Gendering of organizations

Gender Issues

Management means the process of designing and maintaining an environment in which individuals, working together in groups, efficiently accomplish selected aims. Gender does neither mean 'women' nor 'feminine. Gender related issues are here to rock the world and its impacts are being felt in all organizations in terms of gender related biases, discrimination, sexual harassment, Organizational conflicts etc. 

These issues need to be addressed properly otherwise can disturb the entire work culture smooth functioning of the organisation. Achieving gender equity needs restitution of employees towards gender differences through various workshops, lectures, conferences, role playing etc., so that these differences are perceived as strengths of organisation rather than an obstacle.

Are organizations gendered?

Taylor scientific management assumed that workers were not gendered. Scholarship on bureaucracy focused on the impersonal, legal-rational aspects of organizations which were supposed to be genderless. Human relations approach focused on “emotions”, but neglected gender and sex. We will focus on

• women and power in corporations (Rosabeth Moss Kanter)
• the gender of organizations (Joan Acker)
• women workers in China (Ching Kwan Lee)

Feminist organizational research since the 1970s:  Bureaucratic organizations, hierarchies, job definitions, norms of worker and manager conduct, the delivery of services, and the organization of labor in production are all gendered.

• Women and power in organizations
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter studied “power and powerlessness in organizations”

Where does power come from in organizations?

Importance of informal social networks (a point made by the Human Relations school): alliances with sponsors, peers, subordinates 

1. People who have authority without system power are powerless.
2. If people feel powerless, they concentrate their power needs on those over whom they have authority. 
3. Stereotypes about women managers  “bossy women managers”

Kanter: women are treated as “tokens”, or “symbols” in organizations rather than as individuals their actions and behavior are always under scrutiny and suspicion Women are in a “no-win” situation: women managers are expected to act like men; 

1. if they don’t, they are seen as inadequate for the  job. 
2. if they act too much like men, they are accused of violating their gender identity

Solution according to Kanter: 

1. Number of men and women in organizations should be equal for women to have real power
2. How can Moss Kanter be criticized? What are some other perspectives?
3. Moss Kanter and other early feminist organization scholars considered bureaucracies to be gender-neutral, and proposed gender as an additive category 
4. Moss Kanter: bureaucratic organizations are gender-neutral, but tokenism towards women resulted in their powerlessness
5. Ressner: a dual organizational structure consisting of bureaucratic power (which is gender neutral) and patriarchy (male power)

A radical feminist approach which challenges Moss Kanter and Ressner:

• Ferguson: bureaucracy exemplifies oppressive male power. 
• Bureaucracies “feminize” their clients and workers.

In order to overcome this, women should develop non-bureaucratic feminist organizations based on participatory, bottom-up democratic “female” values 

Organizations are gendered processes: “Advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine.”

Gendering of organizations

1. Constructions of divisions along lines of gender (e.g. division of labor, of physical space, of skilled versus unskilled work)
2. Construction of symbols and images that explain, express, reinforce, or sometimes oppose those divisions (e.g. notions of masculinity and femininity constructed in language, ideology, popular culture, etc.)
3. Interactions between women and men, women and women, men and men, that enact dominance and submission (e.g. conversation patterns between men and women)
4. The above processes produce gendered components of individual identity (e.g. consciousness of the existence of the above three aspects of gender, such as, choice of appropriate work, language use, clothing, and presentation of self as a gendered member of an organization)
5. Gender is a constitutive element of the organizational logic (exemplified in work rules, labor contracts, job evaluations, etc.) Joan Acker gives an example about job evaluations are constructed by management

Work and Gender

We cannot separate our social identify from our sex and gender. Gutex (1985) has identified three significant influences of gender in the workplace.

1. Sex segregation of work: Most of the employed women in USA and elsewhere work in clinical work or less prestigious professions, and their work is less diverse than that of women
2. Differences in power, states and prestige: men typically hold jobs with more of these characteristics;
3. Work conditions wait person characteristics that emphasize the effect of gender: women’s job usually have more pleasant working conditions and emphasize appearance more than men’s.

