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The overall purpose of this paper is to study gender and equality‐related issues by exploring gender functions in the northernmost borderland of Sweden (the Tornedalen area). The study focuses on women's views of their own lives and how local culture may shape their identity.

By analysing a large number of women's narratives through approaching feminist poststructuralism, the analysis focuses on gender relations and how women have adapted their lives according to the norms of the local society. The study involves a historical perspective from the middle to the late twentieth century. This includes transitions from an almost exclusively rural to a more urbanized life (within the countryside) and from a time when almost all women were full‐time housewives to a time when this has become a rarity.

The traditional culture in Tornedalen still existed in the late 1990s with pressure coming from the older generations to maintain traditional gender functions. From a feminist poststructuralist perspective, competing discourses affects the identity of the Tornedalen woman. Such competing discourses lead to, for example, women being impressed by masculine men who dominate the family whilst also, seemingly, expressing concern for equality issues. Many common gender identity characteristics also exist, such as (a feeling of) being strong (to be able to live in Tornedalen) and (a feeling of) being very much aware of (and claiming) local gender inequality. Originality/value – The paper provides new knowledge as to how inequality may persist in (a) local area(s) ruled by traditional norms. It also provides insights into women's lives and how identities evolve in (a) small local society(ies).

As the Era of Accountability has given rise to the prevalence of curriculum standards and multiple educational stakeholders have engaged in the writing of these documents, the National Council for the Social Studies has revised its original standards document published nearly two decades ago. This study investigated what the revised document reveals in terms of gendered discourses. Through employing the tools of discourse analysis, the dominant discourses advanced in the document’s curricular recommendations were revealed. Two discourses prevailed in the analysis: gender imbalance with a narrow view of valued masculinity and gender-free with a hidden discourse of males dominating in those spaces. A discussion of the presence of trans and other gender identities in the document is included. As gender is sparsely mentioned in the curricular recommendations, and a binary view of gender is adhered to throughout, there is little guidance for curriculum writers and teachers to teach in transformative ways that challenge the status quo.

This paper aims to critically analyze media discourses on women owner-managers/entrepreneurs (OMEs) in the Kenyan and Omani newspapers.

A critical discourse analysis is carried out on a total of 408 online media articles (174 articles from Omani newspapers and 234 articles from Kenyan newspapers) on women OMEs over the period 2010-2018. Articles are also classified based on their framing of women’s entrepreneurship.

Five main categories of media discourses are identified, i.e. discourses on government/institutional initiatives; women OMEs’ dependency; women OMEs’ femininity; women OMEs’ societal impact; and normalization of women OMEs. These gendered media discourses and underlying assumptions further perpetuate women OMEs’ subordinate position in society, weaken their social legitimacy and trivialize their roles as managers and leaders in society.

The analysis was limited to online articles published in mainstream media. Future research could focus on offline print media from smaller media distributors or other distribution channels.

Policymakers and media houses need to pay greater attention to the subtle mechanisms reproducing gender stereotypes. Women OMEs should also take a more active role in constructing their identity in the media.

This paper highlights the underlying assumptions of media discourses regarding women’s empowerment that negatively impacts their social legitimacy. This paper also draws attention to media’s role in the trivialization of women OMEs’ leadership and managerial roles and subsequent marginalization of their social status.

The purpose of this study is to gain increased knowledge about gender diversity and innovation in mining by analyzing how women are discursively represented in relation to these two concepts, and in doing so establish how diversity management is received and communicated in the industry.

The study is based on analysis of texts including references to gender diversity and innovation in mining found on the web. The tool used to retrieve the data has been WebCorpLive, a tool designed for linguistic analysis of web material.

Although increased female representation is communicated as a key component in the diversity management discourse, based on the idea that diversity increases innovation and creativity, closer analysis of texts on diversity and innovation in mining shows that what women are expected to contribute with has little explicit connection with innovation.

