Mobile Phones and Entrepreneurial Identity Negotiation by Urban Female Street Traders in Uganda

Mobile phones have been posited as enhancing women's entrepreneurship and gender equality in developing countries, yet empowerment outcomes are unclear. This article considers how women in the gender‐segregated informal economy construct their entrepreneurial identity in relation to mobile phones and the discursive repertoires that marginalize and empower. Using data from interviews with six urban female street traders in Kampala, Uganda, it explores how these repertoires illustrate their sense of self, positioning and belonging to the business community. Normative representations and positioning of female traders can sideline entrepreneurial identity and over‐validate gender identity. But, participants also negotiate entrepreneurial identity construction in response to these marginalizing influences. Although the data demonstrate that participants are equivocal about their entrepreneurial identity or fit in business, some representations are more validating and offer a sense of belonging. The article concludes by highlighting the nuanced opportunities for social change their discursive repertoires may present.     

Gender,Equality and the Culture of Organizational Assessment

In spite of years of equal opportunities legislation and guidelines, a marked gender imbalance at the apex of organizational career structures persists (Carrier 1995). The predominant liberal model of equal opportunities (EO) seeks to alleviate sex-discrimination through advocating gender-neutral or ‘same’ treatment (Meehan and Sevenhuisjen 1991; Gatens 1991; Bock and James 1992). However, the present study suggests that ostensibly gender-neutral organizational practices may exclude characteristics, values and concerns more typically associated with women. This paper draws on a study of gender in selection to corporate management and raises questions about whether and how characteristics, values, goals and concerns which have been perceived as ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ may be excluded from ostensibly gender-neutral equality practices. Findings suggest that EO theory and practice need to move beyond limited either/or debates around ‘equality’ and ‘difference’. In order to do so, it may also be necessary to challenge dichotomous thinking about gender which currently informs much of that debate. In order to facilitate the development and progress of women in organizations it is not enough for EO initiatives to treat gender as a category of difference that can be overcome through superficial changes, for example in interview procedures, which merely seek to exclude issues perceived as gendered. Instead, a longer agenda for equality must move beyond the debate about women’s ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ from men to include a deeper understanding of the gendered nature of organizational positions, structures and practices.     

Women's Access to Property: A Comparative Study on Islamic and Kemalist Women in Turkey

This article uses a comparative approach to discuss women's access to property using evidence collected from field research conducted on two distinct communities of Istanbul: one secular and one Islamic. The two groups of women possess distinctly different views of the world and how it is organized. This is particularly the case concerning gender where secular women put forth a view rooted in the sameness of the genders where the Islamic women were clear in their commitment to the idea of difference. These attitudes toward the equality and difference of the genders structures the relations of these women to property and the process of inheritance.     

Theorizing equal opportunity in Muslim majority countries

This article offers an interdisciplinary and transnational review of feminist, management and Islamic literatures to develop an understanding of philosophical theorization and institutional framing of equal opportunity in employment in Muslim majority countries (MMCs). The review suggests that ‘the mainstream’ western literature on gender and equal opportunity, along with its secular orientation, may not capture the complexity of gender and equal opportunity in MMCs. Through integrating Islamic writings and gender scholarship, the article examines how equal opportunity theorizing may be advanced by Islamic philosophies and interpretations. In particular, it presents two concurrent principles of gender relations in Islam, for instance, equality and difference of women and men. While Islamic scholars generally agree that women and men are equal because both are created by one God, there are two competing interpretations with respect to the principle of difference between women and men. The first is an egalitarian interpretation which advocates affirmative action in women's favour, and the second is a patriarchal interpretation which supports women's subordination to men. We present this discussion and use it to develop our understanding of equal opportunity or lack thereof in MMCs.     

“This Is Our Gender Person”

Despite the prevalence of gender experts in international development institutions, their impact in terms of transformative feminist politics remains questionable. Gender experts, and their profession more broadly, have been strongly criticized by a range of feminists working in academic contexts. In particular, some have argued that neoliberalism and feminism have converged,  framing the role of gender experts as primarily to legitimate and embed neoliberal models of development. This article engages with these critiques from the perspective of the gender expert her/himself, drawing on first-hand experiences to tease out some of the tensions and complexities of this work. After setting out some general challenges for gender experts, I focus on one particular aspect of the current gender and development paradigm – the “business case” for gender equality – and explore how it feels to work within such a framework. In doing so, I aim to reflect on the possibilities of promoting transformative change whilst at the same time acknowledging and embracing the dilemmas and contradictions involved in the daily politics of working as a gender expert.     

