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This study sought to examine how women founders navigate gender and cultural influences in constructing network ties in Jordan.

In-depth interviews document the experiences of 14 women founders operating digital technology-based businesses in Amman, Jordan.

Gender homogenous ties were perceived to be of diminished quality, limiting the ability of the women founders to acquire resources while risking isolation from diverse networks. Formal professional, male-centric ties were perceived to offer more business impact due to the applicability and usefulness of information. Formal communication, use of intermediaries and industry events were used to develop network ties. These approaches enable founders to respect gendered collectivist norms, such as adhering to family members’ expectations about occupational roles, while meeting new business associates. The strength of network ties emerged as a continuum with strong, weak and midpoint ties. Midpoint ties offered valued encouragement and emotional support but were perceived to be less effective and provided fewer resources compared to strong network ties.

Mechanisms of gender inequality are evidenced in how gender, culture and social networks operate in relation to each other. Perceptions reflect culturally situated, within-group stereotypes, informing how women founders discount other women’s knowledge and experience.

This study aims to explore academic women’s silence from the perspective of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), by examining the triadic influences of the individual, environment and behaviour, which impacts their silence. The study examines how women use personal, proxy and collective agency (Bandura, 2018) to reduce silence.

Interviewing 22 academics (20 women, 2 men) at a leading Polish university, this study used the Gioia et al. (2013) method to analyse the interviews, creating first- and second-order codes and final aggregated concepts.

This study finds, from an environmental perspective, that societal-level gendering, which is underpinned by critical social factors and institutional logics that are part of Poland’s culture promoting gender stereotypes and family values influences women’s silence. There is clear evidence for the regression of women’s rights, which compounds women’s silence. These societal-level factors influence a hierarchical, bureaucratic organizational structure, alongside gender segregation. From an individual perspective, reasons for silence include socialization, fear, women’s lack of power, inequality and self-silencing to mitigate harassment or discrimination. Collective agency was a strongly mentioned theme to help reduce silence, which includes implementing training and development initiatives, creating a safe platform to voice concerns, structural transformation and cultural change.

This study contributes to literature regarding women’s silence by exploring reasons for silence through the lens of Bandura’s social cognitive theory and agentic perspective, which demonstrates how silence could be reduced through collective action, in the understudied context of Poland, which highlights how country context intersects with organizational context and individual experience, influencing women’s silence.

Gender inequality and age discrimination persist in the Higher Education (HE) sectors. The significance of gendered health at middlescence, including peri/menopause, is often negated. This article explores women’s lived experiences of gendered health issues at middlescence in the neoliberal academy through an intersectional lens.

Two female academics engaged in dialogic narrative using duoethnography addressing their experiences of gendered health issues in a UK Higher Education Institution (HEI). They recorded intentional written reflections and met to explore their experiences over a four month period. Thematic analysis was applied to analyse their responses.

Both women considered how they self-advocated for their own care at the stage of middlescence whilst seeking health support and in accessing accommodations in the HE workplace. This process impacted on the construction of their professional identity and on their self-concept as social work academics at the dynamic intersection of age, gender, ethnic, social and professional status.

This article uniquely foregrounds two female academics’ lived experiences of middlescence in a UK HEI conceptualised through an intersectional lens. Their experiences are explored in the context of gendered age discrimination in HE sectors that are perpetuated through masculinized forms of career progression and management. The concept of the ideal academic, a white male, unencumbered by domestic responsibilities, is contested through consideration of care ethics. We acknowledge that forms of epistemic injustice silence women’s narratives in the neoliberal academy but highlight recommendations to enable their stories of gendered health discrimination to be heard.

This article details a research approach that created impact through suspending assumptions of Western research methods and positioning Indigenous research partners as experts and co-creators of the research process.

The research partnership placed Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing at the center of research design and methodological choices. At all decision-making points upon commencement of the research, Indigenous (non-academic) research partners were engaged and determined the outcomes of the research partnership.

The impact of this research partnership was three-fold. First, this partnership impacted women directly through employment of Australian Indigenous Environmental Rangers as research associates. Second, the partnership increased awareness and collectivism of Indigenous women’s voices as leaders and advocates for policy change, bringing a new cohort of women rangers wishing to participate as research associates in the project. Third, was the establishment of a National Forum and the formal application for a $1,000,000 Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant to continue research at the National Forum.

