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Preventative health services are keen to identify how to engage men and increase their participation, thus improving health, well-being and life expectancy over time. Prior research has shown general gender norms are a key reason for men’s avoidance of these services, yet there is little investigation of specific gender norms. Furthermore, masculinity has not been examined as a factor associated with customer vulnerability. This paper aims to identify the relationship between gender norm segments for men, likely customer vulnerability over time and subjective health and well-being.

Adult males (n = 13,891) from an Australian longitudinal men’s health study were classified using latent class analysis. Conditional growth mixture modelling was conducted at three timepoints.

Three masculinity segments were identified based on masculine norm conformity: traditional self-reliant, traditional bravado and modern status. All segments had likely customer experience of vulnerability. Over time, the likely experience was temporary for the modern status segment but prolonged for the traditional self-reliant and traditional bravado segments. The traditional self-reliant segment had low subjective health and low overall well-being over time.

Practitioners can tailor services to gender norm segments, enabling self-reliant men to provide expertise and use the “Status” norm to reach all masculinity segments.

The study of customer vulnerability in a group usually considered privileged identifies differential temporal experiences based on gender norms. The study confirms customer vulnerability is temporal in nature; customer vulnerability changes over time from likely to actual for self-reliant men.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of masculine identity in generating value destruction and diminished well-being in a preventative health service.

This research used five focus groups with 39 Australian men aged between 50 and 74 years. Men’s participation in the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program informed the sample frame. In total, 12 Jungian male archetypes were used to identify different masculine identities.

Thematic analysis of the data revealed three themes of masculinity that explain why men destroy value by avoiding the use of a preventative health services including: rejection of the service reduces consumer disempowerment and emasculation, active rejection of resources creates positive agency and suppressing negative self-conscious emotions protects the self.

Limitations include the single context of bowel cancer screening. Future research could investigate value destruction in other preventative health contexts such as testicular cancer screening, sexual health screening and drug abuse.

Practical implications include fostering consumer empowerment when accessing services, developing consumer resources to create positive agency and boosting positive self-conscious emotions by promoting positive social norms.

This research is the first known study to explore how value is destroyed in men’s preventative health using the perspective of gender identity. This research also is the first to explore value destruction as an emotion regulation strategy.

Traditional masculinity ideologies dictate men should be tough, self-reliant and display restrictive emotionality. Men who seek mental health services, a behavior that typically involves expressing feelings and showing dependence, are often subject to stigma. The purpose of the study is to examine the gendered perceptions of men who seek help for mental health concerns, as well as how masculine advertisements moderate these perceptions.

After viewing either masculine or control advertisements, participants read descriptions of men who sought help for psychological or physical symptoms and provided masculinity ratings in a task ostensibly unrelated to the advertisements.

Across two experiments, participants perceived the male target who sought help for psychological symptoms, a behavior incongruent with the traditional masculinity ideologies, as less masculine than his counterpart seeking help for physical symptoms. Importantly, exposure to masculine advertisements attenuated the gendered perceptions for psychological help-seeking: viewing masculine advertisements led participants to deliberately reflect on society’s expectations for men to be physically masculine and tough and the extent to which men should conform to these standards. These reflections counteract the effect of stigma on the gendered perceptions of men seeking help for mental health concerns.

The representation of men as masculine and rugged in advertisements is believed to contribute to public perceptions of men seeking help for mental health concerns. Yet the current research demonstrates an unexpected effect of viewing masculine advertisements in attenuating the gendered perceptions of men’s help-seeking.

The purpose of this paper is to examine female creatives' perceptions as to why there are so few women working as creatives (art directors, copywriters, and creative directors) in advertising.

Interviews with 21 female creatives provided insights into reasons for underrepresentation. Inductive coding was used to allow themes and categories to emerge from the data. A social constructionist interpretation was used.

Since both gender and creativity are socially constructed, doing gender in the masculine creative department impeded progress and job satisfaction for women. Because women were held accountable both to the norms of the masculine field and to the norms of femininity, their performance suffered as they tried to succeed in an inequitable system.

