gender on the agenda: male advantage in organizations

Gender on the Agenda: Male Advantage in OrganizationsThe Promise and the Price: The Struggle for Equal Opportunity in Women's Employment. byClare Burton; In the Way of Women: Men's Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations. byCynthia Cockburn; Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions. by Sophie WatsonReview by: Ronnie J. SteinbergContemporary Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 5 (Sep., 1992), pp. 576-581Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2075532 .

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wards academic success and not gender- linked interactional styles.

In sum, Bonner and McIlwee and Robinson foster our understanding about how sex segregation is reproduced in the workplace. Although women have clearly gained access to some of the more elite professions, more subtle (but no less insidious) barriers remain. The evidence suggests that the kind of blatant hostility Bonner's female medical students encountered at the turn of the century may

have evolved into the more subtle institution- alized antagonism that McIlwee and Robin- son's engineers experienced. Although encoun- tering less overt discrimination, women must still contend with gendered professional institutions. Only when this more subtle discrimination is eliminated from the professional workplace will the barriers to women's full integration into the American occupational structure come tumbling down.

Gender on the Agenda: Male Advantage in Organizations

RONNIE J. STEINBERG Temple University

The Promise and the Price: The Struggle for Equal Opportunity in Women's Employment, by Clare Burton. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991. 181 pp. $18.95 paper. ISBN: 0-04-442286-5.

In the Way of Women: Men's Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations, by Cynthia Cockburn. Ithaca: ILR Press, 1991. 264 pp. $36.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-87546-700-8. $16.95 paper. ISBN: 0-87546-701-6.

Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, edited by Sophie Watson. London: Verso, 1990. 243 pp. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-86091-255-8. $17.95 paper. ISBN: 0-86091-970-6.

What do we mean empirically when we say that work organizations are male institutions? At the simplest level, we mean that men dominate organizational positions with the power to make decisions that influence the character and outcomes of the organization as a whole. But we also mean that, regardless of whether the incumbent of a position is male or female, "the present arrangements in work organizations represent the cumulative out- come of a series of bargains and compromises . . . [in which] women have not played a significant or influential part" (Burton, p. 3; see also Acker 1989). This is what Burton calls "the mobilization of masculine bias" (p. 14).

Masculine values are at the foundation of informal and formal organizational structures. Masculine styles of authority are legitimated by reliance on bureaucratic and hierarchical organizational forms. Images of masculinity and assumptions about the gendered division

of labor organize institutional practices and expectations about work performance. In- deed, as Cockburn brought to our attention in her contemporary classic, Brothers (1983), for men, work is not just about earning a paycheck but also about constructing a masculine identity. If women can perform male work competently, she argues, then the men performing these jobs are not real men.

Regardless of their location in the organizational hierarchy, men have a vested interest in maintaining their gendered advantages. Men not just are passive recipients of organizational advantages but also actively recreate their dominance every day. They maintain organizational arrangements and institutional policies that appear to be gender neutral, but that, in fact, advantage men. They are comfortable with styles of social interaction that sustain masculine and femi- nine identities even as they deny doing so. And, when actually faced with explicit



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pressure from women to institute change, as the books under review attest, men, in most instances, resist, undercut, and dilute reforms that would redistribute power.

These three books examine the gendered character of social arrangements and power relations in government and the private sector. The intellectual issue that ties them together is the limits and possibilities of fully integrating women into historically male institutions. The Watson and Burton collec- tions grow out of the experience of Australian feminist academics and activists to infiltrate government bureaucracies with the explicit goal of creating public policies consistent with feminist objectives. The Cockburn study focuses on four British organizations with an eye to uncovering the forms of male resistance to women's equal employment. To- gether these books offer an illuminating and richly textured account of the dilemmas women face in trying to move beyond symbolic gestures to achieve material change within institutions actively structured to deter their efforts.