We offer readers the opportunity to observe our process of engaging in effective research collaborations with Australian Indigenous peoples who are typically not included as co-creators and equal partners in Western academic research. The research collaboration centered upon Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing to amplify impact. We demonstrate the impact of framing the research as storytelling, so enabling data collection through the culturally safe methods of “dadirri” as well as the “yarning circle”, both of which privilege Indigenous knowledge systems.

Organizations are increasingly emphasizing inclusive practices to leverage the valuable potential of their human resource. This study seeks to investigate the influence of organizational norms on the experiences of inclusion among women in manufacturing organizations. This study aims to comprehend how gendered perceptions of the ideal worker shape women’s sense of inclusion within the workplace.

The research adopted a qualitative approach to understand women’s experience of inclusion in the manufacturing workplace. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to conduct semistructured interviews with 52 professionals working in the four manufacturing organizations. These employees were working in different roles as functional managers, human resource managers, diversity officers and female employees. Interviews were analyzed following a three-step coding process. ATLAS.ti software was used to analyze the data. The study draws upon Acker’s theory of “gendered organizations” and West and Zimmerman’s concept of “doing gender” to understand workplace narratives, adapting these theories to the specific context of India.

This study highlights frequent experiences of exclusion experienced by women in the workplace. This is because of a prevalent culture that prioritizes the ideal worker image within workplace narratives, serving as a significant catalyst for these experiences of exclusion. Additionally, the study underscores how apparently supportive measures, initially appearing beneficial, can inadvertently heighten women’s vulnerability to workplace exclusion.

This study shows how broader national and industrial cultures, which are often male-dominated, can, further reinforce barriers to creating a gender-inclusive workplace. Overall, the study underscores the importance of addressing ideal worker narratives as pivotal steps toward fostering a workplace that is genuinely inclusive for women.

This study aims to (1) examine corporate sustainability communication that promotes pro-environmental behaviour and (2) explore women’s experiences and expectations in relation to sustainability communication. Based on the findings, the study proposes a sustainability communication model that can facilitate the needs of both companies and women.

A case study was conducted to examine sustainability communication within the support waste management project of one company in Bali, Indonesia. Following the appreciative inquiry method, focus group discussions involving Balinese women and in-depth interviews were conducted to discover the best experiences and most appropriate ways to participate in waste management initiatives.

The findings show a gap between women’s understanding of sustainability issues and the information provided by the company. The company and women construct their own understandings of sustainability issues, and each has different capacities, needs, interests and values. This study contends sustainability communication as a process for co-creating meaning. It should begin by using the livelihoods and tangible impacts on women groups as the entry point.

The proposed framework suggests communication intervention that acknowledges the importance of community participation and empowerment as well as three levels of impact: for themselves, their environment, and their communities. This study also recommends further studies in different contexts, as this study was conducted in collectivist rural communities.

The proposed framework accentuates the value of communication processes and management as well as sustainability outcomes, and considers women as actors, rather than as objects.

This study aims to investigate the research question: how do women leaders in the professional business services (PBS) sector develop and approach workplace (in)authenticity?

Ten senior women leaders in the Midlands region of the UK were purposefully selected and interviewed. A semi-structured approach meant that the author adopted a social constructionist paradigm and feminist interpretation. Questions were designed to elicit rich descriptions from the participants. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted to address the study’s purpose.

Four themes were important to women when they developed and approached workplace (in)authenticity: (1) Power Structures, (2) Fit to Belong, (3) Influential Femininity and (4) Through Her Evolution. Women described masculine-majority organisations exerting power. They were pressured into altering their behaviours to “fit” into workplaces. When women had the latitude to be themselves, their leadership excelled. Women’s authenticity developed through increased self-knowledge, helping them to overcome workplace challenges. The study concluded that women face complexities when developing and approaching their constructions of authenticity, namely in the barriers and ramifications they face.

The study suggests several implications for practice and theory concerning enablers and barriers to women leaders' workplace authenticity. The link between authenticity and workplace gender equity needs to be investigated.

The study provides evidence that women are challenged when becoming authentic, therefore, altering their careers irrecoverably in some cases.

This study aims to investigate the level of empowerment of rural women organic farmers through the Total Observed Score of a Statement-Revised scale (TOSS-R).

In doing so, exploratory factor analysis is used to investigate the factorial structure of the 8-dimensional TOSS scale. Further, first and second-order confirmatory factor analysis is used to confirm the construct reliability and model adequacy of TOSS-R. The data has been collected from 314 women organic farmers from four selected districts (Nayagarh, Khurda, Boudh, and Ganjam) of Odisha based on 2022 records from the Directorate of Horticulture.

