This special issue reviews contemporary gender and diversity insights into management and organization studies (MOS). The purpose of this issue is to critically evaluate key threads and concepts contributing to academic debates in diversity, gender and feminist theorizing. This paper highlights key threads in current scholarship, including relationality, power, intersectionality and social constructionist epistemologies and, in so doing, uncovers new insights and contributions. The paper provides a model which locates different themes and 'moments' in the development of gender and diversity scholarship and acts as a heuristic device which can guide gender and diversity scholarship and assist in conceptualizing the field. Building on the key threads weaving the special issue together, the paper advances new understandings of gender and diversity through integrating feminist post-colonial scholarship, transnationalism and geographies of space and place literatures. The paper argues for scholars to 're-imagine' different possibilities for gender and diversity enquiry so as to encourage interdisciplinarity and align with social science research in contemporary critiques of globalization and global social capital in order to add richness and complexity to current theorizing. Specifically, the authors argue for MOS researchers to engage in dialogue with all global stakeholders, and they encourage cross-fertilization of theories and values between writers from both the Global North and the Global South.

It is currently fashionable to herald “managing diversity” as an approach which signals a new dawn for equal opportunities. Within the management of diversity is a new, more positive approach to employee “‘difference” which prescribes the valuation of individuality and the abandonment of group based equality initiatives. In principle the focus on individuals suggests this approach lends itself particularly well to disabled employees who constitute a more heterogeneous group than women and ethnic minorities. The article evaluates this in the light of debates traditionally located within gender literatures and applies them to survey data gathered from UK HRM managers which details the disability equality initiatives adopted by their organisations. It argues that differences between disabled groups and those constituted on the basis of gender or race, together with differences amongst disabled people renders the group based and the managing diversity approach to equality largely rhetorical.

This paper makes the case that the current single-axis approach to the diagnosis and remedy of pay discrimination is inadequate in the case of multiple disadvantage. While a good deal is known about pay gaps, particularly those affecting women, less is known about those affecting people in other disadvantaged groups and those in more than one such group. This analysis of multiple years of pay data, n = 513,000, from a large UK-based company shows that people with more than one disadvantaged identity suffer a significantly greater pay penalty than those with a single disadvantage. The data also suggest that penalties associated with multiple disadvantage exponentially increase. In other words, disadvantages seem to interact to the detriment of people at 'intersections'. The paper considers the implications for policies aimed at reducing pay inequalities. These currently take a single-axis approach and may be misdirected.

Using a longitudinal research design, this article considers employers' human resource management practices in respect of disability equality: in 1995 under the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act and in 2003 under the Disability Discrimination Act. The article analyses whether there has been a change to employers' practices and whether or not this change is associated with increased employment of disabled persons. The findings show that proactive HR measures to encourage disabled employment, including positive discrimination, had a significant impact on disabled employment in 1995, whereas HR measures centring on managerial responsibilities and making adaptations had a similar result in 2003. We argue that, for optimum effectiveness, HR departments should employ the full range of HR measures that are available, including positive discrimination, and that this approach should be underpinned by a range of enforcement measures. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.