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Over the past 20 years, the European Union has developed a comprehensive policy on gender equality (GE) in the fields of research, innovation and higher education. While North European countries have actively implemented policies in this direction, South and East European countries have been far less active and made limited progress, resulting in widening policy gaps across countries. Drawing from the experience of a capacity-building project (TARGET), this chapter explores the factors that impede the implementation of gender equality plans (GEPs) in research and higher education institutions across five countries – Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Italy and Serbia. It argues that the lack of a coherent GE discourse in research and innovation policies that sheds light on structural barriers and implicit bias is a central impediment: it severely limits the potential of GEPs and the power of change agents in research and higher education organisations in Southeast Europe to stimulate institutional change.

This paper critically examines how female students at a Finnish business school understand gender in management.

The analysis is based on female students' learning diaries from a basic management course.

The findings show how students respond to the topic of gender inequality through a neoliberal postfeminist discourse. The students' discourse is structured around three discursive moves: (1) rejecting “excessive” feminism, (2) articulating self-reliant professional futures and (3) producing idealized role models through successfully integrating masculinity and femininity.

This article contributes to current understanding of the role of postfeminist sensibilities in shaping student participation in the management profession. Awareness of students' responses to gender-equality initiatives offers management educators insight into the inclusion of equality topics in teaching in ways that support equal gender socialization in the management profession.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

This paper aims to analyze the discourse of Arab feminism social media pages as a form of real-time new media. This is to be conducted culturally to understand the Westernized character these pages tend to propagate and the politico-cultural significations of such a propagation.

Using visual and content analysis the paper analyzes both the written and visual contents of two popular Arab feminist Facebook pages, “Thory” and “Feminist doodles” to explore its culture relevance/Westernization via the categories of “re-employing the binary second wave feminism, the historical relevance and the Westernized tone of both pages.

The pages showed a tendency toward second wave, Westernized, anti-orient feminism. Such importation of feminism made the pages’ message not only a bit irrelevant but also conceptually violent to a large extent. Starting from alien contexts, the two pages dislocate the Arab women experiences of their situation for the sake of comprehending and adapting to heavily Westernized images.

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate over the gender issue in the Arab context after 2011, what it originally offers is discussing the cultural relevance of popular feminist Facebook pages claiming to represent the everyday struggles of the Arab women. In addition, it shows the impact of real-time media on identity formulation.

This research attempts to make sense of the experiences of two academic women who become mothers.

This paper is an autoethnography. Applying the autoethnographic method allows us to discuss cultural phenomena through personal reflections and experiences. Our autoethnographic reflections illustrate our struggles and attempts of resistance within discursive spaces where motherhood and our identity as academics intersect.

Our personal experiences combined with theoretical elaborations illuminate how the role of the mother continues to be dominated by such gendered discursive practices that conflict with the work role. Once women become mothers, they are othered through societal and organizational practices because they constitute a visible deviation from the masculine norm in the organizational setting, academia included.

This paper explores how contemporary motherhood discourse(s)within academia and the wider society present competing truth claims, embedded in neoliberal and postfeminist cultural sensibility. Our autoethnographic reflections show our struggles and attempts of resistance within such discursive spaces.

This study aims to explore how and why employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions differently and the role of sociocultural factors in this process using sociomaterial analysis.

Data were gathered from 34 Sri Lankan knowledge workers using a series of workshop-based activities. The concept of sociomateriality is employed to understand how sociocultural elements are entangled with technology in work-life boundary experiences.

The findings of the thematic analyses suggest how culture is intertwined in the way employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions and how they manage information communication technologies (ICTs) to balance their work and nonwork demands. Participants have been unable to avoid technology-mediated boundary interruptions from work, as organisations have created norms to keep employees connected to organisations using information communication technologies. Traditional gender roles are specifically found to be entangled in employees' boundary management practices, disadvantaging women more.

The findings highlight how national culture and gender norms create challenging work-life experiences for female employees than males. This could create a disadvantageous position for female employees in their career progression. It is crucial to consider factors such as boundary preferences and family concerns when deciding on family-friendly work policies. Also, organisations have to consider the development of explicit guidelines on after-hours communication expectations.

Using the lens of sociomateriality, researchers can understand the contextual entanglement of ICTs with national culture and gender norms in creating different work-life boundary experiences. It seems ICTs are creating a disadvantage for female employees when managing work–nonwork boundaries, especially in power distant and collectivist cultures where traditional gender norms are highly valued and largely upheld. This study also contributes to the current discourse on work-life boundaries by providing insights from non-western perspectives.