The Many Faces of Gender Inequality at Work

Abstract

THE MANY FACES OF GENDER INEQUALITY AT WORK In January this year, the day to day editorial work for Work, Employment and Society (WES) moved from the University of Leicester to the Middlesex University team, for the period 2018-2020. We are an interdisciplinary team, with members from four departments within Middlesex University. In addition to dedication to the core sociological approaches of the journal, the team members have been selected to reflect the increased interdisciplinary character of the journal. Members bring a wide range of research interests and perspectives, with particular emphasis on the growing research areas of labour process, new forms of work, precarious work, globalisation, diversity, mobility, labour migration, and psychosocial studies. To capitalise on our diverse research expertise, we have decided that, whenever possible, we will create thematic issues of WES and preface them with short editorials. In doing this, we hope to better focus the attention of academic and practitioner communities with an interest in a specific theme, to foster dialogue, and to signal potential areas for further research. Introducing the Thematic Issue The collection of articles included in this first thematic issue addresses gender inequalities, a theme that has featured intensively in the public sphere in these past months, including high profile revelations about gender pay discrimination such as those at the BBC and others in the UK, the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns, and ongoing debates about gender inequalities in the global labour market. Our assembling of this particular issue also coincides with UK

Gendered labour process

“…Of these, themes (4), ( 7), ( 8) and ( 9) are discarded since the aim is to engage with the labour process aspects (Reskin, 1993), rather than the supply side factors (except theme 12, career aspirations, that is a supply side factor) of gendering of organizations (Collins, 1998). However, they formed the basis for the other basic themes (Lup et al, 2018;Ronen, 2018). The remaining eight basic themes are clustered under four organizing themes by using the perspectives from labour process theory and gendering of organizations.…”

Hegemonic masculinity or masculine domination

“…Hearn (2012) points to the lack of applicability of the concept of hegemonic masculinity in studying men’s violence against known women, and argues that the test of any theory of masculinity would lie in its applicability to study men’s violence against known women, re-asserting that a conception of hegemony of men is more viable than the conception of hegemonic masculinity (Hearn, 2004, 2012). Women’s experience of discrimination in contemporary workplaces stems from the way organizations are structured, work is organized and people managed, in the image of a man (Acker, 1990, 2006; Bonnes, 2017; Crowley, 2013; Good and Cooper, 2016; Jonnergård et al , 2010; Lup et al , 2018; Mastracci and Arreola, 2016; Oksala, 2016; Patterson et al , 2017; Pecis, 2016; Ronen, 2018; Sandberg et al , 2018; Sandlund et al , 2011; Yang and Aldrich, 2014; Todd and Binns, 2013; Trotter, 2017; Van Echtelt et al , 2009; Williams et al , 2012; Williams, 2013), rather than a configuration of practices of hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, women’s experiences of bullying and sexual harassment need to be viewed in the social and organizational context rather than an individual phenomenon or as a practice of hegemonic masculinity (Berlingieri, 2015).…”

Employment discrimination against gender diverse individuals in Western Australia

“…The employment discrimination literature is concentrated overwhelmingly on a handful of socially disadvantaged groups, and it focuses largely on the obstacles that members face as job applicants and employees. Two of the most prominent social groups at the receiving end of research on discrimination in the workplace are women and racial and ethnic minorities (Lup et al , 2018; McGinnity and Lunn, 2011). Also at the top of this list can be found any number of studies investigating employment discrimination on the basis of age (Turek and Henkens, 2019), disability (Hoque et al , 2014), religion (Khattab and Hussein, 2018), sexual orientation (Colgan and Rumens, 2014) and, increasingly, some intersection of these traits (Acker, 2012; McBride et al , 2015; Tatli and Ozbilgin, 2012).…”