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?
We’re trying to even out the old sexuo-economic relations in the wobblie home, so I’m going to be hanging with the baby wobs in the A.M., and then I have one shot at boating an incredible stretch of river before the water falls to low, so I’ll be in my boat for the afternoon. After leaving tonight, I’ll be back tomorrow evening.
Now, let’s get funky with that fun, fun materialism!
You can also think about the fact that within the home, the woman is the proletariat–producing children–but, until recently, not the owner of those children. Her husband was. When Marx wrote his analysis of marriage, it was clear to him that the workplace structure of who owned the means of production and then owned the products of that production were similar. Man simply owned woman and claimed all she produced. She was his means of reproduction.
Now, interestingly, it is frequently said that woman is favoured in divorce cases when determining custody. 100 years ago, of course, any woman who divorced lost custody of her children to her husband.
Yet, we’re still operating with assumptions of roles within the home that wind up having an impact on women’s economic performance out in the world. For me, as a single mom, it’s actually easier. I just simply allow myself t live in a pigsty most of the week, focusing on my job and my kids, and then shit like housework gets done when there’s time for it to get done. SO, you can also ask whether culture–and those damn advertisements that tell women their houses should be SPOTLESS–don’t also contribute to a construction of expectations that leads to these labor divisions withi the home?
Oh man have you actually hit home with this. I can say I burned myself out in the early days of my life doing both. Being the one of the reproductive machine at home and working more than 16+ hours at the job. I do not know how I got it all done, except I was meeting myself in the middle doing all things. Upon my last divorce, I decided I can actually do better on all things. Cutting back on time on the job working normal hours and then I could be at home more. I did not delegate any more to child rearing to others. I took charge of things all on my own. This scared many men away from me in my attitude. Why? Cuz I actually can do such a thing all by myself and did not need a man to dictate to me on what is my priorities. I even found time to study and apply towards getting a better degree, too….for shame the men thinking that they own everything, including me.
Perhaps a hegemonic construction of household gender roles? I’ll defer to a resident Gramsci expert! 😉
Back when I was still experiencing monthly menstral cycles, I used to envision what the “work week” schedule would be like if women had designed it. We tend to need a time of refuge and reflection once a month (I also wonder what would happen to PMS if we took that time rather than just pushing through and trying to keep up). Women of “child-bearing age” have a cycle that matches the moons cycles and I think that we would have designed our work cycles more along those lines. Possibly another, more obscure way the the entire work world is gendered.
{The academy is a masculine gendered organization because of the assumptions upon which it is built.}
Not only the academy, but this society overall, is a masculine gendered organizational structure, isn’t it? Men still head up business, education, religion and government. They still set the criteria for “success” for all of us. And with few exceptions, hardly anyof them have much of a clue about the vast role women still play as unpaid care-givers, in addition to their work and careers. We’re jnot ust wives and mothers and primary homemakers, but we’re also as the gender most likely to be expected to be there for the ill and aged among our families and neighbors, and “volunteer” our time to community, church, and have the energy left for some good sex at the end of the day!
Meanwhile, most men, I believe, continue to see their primary role as succeeding “out there” in the world, and bringing home as much bacon as they can, no matter how much time it takes..and guess what? They can AFFORD the 100 hours a week, ,when they don’t also have to consider themselves primarily responsible for laundry, food shopping, food prep, food cleanup, laundry, housecleaning, pregnancy, labor, delivery, 24/7 kid care, 27/7 on call care of sick or aged family members and on and on.
Neat deal, if you’re a man. Not so neat for women..who somehow are supposed to be able to, (if they wish to “succeed” in business or the academic world,) come forth with competitive 100 work weeks PLUS fill the above, time honored, unpaid care giving roles.
I do not hold out much hope of seeing this ever change substantially because it really hasn’t changed all that much in my 64 years . It won’t change as long as those in power are primarily of one gender, and it’s the gender that benefits the most from maintaining the status quo.
Add in what we’re seeing now, with the rise of the religious extreme right, and we’ll be damned lucky to not end barefoot, pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink again.
Everywhere, there is the unspoken requirement to do things “men’s way”. Put in more time, more face time, whether not that is meaningful. Example, the guy where I used to work was not very creative, way too methodical and didn’t create good programming systems, but because he worked 12 hours a day and every weekend, he rose to senior management. Of course, in order for him to do this, he had a wife at home who did everything, including homeschooling, with their 3 girls.
