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This study aims to explore the relationships between gender, gender identity and Word of Mouth (WOM). There are three objectives of this study. The first was to observe the impact of gender identity on WOM. The second was to examine the mediation role of self-brand connection (SBC) bridging the relationship between gender identity and WOM. The final one was to test the moderating role of gender.

The conceptual model was tested by analyzing data collected via Mturk from Americans participants who use Airbnb. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to evaluate the psychometric property. To test hypotheses, the structural equation model was assessed. Further, Hayes’ PROCESS was adopted to examine the mediation role of SBC. The moderation role of gender was examined by the chi-square difference test.

The research outcomes elucidated that feminine gender identity exerted a noteworthy influence on WOM communication, whereas masculine gender identity appeared to bear no significant impact on WOM. It was determined that SBC operates as a potent mediator bridging the relationship between gender identity and WOM. Gender did not demonstrate a significant moderating effect on any part of the WOM communication pathway in the context of this study.

The conclusions drawn from this research underscore that practitioners in the field of brand management should not overlook the crucial role of consumers' gender identity. It is imperative to cultivate robust, positive relationships with consumers as a strategic measure to engender favorable WOM communication.

This investigation distinguishes itself as one of the relatively scarce studies interrogating the relationship between gender identity, gender and WOM, specifically through the mediating lens of SBC. Consequently, the discoveries made herein have the potential to furnish unprecedented insights into comprehending consumer behavior in the hospitality industry with respect to WOM communication, particularly as it pertains to the dimension of gender identity.

Aging workers are a diverse group yet research on aging infrequently examines the joint effects of age and gender upon various life domains and decisions. In order to fully understand the experience of a person, you must examine her/his roles and identities as they intersect. Intersectionality extends to the work setting, and the notion of intersectionality is presented as a paradigm that can yield significant insights into the joint consideration of age and gender in the workplace. These relationships have the potential to shape identities, which may in turn influence work perceptions and outcomes. As a result there are important considerations, consequences, solutions, and future research topics, as well as Human Resource practices that are discussed in this chapter.

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.

Despite the absence of federal legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression, many companies have adopted such policies in recent years. We examine the impact of several contextual factors thought to influence gender identity and expression nondiscrimination policy adoption among Fortune 500 firms from 1997 to 2007. Our findings suggest that city and state laws likely influence policy adoption, as do federal case rulings regarding gender nonconformity and the adoption of similar policies by companies in the same industry. We found little evidence that companies respond to state or city executive orders or to media coverage of gender identity issues in the workplace.

Purpose: This study examines the experiences and struggles of young women with breast cancer as they navigate the intersectionality of their illness and gender identity. Specifically, the research explores the construction and expression of gender identity as a core part of who they were prior to diagnosis and who they desire to be in the future.

Design and methodology: A phenomenological approach was used to investigate how women with breast cancer experience changes related to gender identity. Eighteen in-depth interviews were conducted with young women who have been diagnosed within the last five years.

Findings: Young women undergo gender identity disruptions and shifts as the result of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Informants expressed feelings that their resultant identities do not conform to cultural normative representations of gender, which profoundly impact their perceptions of the physical self, gender roles, and intimate relationships. At this acute stage, they struggled with the loss of important body markers of femininity (breasts, hair, etc.) and attempted through consumption to find alternative ways to enact gender expressions.

Originality and value: This research explores consumer experiences when bodies do not conform to idealized body images and cultural representations of gender. Informants revealed a complex portrait of women who experience the early, invasive stages of illness and body transformation.

Gender-diverse people experience unique cultural and interpersonal stigma in mainstream society and sometimes within their own communities; they face allegations of inauthenticity based on their nonconformity to either cisnormative or transnormative gender regimes. Based on 21 in-depth life history interviews, we unveil the intricate interactional process of negotiating identity and authenticity in the biographical work of gender-diverse individuals. In this study, gender-diverse people engaged in a “gender audit” with their gender-diverse interviewer. Gender audits yield verbal performances of gender with oneself and others. Ambiguity was “accounted for” or “embraced and created” in their biographical work to organize their life stories and undermine binary essentialism – a discourse that was “discursively constraining.” Gender audits took place in participants' day-to-day lives, either through self-audits, questioning from others, or both. In the final analysis, we assert that we all engage in gender auditing. Gender audits are intersubjective sites of domination, subordination, resistance, and social change. Gender diversity, then, can be viewed as a product of gender in flux.

