This chapter discusses how gender is constructed and communicated about in the workplace. It explores how workplaces are often designed around masculine norms that marginalize women and how communication reinforces these gendered structures. The chapter also examines how the intersection of gender and race further disadvantages black women in the workplace. It argues that workplace policies and practices, as well as broader societal discourses, need to change to make workplaces more equitable for all genders and races.

1. CMS 498
Gender at Work
Chapter 9
Susan Chase
Communicating Gender Diversity; A Critical Approach
Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco – Catherine Helen Palczewski
Sage Publications, Inc 2007
Thousand Oaks, California

2. Gender at Work
“Women and men are never only women
and men, each person possesses and
intersectional identity.” Kimberlle’ Crenshaw

3. Discrimination laws were failing
black women
Crenshaw explores how Title VII of the 1964
U.S. Civil rights act is failing black women.

4. If a black woman sought redress
employers would demonstrate
how
They treated black men fairly and were not
sexist because they treated white women
fairly.

5. Crenshaw(1989) concludes that
“the intersectional experience is
greater than the sum of racism and
sexism” and thus attention to
intersectionality is essential to
explain,
“the particular man in which Black women
are subordinated” (p.59)

6. Discriminatory gender
constructions based on sex & race
Are most manifested at work

7. Chapter 9 looks at the exploration
of the intersecting ways in which
People participate in the “saying and
doing” of gender in the workplace.

8. We must look at communication about work and
not just communication in the workplaces to
understand the complex relationship between
work and gender.

9. The act of women leaving the
workforce to take care of their
children is called off- ramping

10. Communication problem
in U.S. & Britain
reporting that many
women are off-ramping
 Claim that many women are leaving is incorrect – no
economic data to support
 may make employers think twice about hiring a young
woman over a man
 There are other factors influencing women leaving the
work force
 Recession
 Work structure unfriendly to family forcing mothers to
choose
 Family structure – partners unable or unwilling to off-ramp
 Difficulty on-ramping

11. Off-ramp is not viable for
all women
More Black women are single parents.
They earn more than their husbands.
• Need help supporting
extended family.
• View work as elevating
• Their status as women
• & elevating their family,
• Extended family & race.

12. Choice?
• “Whether women choose to on-or off-ramp, their
choices are constrained and defined by institutional
structures.

13. This chapter discusses
• Communicative practices through which work
constructs gender
• Communication about gender that constructs work

14. What is work? Who
works? How do you
work? Where does work
take place?
• The western bias is that you get paid for work, it
occurs outside the home and taking care of your
children is not work.

15. Who stays home with the
kids?
• Hetero
male same sex
female same sex
• 22% one partner
Stays home
• .3% dads
• 25% mom
26% 1 partner stays home
(Bellafante, 2004)

16. Work expectations- not
consistent among sexes
• “Work organizations are ‘masculinized’”(Britton
1999,p.469)
• Work is not a gender or sex neutral institution
• The description of work as an institution has
masculine characteristics.

17. Work is social institution
in that it is what makes
Americans American!

18. A man is not a real man
unless he is employed
• (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005)
• The job a man does is a major basis of his identity
and what it means to be a man (messerschmidt,
1996,p33)

19. Every male in the U.S. is
expected to work
• Women with small children are exempt from this
expectation
UNLESS
• They are on welfare
• Work –good
Welfare -bad

20. “An amazingly persistent pattern is
repeatedly reproduced with
gender/sex i.d. of jobs” (Acker, 1990, p. 145)

21. Male dominated vs.
Female dominated
occupations
•
•
•
•
•
Male
Prestige
Authority
Autonomy
$
Female
less of all

22. How organizations
maintain gendering
• Communicative practices of
Organizational structure
Ideology
Interaction among workers
Construction and maintenance of
individual identities
(Britton 1999, p.456)

23. Power at work
• Power permeates work in complex ways
(mumby 2001)
 Boss to worker
 Between workers as a result of sex or race privilege

24. Conflicting institutions
Family/Work
• Mothers criticized for putting kids in daycare
• Mothers on welfare staying home criticized for not
working
• Mink, 1995, pp.180-181

25. Work values seen as
opposite of Family values
• Work and family as opposite social institutions each
with different demands, values and goals as a result
tension causing people to feel they must choose
one over the other.
• The choices are gendered, raced and classed.

