Gendering

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The process of gendering serves to create something that is “gendered”—that is, that causes a division based on sex or gender and that privileges one sex or gender, thereby silencing or suppressing the other. For example, the role of nurse is significantly gendered in that it is generally expected that a woman would possess the feminine characteristics thought necessary to carry out the role successfully. It is said that women possess an advantage when it comes to hiring and promotion in this career. The opposite occurs in the gendering of occupations such as engineers and chief executive officers. Studies demonstrate that men are privileged in such occupations, due to the traditionally male characteristics deemed necessary for success within such positions.

Several organizational theorists have written about the genderedness of organizations in their entirety. By this, they are referring not only to gendered positions as discussed above, but to the structures, roles, rules, policies, relationships, and identities that are privileged or silenced due characteristics of sex or gender ascribed to them. Much research has been done on the genderedness of organizations, as related to issues of the presence of gendered structures, policies, and procedures, as well as the outcomes of such. As a result, researchers have identified what gendered organizations look like and the impact on disadvantaged groups (i.e., job segregation, underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups in management, glass ceilings, mommy tracks, etc.). Despite the fact that organizations have been identified as being gendered for quite some time, researchers are still trying to better understand the processes responsible for the creation and maintenance of these gendered organizations—that is, the gendering.

Central to the development of this research is the more recent (within the past two decades) notion of gender as a dynamic process. Candace West and Don Zimmerman were instrumental in shaping this new understanding of gender as something people do, as opposed to something people are, in the publication of their article titled “Doing Gender” in 1987. Although not the first to identify gender as a process (this had been suggested in other academic fields prior to 1987), their article solidified researchers' understanding of gender as a social process and emphasized the importance of this understanding in organizational research. Shortly after publication of this important work, Patricia Yancey Martin further problematized the notion of “doing gender” and used the term gendering in an unconventional way throughout much of her work in the 1990s. Her work is frequently cited and well regarded.

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At the same time that the work noted above was being produced, Joan Acker and her colleagues were working on the conceptualization of social structures (organizations included) as gendered. In “Differential Recruitment and Control: The Sex Structuring of Organizations,” Joan Acker and Donald R. Van Houten note the apparent genderedness of organizational structures and positions. Within this piece, Acker and Van Houten note the existence of gendering processes but do not refer to them as such. It is not until her solo work of 1998 that Acker uses the language of gendered processes. In Class, Gender and the Relations of Distribution, Acker contends that the organization of labor and production are gendered and that this genderedness is a result of gendered processes. It is here that the notion of gendered processes first comes to the forefront in Acker's work. It is also where she provides a definition of gendered and introduces her notion of gendering as the processes within organizations that are responsible for the creation of gendered organizational phenomenon.

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