Gender Notes

Gender

• Girls continue to outperform boys both at age 7 and GCSE.

• Yet Carter and Silva – lag men at every career stage right from their first professional jobs, men start their careers are a higher level than women even once adjusted for years of experience/region/industry, and when holding for both not having children.

• Goldthorpe – women still achieve greater social mobility through marriage tan their own employment.

Do women make good managers? Is ability a barrier? Should women have to choose between work or family?

• Weber: the existence of patriarchal dominance is normal in the light of the normal superiority of the physical and intellectual energies of the male. Lol.

• Women make good managers because of not in spite of their gender:

  • Fels: giving is the chief feminine activity, so women tend to make highly supportive managers and team players.

  • Rosener: that women have lacked formal authority over others and control over resources means they have had to find other ways to accomplish their work, may be better suited to many business environments.

  • transformational leadership – getting subordinates to transform their own self-interest into the interests of the group through concern for a broader goal, encouragement of participation, sharing power/information, enhancing other people’s self worth.

  • Compared to transactional leadership this can increase organisation’s survival chances in undercertainty.

  • Other view is Wajcman: management is ungendered, women in senior positions are indistinguishable from their male counterparts, both in style and ability.

We associate women with ‘family’ and men with ‘work’

• Kelly: the cultural norm is that women are expected to carry the domestic burden.

• Wajcman: the traits associated with being a ‘good manager’ are ‘masculine’.

• our expectations within society mean that men are more likely to be linked with career and women are more likely to be linked to family.

• As shown it has no basis in fact – reject Becker’s human capital theory – the sexual division of labour cannot be mutually advantageous due to efficiency if men and women are equal in terms of career capabilities.

• Self fulfilling: absenteeism is higher among women (Goldberg) so they do not meet Colgon and Thomlinson’s criteria for career progression.

• The question of choice should not be being asked about one gender and not the other, women and men both have families, but cultural ideas are so ingrained that a gender-non-specific question has become one sided.

This association is partly down to the way we define femininity:

• Fels: cultural imperatives that equate ambition and quests for recognition with a lack of femininity. Ambition seen as necessary and desirable in me, but representative of egotism, selfishness and manipulation in women.

• Instead the provision and relinquishment of resources is seen as desirable. Leads women to deflect attention despite equal want to acquire skills and receive affirmation, results in the achievement of feminine coming only from a relationship context – providing and caring for in the role of either a wife or a mother.

• Threats to sexual identity lead to demoralization.

And also lead women to underestimate their own ability, so don’t feel as competent in a career...

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