Phantom Of The Male Norm
Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 18 No. 3 May 2011 doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2010.00546.x Are Women in Management
Victims of the Phantom of the
Male Norm? gwao_546 298..317
Yvonne Due Billing*
Managerial jobs have conventionally been understood as male and thus as not being directly suitable for women. The point of departure of this discourse is that women and men are different and that there is congruence between men and managerial jobs. On the basis of a qualitative study of women managers, I argue that there is a need for more sophisticated ways of appreciating the experiences of (many) women in relation to management. Variation, complexity and contradictions may be lost when holding onto essentialist understandings …show more content…
such as the male norm.
Keywords: management, doing gender, the male norm, congruency
Introduction
T
his author questions the continuous use of the male as the norm in management as an appropriate indicator for explaining women’s difficulties in management. This idea rests on a discourse that celebrates differences between men and women and is based upon somewhat rigid ideas of managerial jobs and a belief that organizations are similar in this gender aspect. This discourse supports an understanding of women as ‘others’ (deviants) and, I argue, reduces the complexity of women’s (and men’s) lives and their identities and also ignores the fact that organizations and management jobs differ significantly. Based on a qualitative study of 20 Swedish and
Danish women managers, I argue that their experiences can be dealt with in ways other than reducing them to victims of the male norm phantom.
Firstly, I am going to provide some examples of how the notion of the male as the norm is used in the literature and the difficulties this term presents us with, as it cannot account for the complexities in the experiences of women managers. Next I introduce the concept of congruency to indicate a perceived
Address for correspondence: *Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Department of Sociology PO Box 2099, DK-1014 Copenhagen K; e-mail: ydb@soc.ku.dk
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match between people and their jobs. If, for example, a managerial job is perceived to be incongruent with specific kinds of people then we should expect such people to be reluctant or perhaps ambivalent about accepting a managerial job or, after having accepted such a job, at least, to display some resistance to the norm in that job or to act contrary to the norm and to make some kind of adjustment to their managerial behaviour. If, on the other hand, they are not greatly affected by tacking on such a position then perhaps notion of the male as the norm is too simple a concept to provide a meaningful understanding of what goes on in organizations.
In all organizations there are norms and rules for behaviour, some of which may be gendered in the sense that gendered differences are created.
‘Doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987) cannot be completely avoided: we do gender and sometimes we undo gender (Deutsch, 2007) (that is, conform to or break away from sex stereotypes). I show how some of the women interviewed sometimes use gender categories as discursive resources, for example, to make sense of their daily experiences of doing management and to navigate around gender norms and constrains.
I investigate congruency in relation to their job and the perceptions and experiences of the women interviewed. Having found that it makes sense to categorize their managerial jobs in four different classes, I finally discuss the problems in continuing to use established categories when they no longer resonate with women’s experiences.
The male as the norm?
Organizations have historically been constructed and developed according to expectations that men were the breadwinners and that a bureaucratic career was equivalent to a male career (Witz and Savage, 1992). The development of hierarchical structures took place along gendered lines as women were recruited as cheap labour and were meant to fit into subordinate positions. As stated by Witz and Savage (1992) women’s entry in these jobs made it possible to promote male clerks more quickly. Predetermined career structures were reserved for men, and men’s careers were facilitated by the existence of female supporters, making it possible for men to spend most of their time in the organization. The stereotypical man that set the original norm was a career man with a supportive wife working in the home. This constellation still exists, but it is nowadays less widespread. In Europe most women have paid jobs (Glover and Kirtin, 2006). In the Nordic countries double-career families or dual breadwinners are the most common, as two incomes are needed to provide a reasonable standard of living in response to high taxes.1
Despite the fact that a large number of women work outside the home, there are still more men than women managers. Many women have advanced to the middle levels but there are few at the top.2 This has been seen as the
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result of excluding mechanisms, of the masculine ethic and image these positions convey (for example, Acker, 1990; Kanter, 1977; Wilson, 1998) and of women’s lifestyle preferences (Hakim, 2000).
In this article the focus is not on why fewer women get to the top but on how the interviewees positioned themselves in relation to different managerial jobs and how they experienced becoming and being managers, for example in relation to their former colleagues. The main purpose is to discuss established understandings such as the problem of using the male as the norm when it no longer resonates with many women’s experiences.