The Division of Labour and Inequalities Between the Sexes: An Ideological Dilemma

This article is concerned with the different assumptions and strategies that respondents in the banking sector and the police force use to account for the existence of inequalities between men and women. We search for a perspective that can theorize the different ways in which these employees deal with the existence of inequalities. We examine conceptualizations of the division of labour and of inequalities between the sexes in mainstream organization studies and in liberal, socialist and postmodernist feminist perspectives to organization studies. While these different perspectives highlight different types and causes of inequalities, no perspective can make sense of all the organizational practices in the banks and the police force. We are of the opinion that Billig's concept of ideological dilemmas offers a fruitful starting point to reflect upon the simultaneous existence of the different concepts and provides a valuable framework for our research. It sheds light on the ideological nature of theories, analyses how people think and argue with ideology by bringing in contrary and conflicting notions and opens the possibility of engaging in open dialogue about strategies for change.     

Dealing with the Dilemmas: Integration at the Street‐level in Norway

In Norway, as elsewhere in Europe, the debates about immigration, increasing cultural diversity and the need for integration, are heated and polarised. For welfare state workers and institutions, the perceived task and challenge of integration has to a large extent been to both provide space for cultural diversity and to promote social equality through participation in the labour market, education, and civil society. Amidst all this ongoing debate, a large number of people deal with these issues as a part of their daily work. This paper focuses on the dilemmas such street‐level bureaucrats, or diversity workers, encounter in their work with refugees, immigrants and their children. Most of all, it explores the strategies they have developed to handle such situations. Street‐level bureaucrats have a range of strategies to get around integration dilemmas, which are presented here as five distinct response repertoires. The analytical construction of these repertoires is useful because it provides us with a tool to describe and understand what is going on when policies are translated into institutional practices. It shows how public sector employees are handling the everyday dilemmas that policy does not provide the solutions for. Finally, this analysis of repertoires can also be useful in thinking normatively about what kinds of strategies particular institutions ought to nurture and how they can achieve this.     

Organizational perspective to gender mainstreaming in the Finnish state administration

Gender mainstreaming has been celebrated as a new policy strategy for change in gender relations. However, its transformative potential seems to be lost in the process of implementation. The aim of this article is to evaluate the policy effectiveness of gender mainstreaming and its ability to bring about change in gendered social structures and practices. Previous research has focused on gender mainstreaming as a policy strategy. This article provides a new perspective on the problems of implementation by approaching gender mainstreaming from an organizational perspective. Gender mainstreaming takes place in certain organizational contexts, implemented by local actors. This article reveals the practices of implementation in the Finnish state administration, specifically in the Ministry of Defence. The analysis is based on a discursive reading of thirteen group and individual interviews collected in the Ministry of Defence in 2012. The article pinpoints two interlinking problems concerning implementation of gender mainstreaming on the organizational level. First, the state officials, who should implement gender mainstreaming, do not have enough information to do so successfully. Second, there is resistance toward gender mainstreaming on the organizational level. This article suggests that negotiations about gender, gender equality and gender mainstreaming as complex issues concerned with social power relations should be included in the process of implementing gender mainstreaming.     

Gender Equality and Corporate Governance: Policy Strategies in Norway and New Zealand

Advancing gender equality in the labour market continues to be a policy objective in many OECD countries. Wide national variations are evident in strategies and accomplishments towards improving gender equality at all levels of the labour market, including senior management and corporate governance roles. This article compares policy strategies in Norway and New Zealand directed towards achieving gender equality in the governance of corporate institutions. A principal feature of the New Zealand strategy has been a soft regulation approach in the form of advocacy and encouragement of equal employment opportunity policies, awareness‐raising and benchmarking. For Norway the use of legislation in the form of quotas and affirmative action programmes has been the predominant strategy. Using empirical data collected in 2004–2005 on women's perceptions and experiences of corporate governance participation, this article critically examines these different policy strategies.     

How Do Women in Developing Countries Increase Political Representation in National Assemblies? A Longitudinal Analysis of South Korea

Previous studies have found that political, socioeconomic, and ideological factors are critical determinants of gender equality in political representation. However, these studies have not explained the combined effects of these factors over time in each country. Furthermore, because they focus primarily on Western, developed countries, the experiences of non-Western developing countries have been overlooked. To fill this gap, this article uses data on South Korea from 1948 to 2008 to examine the effects of political, socioeconomic, and ideological factors on the level of women’s political representation. Results indicate that, compared to socioeconomic factors, political and ideological factors are more critical determinants of gender equality in political leadership.     