Almost twenty years ago, many Australian feminists consciously developed a strategy for working inside the government and carried out a well-orchestrated campaign to achieve that end. Those "femocrats," as they came to be called, were not only interested in affecting traditional women's issues but also wanted to shape such issues as education funding and curriculum, tax and other fiscal policies, and economic development priori- ties. In 1973, Prime Minister Whitlam of the Labour party appointed an Advisor on Women's Affairs reporting directly to his office, choosing a well-known tutor in philosophy with ties to a radical feminist organization. Many other appointments fol- lowed in the federal bureaucracy and in most of the six Australian states. Even when the Labour party lost power (in the federal government between 1975 and 1983), all was not lost. Between 1975 and 1977, ten new women's units were introduced in major ministries. In 1977 the Advisor on Women's Affairs was downgraded, but in 1983, with the reelection of the Labour party, the femocrats once again became a powerful force. The political fortunes of femocrats at the state level also ebbed and flowed over this twenty-year period, yet at no point was it politically possible to rid government bureau-

cracies of the femocrat influence. In no country (except perhaps Canada) have avowed feminists assumed such a wide range of high-ranking policy-making positions.

The femocrat strategy has not been uni- formly embraced within the wider feminist community, however. Many have charged that feminists working within the state are forced, out of necessity, to dilute the demands of grass-roots feminists. Playing the State, a collection of original essays edited by Sophie Watson, provides empirical information with which it is possible to address this debate in the Australian context. On balance, the femocrat strategy is viewed as effective. Hester Eisenstein, for example, offers a compelling first-person account of the implementation of equal employment opportunity (EEO) legislation in the Department of Education in the state of New South Wales. After much negotiation and compromise, a resistant government unit crafts an innovative affirmative action plan that removes important barriers to moving women teachers into administrative positions. Chris Westwood, a feminist theater activist, recounts the ways in which she and a feminist insider funded a series of innovative projects in women's theater. The list of accomplishments that emerges from the case material is impressive, especially the far-reaching efforts to imple- ment EEO in the public and private sectors and the financial support received by grass- roots feminists in the women's health and the battered women's movements, even those with programs built from radical feminist principles. To an American feminist working in these policy arenas since 1980, it goes well beyond anything we could hope to attain.

Only two major criticisms are leveled against femocrats. First, as elite white women, they are said to have a limited understanding of the oppression that migrant and aboriginal women suffer. The femocrats also appear to embrace a model of sex equality that emphasizes standards of same- ness, which carries the risk of asking women to conform to male standards without recog- nition of the different social realities men and women face. At the same time, several chapters suggest that grass-roots feminists failed to organize effectively to take advantage of available governmental resources and that migrant and aboriginal women benefited from government-sponsored training, EEO,



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and health programs, as well as direct funding to unions for women's programs. These debates within the feminist movement will come as no surprise to U.S. feminists. What is unique to Australia is the degree to which feminists contribute to shaping the terms of debate and the policy proposals behind the scenes.

Playing the State also devotes considerable attention to the inadequacies of existing feminist theories of the state. Judith Allen correctly criticizes theories for their treatment of the state as disembodied, abstract, and unitary. In these formulations, she remarks, " 'The state' is too blunt an instrument to be of much assistance (beyond generalizations) in explanations, analyses, or the design of workable strategies" (Watson, p. 22). In- stead, according to Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, the state needs to be viewed as a historical product in which interests and claims are constructed and modified under differing structural and political conditions. The Australian government has been some- what flexible with respect to feminist demands, even as it has modified and redefined them. It is, as Pringle and Watson note, "an erratic beast" (Watson, p. 239). Given the intellectual feminist debate that shaped this volume, I was disappointed that the essays spent so little time examining the state as a male institution and its implications for a femocrat strategy, because the idea of gendered institutions is well accepted among Australian sociologists. Indeed, Australian feminist sociologists have been describing institutions as gendered and analyzing its implications for over a decade. While it is clear that the collection's contributors do not view government as an arena in which feminists are able to translate their platforms automatically into policies and programs, the volume fails to address in any systematic, empirical way where government acceptance ends and resistance begins. Although this is a good collection, in my judgment, two other books on the femocrat strategy and political reform in Australia address this concern more effectively (see Franzway, Court, and Connell 1989; Eisenstein 1991). The two other books under review also examine this issue more successfully.

