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Compared to the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more workers today seemingly have choice over where, when and how they do their work. However, gender inequalities at work and at home persist, which may impact perceptions of choice. Thus, researchers must investigate the potential impact of gender and domestic responsibilities on perceptions of work-related options, including perceptions of workspace choice.

Using an original dataset with workers in North America, South America, Europe and Asia (N = 3,147), the authors conducted logistic regression analyses to explore whether workers felt they had a choice in where they do their work (workspace choice). In addition to gender, the authors considered the effect of domestic responsibilities (childcare and housework) on worker perceptions of workspace choice.

In the paper's initial regression, the authors found that men (OR: 1.24; 95%CI 1.04–1.48) as well as workers reporting that a partner was responsible for all or most of the housework (OR: 1.80; 95%CI 1.34–2.40) and childcare (OR 1.51; 95%CI 1.09–2.09) reported feeling a greater sense of workspace choice. Simultaneously, follow-up regression analyses found that women and men whose partners had a greater share of domestic responsibility had amplified perceptions of choice. However, surprisingly, men who claimed primary responsibility for domestic work also reported more choice over workspace.

Using an international sample, the authors explore gender inequities in worker perceptions of workspace choice. The authors' findings suggest that domestic responsibilities interact with gender in interesting ways, leading to differences in perceptions of choice in the post-pandemic workplace.

Building on work that explores the relationship between individual beliefs and ability to recognize discrimination (e.g., Kaiser and Major, 2006), we examine how an adherence to beliefs about gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism, and meritocracy shape one’s interpretation of an illegal act of sexual harassment involving a male supervisor and female subordinate. We also consider whether the role of the gendered culture of engineering (Faulkner, 2009) matters for this relationship. Specifically, we conducted an online survey-experiment asking individuals to report their beliefs about gender and meritocracy and subsequently to evaluate a fictitious but illegal act of sexual harassment in one of two university research settings: an engineering department, a male-dominated setting whose culture is documented as being unwelcoming to women (Hatmaker, 2013; Seron, Silbey, Cech, and Rubineau, 2018), and an ambiguous research setting. We find evidence that the stronger one’s adherence to gender egalitarian beliefs, the greater one’s ability to detect inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment while gender essentialist beliefs play no role in their detection. The stronger one’s adherence to merit beliefs, the less likely they are to view an illegal interaction as either inappropriate or as sexual harassment. We account for respondent knowledge of sexual harassment and their socio-demographic characteristics, finding that the former is more often associated with the detection of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at work. We close with a discussion of the transferability of results and policy implications of our findings.

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale that can be used to assess inequality at work based on gender, age and ethnicity that is grounded in Acker’s (2006) inequality regimes.

The authors used three representative samples (total N = 1,806) of Swedish teachers, nurses and social workers to develop and validate the scale. The validation process included the assessment of content validity, confirmatory factor analysis for factorial validity, internal consistency and associations with theoretically warranted outcomes and related constructs to assess criterion-related validity and convergent validity.

The authors found evidence supporting the content, factorial, criterion-related and convergent validity of the InEquality in organisations Scale (InE-S). Furthermore, the scale demonstrated high internal consistency.

The newly developed scale InE-S may be used to further the understanding of how inequality at work influences employees. This study makes a contribution to the current literature by providing a scale that, for the first time, can test Acker’s hypotheses using quantitative methods to demonstrate the consequences of inequality at work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the identity work undertaken by female next generation to navigate (in)visibility in family businesses with male successors. To enhance understanding of gendered identity work in family businesses, the authors offer important insights into how female next generation use (in)visibility to establish legitimacy and exercise power and humility in partnership with male next generation in their family business.

This empirical qualitative paper draws upon in-depth interviews with 14 next generation female leaders.

This study offers a model to show how female next generation establish their legitimacy amongst male next generation in power via a careful balancing act between vying for visibility (trouble) and forgoing visibility (exclusion). These female next generation gained acceptance by endorsing their own leadership identity and exercising humility in partnership or by endorsing their brother's leadership identity and exercising power in partnership.

This study highlights the need for the incumbent generation to prepare successors, regardless of gender, via equal opportunities for business exposure and leadership preparation. This study also shows that vocalizing female-centric issues and highlighting hidden power imbalances should be led by the entire management team and not simply delegated to a “family woman” in the management team to spearhead.

This study advances understanding of gender dynamics and identity in the family business literature by identifying specific strategies utilized by female next generation to navigate (in)visibility in family businesses with male successors.

Drawing on Bourdieu's conceptualisation of physical capital, this article explores the experiences of male and female employees in non-traditional occupations where body work is an integral part of the role. Specifically, the authors examine how being an underrepresented gender in this context impacts the experience of work, including challenges faced and perceptions for future opportunities in the role.

The research is based on two in-depth case studies undertaken in the social care and security/door work sector. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with male social care workers and female security workers in the night-time hospitality sector. Management representatives were also interviewed in each case. The interviews examined how the nature of the work in these roles impacted on the underrepresented gender's perceptions of various aspects of their working lives.

