 1991, for instance, highlighted how two dif erent jobs drawing on very similar skills are gendered com-
pletely dif erently. She studied selling insurance and selling hamburgers and found that in both areas the performance stylised in prescriptive
140 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work
interaction norms required is rather similar. Even though similar things are done, selling insurance was seen in this case as something that men
do, while selling hamburgers was seen as something that women do. Hall 1993 has shown how gender dif erentiation in similar jobs in service
work takes place through subtle distinctions. In her case, she studied waitering and waitressing, the latter gendered feminine while the former is
gendered masculine. In both instances, people serve at table but she shows how through dif erent uniforms and forms of interaction a i rm gender
boundary between these types of work is established. In these cases, organisational rules and regulations lead to certain forms of gender being
enacted while a job, is being done.
A major concern of studies has also been the notion of hierarchy. Hierarchy refers to the idea that certain actions are evaluated dif erently
depending on whether men or women do them. Illustrative for this is a study on an employment oi ce Korvajärvi, 1998. Here it is shown that
women often adopted a style of listening to customers and helping them while men rather followed the path of fuli lling their targets. However,
men’s styles were evaluated more highly because they were more ei cient even though women’s styles potentially led to higher customer satisfaction.
Studies of ‘doing gender’ in organisations focus on how gender dif eren- tiation, hierarchy, and asymmetry are maintained through the enactment
of gender at work.
Studies on doing gender at work are also particularly useful in showing the l exibility of gender. Leidner’s work 1991 could again function as
an example as she highlighted how similar tasks get gendered dif erently. Another example is provided by Pierce 1996 who shows that emotional
labour, which is often seen as something feminine, is performed by men in the masculine profession of litigation. This is particularly interesting
because recent commentators have claimed that professions such as man- agement are becoming feminised. This means that the skills needed are
those associated with women Helgesen, 1990; Rosener, 1990; Fondas, 1997; Sharpe, 2000. However, these claims have not yet led to a better
representation of women in senior management Catalyst, 2006; Singh and Vinnicombe, 2006. Fletcher 1999, 2004 argues that this is the case
because the skills women are said to bring are not necessarily recognised as such. The feminine skills that women are assumed to bring often remain
under the radar and are accepted as normal for women. However, femi- nine skills are rarely regarded as a specii c skill or competence in women.
We came to similar conclusions in our own work. In information tech- nology IT work it is often asserted that women bring the soft skills that
such work needs Kelan, 2008. It is argued that it is no longer enough to be a technically versed hacker as IT work is increasingly service work
The value of seeing gender as a ‘doing’ 141
and IT workers have to understand themselves as customer focused. Since women are assumed to bring people skills which in turn would enhance
the customer focus, this argument is regularly deployed to argue for more women in this profession. In this study it was explored how the ideal ICT
worker is gendered. People described the ideal ICT worker as having a mix of technical and social competencies and this portrayal was gender
neutral. In other parts of the interviews it was argued that there should be more women in IT work since they bring social competence to work.
These discourses were rarely connected to the gender-neutral ideal worker portrayal. What is more, this research highlights that the skill evaluation
is thus that men are rewarded for showing social skills as they have to work harder to display them. Social skills in women were rewarded less,
simply because it was assumed that those skills come naturally to women and women do not need to work hard to display them. This study shows
how the gendering of skills dif ers in dif erent contexts. It also highlights how the meaning of ‘doing gender’ can be very dif erent, depending on
the context in which it is deployed. Researchers studying ‘doing gender’ therefore have to pay careful attention to what is seen by the research par-
ticipants as well as the researchers themselves as gendered and how that dif ers in dif erent contexts see also Nentwich, 2004, 2006.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
As we have argued elsewhere Nentwich and Kelan, 2007, the applica- tion of ‘doing gender’ is by no means without problems. However, seeing
gender as a social process provides researchers with fresh insight on how gender is done at work. It transcends – or at least problematises – the
essentialist assumptions entailed in much research on gender at work since it shows how gender is constructed in a situation rather than conceptuali-
sing gender as a variable. An understanding of gender as a social process allows researchers to analyse how gender segregation is retained in a work
context through interactional achievements. Organisations are also gen- dered in so far as they invoke certain ways in which gender ought to be
done. ‘Doing gender’ is linked to doing hierarchies where the masculine is valued higher than the feminine. Gender itself is highly l exible and
what is gendered feminine in one context could be gendered masculine in another. A shift towards ‘feminine skills’ in various work contexts might
therefore not evidently lead to a revaluation of women workers. We can conclude that seeing gender as a social process allows researchers to use
contemporary gender theories to better understand how gender with all its consequences is achieved in a specii c situation.
142 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work
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