Reprogramming Femininity? The Construction of Gender Identities in the Israeli Hi‐tech Industry between Global and Local Gender Orders

Frenkel, Michal

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2008.00398.x

Cited by 51 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…In comparison, approximately 40% of the women in the top percentile of wage earners in the United States do not have children (Hewlett, 2002). Given the high cultural value of bearing children and Israeli women's aspirations for advancement, social norms and practical arrangements support the combination of managerial careers and mothering (Frenkel, 2008). However, although these arrangements, in Israel and other countries with family-friendly policies, may allow mothers to hold leadership positions, they may also bring disadvantage.…”

Section: Work-family Issuesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Gender and Leadership: Negotiating the Labyrinth

Kark

Eagly

2009

Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology

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There is no topic with more profound implications for gender equality than leadership. Gender equality cannot be attained until women and men share leadership equally. With unfettered access of women to leadership, the policies of organizations and governments would balance the concerns of women and men more equitably. Yet, women and men are not equally represented as leaders in any contemporary nation. Therefore, it is essential that people committed to furthering gender equality understand what enhances the access of women and men to leadership and their ability to perform well in leader roles. To foster this understanding, we focus this chapter on explaining why women have less access to leadership than men do, especially to roles that confer high levels of power and authority. We also explore women's considerable progress in attaining such roles in many nations. An understanding of both women's advancement and their continuing lack of equality with men illuminates the changes needed to produce gender equality.The first issue we address is whether the typically greater family responsibilities of mothers than fathers are the main deterrent to women's rise as leaders. The second issue is whether people are prejudiced against women as leaders and, therefore, discriminate against them as candidates for leadership roles and resist their authority once they occupy these roles. Such prejudicial pressures can affect women's leadership behavior. The third issue is whether challenges to women as leaders reside at least in part in the structure and culture of organizations. As we argue in this chapter, the conjunction of these several considerations produces paths to leadership that are decidedly more challenging for women than for men-challenges that can be metaphorically described by a labyrinth that women traverse to attain power and authority and exercise it effectively (Eagly & Carli, 2007).Given that all individuals possess identities in addition to their gender, the multifaceted challenges to leadership that individuals face can differ depending on attributes such as sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. Throughout the chapter, we remain cognizant of the different contours that these intersectionalities impose on men's and women's leadership (Shields, 2008).

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Section: Work-family Issuesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Gender and Leadership: Negotiating the Labyrinth

Kark

Eagly

2009

Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology

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“…The Israeli high-tech industry constitutes an intriguing study arena of this issue, because according to Frenkel (2008) this context is comprised of two cultural repertoires characterized by divergent and contradictory fundamental assumptions: on one hand, the Israeli society, which is familycentered (e.g., Harpaz, 1990), and on the other hand, the high-tech industry, which is considered by some authors (e.g., acker, 2004;Copper, 2000) as a masculine environment in which women are welcome as long as they perform as surrogate men by working long hours and playing down their care-giving activities.…”

Section: The Israeli High-tech Industry As a Bicultural Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Centrality of and Investment in Work and Family Among Israeli High-Tech Workers

Snir

Harpaz

Ben-Baruch

2009

Cross-Cultural Research

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Workers' attitudes concerning the competition for individual's resources between work and family are expressed by the relative centrality they attribute to each of these domains. This competition is also manifested in the tradeoff between work and family time. The study deals with 319 Israeli high-tech workers. We examined the effect of parenthood on men and on women regarding the centrality of and investment in work and family in the bicultural context of the Israeli high-tech industry (i.e., the family-centered Israeli society on the one hand, and the masculine work-centered high-tech industry on the other hand). a contrasting parenthood effect on men and women was found. Fathers showed higher relative work centrality than childless men, whereas mothers showed lower relative work centrality than women without children. Fathers invested more weekly hours in paid work than childless men, whereas mothers invested fewer weekly hours in paid work than women without children. In the parents' sub-sample, mothers evinced higher relative family centrality than fathers. Mothers also invested more weekly hours in childcare and core housework tasks than fathers. The uniqueness of the findings is that the contrasting parenthood effect prevails even in the demanding high-tech sector, in which women are expected to work long hours and play down their care-giving activities. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that mothers struggled to juggle active family caring with a career, at UNIV OF SOUTH DAKOTA on March 15, 2015 ccr.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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“…For professional and managerial women, the birth of a first child is often followed by a struggle to maintain a sense of self as professional while striving to be a "good mother" (P. M. Buzzanell & Liu, 2005;Frenkel, 2008;Millward, 2006). For example, Buzzanell and Liu (2005) interviewed 15 women of varying occupational status about their experiences with workplace pregnancy and returning to work post-maternity leave.…”

Section: Identity Work At Key Transitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stories of coming to terms with backlash in the form of demotion or denial of promotion led Buzzanell and Liu to conclude, "the gendered social order undermines women's identity work to construct themselves as normal workers who just happen to be pregnant and, later, mothers" (2005, p.18). In an investigation of gender-identity construction in the Israeli context in which middle-class women are expected to pursue high-profile careers while simultaneously upholding traditional family values, Frenkel (2008) discovered that women professionals craft masculine, "ideal worker" preparenthood identities that are defied by the birth of a child: "these 'surrogate men' start categorizing themselves as 'feminine' and reconstruct normative femininity in a new way" (2008, p. 359). While this context is perhaps extreme, the notion of the "ideal worker" in the developed world continues to be imbued with masculine traits (Bailyn, 2006;Rappoport et al, 2002), leaving professional and managerial women to make sense of who they have become as workers and mothers.…”

Section: Identity Work At Key Transitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identity in Transition: Women’s Narrative Identity Work on the Path to Professional and Mother

Bataille

2014

AMPROC

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Although numerous scholars claim that identity is an integral aspect of engaging in work and family, the extant literature falls short of explaining how women's identities evolve over time through the significant transitions involved in pursuing professional careers and raising families. In fact, much of the literature is grounded in the assumption that work and family represent competing identities for women. Missing from this body of literature is a conceptualization of pursuing a professional/managerial career and having a family as a complex set of transitions that provoke the questions, "Who am I?" and "Who/what do I want to be?" Through a narrative study of 35 professional/managerial women, I uncover novel forms of narrative identity work that illuminate how women construct, revise and present their identities as they transition from university students to young professionals, from non-mothers to mothers, and from childless employees to those with childcare responsibilities. Further, I posit that these forms of narrative identity work reflect three higher-order identity processes: identity exploration, identity adaptation, and identity expression. Through a within and between-case examination of the configurations of identity processes across the three transitions, I uncover four dominant patterns that provide novel insights into how women's identities evolve over time on the path to professional and mother.ii

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Reprogramming Femininity? The Construction of Gender Identities in the Israeli Hi‐tech Industry between Global and Local Gender Orders

Cited by 51 publications

References 23 publications

Gender and Leadership: Negotiating the Labyrinth

Gender and Leadership: Negotiating the Labyrinth

Centrality of and Investment in Work and Family Among Israeli High-Tech Workers

Identity in Transition: Women’s Narrative Identity Work on the Path to Professional and Mother

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