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This study aims to explore the individual lived crucible experiences of women leaders in higher education (HE) and business as the catalyst to investigate organisational inequality regimes that prevent women leaders from fully participating, contributing and flourishing at work. Drawing upon Bolman and Deal’s four-frame theoretical organisational model, this study analyses women’s lived crucible leadership experiences to better understand the organising processes and practices that render intersectionality invisible that reinforce and perpetuate inequality regimes.

A collaborative autoethnographic research method was selected for data collection. The research team members each selected one significant crucible moment from their professional career and used the Gibb’s six-part reflective cycle to document their narrative and reflect on their leadership experience. A reflexive thematic analysis was used based on Braun and Clarke’s six phases.

The study features the importance of creating a climate in organisations that acknowledges the need for greater equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) to support women leaders. Four global themes emerged from the analysis of the leadership narratives: organisation, power dynamics, emotional distress and perseverance and intersectionality. These themes illuminate a greater understanding of organisational life for women and confirm the presence of inequality regimes of gender and race.

This is the first study to explore the impact of women leaders’ crucible experiences through the lens of the Bolman and Deal’s model that highlights the need to consider an EDI lens as the fifth frame.

In this paper, I show how a consideration of legitimacy processes is of theoretical use in addressing two current issues in status research. First, I investigate under what conditions the contrast between the sex composition of a work group and the sex composition of an organization’s authority structure may trigger the salience of gender status in task groups. I argue that this contrast will make gender status salient when an evaluation from an authority figure outside the group creates inconsistency and uncertainty in the current status structure within the group. Delegitimation of a superior is one such process that produces this inconsistency and uncertainty. Second, I examine under what conditions status position compared to identity will more likely stimulate behavior among work group members. I argue that the legitimation of the superior and the group’s status order reduce the likelihood that group members will pursue status inconsistent, identity behaviors. Delegitimation, however, increases opportunities for acting in identity consistent ways and reduces the costs for doing so, thus enhancing the likelihood of identity-based behaviors.

Gender remains a politically charged and powerful ideological social identity dimension that categorically essentializes and reproduces opportunities and limitations in organizations. Addressed in Chapter 6 are assumptions about gender and ways that gender classifications and gender roles form and spill forth into both work and home life for an overlap of public and private spheres that disadvantage women and privilege men. Furthermore, femininity and masculinity constructs strengthen the power system that undergirds them, reinforces their meanings, and perpetuates behaviors, changing over time, across and within cultures, and over the life course.

In organizations, the glass ceiling metaphor has become a popular representation of inequality in the workplace for women, people of color and sexual minorities; a phenomenon expanded in recent years to include glass walls and glass cliffs to describe advancement barriers. Gender-neutral mindsets and blame-the-victim strategies found in organizations are examined, as well as the breadwinner role and intersectionalities of gender with social identity dimensions of age, ethnicity, and social class. Chapter 6 is divided into these subthemes: gender, roles, femininity, and masculinity; power and gender inequality at work, and effects on women; gender, parenting, and the second shift; the breadwinner role, hegemonic masculinity, and masculinity in crisis; gendered occupations and feminization of career fields; intersectionalities of gender with age, ethnicity, and social class; and shattering schemas with androgyny and transgenderism.

The Society of Gender Professionals is a new international association of gender practitioners, academics, and activists dedicated to promoting feminist action and applied research, and raising the profile of gender expertise around the world. The organization’s start-up team relied on feminist and sociological research and theory to develop its organizational policies and practices. Throughout the start-up process, the team documented approaches, challenges, and lessons learned in meeting minutes, video recordings, email conversations, feedback surveys, and personal reflections in order to investigate and learn from efforts to put feminist organizational theory into practice. This paper seeks to review the theories that guided the founding of the Society of Gender Professionals and shares the challenges, reflections, and lessons learned in the process of building an organization that seeks to deconstruct privilege and hierarchies and promote inclusivity across a diverse membership. By publishing these experiences, the organization aims to contribute to the broader literature around cultivating feminist organizations so that others may learn from the complexities and considerations addressed, and further advance their own feminist organizational efforts.

Gender is a defining feature of informal/precarious work in the twenty-first century, yet studies rarely adopt a gendered lens when examining collective efforts to challenge informality and precarity. This chapter foregrounds the gendered dimensions of informal/precarious workers’ struggles as a crucial starting point for re-theorizing the future of global labor movements. Drawing upon the findings of the volume’s six chapters spanning five countries (the United States, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and India) and two gender-typed sectors (domestic work and construction), this chapter explores how gender is intertwined into informal/precarious workers’ movements, why gender is addressed, and to what end. Across countries and sectors, informal/precarious worker organizations are on the front lines of challenging the multiple forms of gendered inequalities that shape contemporary practices of accumulation and labor regulation. They expose the forgotten reality that class structures not only represent classification struggles around work, but also around social identities, such as gender, race, and migration status. However, these organizing efforts are not fighting to transform the gendered division of labor or embarking on revolutionary struggles to overturn private ownership and liberalized markets. Nonetheless, these struggles are making major transformations in terms of increasing women’s leadership and membership in labor movements and exposing how gender interacts with other ascriptive identities to shape work. They are also radicalizing hegemonic scripts of capitalist accumulation, development, and even gender to attain recognition for female-dominated occupations and reproductive needs for the first time ever. These outcomes are crucial as sources of emancipatory transformations at a time when state and public support for labor and social protection is facing a deep assault stemming from the pressures of transnational production and globalizing markets.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