The results showed that the TOSS-R is showing better model adequacy compared (CMIN/df = 2.031, RMSEA = 0.073, SRMR = 0.064) to the earlier TOSS scale (CMIN/df = 2.697, RMSEA = 0.840, SRMR = 0.096). Further in the analysis of the overall empowerment, the TOSS-R scale determined that 49.60% of women are highly empowered, 44.58% are moderately, and 5.73% are less empowered.

The study emphasizes that the policymakers should establish a local capacity to promote gender equity in land titling such that women irrigators will be officially labelled as “farmers”, thereby bringing them under government scheme that is exclusively granted to women farmers.

The study’s novelty lies in a more comprehensive model of determining the empowerment of women organic farmers which has the capability to determine the constraints of the women failing to be empowered in the farming sector.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2023-0693

The paper explains how challenges and achievements of human social responsibility (HSR) are addressed by women innovators across the organizational borders of various industries. More precisely, this qualitative study’s goal is to clarify the empowering roles of discursive strategies employed by Women in Innovation (WIN) organization when communicating about women innovators’ demanding realities and about their collaborative initiatives meant to generate changes related to gender, diversity and intersectionality. The WIN members include women leaders in the innovation space with extensive professional, advisory and international experience.

The paper proposes an approach that brings together perspectives upon empowerment, perspectives on social, intellectual and symbolic capital and a social semiotic perspective on discourse. The WIN blogs are investigated to facilitate: first, an understanding of how discursive strategies recontextualize the women innovators’ identities and actions and second, an understanding of how these discursive strategies contribute to sustaining and legitimizing dynamic social capital while building new intellectual capital and symbolic capital across organizational borders.

The WIN discourses both disclose contemporary gender, diversity and intersectionality challenges across organizational borders as well as promote ways of breaking the barriers that prevent women innovators from thriving. The discursive strategies recontextualize women innovators as resourceful social actors with multiple identities. Their social actions are discursively recontextualized as collaborative challenge-solving enterprises. These recurrent discursive strategies accomplish empowering functions at individual, relational and collective well-being levels through materializing new intellectual and symbolic capital when revealing the manifestations of bridging and bonding social capital.

This paper provides a novel integrative approach to explaining in detail the complexity of empowering discourses at several levels of analytical delicacy. It responds to the needs of HSR research and practice for gaining more insights into the challenges of communicating effectively about how to create a more socially responsible world.

This study explores the opportunities for a gender-inclusive architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, focussing on the gap between architectural education and practice. This study focusses on three research questions: (1) What factors influence women architects' career retention and advancement in the AEC industry? How can practice outcomes be linked with educational approaches for gender inclusion in the AEC industry? (3) What critical factors can enable structural changes in architecture education, including AEC-related subjects and practice/career pathways towards gender equity?

This paper is based on a systematic literature review (SLR). The established timeframe for selecting papers in this study considered the last 20 years, as various seminal studies in feminism and gender inclusion in architecture emerged in the early 2000s through the definition of keywords used in two prestigious databases. The academic articles selected were filtered through a process of inclusion and exclusion, following criteria for suitability and relevance using a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews (PRISMA) diagram.

This study revealed key trends in the literature review consistent with the research questions, including (1) the disproportionate struggles women face at individual, interpersonal and organisational levels and the gender-based bias from entry and progression in the AEC industry that also requires multi-level interventions; (2) traditional architecture education affects female students and educators who find networking, social capital and leadership opportunities to challenge gender-based stereotypes and promote workplace equity, and finally, (3) observe enablers for fostering equity in architecture and education, which should not be limited to policy-driven interventions but structural transformations through transparency, mentorship, leadership, awareness raising and empowerment of women and men, promoting inclusivity and gender equity in the AEC industry.

This study considers a global understanding of gender equity in the AEC industry, regional and country-specific analysis needs to be considered in future studies. The study's focus is on women’s inclusion, acknowledging the limitations of conventional binary gender concepts; future studies need to include the experiences of LGBTI + communities and other underrepresented groups. The literature review considers only academic articles; future research should also consider industry reports, government initiatives and organisational documents for a broader understanding of diversity efforts in business.

This paper observes the issues for gender-inclusive architecture within the context of a male-dominant AEC industry through linking architectural education and practice. Studies rarely focus on this link and address workplace issues. This study highlights this link and extends the discussion through the critical literature review, providing a new ground for geographic-specific or intersectional studies.