So many situations become competitive when they don’t need to be, and cooperation is scorned. One team cannot just win, they must annihilate the opposing side, and I’m not talking sports. In most groups, sides must be drawn and there must be winners and there must be losers.
Yep, I thought things had changed for women until I went to work for a big corporation. Lip-service is paid to women, but men and their ways are still the only way to do business.
The end result is not always better, either. The proponent of the best idea may not be the loudest bully, so their ideas may not be chosen. That’s not really best for the bottom line, but it’s how things get done.
You’re absolutely right about the whole of society being gendered. I had visions of sending the diary in that direction, but I think that would have been a big chunk to chew, so I kept the institutions a little closer to home.
Incidentally, a good friend of mine is writing her dissertation on how gendered IMF structural adjustment loans are transforming the household division of labor in the Balkans. Fascinating work!
Fantastic diary. Fantastic comments. Keep it up!
Wasn’t there a research study a few years ago that found then even among men, there were disparities in salry contingent on marital status? That is, married men made much more than their single counterparts, as well as married and single women. I have to assume this is in part due to the gendered definition of “professional success” — long hours, ability to subordinate (or ignore, if you have a spouse assuming responsibility for domestic stuff) personal matters to workplace/job issues, etc. When you redress the genedered definition of success it helps more than just women.
I find myself agreeing with the conclusions, but I’m not sure I understand the premise.
I think gender is much much more than simply expression. Gender roles are largely socially created, but I feel it’s important to remember that these are social interpretations of very real biological differences.
One of the barriers to a reasonable discussion of women’s reproductive rights, I think, is because men simply cannot see the significance of biological differences — either that or they feel threatened by them. I also think there’s more to who we are than our glands. I swear the most profound differences between men and women are in the mind — i.e., the brain. Some of gendered behavior is socially trained, sure, but can we really say “boys will be boys” simply because they were raised to be boys?
This is all maybe way off the path of the main thesis here, but I think the premise is built on some uncertain ground, and I’d hate to have nature/nurture debates on gender distract from the very real fact that the social constructs of organizations are very much driven by gender-influenced agendas.
Am I way off?
Not to discount sexual difference, but it seems to me that two categories don’t begin to cover it. There’s often just as much variation among women, for example, as there is between men and women. I think the categories we have are inadequate to describe the bodies we are.
As for the ‘boys will be boys’ thing, I’m not quite sure what you mean (ie, which specific behaviors/tendencies you think come from the Y-chromosome), but along these lines, I wonder if experience plays a much larger role in shaping bodies than many people believe. There was an interesting study done a handful of years ago on taxi drivers in London where it was learned that their brains actually
changed structurally in a navigation-specific region over time spent learning and doing their jobs. This sort of thing indicates the possibility (to me anyway) that the simple existence of physical or structural differences (like in the brain) in differently sexed bodies could have more to do with society and experience than would seem immediately intuitive. After all, the pressure to conform one’s behavior to a ‘socially accepted’ gender role is immense.
I understand what you’re saying, and I totally agree about pressure to conform. I spend hundreds of dollars a year on clothes for that very reason. (And I type much more directly and assertively than I do in person, which I take as another reaction to that pressure.)
But I’d like to clarify what I was trying to say in my first comment. First off, I did not intend to make any biologically-determinant argument about gender. In fact, I would never go so far as to assert belief in chromosome theory. Since XY women have given birth, it hardly seems accurate to claim that chromosomes determine gender. (Forgive me for not having specifics, but I believe the IOC stopped chromosome testing for the Olympics years ago when a birth mother “failed” her chromosome test.)
What I’m getting at is more along the lines of what probably would be considered more radical feminist thought of the ’70s that revolves around the physiological differences between men and women, and how that affects not only culture but psychology. One paradigm is the penetrator/penetratee dichotomy. Men as penetrators view the world differently than women. There’s lots of literature on how that paradigm leads to rape, different approaches to problem solving, behavior that is praised or discouraged, etc. So the social pressures, in effect, are dressing up a more fundamental biological distinction. Just because we have gender-focused traditions, fashions, taboos and the like doesn’t mean that gender itself doesn’t exist on a fundamental biological level, even as it plays out in our social interactions.