In Sweden, gender mainstreaming policies have a long political history. As part of the national gender equality strategy of the Swedish forest industry, the ten largest forestry companies committed themselves to gender mainstream their policies. Limiting the impact of policies and the agency of change, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the varied and conflicting meanings and constitution of the concepts, the problem and, in extent, the organisational realities of gender mainstreaming.

In both, implementation and practice, gender mainstreaming posse challenges on various levels and by analysing these documents as practical texts from the WPR-approach. This paper explores constructions of gender and gender equality and their implications on the practice and the political of gender mainstreaming in a male-dominated primary industry.

The results show that the organisations themselves were not constituted as the subject of the policy but instead some of the individuals (women). The subject position of women represented in company policy was one of lacking skills and competences and in the need of help. Not only men and the masculine norms but organisational processes and structures were also generally invisible in the material. Power and conflict were mainly absent from the understanding of gender equality. Instead, consenting ideas of gender equality were the focus. Such conceptualisations of gender equality are beneficial for all risk concealing power structures and thereby limit the political space for change.

By highlighting the scale of policy and the significance of organisational contexts, the results indicate how gender and gender equality are constitutive through the governing technologies of neoliberal and market-oriented ideologies in policy – emphasising the further limiting of space for structural change and politicalization within the male-dominated organisations of Swedish forest industry.

This paper aims to explore how gendering of the learning environment acts to shape the design and outcome of workplace learning. The primary intention is to reflect on the idea of gender-equal organizations as a prerequisite for workplace learning.

A review of literature relating to gender and workplace learning was conducted with the relation between gender-(un)equal organizations and the design and outcome of workplace learning as the focus of the analysis. This was followed by an analysis of the characteristics of an organization that promote both adoptive and developmental workplace learning.

The literature shows how the gendering of the learning environment acts to shape workplace learning, often by preventing development learning and limiting adoptive learning to already privileged groups. To facilitate development, workplace learning requires that organizations are guided by nuanced knowledge of work organization and strategically use workplace learning to challenge existing power relations; that they are not characterised by gender segregation; and that the presence and protection of gendered practices and identities do not dominate learning activities.

Stressing gender-equal organizations as a prerequisite for learning requires stakeholders to integrate a gender perspective in the design of workplace learning.

This paper contributes to the literature considering workplace learning by highlighting how gender-equal organizations constitutes a prerequisite for workplace learning and in defining a few basic characteristics of such organizations.

Leadership philosophy is explored through gender and other demographic characteristics in the Australian Public Service (APS), at the federal government level. Leadership philosophy is conceptualised as the leader’s attitudes, values and behaviour. Gender differences in characteristics of leaders (executives and middle managers) are examined in terms of strategic behaviour, management style, work‐related values, adoption of information technology, perceived organisational morale, family/work conflict and personal, work and family satisfaction. The gender differences are investigated using questionnaire responses from a sample of 750 respondents, of which 569 were male and 145 female. The APS findings are compared with a Cranfield study conducted in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), where gender differences are explored in terms of management and strategic orientation. A sample of 515 chief executives, medical, clinical, HR and financial directors, chairpersons and other non‐executive directors, consists of 406 male and 108 female respondents. The APS study reveals that there are no significant gender differences in the majority of measured characteristics. Similarly in the NHS Trusts study, no significant gender differences are found in terms of management and strategic orientation. The conclusion reached is that other demographic characteristics are influential in forming leadership philosophies, namely job and organisational tenure and experience of senior management responsibilities, thus highlighting the importance of organisational demographics and their impact on leadership attitudes and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate diversity management in an under-researched country by merging theoretical insights developed in the Western literature with cultural aspects of a traditionally homogeneous country, South Korea.

This study integrates theory and research on why diversity can have either a positive (i.e. the information/decision-making paradigm) or a negative (i.e. the social categorization paradigm) effect on performance with different diversity perspectives (i.e. integration-and-learning, access-and-legitimacy, and discrimination-and-fairness). This study develops a model of when and how gender diversity affects organization performance and test the model with a sample of 177 South Korean organizations.

This study finds that gender diversity is negatively related to organization performance in South Korea. This study also finds that the effect of gender diversity is contingent on organizational diversity perspectives. Organizations with high gender diversity perform better to the extent that they have a discrimination-fairness perspective, but not a business-oriented perspective. On the other hand, a discrimination-fairness perspective is unrelated to performance for organizations that are low in gender diversity.

Although gender diversity in the South Korean workplace continues to increase, the relationship between gender diversity and organization performance has rarely been studied in the aspect of Korea’s traditionally homogeneous culture. This study highlights the importance of cultural-contingencies in understanding the consequences of diversity.