The study contributes with increased knowledge about diversity management by providing an example of how it is received in a traditionally male-dominated industry.

The findings indicate that for diversity management to have a real effect in mining, it needs to be based on gender equality and social justice motives, rather than on a business case rationale – the principal motive today. To enable this change, stereotypical gender patterns, as shown in this study, need to be made visible and problematized among policy makers, practitioners and actors on all levels of the industry.

The study contributes with new knowledge about gender in the mining industry previously not attended to by using a method which so far has been sparsely used in discourse analysis, although pointed out as promising.

The chapter seeks to examine how local women’s groups in Burundi and Liberia have responded to the opportunities offered by UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and how transnational understandings of gender security have affected the way the locals advocate for gender policies at home.

Through discussion of data collected during extended fieldwork, the chapter illustrates the internal negotiation process between the international and the local elements of the transnational campaign for the implementation of Resolution 1325. The chapter first looks at the processes of identity creation and learning that enable local activists to adapt to transnational understandings of gender security. Second, it looks at the (re)production and adaptation of those understandings in local campaigns for gender security in post-conflict¹ Burundi and Liberia.

The chapter demonstrates how a very particular discourse on ‘gender security’ is used and reproduced through power relations between local and transnational activists, thereby enabling certain practices and policies to become natural and the best possible option.

This implies that while transnational advocacy networks help grassroots social movements to be heard at international fora, these networks also impose certain discourses and practices, contributing to a depoliticisation of the grassroots activity.

Understanding how transnational advocacy networks negotiate and transform local women’s rights discourses is all the more important since these transnational networks have been considered as moral authorities in the global political arena.

Purpose – This chapter analyzes how various gender discourses transmitted through mass media such as television form discourse competition and conflict today as China is confronting cultural globalization. In that context, a wave of consumerism and nostalgia for cultural tradition become two of the key factors that shield patriarchy and resist feminism.

Method – Quantitative and qualitative responses of Chinese university students to video productions from South Korea and the United States are studied, compared, and contrasted by using survey and focus group discussion methods.

Findings – Women and men students show preference for different types of televised and film entertainment. Both respond to the gender discourses depicted, seeing in them models for behavior and fashion. The independence and sexual freedom reflected in TV series from the United States is seen by many as less applicable to the Chinese context than the idealized traditionalism of the Korean series.

Social implications – Global culture provides alternative and competing gender discourses, which can lead to social change or to nostalgia for an idealized tradition in the face of change. To the extent that both women and men adopt the male gaze, patriarchal culture is strengthened, not challenged in the process.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of symbolic violence in his work on Masculine Domination, the purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of legitimacy surrounding the presence of female directors are constructed in the boardroom, and the role of symbolic violence in the process.

The authors carried out the investigation through a series of 32 interviews, mostly with board members in government-owned, commercially focussed companies in Québec. The study was conducted in the aftermath of the adoption of a legislative measure aiming to institute parity in the boardroom of government-owned companies.

The analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are predicated on two main discourses, as conveyed through board members when interpreting the presence of female directors. In the first discursive representation, feminine gender is naturalized and mobilized by participants to support (quite oftentimes in a rather apparent positive way) the distinctive contributions that femininity can make, or cannot make, to the functioning of boards. In the second discourse (degenderizing), the question of gender disappears from the sense-making process. Women’s presence is then justified and normalized, not because of their feminine qualities, but rather and uniquely for their competencies.

While, from a first level of analysis, the main discourses the authors unveiled may be considered as potentially enhancing women’s role and legitimacy within boards, from a deeper perspective such discourses may also be viewed as channels for symbolic violence to operate discreetly, promoting certain forms of misrecognition that continue to marginalize certain individuals or groups of people. For example, the degenderizing discourse misrecognizes that a focus on individual competency contests overlooks the social conditions under which the contesters developed their competencies.

Provides awareness and a basis for directors to understand and how symbolic power covertly operates in apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance and challenge assumptions.