The Promise and the Price is a collection of recent essays by Australian sociologist and femocrat Clare Burton examining why EEO

programs have not succeeded in integrating women into work organizations. These essays focus on identifying those aspects of social arrangements and personnel practices that devalue women in the workplace. In her position as Director of Equal Opportunity in Public Employment in New South Wales, Burton has more than a passing interest in understanding how organizations work and how their gendered character is maintained. The essays provide a goldmine of specific case material on the direct and indirect mechanisms through which male advantage is maintained in work organizations, tracing with insight and sophistication how gender operates "as a structuring principle within work organizations" (Burton, p. vii).

The collection begins with an overview of the cultural expression of masculinity in the work organization, building not only on insights from her experience and the feminist sociological literature but also on the classic work of Theodore Caplow (1954) and Everett Hughes (1944) on "homosociability" and its implications for a fear of EEO. In this and in the next chapter she points to the prevalence of masculine protection strategies among individuals and to the mobilization of masculine bias in such organizational practices as the definition of merit and the concept of skill. Although Burton acknowledges that men resist the full integration of women in the workplace, her concern, in the remainder of the essays, is less with the masculine protection strategies than with the institutional practices that protect the vested interests of men and sustain gendered relations. Through- out the collection as well, she explores the implications of her analysis of organizations for the development of effective EEO policy, arguing that the policy emphasis of redistrib- uting people among seemingly neutral and rigid abstractions called jobs is a misguided approach to EEO, likely to have limited effectiveness (p. 27).

Burton suggests that there is a "gender- structuring" of organizations that affects "the form and character of the internal labor market," allocation practices, the differential treatment of men and women in positions, and the consequences of their experiences on their aspirations (p. 30). She relies on, but goes far beyond, the path-breaking work of Kanter (1977) in that she suggests that EEO will not work as long as the gendered



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character of institutional practices and organizational culture remain invisible and unmodi- fied. I concur on the basis of fifteen years of research and activism on affirmative action and compensation policies. Integrating women into male institutions cannot be reduced to majority X's and minority O's.

The essays discuss promotion and compensation practices, performance appraisal procedures and merit policies, and proposals for work reorganization and job redesign. Her essays not only identify the ways in which gender is reproduced in these practices but also include specific guidelines for building EEO principles into modified personnel procedures. Her analyses have relevance for work organizations in all advanced capitalist democracies.

The final section, "Valuing Women's Work," provides an excellent overview of gender bias in job evaluation and in performance appraisal. I recommend it to anyone interested in compensation practices or pay equity policies. Unlike most analysts of pay equity, Burton is appropriately skeptical of the Australian strategy of using their national industry wage boards as a route for achieving pay equity. Her assessment of its limitations is a welcome corrective to the misinformation in the United States about Australian accomplishments in this policy area. The Promise and the Price illustrates well that active engagement in the policy arena is fully compatible with good scholarship. By placing gender at the center of her analysis, Burton takes the American literature on the sociology of the labor market and work organizations farther than we have.

In the Way of Women: Men's Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations is British feminist sociologist Cynthia Cockburn's latest study of gender relations in the workplace. She cleverly chooses four very different organizations-a private retail firm, a department within a government bureaucracy, a local elected body, and a trade union. Each organization expressed a commitment to integrating women that went far beyond what was required by law, but none of the organizations achieved very much. The retail firm, for example, attempted to promote women as retail store managers. Manage- ment in the central office had historically been drawn from the national pool of store managers. Those familiar with the work of

Strober and Arnold (1987) on bank tellers and Reskin and Roos (1990) on the general process of resegregation will not be surprised to learn that store manager ceased to be a promotion path to the central office once women began to enter its ranks.