Gendering of job evaluations

1. Jobs are separate from people (a set of tasks, competencies and responsibilities)
2. Jobs are located in a hierarchy, which is, again, separate from people
3. Organizational logic assumes a congruence between responsibility, job complexity, and hierarchical position
4. In organizational logic, both jobs and hierarchies are abstract categories that have no occupants, no human bodies, no gender. However, an abstract job can exist, can be  transformed into a concrete instance, only if there is a worker.
5. The closest the disembodied worker doing the abstract job comes to a real worker is the male worker whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another woman takes care of his personal needs and his children.
6. The woman worker, assumed to have legitimate obligations other than those required by the job, did not fit with the abstract job. A job is thus a gendered concept.  “"A job" already contains the gender-based division of labor and the separation between the public and the private sphere. The concept of "a job" assumes a particular gendered organization of domestic life and social production”
7. Hierarchies are also gendered. Highest positions in a hierarchy are supposed to be filled by people who are “suitable” to take the responsibilities described in the job description.
8. The assumption of gender-neutrality also assumes that bodiless workers have no sexuality, emotions and do not procreate. Thus, men’s and women’s sexualities are controlled or fostered in different ways in bureaucratic organizations.  hegemonic masculinity is expected of managerial men, sexualization of certain jobs filled by women
9. The positing of bodiless, sexless jobs (and hence of job evaluations – recall Richard Edwards) is also used as a mechanism for labor control 
10. Rational-technical and seemingly gender-neutral labor control mechanisms are used to create gendered organizations, women's labor is controlled, women are excluded from certain jobs, or they are oppressed in certain positions within bureaucratic hierarchies
11. How can we think of the gendering of organizations in the context of manufacturing jobs? Case of the “South China Miracle” workshop of the world
12. Most factories are owned by Hong Kong businessmen; many of them are subcontractors for Western companies, Young migrant men and women from different regions of China work in factories in South China 
13. Ching Kwan Lee’s ethnography of two factories in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. In both, women constitute the majority of production workers, and supervisors are men. 
• Shenzhen: migrant single workers, very low wages
• Hong Kong: middle aged, working mothers

Two factory regimes

Ching Kwan Lee observed two different “factory regimes” (production politics) in Shenzhen and Hong Kong

1. A regime: an apparatus of domination and a site of local resistance
2. Shenzhen: localistic despotism
3. Hong Kong: familial hegemony

Localistic despotism

1. Overt and very strict labor control in the Shenzhen factory: physical controls, timed labor, deduction of wages for punishment
2. Localistic ties among workers
3. Control over young women as “maiden workers”
4. Why did women endure this situation?

Labor market in Shenzhen

1. Localistic networks are important to find jobs and to survive in the factories
2. Migrant workers belong to the “floating population” of nearly 100 million in China labor surplus
3. Rural origins, youth, lack of industrial work experience
4. Management legitimizes strict labor control

Familial hegemony

1. Covert labor control, some degree of autonomy for workers: few physical controls, games, chatter
2. Use of familial nicknaming among workers
3. Management acknowledgment of women’s motherly responsibilities
4. Matron workers: management saw these women’s work as secondary to their familial responsibilities, women workers also internalized their position in the factory vis-à-vis men, Shop floor autonomy allowed management to utilize experienced women’s labor more

Labor market in Hong Kong

1. Tight labor market with limited number of experienced workers
2. Long company tenure of workers
3. Women workers relied on relatives for family and childcare

The Causes of gender Difference

1. As political and sociological reasons: Man being superior physically assigned itself the various role of decision making, supporting family and safeguarding it slowly emerged more powerful in every aspect and started dominating women and build a system more suited to its own interest and this has carried on since long.
2. As psychological reason: Chodorow, Horrigan; Kellov suggest that as children grow the male is able to objectify and control his environment, and to define himself as separate from the world around him. The female on the other hand defines herself in relation to world around her, or as part of a community, in a subjective environment.
3. Sex role behaviour has changed radically over the past few decades. Exposure of women as an outcome of education, media revolution and modernization of culture and society has remarkable changed perception of women about her from limiting herself to household chores to woman of substances, able to storm the world. This new outlook has created some conflict in society and organisation are also falling its victim.
4. As Economic Reason: Prior to industrial revolution, women in man societies enjoyed equal status performing as an equal economic entity performing valuable work in their homes and on their lands. Though the work of women was regraded by gender, but highly valued for its vital contribution to family. While women ran their home, bore children and worked in fields, their male counterparts would fan, hunt, trap animals and the like and thus dependent upon efforts of each other. But with the industrialization, it was largely men who moved into wage-based economy.

Organization Conflicts and its Causes

1.  Communication Barriers between Women and Men
2. Women as Weaker Sex
3. Problem of Compatibility between business and family
4. Sexual Harassment
5. How to tackle the issue with professional resistance from both men and women in the organisation.

How to Manage Gender Issue

1. Building a Shared Vision - organisation must share their vision with every employee and their response and understanding of the vision must be taken onto consideration before putting vision onto action.
2. A Gender-Sensitive Working Environment - building an environment which is sensitive to the needs of all the members working in the organisation should be such that allow all persons to carry out their work. Satisfactorily and permit each members’ qualities to be recognized, encouraged and harnessed to the betterment of the organisation.
3. Achieving Gender Equality - Carry out employee surveys to obtain regular feedback from employees on policies to achieve gender equity and Implement gender awareness training Programmes.
4. Ensuring gender sensitive and equitable recruitment and selection policy - Prepare gender-sensitive job descriptions and specifications. Ensure that all staff responsible for recruitment is committed to gender equity.
5. Equitable Remuneration - Adjust pay rates so that jobs of equal value to the organisation are paid equally
6. Performance Appraisal to be fair - Gender review of all management and procedural manuals, to ensure that gender biases in language and procedure are removed and gender issues are highlighted including those for performance appraisal and monitoring, to ensure that women’s and men’s different perceptions and priorities are reflected.
7. Helping women in ensuring balance in work and family life.