The end of the gender revolution? Gender role attitudes from 1977 to 2008

After becoming consistently more egalitarian for more than two decades, gender role attitudes in the General Social Survey have changed little since the mid-1990s. This plateau mirrors other gender trends, suggesting a fundamental alteration in the momentum toward gender equality. While cohort replacement can explain about half of the increasing egalitarianism between 1974 and 1994, the changes since the mid-1990s are not well accounted for by cohort differences. Nor is the post-1994 stagnation explained by structural or broad ideological changes in American society. The recent lack of change in gender attitudes is more likely the consequence of the rise of a new cultural frame, an "egalitarian essentialism" that blends aspects of feminist equality and traditional motherhood roles.     

Intertwining Gender Inequalities and Gender‐neutral Legitimacy in Job Evaluation and Performance‐related Pay

This article analyses the intertwining inequalities in wage determination and the gender‐neutral legitimacy that pay systems provide by masking these inequalities. Job evaluation and performance‐related pay were originally designed for purposes other than promoting equal pay, namely as managerial tools for determining wage levels. Typically, the main objective of a pay system is not to promote equal pay. Still, as a tool for assessing the value of work, job evaluation is regarded as a central method in promoting equal pay. The use of job evaluation is recommended by the European Commission and the International Labour Organization, and often features in gender‐equality policy and legislation. In contrast with the status of job evaluation, little research exists on performance‐related pay and gender pay equity. The findings show that the wages determined by pay systems reflect gendered cultural valuations of jobs and occupations. Pay systems provide gender‐neutral legitimacy for gender‐based wage disparities.     

Identity without Politics: Framing the Parity Laws and Their Implementation in French Local Politics

This article provides an alternative approach to the argumentsof "critical mass," whose tenets assume that policies fosteringwomen’s rights would arise from an increase in women’spolitical representation. Instead, the article argues that thecultural repertoires that are used to justify women’shigher numerical presence also matter. Indeed, different repertoires—suchas claiming women’s inclusion into politics in the nameof women’s interests or in the name of their difference—havedifferent political outcomes. This case study of the Frenchsex-parity laws, which ensures a 50-percent quota of women inpolitics, explores the connection between the rationales tolegitimize the laws and their implementation at the local level.This provides for, first, an investigation of how the requirementto make the parity claim compatible with French cultural repertoireson citizenship and sovereignty has led parity advocates to definesexual difference as universal. Then, drawing on interviewswith local politicians, it shows how this rationale underliningsexual difference has failed to define gender relationshipsas political and, thus, to promote gender equality in localpublic policies.     

The effectiveness of corporate gender equality plans in improving leave provisions for fathers in Spain

ABSTRACT

Official Spanish policy seeks greater gender equality by, among other things, encouraging men’s use of their legal rights to parental leave and requiring employers to implement equality plans. This article contains a first-ever analysis of the extent to which company equality plans are used to improve upon the legal provisions governing parental leave and whether those improvements actually encourage greater leave use by men, help to degender leave use and promote fathers’ co-responsibility for childcare. The improvements implemented by companies are analysed against a backdrop of economic crisis (2007-2016), during which public policy underwent no substantial change. An analysis of the gender equality plans in place among 107 ‘gender equality employers’ (GEEs) revealed that most included no enhancement of the existing legislation and only a few work organizations provided incentives for men to use leaves as part of their work-life balance strategies. Substantial progress in this regard can only be expected through increasing government provision of parental leave aimed at men and/or increasing government pressure on companies to encourage leave taking by men.     

Gender Mainstreaming: An Assessment of Its Conceptual Value for Gender Equality

Evaluations of gender mainstreaming show that there has been limited change to gender equality and it has been very fragmented across EU countries. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to evaluate the heuristic and conceptual value of the term gender mainstreaming as a metaphor for gender equality. Our results from applying an image‐schematic model of metaphor evaluation show that gender mainstreaming represents a nonsensical metaphor for gender equality. We conclude with recommendations for reconceptualizing gender mainstreaming.     