Anyone who has recently watched television or movies can tell you that transgender, gender nonbinary or gender expansive people are becoming more visible in these media. This trend reflects the reality that younger generations are increasingly identifying with more fluid and nonbinary gender and sexual identities and are progressively expressing those identities in a more flexible and changing manner (Herman et al., 2022; Wilson & Meyer, 2021). Unsurprisingly then, those individuals are also more visible at work, including in workplaces with employer-mandated dress codes. Indeed, in 2020 the US Supreme Court decided a case involving a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who was fired because her employer, a funeral home, required her to conform to its gender-binary dress policy and wear clothing mandatory for people assigned male at birth, rather than appropriate for her female gender identity ( Bostock v. Clayton County, 2020).

However, as the description of Aimee Stephens's own experience illustrates, often these employer appearance codes are based on a binary and fixed conception of gender and gender identity and expression at odds with the increasing number of workers who do not identify within those rigid parameters. Moreover, even when an employee, like Aimee Stephens herself, could have fit within her employer's dress code, the improper application of that policy to her, or employer concerns about customer or co-worker discomfort with an employee's appearance under the policy may mean that a worker's identity and expression may still conflict with a workplace appearance code. For gender nonbinary or nonconforming individuals, these complications are magnified.

This chapter explores the practical problems and barriers that employer dress codes have on employees whose gender identity and/or presentation move beyond the traditional male/female binary. Using insights from queer theory, gender expansive employees serve to interrogate fundamental assumptions behind workplace dress policies and the formal and informal ways in which these policies are policed. The chapter will explore that discordance, examine possible employer resolutions, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of those responses.

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.

The new, Spice Girl‐less millennium, “offers an opportunity to wipe the slate clean, to abandon concepts, models and formulations once thought liberatory now considered incarceratory; to start afresh on the other side of the year 2000”. Foremost among the concepts to be updated is gender identity. In a postmodern society, traditional notions of femininity and masculinity come across as antiquated and illusory. The consumption ethic has deconstructed the historical male‐female mind‐body producer‐consumer dichotomy and made identity construction a consuming pastime. It has also turned gender into a pastiche of possibilities. Yet in the utopian cyber future that awaits us, what will become of gender identity? In the ethereality of the Internet, where existence is ephemeral, is gender identity a meaningful and necessary concept? This paper reviews the historical (modern) significance of gender identity to marketing, explores the postmodern consumer condition, and prophesies a paradisal vision of gender identity in the consumer society to come.

Women are underrepresented in most university entrepreneurship education (EE) programmes and less likely than men to pursue business venturing as a career. One reason may be the “entrepreneurial identity gap”, whereby female students do not see themselves as successful entrepreneurs. This paper aims to explore the nature of this identity gap and its relationship to entrepreneurial intent and entrepreneurship education.

A set of contemporary, gender-inclusive entrepreneurial attributes was developed using entrepreneurial subject matter experts and tested with 591 university students to explore the nature of the gendered entrepreneurial identity gap.

While masculine stereotypes persist and the entrepreneurial identity gap is larger for female students, results suggest that a more gender-inclusive vocabulary of entrepreneurship is emerging among the student population and an androgynous perception of the idealized entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship education had a positive influence on entrepreneurial intent.

Study findings advance the conversation about entrepreneurial identity, the nature of the gendered identity gap and the role of education in closing that gap. The questionnaire and set of gender-inclusive attributes should continue to be tested beyond student samples.

Based on this study, entrepreneurship education could benefit from more gender-inclusive instructional practices and vocabulary and a broadened definition of what it means to be entrepreneurial. More students – both men and women – will see themselves as entrepreneurs and be inspired to participate in the innovation economy.

This study takes a novel approach to the study of entrepreneurial identity, developing a new set of attributes and contemporary vocabulary around business venturing.