This paper examines how being a woman operating within a masculine paradigm might be especially difficult in creative fields. Because creativity is constructed based on mostly male gatekeepers using masculinity as a model, women are devalued and unable to influence the field of gatekeepers.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the customary emphasis on masculine values in top management teams (TMTs) and offer a cultural feminist approach to improving women's participation in leadership roles in organisations.

The paper builds on the theory of diversity and “difference”, instead of “sameness”, to demonstrate the relationship between feminine values, team member diversity, and team effectiveness. The paper develops a three‐tier approach to making better use of gender diversity in TMTs: unravel masculine hegemony in the workplace; create awareness of distinct values offered by women as team members and team leaders; and progress team diversity from the customary token representation to gender inclusive team structures and routines.

The paper suggests that TMTs benefit when learning to accommodate and integrate feminine values, along with masculine values, into an inclusive work culture that enhances teams’ performing capacities.

Token representation is only one dimension of gendered disadvantage. Several complex forms of gendered disadvantage reside at macro‐level or extra‐organisational layers of life. Therefore, tackling masculine hegemony should involve a multilevel approach that tackles gendered disadvantage in domains as wide as work, organisation, and society.

Through the three‐tier framework for managing diversity in TMTs, the paper offers a practical way forward, moving beyond the current functional‐structured approach towards TMTs.

The paper argues that conventional diversity management practices remain influenced by a hegemonic masculine approach towards increasing women's participation in employment. Furthermore, a narrow emphasis on “sameness” instead of “diversity” of women and men reinforces male hegemony, contributing to the perpetuation of low numbers of women in TMTs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the representation of male entrepreneurs in the media has changed in the after-effects of the #metoo movement.

The authors perform a discourse analysis and visual analysis of how male entrepreneurs in the Swedish business magazine Affärsvärlden are represented. A centre-margin analysis is laid out, focusing on who and what constitutes (or endeavours to constitute) the legitimate male entrepreneur.

The results of the analysis show that male entrepreneurs are represented with different discursive success factors. These success factors are linked to a driven personality, a high-status leisure activity, a supportive but invisible family, a focus on financial measures and a global outlook. Marginally, there has been a change towards more humbleness, and a shift from financial growth to turnover, in the representation of entrepreneurial masculinities after the #metoo movement.

To bring about a more equal norm regarding male entrepreneurial identity, more space and attention must be given in the media to the subordinate masculinities of entrepreneurs.

Previous gender research on entrepreneurship has, to a large extent, focussed on female entrepreneurs and research focussed on male entrepreneurs is conspicuous in its absence. However, the male entrepreneur, just like the female entrepreneur, needs to relate to, be compared with and adapt to a norm of how the ideal entrepreneur should be. Therefore, it is important to establish and illuminate who the male entrepreneur is assumed to be, to better understand and question that role.

Although men's studies is no longer a novelty on college campuses, it can still raise some bewildered eyebrows and prompt a few explosive reactions. Recently, on a national computer bulletin board used by reference librarians, a request for journals, articles, and books “that analyze drama from a male/masculine perspective” touched off considerable crossfire among respondents. Beneath the hostilities, however, were serious questions and understandable confusions about the topic of men's studies. These concerns suggest that some clarifications concerning the new men's studies might be useful.

Interventions to support gender equality in organisations are often unsuccessful. Stakeholders disagree about the causes and problem definition of gender equality or pay lip service to the principle of gender equality, but fail to implement gender equality in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine participatory modelling as an intervention method to support stakeholders in: reaching a shared problem definition and analysis of gender inequality; and identifying and implementing policies to tackle gender inequality.

The authors apply participatory modelling in case studies on impediments to women’s careers in two Dutch universities.

This study shows that participatory modelling supported stakeholders’ identification of the self-reinforcing feedback processes of masculinity of norms, visibility of women and networking of women and the interrelatedness between these processes. Causal loop diagrams visualise how the feedback processes are interrelated and can stabilise or reinforce themselves. Moreover, they allow for the identification of possible interventions.

Further testing of the causal loop diagrams by quantifying the stocks and the flows would validate the feedback processes and the estimated effects of possible interventions.

The integration of the knowledge of researchers and stakeholders in a causal loop diagram supported learning about the issue of gender inequality, hereby contributing to transformative change on gender equality.