I didn’t intend to get into a debate on this, but merely to say that there’s quite enough debate over this issue to preclude any easy “obvious” conclusions, and so to use it in the otherwise (I feel) very important argument about the gendered nature of the very structure of organizations could be counterproductive.
Fwiw, I’m not trying to subtract from the discussion on gendered institutions. I think wobblie has written an interesting diary, most of which I agree with.
Please don’t misconstrue my reply to your post as an unfriendly sort of challenge. The thing is, so much gender theory begs the essentialist question that I think it’s hardly ever an irrelevant or counterproductive part of the discussion.
The overwhelming majority of gender theory discussions eventually come to some talk of sex dichotomies. In general, those sorts of divisions seem short-sighted and false to me, perhaps mostly because they’re wholly inadequate to describe my own lived experience as a queer woman, but it’s also true that many of my straight friends and acquaintances have told me that those sorts of divisions don’t resonate with their own identities and experiences either. To take the example you mention, penetrator/penetratee–that sort of division does not and cannot accomodate my sexuality or my psychology, and I’ve had a fair number of straight friends who would also fall outside of that kind of categorization scheme.
I don’t entirely disagree that “social pressures are dressing up a more fundamental biological distinction”, but I think the positing of male/female as binary opposites is highly problematic. (If you’re interested in why, my gender theory diary from last week does a fair job of glossing that.) I see sex and gender as situate on a continuum just as much as sexuality, with there being substantially more bodies located in the middle ground than at oppositionary poles, and I think it’s this tendency to put much more complex things into overly simplistic dichotomies (at least in large part) that’s gotten us the constrictive and sexist gendered institutions that we have.
IndyLib, I don’t find your responses as unfriendly, and I hope you don’t see mine that way, either.
I think I can see what you’re getting at about “simplistic dichotomies,” but to me the notion that somehow we’re really all just the same verges on the simplistic side as well.
Why is it that you identify as lesbian? I don’t mean this as a challenge, but I wonder at the assertion that there is no significant male/female dichotomy when so many of us end up with such strong sexual orientation preferences. If there is no significant distinction, then I would think we’d all be omnisexual through and through.
To paraphrase some of Abby Rockefeller’s writings of the ’70s, in theory any man can rape any woman. Our culture attenuates that to an extent – not enough, if you ask me — but when it comes to penetration, the man must be willing, the woman need not. Men also can rape other men, but aside from a ‘Born Innocent’ scenario, women cannot rape other women … or men, for that matter. I think we see the implications of this in our culture, where “straight” men seemingly tend to fear homosexuality much much more than straight women.
I don’t mean to imply that biology is destiny, but merely that the biology underlies nearly all of our cultural dressings of gender. For all the variations we see, a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and while our culture really does “mainstream” people into gender roles, even in the androgynous realm, I don’t know, I see important distinctions … in brain chemistry, in anatomy.
I think the implications of this in politics and culture are profound. The male understanding of abortion, for example, is much more abstracted than a woman’s. That doesn’t necessarily lead directly to any given political views, but it certainly colors how one views the issue.
Safety at night is another issue where men have a slightly different perspective. I daresay that if there were a rash of rapes of men across the country, there would be an outcry and we’d see very very different rape laws and courtroom standards than we do now. I would bet that rape culture apologists like Gilliard would sing a different tune if they were the ones who faced this kind of threat if they went out for a beer at 10 p.m. But the numbers work against this scenario — there are just far far more men who deliberately or opportunistically rape women than there are men wanting to rape other men. (The culture wrapped around that plays into it, too. A man can get another man to back down, but how many men will really back down to a woman who’s not his wife, lover or mother? A man fights back, he does what’s expected. A woman fights back, and she’s out of line and can expect worse violence. –Speaking in generalities, not universalities.)
In patriarchal organizations, I feel there are two main vectors at work: the chest-beating competition, and the coralling and containing of females. I see these as outgrowths of male uncertainty in paternity and competition for females, now being played out even though reproductive privileges are not necessarily (or usually at best indirectly) at stake. Yet I don’t see them as determinative of the culture, merely underpinnings. In business I’ve known quite a large percentage of men who’ve been anything but that stereotype. And yet an almost primal lust for that (pardon my language) pissing contest seems to run strong and deep. We see this in many posters on dKos, and in politics in general. (I’m working on a post on that dynamic, so more on that later.) It’s the “male culture” that tends to drive a lot of us women out — not because we can’t hack it, but more that we just don’t get much thrill out of it.