Exploring linkages between organisational culture and gender equality work—An ethnography of a multinational engineering company

This article explores linkages between organisation-specific cultural narratives and gender-equality programme planning through the lens of the ‘historicity’ concept. The article argues that to fully understand problem definitions, programme design and organisational change processes related to gender equality, scholars and practitioners cannot focus one-sidedly on expected outcomes and effects; we must also factor in cultural narratives, because gender equality actors never arrive at their work as ‘tabulae rasae’. A community of actors always draws on shared dispositions that give sense, direction and shape to their anticipations of the future hereby guiding their actions in the present. Based on an ethnography of a multinational engineering company, the article shows how cultural narratives may serve in different ways as support factors for gender equality programme planning and implementation, if they are actively but mindfully engaged. This mindfulness is important as positive cultural narratives may entail problematic gender dimensions. On the other hand, negative cultural narratives may entail important learning outcomes that may benefit future gender equality initiatives. The analysis further points to the centrality of strategic communication, leadership commitment and comprehensive evaluation in order to mobilise the potential of cultural narratives as support factors to gender equality work. Finally, this article offers a rich example to scholars and practitioners of how to employ cultural analysis in relation to gender equality activities, and demonstrates the value of the insights produced by this analysis for the case company and its gender equality programme.     

Can Changes to Gender Equality Be Sustained?

The aim of this paper is to discuss how changes to gender equality in organizing can be made sustainable. Numerous studies have reported on projects which have not succeeded in their efforts to implement gender equality. In this paper, we analyse the results from two programmes which aimed to increase equal opportunities among private and public sector organizations. Theoretically, the study is based on the framework of doing gender, which is combined with insights from studies using the translation model of organizational change. The translation model of organizational change enables investigation of formal and informal processes within an institutionalized setting. By studying those aspects that were stabilized into an institution within these two programmes, as well as those which were not, the approaches that had become sustainable for the programmes in the long term could be discerned. When comparing the two programmes, it became apparent that complications arose at the point at which the theoretical aims of gender equality were translated into actions. The analysis of the outcomes of these programmes indicates, however, that, even though the formal goals were not reached, equal opportunities within the participating organizations did benefit from these programmes.     

The Business Case of Gender Equality in Swedish Forestry and Mining ‐ Restricting or Enabling Organizational Change

Forestry and mining constitutes an important part of Swedish basic industry. These industries are heavily male‐dominated and are expressing an ambition to become more gender equal and less gender‐segregated, arguing that this could strengthen their competitiveness in a number of areas. In this article we explore how company representatives construct gender equality as a business case and discuss how these constructions restrict and/or enable gender equality in these organizations. Departing from a social constructivist understanding of how language (re)produces gendered power relations in the workplace, the empirical basis of this paper consists of eight interviews with respondents who possess special insights into, and being of strategic importance to, gender equality issues in forestry and mining companies. In our analysis we found three dominant dimensions of the business case of gender equality Marketing (as) gender equality, Uncovering the male norm and Gender equality as a depoliticized value. We conclude that the business case framing facilitates for the companies to engage in issues of gender equality. However, issues concerning conflicting interests and power relations seem to be difficult to address within the business case discourse. This we argue affects and shapes the terms for gender equality in these organizations.     

Beyond dichotomy: Drawing distinctions and embracing differences

The recognition of gender as a constituent element of social structure poses a profound challenge to received wisdom and practice in sociology. We review selected aspects of the new scholarship and its fundamental critique of objectivism and dualistic models. Counterchallenges are acknowledged: from institutional and collegial resistance, on the one hand, to an enhanced awareness of the dilemmas posed by diversity and sameness within and between gender categories, on the other hand. From their struggle with these issues, feminist scholars are constructing a sociology that transcends dichotomies, embraces diversity, and links the several levels of social analysis.     

Gender mainstreaming and evaluation in the EU: comparative perspectives from feminist institutionalism

This article presents a focused comparative analysis of the institutionalization of two governance practices in the European Commission that levy distinct challenges to the gender status quo: gender mainstreaming (which overtly challenges gender bias) and evaluation (which does not have explicit feminist aspirations). With reference to five dimensions, we identify evaluation as relatively strongly institutionalized, and gender mainstreaming as relatively weakly institutionalized. We draw on the explanatory power of feminist institutionalism to unpack these findings, arguing that a feminist institutional perspective can shed light on this variation, as it provides greater insight into the formal and informal institutions that constrain, enable and shape the implementation of evaluation and gender mainstreaming. We assert that the notion of path dependency, the logic of appropriateness, and the concept of layering serve as useful tools to understand the gendered nature of the European Commission. This research provides insights into the institutional factors that impact the implementation of gender equality strategies (such as gender mainstreaming). In turn, this contributes to the development of more effective strategies to promote institutional change toward greater equality.