The originality of the paper lies in the application of participatory modelling in interventions to support gender equality.

There is a dearth of studies exploring the intersection of gender and disability within entrepreneurship research. This is despite women’s entrepreneurship research encouraging an expansion of the research questions asked and approaches taken. As a contribution to this debate, the purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of gender and disability as social categorizations which can shape entrepreneurial opportunities and experiences for disabled women entrepreneurs.

The paper offers an intersectional conceptual lens for the study of disabled women entrepreneurs to explore a concern for a particular social group – women – at a neglected point of intersection – disability – within the social setting of entrepreneurship. Guided by the research question (how can gender and feminist disability theory contribute to the development of an intersectional theoretical lens for future entrepreneurship research?), the potential for new theoretical insights to emerge in the entrepreneurship field is identified.

Through a gender and disability intersectional lens for entrepreneurship research, four theoretical synergies between gender and disability research are identified: the economic rationale; flexibility, individualism and meritocracy; and social and human capital. In addition to the theoretical synergies, the paper highlights three theoretical variances: the anomalous body and bodily variation; sexuality, beauty and appearance; and multiple experiences of care as potentially generative areas for women’s entrepreneurship research. The paper identifies new directions for future gender, disability and entrepreneurship research by outlining research questions for each synergy and variance which draw attention to disabled women entrepreneurs’ experiences of choice and control within and across different spaces and processes of entrepreneuring.

The conceptual intersectional lens offered to study disabled women’s entrepreneurship highlights new directions for exploring experiences of entrepreneuring at the intersection of disability and gender. The paper brings disability into view as a social category that should be of concern to feminist entrepreneurship researchers by surfacing different dimensions of experience to those currently explored. Through the new directions outlined, future research can further disrupt the prevailing discourse of individualism and meritocracy that perpetuates success as an individual’s responsibility, and instead offer the potential for richer understandings of entrepreneuring which has a gender and disability consciousness.

This study aims to explore the impact of board size, board gender diversity and federation age on the likelihood of having a female chair in National Sports Federations (NSF).

A quantitative methodology compares 300 sports boards in five countries (Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the UK), using data collected from NSF’s websites.

The board size and federation age have no significant impact on having a female board chair when the countries and the percentage of female directors are included in the model. When the number of women is measured in absolute value rather than in relative terms, the only variable that predicts a woman chair is the country. When the model does not include country differences, the percentage of female directors is key in predicting a chairwoman, and when the number of women is used as a variable instead of the percentage, a board’s smaller size increases the odds of having a chairwoman.

There are some limitations to this study which we believe provide useful directions for future research. Firstly, the authors have not considered the role of gender typing in sports activities which explains the extent that women participate in specific sports (Sobal and Milgrim, 2019) and the related perception of such sports in society. The social representation of sports activities classified as masculine, feminine or gender-neutral can hypothetically influence women’s access to that specific federations’s leadership. The authors included the country factor only partially, as a control variable, as the social representation of sports usually goes beyond national boundaries.

This study has implications for sport policymakers and stakeholders, and for institutions such as the IOC or the European Union that implement equality policies. If the aim is to increase female presence in the highest position of a sports board and to achieve gender equality more generally, other policies need to be implemented alongside gender quotas for the sports boards, namely, those specifically related to the recruitment and selection of the sports board chairs (Mikkonen et al., 2021). For example, given the implications of critical mass and its ability to increase more female’s engagement then the role of existing chairs acting as mentors and taking initiative in this objective may be warranted. Furthermore, attention should be paid to the existing gender portfolio of each board and its subsequent influence on recruiting a female chair, regardless of the organization’s age. Knoppers et al. (2021) concluded that resistance to gender balance by board members is often related to discriminatory discourses against women. The normalization of the discourses of meritocracy, neoliberalism, silence/passivity about the responsibility of structures and an artificial defence of diversity emphasise that equality should not only be determined by women (Knoppers et al., 2021).

When countries are included in the model, the results suggest that the social representation of a female board member is different from that of a female board chair.

The originality of the study is that it shows the factors that constrain women taking up a chair position on NSFs. Theoretically, it contributes to existing literature by demonstrating how a critical mass of females on boards may also extend to the higher and most powerful position of chair.