I’d like to say it’s straight culture, but I’ve seen the same in gay male culture. Different language, different triggers, but a lot of that same dynamic.
This is starting to sound like an indictment of men, and I don’t mean that. (We could do the same thing about female culture, but the original post was on what are mostly patriarchal orientations/biases/DNA in organizations themselves.) Merely I suggest the possiblity that male culture is not necessarily just a purely cultural fabrication. It really seems to me to be more of a mosaic of traditions, rituals, taboos, etc. that provide sets of rules of expected behavior of a group of people defined by their anatomy. It always seems to get back to that anatomy. And yet different men respond differently. It’s complex, I agree.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed this exchange. And I apologize if this seemed to hijack the original thread.
Wow, I certainly didn’t mean that I think everyone is the same! I meant that there are more differences between people each-to-each than fit into only two categories. I don’t think there should be fewer categories, I think there should be many more, and that they should all be soft around the edges. Bodies frequently straddle socially constructed lines, and if we made the lines softer, they’d do less damage to our bodies. People are hurt badly by things like infant genital surgeries and spending huge chunks of their lifetimes fighting a society trying to police them into one of two boxes. For others, it’s a constant stream of papercuts, but there’s still damage.
I don’t usually identify as a lesbian; I usually use the word ‘queer’. The experiences I’ve had with sexual desire are very broad. Probably a better word for me would be ‘pansexual’ but people don’t often know what that word means and I’m not always up for a big explanation about it. (Also, I think there’s much more variation in sexuality than would seem apparent; I’ve had sex with a number of ‘straight’ women and ime this is not uncommon. It’s also not uncommon for straight-identifying people to talk to queers about homoerotic desires they never confess to other straight-identifying people.)
It’s interesting to consider the issue of sexual orientation in terms of sex and gender dichotomy, since it wasn’t long ago that it was an incontrovertible scientific fact that gays weren’t ‘real men’ and lesbians weren’t ‘real women’ specifically because their sexual desire didn’t line up right according to the social definitions of sex categories. Since there were no other categories and since the pressure to fit into one of the acceptable two was paramount, queer folk often wound up institutionalized.
These sorts of essentialist assumptions are dangerous. They’re the primary underpinning not only for homophobia, but for centuries of sexism and racism and other oppressions.
Consider the relatively recent discovery that race is predominantly a social construction. That doesn’t mean that race does not exist. Nor does it mean that there are no differences between bodies. But there seems to be no definitive categorical difference of the sort widely believed for centuries. Science seems to be saying that we are not different ‘kinds’ of the same species; there’s just as much (if not more) variation inside of a single racial category as there is between two racial categories. When people looked at each other and went, “See, there are differences, we can observe them, and this leads to behavioral differences as well, we must be different on an essential level,” they were not only wrong, but it led us all down a dangerous and tragic path in human history.
We should be extremely cautious when we get anywhere near essentialism. Just because we observe sex differences in between bodies that may seem dichotomous up front doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re seeing the whole picture. This is partially why I linked the London cabbie study upthread. There’s an example of where people’s day-to-day experiences in the world have actually changed the structure of their brains. If someone’s brain structure can change just by spending a few years driving a cab in London, I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to suppose it’s possible that someone’s brain can develop a certain way by being treated ‘like a boy’ or ‘like a girl’ throughout their entire formative period in life. And these different social treatments are pervasive and persistent, even today, even when parents don’t think they’re treating boys and girls differently.
Again, I’d reiterate, I am not denying difference. I am not denying that bodies are born differently each-to-each, with individual genetic codes and various commonalities and differences from body to body. I do think there are distinctions between bodies and people–lots of them, far too many of them for only two categories of sex and gender. To better understand them scientifically and socially, I think we have to ask different questions. Rather than supposing that we have the categorization scheme right (just as we mistakenly did with race), I think we should step back and be more willing to question more of our basic assumptions.
Not that I expect that to actually happen any time soon, lol. After all, it would lead to better scientific understandings of ourselves and a great deal more social equality, so the currently entrenched power structure resists it like a wealthy Republican resists a national healthcare plan.