Implications in terms of policy making to promote board diversity are discussed. This is particularly relevant since many countries around the world are considering affirmative-action-type regulation to accelerate an otherwise dawdling trend in the nomination of women on boards.

The research is the first to empirically address the notion of gendering in the boardroom, focussing on the construction of meanings surrounding the “legitimate” female director. The study is also one of few giving access to a field where a critical mass is attained, allowing the authors to investigate perceptions regarding the extent to which the order of things is altered in the boardroom once formal parity is established. Finally, the study sensitizes the authors further to the pertinence of investigating how symbolic power covertly operates in today’s society, including within apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance.

The purpose of the chapter is to overcome interpretative dualism on migrant and native women’s victimization by proposing a Bourdieusian approach to the continuities of symbolic violence within post-patriarchal regimes of women’s freedom.

This conceptual chapter examines the Bourdieusian approach to some empirical research and continues with questions for feminist thought. The author discusses sociological research in Italy and in European contexts, and highlights the many “gazes” which can reveal the illusio of universal gender rights and the neo-colonial discourse on migrant women.

Research finds that the participant objectivation attitude and concern for disturbing dissonances in the habitus and body hexis of “others” produces tools for revealing the misrecognition of domination. At the theoretical level, the chapter shows how the plurality of hegemonic discourses on symbolic violence endorses not only social forces reproducing neo-colonial stratifications of gender, sense of belonging and class positions, but also ambivalent experiences of domination and freedom for women.

The chapter aims to motivate the encounter between Bourdieu’s view of male domination and classical feminist constructs as lived body experience, sexual contract, and traffic in women.

The chapter provides an innovative analysis intersecting Bourdieu’s constructs and feminist thought in re-considering “gender-women” as a privileged locus for feminist discourse. Gender dualism under the lens of symbolic violence is viewed as both an appearance and a structural field within the dynamics of domination.

This exploratory study aims to compare how businesswomen with different initial bounds to their businesses resort to gender discourses to construct a shared business identity in group interaction.

The study was conducted with two focus groups of Portuguese businesswomen with different initial bounds to their enterprises: those who created their own companies and those who “inherited” family businesses. All the participants of both groups own and manage their businesses.

A discourse analysis of the interactions shows that the identities of businesswomen are constrained and produced by different masculinities (authority, professionalism and self-determination) and femininities (restrictive and emancipatory). The interweaving of these gender discourses results in the production of a “respect” identity in the family businesses group and a “self-determination” identity in the start-up businesses group.

The comparison of the different business identities shared by women with particular business experiences contributes to reflections upon the diversified contours that gender discrimination can undertake, and upon the need of practitioners to adjust the gender policies according to those particular experiences.

The paper compares and highlights how Portuguese businesswomen with different business backgrounds collectively construct specific and shared business identities that allow them to deal with diverse experiences of gender discrimination and devaluation.

Despite the ongoing increase of women in the top positions, they are still underrepresented in politics. The studies that primarily focus on women’s underrepresentation in politics neglect the role of gender as a category that structures and makes sense of social practices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary gender order in politics through discourse analysis and the contribution of the critical feminist perspective.

The study is based on 30 biographical interviews with Italian politicians and focuses on the account of their political experiences and on the meanings attributed to these.

The results of this paper underline the tendency to either absolve or blame women for gender inequality in politics through different interpretative repertoires: “Women’s disinterest toward politics,” “Politics as masculine context” and “Politics–family unbalance.” The analysis allowed to unravel the way in which the discursive practices create and reproduce the hegemonic gender order in politics.

The research is limited to 30 qualitative interviews, and so results cannot be generalized.

The findings of this paper highlight the importance of exploring issues relating to the gender gap in politics and stress the need to implement actions to promote gender equality in politics.

The paper contributes to an understanding of women’s underrepresentation in politics and offers causes for reflection on a phenomenon that has profound implications for our society.