The findings illustrate how many of the challenges associated with non-traditional occupations are experienced differently in body work roles, either being amplified or instead presenting opportunities for the role holder with implications for the day-to-day and longer-term experience of work. The findings illustrate how the actions and behaviour of management and colleagues can exacerbate the extent to which underrepresented gender feel accepted within their role and organisation.

Organisational decision makers need to be aware of the importance of reviewing practices regarding hiring, promotion and the allocation of tasks and duties for non-traditional role holders engaged in body work.

The article contributes to understandings of “body work” and physical capital in non-traditional occupations, illustrating how gender-based assumptions can restrict individuals in these roles to a greater extent than in other forms of work where the body is salient to the performance of the role.

The purpose of this study is to generate an empirically informed theoretical framework which can be used to analyze the relationship between gender and innovation in the context of a municipality. The authors present and analyze three illustrative tales from a feminist perspective. The authors thus offer a more balanced approach to the conceptualization of gendered ascriptions with respect to the possible outcomes of innovation work in a public context.

An ethnographic account which employed “shadowing” as a method of observation.

The article presents a debate on how the social construction of gender and innovation can be placed in the context of a municipal reality. Our analysis reveals how the complexities of a gendered work life within a municipality can create paradoxes. A constructionism approach was used in the identification of hidden and unspoken paradoxes that exist in public spheres.

The authors used empirical tales from a very specific context, namely a Swedish municipality. The central implication of this study is the recognition of innovation as being masculine-gendered within the feminine context. This implication thereby deepens our understanding of gender paradoxes in the public sector.

This study provides insights to practitioners who intend to work with innovation in a public organization.

The social implications of this study is that when a male-gendered concept like innovation is implemented in a female-gendered context, like a municipality, it is of importance to contextualize the concept.

The empirical value of examples of a gendered work landscape at a Swedish municipality.

The study will inform relevant workplace gendered policies at the university and other academic institutions.

A cross -sectional study was conducted on all the Arabian Gulf University full-time employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, in June 2021. A questionnaire was sent to the employees requesting data that included sociodemographic data, living conditions, psychological status, social aspects, work productivity and satisfaction. The generalized anxiety disorder questionnaire (GAD-7) was used to screen for anxiety.

Gender disparity was noted in the increase of responsibilities at home and towards young children, and in stress and anxiety. Women’s reductions in peer (90.7%) and social (88%) interactions were higher than among males (81.8%, 73%, respectively). There was a narrow gender gap in work productivity and workload. More males reported that the university was concerned about its employees during COVID-19 and were satisfied with the measures taken. There was a gender disparity with respect to superiors periodically checking if the workload was manageable and discussing the mental health and well-being of the employees.

Future research directions may focus on how gender impacts the perception and response to crises in higher education in Arab countries.

This is one of the few studies in the region that examined the gendered psychosocial impact of COVID-19 and productivity in the workplace using a higher education institution as an example.

Stereotypes are simplified and widely shared visions held by a social group regarding a place, object, event or recognizable set of people united by certain characteristics or qualities. They are “dangerous” mental models because they are widely disseminated, devious and capable of acting even unconsciously in individuals, social groups and organizations altering the rationality of assessments and choices and producing discrimination and prejudice. Stereotypes acritically extend from a characteristic of a significant percentage of a category to the totality of individuals. The process of generalization triggered by a stereotype produces the error of discrimination and prejudice. There are numerous forms of stereotypes, but this study takes into account gender stereotypes because they act pervasively, often subtly, to reduce “productivity”. People who are aware of being discriminated perceive an unsatisfactory fulfillment of their motivations, which reduces their incentive to improve their performance. Since productivity measures the efficient use of energy from working in production processes, the author believes that wherever gender stereotypes are at play, there is a productive “waste of energy”, an inefficiency in work activity with harmful effects for organizations of all kinds, including families.

The work aims to demonstrate that wherever gender stereotypes are at play, a “waste of energy” manifests itself in terms of productivity, representing an inefficiency in work activity with harmful effects for organizations of all kinds, including families. To describe the negative effects stereotypes produce in organizations, some models are presented based on the methods and language of systems thinking. These models, although typically qualitative, are capable of exploring the most accepted theories in the literature: tournament theory, the Pygmalion effect, the Galatea effect, self-fulfilling prophecies, the Queen bee syndrome, the role congruency theory, the glass ceiling theory (“think manager, think male” and “family responsibilities wall”). The paper follows a predominantly organizational and corporate approach, although the copious literature on stereotypes belongs largely to the area of social psychology and organization studies.

The paper does not consider the psychological origin of stereotypes but highlights their use as routines-shortcuts for evaluations and decisions demonstrating that, when adopted in social systems and within organisations, stereotypes produce different forms of discrimination: in social rights, in work, in careers and in access to levels of education and public services, reducing performance and limit potential. The paper also examines some ways gender and culture stereotypes can be opposed, presenting a change management strategy and some concrete solutions proposed by the process–structure–culture model for social change (PSC model).