In addition, EEO efforts were defined in the narrowest possible terms as facilitating promotion of women into historically male managerial positions. As a few white, privileged women were promoted, many of the working-class and minority women who performed historically female work were laid off or put on part-time work and temporary contracts. Only the company equality officer understood the contradictory nature of the company policies, but was unable to do anything about it. Elite women were then resented for the limited policies of management, providing a powerful wedge among women who might organize for more compre- hensive organizational transformation.

Cockburn differentiates between the "short" and the "long" agenda in equalizing the positions of women and men. Organizations, she finds, always have a short agenda, "the minimum position supported by top management" (p. 216). The long agenda includes pay equity and sexual harassment but goes farther to include transforming the gendered character of organizational practices and culture. It also includes a sensitivity to the politics of difference, whether on the basis of race and ethnicity or of sexual preference. Obviously, white, privileged, and heterosex- ual women are easier to integrate than are women of other races, classes, and sexual preference.

But the short agenda was not only supported by top management: "The majority of men . . . were unmistakably engaged in a damage-limitation exercise, holding 'equal opps' to its shortest possible agenda" (p. 216). Like Burton, Cockburn documents direct and indirect resistance strategies perpe- trated by men to maintain male advantage. Union women who became local officers in a female-dominated union "reported being sys- tematically undermined by male colleagues, employers, lay representatives and members" (p. 121). They were verbally intimidated, contradicted, and opposed (both in person and behind their backs). They were told not to get emotional when expressing anger. Women noted that senior male union leadership often



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took care of men who were passed over to appoint or hire a woman: "People's feelings are saved. Failure to get one post is compensated by appointment to another. 'That's how women's interests are sold out to save a man's ego' " (p. 124). In the retail firm, Cockburn found that men made snide remarks to other men with women supervi- sors, were quick to point out the setbacks of women managers, and referred to high-level women as tokens. She identifies what she calls a "spiral of contradiction": "Most women do not much like masculinity and do not want to emulate it. Most of them are not prepared to forfeit men's appreciation, however. Yet power and authority are defined as precisely masculine" (pp. 66-70). Cockburn is at her best in depicting the subtle and not-so-subtle power tactics of men against women that often remain invisible because they are so pervasive.

Power tactics include not only direct sexual harassment but also indirect and taken-for- granted assumptions about sexual preference. At the same time, as she notes, married women with children may fit with male assumptions of appropriate gender roles, but they remain discriminated against when they seek promotion because it is assumed (a) that all employees have a primary commitment to either work or family and (b) that women's primary commitment is to family. And those who are promoted and take advantage of "mothers' privileges" ironically confirm the gendered division of labor, exposing the contradictory consequences of maternity- leave policies ostensibly introduced as an EEO measure. The book also includes good examples of women having to conform to male styles of organizing work relations. By the concluding chapter, Cockburn has done a fine job of convincing the reader that "organizations . . . are not just of casual interest to men as a sex. They are crucial to the production and reproduction of power. Men will not readily let women in" (p. 221). In this, as in her other books, Cockburn remains at the cutting edge of feminist sociology.

These books illustrate how good theory emerges out of empirical analysis of the everyday workings of social institutions. The criticism leveled in the Watson collection against the feminist theory of the state is equally applicable to much of what passes for

the sociological theory of organizations, including the state. In their abstraction, much current theory is inattentive to the daily practices that shape organizational policies. Discussions of social arrangements, power relations, and group interactions are disembodied (e.g., see Baron [1991] and Hannan and Freeman [1984] on organizational inertia; Pfeffer [1981] on power; Edwards [1979] on control). Mainstream theories rely too heavily on sterile economic logic at the expense of exposing the richness and complexity of how actual organizational outcomes happen. The feminist approach to developing organizational theory has a methodological corollary. It calls for heavy reliance on intensive case studies of well-selected organizations to uncover systematic patterns of social behav- ior.

