1

Gender & Organizations – Concepts & Definitions

Gender

1. Biological determinism: associated with Sigmund Freud who argues that biology is destiny.

2. Feminisms: a term used to convey the diversity within feminist theoretical and political views on the oppression of women.

3. Gender Freedom: refers to the choice to change one’s appearance and behaviour despite the sex into which one was born.

4. Gender: usually refers to the binary of male and female appearance and behaviour. The concept of “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987), frames gender as malleable, variable, and changing rather than natural, essential and fixed. Organizations are gendered which means that 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 (see Acker, 146)

5. Gender neutrality: a claim of objectivity in hegemonic research on organizations and management, most of which ignores gender.

6. Gender-based Analysis (GBA) is a qualitative and quantitative method used to eliminate gender-bias problems and contribute to a better understanding of women’s health, gender and development, governmental social welfare policies, etc

7. Glass Ceiling: an invisible barrier and a form of gender-based discrimination that limits the advancement of women and minorities, particularly common in professions such as business, engineering and politics.

8. Hegemony: the construction and imposition of unified thinking that serves the interests of dominant groups, homogenizes difference, and disadvantages non-dominant groups. In other words, it is a word that describes power relations and domination of one group over another. Hegemonic is the adjective.

9. Masculinity Studies: just as Women’s Studies explains how femininity is social constructed historically and culturally, Masculinity Studies seeks to understand masculinity as a social construct.

10. Masculinity: refers to the social and cultural process which identifies certain interests and behaviour to bodies with male genitalia.

11.Performativity: the theory that gender is a performance-- we “do” gender. This is a term associated with American theorist Judith Butler referring to gender as existing only in its repetition; gender is performed and thus created; it is not innate.

12. Pink Ghetto: refers to the over-representation of women in low income, low status clerical jobs.

13. Second-Wave: refers to the feminist social movement of the 60s and 70s 14. Sex/Gender Oppression: refers to theoretical and research-based scholarship which

suggests that women are positioned as second-class citizens, or the Other, in a gender hierarchy which supports and reproduces male power, privilege and dominance.

2

15. Sex power differential: coined by Joan Acker and van Houten to describe how the sexual division of labour in organizations (see lecture January 12th)

16. Sexualed: having meaning in relation to sexuality rather than necessarily specifically sexualized (Hearn, Handbook: 300)

17. Social Constructionism: the nurture part of the nature/nurture binary; French feminist Simone de Beauvoir famously argued that “woman is made, not born.” In other words, societal expectations mold gender identity

18. Social Man: a biological female who acts as a social man in organizations (Acker, 139)19. Third- Wave: refers to a new generation of feminist thought around sexuality and

race and is usually dated from the late 80s or early 90s20. Ungendering: A process by which gender is ignored despite its significance in

understanding a specific situation; for example, in the article ‘The Ultimate Rape Victim’ Jane Doe argues that the fact that overwhelmingly men rape women has been altered in rhetoric designed to prevent government men from being offended.

Postmodernism

21. Binarism: a system of though in which one concept is defined by contrasting it with its opposite (e.g. male/female) and their differences are used to elevate one over the other

22. Deconstruction: analysis that takes apart socially constructed categories as a way of seeing how a particular world is constructed

23. Discourse: a set of assumptions, socially shared and often unconscious, reflected in language, that positions people who speak within them, and frame knowledge; groups of statements which structure the way a thing is thought and the way we act based on that thinking.

24. Postmodern conditions: refers to the age we are living in which involves mass communications, globalization, fixation on celebrity culture and mass consumerism.

25. Power: a relational force, not a fixed entity that operates in all interactions; while it can be oppressive, power can also be enabling

26. Privilege: Often so pervasive and accepted as to be invisible, privilege refers to entitlement based on gender, class, race, ability and geo-political location.

27. Subjectivity: the contingent and variable sense of self, conscious and unconscious, both as actor and acted upon.

28. Woman: a contested category complicated by geo-political location, race, class, sexuality and the challenges to gender as a simple binary of male/female

Intersectionality

29. Additive Formula: adding social categories such as race, ability and glass to gender without revisioning how these categories change gendered experience.

30. Ageism: discrimination based on a person’s age.

3

31. Class analysis: locates power and conflict in the historical organization of economics and in social class (Janine Brodie)

32. Common Sense Racism: a concept associated with Himani Bannerji to indicate how normalized everyday discrimination against people of colour has become.

33. Compulsory Able-Bodiedness: attributed to cultural critic Robert McCruer; an extension of Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality referring to the pressure to conform to functional body norms and how dominant culture positions or talks about disability as catastrophic.

34. Inequality regimes: a term coined by Joan Acker in her 2006 book Class Questions, Feminist Answers in which she argues that organizations are a key mechanism by which social inequalities are created.

35. Intersectionality: a concept developed by socialist feminism but not used widely until the 1990s to refer to how race and class complicates gender essentialism.

36. Racialized Others: In Canada, for example, this refers to a group or nation of people who are seen as different from and inferior to the mainstream.

37. Unearned Advantage: refers to how various kinds of privilege are bestowed upon members of society, such as white skin privilege (see Peggy McIntosh)

Political Terms38. Neo-liberalism: a governmental ideology that erases structural disadvantage,

pathologizes dependence on the state and constructs equality-seeking movements as antithetical to a new public good defined in terms of individual responsibility; a political philosophy which supports market-based governance decisions which erode Canada’s welfare state politics.

39. Politics: ``Who gets what, when, and how`` (Harold Lasswell)40. Power To: power to do something: to meet individual and collective goals, reach

political consensus, exercise democratic rights (Janine Brodie)41. Power Over: focus on the institutions and processes that hold regimes of inequality in

place; forces outside our control that privilege some groups and constrain and silence others (Janine Brodie)