26. Work family balance
found in Nordic countries
• Work and home structured to support each other
• Work pay continues during parental leave
• Benefits encourage both parents to take time off
from work
• Other countries offer many work from home
scenarios

27. As of 2000 51% of U.S.
mothers with children
under the age of 1 were
employed

28. Pregnancy Discrimination
Act of 1978 and Family
leave act of 1993
• Allows up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for
pregnancy, personal or family reasons
• Objective to make sure people affected by
pregnancy and caregiving are not penalize and
able to return to work after leave.

29. Legal change is not
enough
Communication must
change also!
• “The process of convincing requires not only that a
given policy be accepted but also that a given
vocabulary(or set of understandings) be integrated
into public repertoire”
Celeste Condite (1990 p. 6)

30. Vocabulary needed to
change
• Discussion of work and childbearing
changes needed
 Maternity leave = benefit (a bonus or
business choice and not a guaranteed
right)
 Pregnancy = disability ( a condition
belonging to one person, which also
renders the other parent absent)
This limited vocabulary means that even
with laws and policies in place, work’s
male-centered structure continues to
present challenges to women who are
about to be parents. Albrecht (1999)

31. Work and Education
• Studies show African American women and
subordination at work their experiences start in
school where they are steered away from particular
work aspirations(Parker, 2003).
• How African American women are talked to and
about influences the types of work they and others
consider suitable.

32. Emotions - Its not about
sex difference
• Men and women are emotional at work, but for men it is
not coded as emotional.
• What others count as an emotional expression depends
on the expresser’s sex/gender (Parkin, 1993)
• Emotions considered appropriate when expressed by a
man are perceived inappropriate when expressed by a
woman (Hearn 1993)

33. Assumption of Progress
• A sex gap in earnings exists across almost all
employment categories( Chen et al, 2005)
•
•
•
•
2003 women’s earnings declined in relation to mens
High in 2002 of 76.6% of mens salaries
2003 down to 75.5%
Job and prestige held constant

34. Organizations are not
gender neutral
(Acker, 1990,p.139)
• Top corporate levels women earn 8% to 25% lower
• Lag behind in bo the advancement and pay was worse
in 2002 than they were in 1995
• Only 5 out of 10 industries studied did women hold a
number of management jobs proportionate to their
representation in the workforce
• (Blau & Kahn, 2000, p.1)

35. 5 reasons for attention to
gender and organizations
1. Sex Segregation of work paid and unpaid
2. Income and status inequality between men and
women and how this is created through organizational
structure
3. How organizations invent and reproduce cultural
images of sex and gender
4. The way in which gender, particularly masculinity, is the
product of organizations processes
5. The need to make organizations more democratic and
more supportive of humane goals.
These are intersecting processes that make issues of power,
control and dominance gendered.
Acker

36. The way men and women socially construct each
other at work affects their work experiences
• This tends to impair women worker’s identities and
confidence (Martin 2003 p. 343)

37. Women are primary in
Care work

38. “Interlocking systems of
gender and racial
oppression act to
concentrate women and
people of color in those
occupations that are lower
paying and lower status”
• Duffy 2005 p. 72

39. Sexual Harassment
Not just about something a man does to a woman but
it is “a tool or instrument of gender
regulation….undertaken in the service of heteropatriarchal norms. These norms, regulatory,
constitutive, and punitive in nature, produce
gendered subjects: feminine women as sex object
and masculine men as sex subjects.

40. Sexual Harassment
• Not something men do to women because they
are women, but something that people do to other
people to maintain strict gender / sex binary norms
and inequalities. Which allows for us to recognize
the harassment of masculine men and feminine
men by women and men. (Frake 1997)

41. Why do men base their
bonding on the sexual
objectification of women?
• Culture of hegemonic masculinity, men become men by
performing their virility in front of other men. (Quinn 2002)

42. Conclusion
• Every person engages in work, paid or unpaid
• Work as an institution both genders and is gendered
• My learnings from this chapter are;
It is important to see not only how we as people gender our
co-workers but how work as an institution genders an
organization and how communication within society and
organizations effect how we feel about and act toward
each other at work.