These books also underline the importance of making gender visible in all research on social institutions. To date, this perspective has been carried primarily by feminist sociologists, whose research on work organizations and the state has been largely ignored by mainstream sociologists. Ignoring gender has several consequences. First, it results in distorted and inaccurate sociology, making part of reality into all of reality. If, as Burton suggests, organizational practices help constitute gender relations and gender relations help constitute organizational practices, then ignoring gender as a focus of research results in an inadequate understanding of how institutions work. Gendered forms of organizations, gendered organizational goals, and gendered power relations are treated as if they were gender neutral and universal. When gender is introduced as a concern, it is most often reduced to a numbers count, which ignores the complexities of institutional arrangements and supporting ideologies. Second, ignoring gender in mainstream analyses of organizations or reducing it to a set of generalizations devoid of references to gender contributes to a mindset within sociology that views research on gender as marginal, less valuable, and less rigorous. It maintains mainstream sociology as a gendered enterprise.

Third, ignoring gender results in misplaced recommendations for change, especially in employment practices. Cockburn and Burton each suggest several ways in which EEO policies rely on flawed analyses of gender relations in organizations. They share the



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obvious assumption that a more complete understanding of organizational dynamics would contribute to more effective policy formulation and implementation. Fourth, and perhaps most important, keeping gender invisible contributes to the maintenance of privileged white male power in social institutions. Ignoring gender is not a posture of impartiality.

References Acker, Joan. 1989. Doing Comparable Worth. Philadel-

phia: Temple University Press. Baron, James. 1991. "Organizational Evidence of

Ascription in Labor Markets." Pp. 113-43 in New Approaches to Economic and Social Analyses of Discrimination, edited by Richard Cornwall and Phanindra Wunnava. New York: Praeger.

Caplow, Theodore. 1954. The Sociology of Work. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Cockburn, Cynthia. 1983. Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change. London: Pluto Press.

Edwards, Richard. 1979. Contested Terrain. New York: Basic.

Eisenstein, Hester. 1991. Gender Shock: Practicing Feminism on Two Continents. Boston: Beacon Press.

Franzway, Suzanne, Dianne Court, and R. W. Connell. 1989. Staking a Claim: Feminism, Bureaucracy, and the State. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Hannan, Michael T. and John H. Freeman. 1984. "Structural Inertia and Organizational Change." Amer- ican Sociological Review 49:149-64.

Hughes, Everett. 1944. "Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status." American Journal of Sociology 50:353-59.

Kanter, Rosabeth. 1977. Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. 1981. Power in Organizations. Marsh- field, MA: Pitman.

Reskin, Barbara and Patricia Roos. 1990. Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Strober, Myra, and Carolyn Arnold. 1987. "The Dynamics of Occupational Segregation among Bank Tellers." Pp. 107-48 in Gender in the Workplace, edited by Clair Brown and Joseph Pechman. Washing- ton, DC: Brookings Institution.

Women in Patriarchal Religious Institutions

ADAIR T. LUMMIS Hartford Seminary

Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism, by Lynn Davidman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 250 pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-520-07282-0.

The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters, by Lora Ann Quinonez and Mary Daniel Turner. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 206 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-87722-865-5.

They Call Her Pastor, by Ruth A. Wallace. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. 204 pp. $44.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-7914-0925-2. $14.95 paper. ISBN: 0-7914-0926-0.

Women who enter traditionally male occupations or organizations in a leadership capacity are likely to encounter resistance from men in power. But, as Ruth Wallace points out (pp. 151-53), the likelihood of resistance is increased in patriarchal religious organizations, where gendered division of authority is both sanctioned by religious beliefs and undergirded by church law.

The three books being reviewed deal variously with how women and organizations within historic patriarchal religions respond to feminist values and changes in society. The

particular nature of religious feminism and patriarchy is the background from which these studies build. Patriarchy typically is defined as a hierarchical social system in which male gender is the necessary (but not sufficient) characteristic of those who assume top leadership positions. In a patriarchal system women may be well cared for, supported, and even honored for expressing their nurturing "nature" and exhibiting moral and spiritual values; women are just not considered to have the qualities necessary to be good leaders. The patriarchy of religious



gender on the agenda: male advantage in organizations

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