The main limitation of the work is that it focuses on gender stereotypes, choosing not to consider the “intersection effect” of these with other stereotypes: racial stereotypes, religious stereotypes, color stereotypes, age stereotypes, sex and sexual orientation stereotypes, and many others, whose joint action can cause serious inefficiencies in organizational work.

As stereotypes are a component of social culture and are handed down, by use and example, from generation to generation, the maintenance over time of stereotypes used by individuals to evaluate, judge and act can be seen as an effect of the typical action of a combinatory system of diffusion, which can operate for a long time if not effectively opposed. Il PSC model indicates the strategy for carrying out this opposition.

With regard to gender stereotypes, it should be emphasized that in organizations and social systems, “gender diversity” should be considered an opportunity and not as a discriminating factor and thus encouraged by avoiding harmful discrimination. In fact, this diversity, precisely because of the distinctive characteristics individuals possess regardless of gender, can benefit the organization and lead to an increase in organizational and social performance. The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2020) Goal 5: Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls is examined in this context.

This study views the action of gender stereotypes as especially harmful “mental models”, highlighting the distortions they cause in the allocation of productive energy in society, groups and organizations. The paper follows a predominantly organizational and corporate approach, although the copious literature on stereotypes belongs largely to the area of social psychology. Using the “logic” and “language” of systems thinking, theories and models that describe and interpret the distorting effects of organizational choices based on stereotypes rather than rational analysis are highlighted. The action of stereotypes and their persistence over time can also be described using combinatory systems theory. With this paper, the author hopes that by acting on the three wheels of change highlighted by the PSC model, through legal provisions, control tools and actions on the culture operated by educational and social aggregative institutions, it should not be impossible to change the prevailing culture so that it becomes aware of the harmful influence of gender stereotypes and other discriminatory mental models and come to reject them. The author hopes this paper will help to understand the need to make this change.

Purpose: The study elaborates the contextual conditions of the academic workplace in which gender, age, and nationality considerably influence the likelihood of self-categorization as being affected by workplace bullying. Furthermore, the intersectionality of these sociodemographic characteristics is examined.

Basic Design: The hypotheses underlying the study were mainly derived from the social role, social identity, and cultural distance theory, as well as from role congruity and relative deprivation theory. A survey data set of a large German research organization, the Max Planck Society, was used. A total of 3,272 cases of researchers and 2,995 cases of non-scientific employees were included in the analyses performed. For both groups of employees, binary logistic regression equations were constructed. the outcome of each equation is the estimated percentage of individuals who reported themselves as having experienced bullying at work occasionally or more frequently in the 12 months prior to the survey. The predictors are the demographic and organization-specific characteristics (hierarchical position, scientific field, administrative unit) of the respondents and selected interaction terms. Using regression equations, hypothetically relevant conditional marginal means and differences in regression parameters were calculated and compared by means of t-tests.

Results: In particular, the gender-related hypotheses of the study could be completely or conditionally verified. Accordingly, female scientific and non-scientific employees showed a higher bullying vulnerability in (almost) all contexts of the academic workplace. An increased bullying vulnerability was also found for foreign researchers. However, the patterns found here contradicted those that were hypothesized. Concerning the effect of age analyzed for non-scientific personnel, especially the age group 45–59 years showed a higher bullying probability, with the gender gap in bullying vulnerability being greatest for the youngest and oldest age groups in the sample.

Interpre4tation and Relevance: The results of the study especially support the social identity theory regarding gender. In the sample studied, women in minority positions have a higher vulnerability to bullying in their work fields, which is not the case for men. However, the influence of nationality on bullying vulnerability is more complex. The study points to the further development of cultural distance theory, whose hypotheses are only partly able to explain the results. The evidence for social role theory is primarily seen in the interaction of gender with age and hierarchical level. Accordingly, female early career researchers and young women (and women in the oldest age group) on the non-scientific staff presumably experience a masculine workplace. Thus, the results of the study contradict the role congruity theory.

Previous studies show that the implementation of gender equality encounters resistance in military organizations, but it is often invisible or seen as confined to anonymous structures or troubled individuals. This paper aims to show how the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) use organizational principles to resist implementing gender equality measures.

The study is a qualitative analysis of discursive strategies in the SAF’s 2013–2018 annual reports to government.

The organizing principles of instrumentality and distance, while existing in parallel with gender equality efforts, actually pursue logics that prevents the SAF from implementing gender equality. The principle of instrumentality in this context means that gender equality in the SAF is of secondary interest to organizational members. The principle of distancing from the problem includes strategies that alienate female from male officers.

The contribution of this paper is the finding that the use of organizing principles represents conscious organizational resistance to gender equality efforts. This kind of use needs to be revealed and criticized to change military organizations.