Anyway, before this turns into a novella, let me also point out that women can most certainly rape men. Just because a man has an erection does not mean he is sexually aroused. It’s not particularly common (although it’s probably underreported) but it can and does happen. And women can most certainly rape other women. I’m not willing to go into much personal detail about that on a board this public, but I can assure you that it’s possible, it happens, and it’s just as traumatic as any other rape scenario.
Finally, wobblie came through and gave us 4s so I don’t think we’re hijacking, but if he has a problem with this subtread I hope he’ll speak up. I’d be perfectly willing continue the discussion on a different diary if necessary.
I stand corrected on rape. I was paraphrasing Abby’s argument, probably ineptly at that, and did not consider other possibilities. Believe me, I understand completely. I don’t think either of us has to elaborate on personal experiences.
I do see a danger, though, in lending too much credence to the environmental influences theory of human development. For example, by this logic “straight camps” would work to deprogram homosexual children, which is something I simply don’t believe is possible. Also, I think some transgenders might take issue with the idea that gender identity is simply a matter of being brought up a certain way.
An interesting item hit the news a few days ago: Genetecists have found a gene that seems to have some sort of correlation, if not a causal relationship, with political views — namely, progressive vs. conservative. I did not see the article, and I confess I don’t have a link, but it hit quite a few blogs. I don’t know how they could even quantify such things, but it is but one new peek into how DNA might produce predispositions in us. (Kind of scary, too. Imagine a politically-driven eugenics program to breed new voters for your agenda. Makes Huxley seem rather inoccuous by comparison.)
I imagine it all falls somewhere in the middle. We’re a combination of both nature and nurture. And each affects the other, which makes for some interesting evolutionary questions regarding our species. My guess is that, if we were to live another 100 years, we wouldn’t recognize the people and culture at all.
That is if we don’t destroy ourselves, first.
I hope I didn’t miscommunicate my position to suggest that I’m an absolutist about social constructionism–I’m definitely not. I would never say, for example, that gender identity is simply a matter of upbringing. But I would say that I think social constructionism plays a large role in many aspects of gender identity. Those are very different things to say. 🙂
I imagine it all falls somewhere in the middle. We’re a combination of both nature and nurture. And each affects the other
About this, we’re in agreement! 🙂
About this, we’re in agreement! 🙂
You know I suspected as much at the start, but had fun vollying this around a bit anyway.
The sexual division of labor is a very useful tool to explain the differences between men and women and their relative power in society. Division of labor in general is a key theoretical factor to explain power differences among classes in Marxist theory, and is one of the more useful findings of that school of thinking. Probably because it comes out of a Marxist theory of the world, it is also useful in explaining the differences between men and women in highly industrialized northern capitalist countries like ours, and less industrial, more traditional, third world countries such as in Latin America.
Much is often said regarding how poorly women are treated in Latin America, which in many respects is entirely true. But on the other hand, women are being accepted into positions of political and business authority in Latin America with much less fanfare and without any of the criticism that such women face here along the lines of “she’s acting like a man in her new CEO role.” Latin American women leaders in politics and business do not feel that they need to act more like their male peers in order to be effective, which appears to be different and more authentic than the way many women leaders feel they have to approach their roles here in the United States.
I believe that one reason for this is because in more traditional societies, the domestic and social spheres of life, where mothers and women are dominant, are more central and more important than the external, career-oriented areas of life where men dominate. While here in America, the domestic world is almost unnoticed because wealth, power, and the careers that attain those things are so much more highly valued.
It is one reason that an industrialized prism is often the wrong one to use when trying to evaluate the relative power of women in less industrial societies.
Is it possible that where doing is more important than being, men have a tendency to dominate, and vice-versa?
I appreciate y’all taking the time to read this.
Just a personal note – in my own marriage I’ve been struggling to redress the division of labor, with varying degrees of success. Both my wife and myself have made some pretty big sacrifices in order to share the joys and responsibilities of raising our child and keeping a household. My wife (a fiction writer) has put on hold her writing and teaches part-time at a community college. My dissertation committee has been very supportive in helping me fit my academic schedule around my family, rather than vice-versa.
At times it seems like an uphill battle. At times, I see myself re-enacting the male roles I had be socialized into growing up – and I get embarrassed and angry about it. But it’s small little campaigns like these that make a bigger difference.
Just thought I’d share.