In today’s little theory party, I’m going to endeavor to explain how organizations are gendered. Before you gasp, “WTF?!”, let me issue the standard explanations and disclaimers. These gender theory discussions were started a few weeks ago here at the Frog Pond and have included some well thought out diaries by lorraine, MAJeff, and IndyLib. It’s become something of a Friday treat for us.
Also, gender theory tends to get dense at times. If you’re really interested in some of the points being made, or just want to make sure that we’re not simply making up words and giggling at our in-jokes, feel free to ask for clarification. There’s a good chance that even we don’t know what we’re talking about.
Now, what were you saying? Oh yes – “Gendered organizations? WTF?!”
More on the flip
Common sense tells us that gender is a property of an individual. A person expresses gender (how it is expressed has been dealt with in previous diaries). Stepping back a little bit, most people can even understand how gender is socially created, that it is an interactional phenomenon. When we step back even further, we can begin to see how social organizations themselves are gendered; that is, the various social organizations in which we participate on a daily basis are structured by and shape our assumptions about gender.
Theories of gendered organizations were developed within the Marxist feminist camp, most notably by sociologists Joan Acker and Dorothy Smith. Acker and Smith start from the premise that the assumptions upon which social organizations are built and the rules that result from these assumptions structure relations of inequality like gender (but also race, class, sexuality, and any other number of the fields of inequality whose complex interactions shape an individual’s subjective experience).
What exactly does this mean? It may be instructive to re-visit the Lawrence Summers fiasco of this past winter. Summers, who is the president of Harvard University, was examining why women were underrepresented in certain fields within the academy. His most outrageous hypothesis was the inherent difference thesis – that women are innately inferior at certain types of work than men. Of course, decades of empirical work show this to be so much frothy bullshit.
What exactly does it take to reach the elite ranks of academia? As many people could tell you, a slavish dedication to one’s research, working 80+ hours a week in the laboratory or office, and frequent travel to professional conferences and presentations – in other words, a lot of work. Certainly both men and women can function at this level, but the academy still favors men in this line of work. Why?
The answer? The sexual division of labor. The academy (and most other work organizations) are premised on the sexual division of labor, that there is someone (a woman) at home who is busy taking care of the necessary reproductive labor (in the short term, making sure that the daily requirements of living are met so that the worker can labor another day; in the long term, raising the next generation of workers). While men have been responsible for production, it has traditionally been the woman’s task to take care of the reproductive aspects.
While some women have been able to find success within the workplace, the sexual division of labor within the home has not changed as dramatically. The onus of household management, child-rearing, and daily household tasks still fall disproportionately on the woman. We’ve all seen the popular articles about the choice between being a mother or a successful career woman. Do we ever see articles about the difficult choice between being a father or a successful career man? No. Why? Because the organization of the workplace assumes that a man will be filling a position, a man with someone at home to take care of his reproductive needs. The assumptions of the workplace posit the sexual division of labor and produce rules accordingly. Looking back at the Summers fiasco, it is exceedingly difficult for female academics to participate at the top of their fields when the sexuo-economic relations of the home make it so that the female is still responsible for the majority of the unpaid reproductive labor. The rules based on the assumptions of what makes an elite scholar are themselves biased against women. The academy is a masculine gendered organization because of the assumptions upon which it is built.
When seeking to address forms of oppression, then, it’s important to note how the institutions within which interactions occur structure the situation to empower a particular group over another. In seeking to redress inequality, we must seek to establish new forms of social organizations which enable a multitude of subjective social positions to participate in ways which avoid the stratification of current or past organizational forms.
That’s the quick and dirty version. What do you think?