The question then is: In what sense do work practices and norms still reflect the life situations and interests of men? For example, Meyerson and
Kolb (2000) argue that organizations are inherently gendered as work practices and norms reflect men’s life situations. I would argue that few jobs are entirely congruent with the needs of those holding them. Thus, men too may find the content and demands of their job at odds with what they really want.
For many women and men, work organizations may mean constraints and suffering. Conversely, both may experience joy and benefits from everyday organizational life. Most managers of both sexes probably have a lot of interests in common (for example, wanting reasonable time for a private life with or without children).
Some of the constraints on managers in organizations, such as the pressure to give priority to work over family, do not originate solely from male domination but are also contingent upon the workings of capitalism where certain performances seem to be necessary for organizations to produce goods and services effectively and competitively. Perhaps this aspect should not be underestimated. The varieties within the categories of men and women should not be underestimated, either. Modern forms of gender identity are more multifaceted and varied than they were a couple of decades ago.
Although traditional images of women as non-careerist and accompanying self-understandings still exist, in large sectors of contemporary society they no longer dominate. Women’s average share of higher education has for years exceeded that of men.3 The modern, professional, career-oriented woman is a legitimate social identity — even a norm. This does not mean that it is unproblematic for women to adopt it if it breaks too strongly with traditional ideas of femininities.
In the Nordic countries day care facilities are more generous than in many other countries and children should not be seen as a (big) hindrance for women who wish to pursue a career. Many men now take (or have to take) more responsibility as parents, even for very small children, than a couple of decades ago, at least in Nordic countries.
Many different factors may influence who we are and how and what we can be and how much time we can devote to our career. The term, the male norm indicates that gender identity is a major identity signifier. But identity should not be reduced to a gender identity. We may belong to or be assigned
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to different social groups simultaneously.
A woman, a manager and an information technology (IT) employee are all possible examples of social identities. However, the crucial element is not the socially available category but the way in which an individual uses a specific social category as a central marker for selfhood. The IT woman manager may not see herself as ‘a feminine’ person, but as an engineer.4 Another divider is age: many people have experienced age discrimination, whether they are men or women. Considering all the variations is impossible. Although women and men construct differences and similarities and position themselves in relation to gender categories, there are other social forces that also shape the individual. How we see ourselves is not only a question of the sex category we belong to. Identities are created in interaction with others and through the way we talk about ourselves, and we may change over time or feel that we have changed our identity. Identity is under the constant influence from a lot of different factors, not fixed in an essentialist past.
Alvesson and Willmott (2002) use the concepts of identity work and identity regulation. This signals the way in which individuals do identity construction based on interpretations of themselves in the world and also that …show more content…
these interpretations often bear strong imprints of others who exercise power over these interpretations. How we define ourselves is then partly an outcome of how others — those around us — provide rewards and sanctions for what we are.
Many organizations hold meritocratic ideals, by which an attractive candidate for a managerial job is constructed as an individual who is willing to accept the rules of the game. In many organizations the ideal candidate is one who is willing to travel a lot, to be available and to work longer than a normal working week; in short; one who is what Acker (2006) called an ideal worker, who is often, but not necessarily a man. The general condition for competition ideally operates independently of gender. Competitive pressure makes organizations more interested in employing those whom they can take advantage of, whether because of their gender, ethnicity, age or other factors. As Brittain
(1989) suggests, capitalism does not need the demarcation of gender. Organizations and management need to survive in a competitive, sustainable world and therefore people are hired who are willing to, and capable of, accepting demands that may not be family-friendly. This is a problem for many workers and it may hit women more if they have partners (or children or both) with whom they have not been able to negotiate a fair sharing of housework and caring work. If women are doing most of the household and childcare work they have little time for socializing with colleagues and building up relations and networks proving their commitment to the social side of the organization (Eagly and Carli, 2007).
Male domination in organizations is said to result in a symbolically masculine culture and ethic, gendering organizations such that it is difficult for women to be accepted once they have become managers. At the managerial
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level the sex composition is still in favour of men and is believed to set the norm for how one should be as a manager, and for the characteristics and attributes expected in a management position (Acker, 1990).
According to
Eagly and Carli (2007), another hindrance to women managers is that they cannot be accepted in the culture because they do not join male managers in strip clubs or go hunting with them. If the norm includes activities like hunting and visiting strip clubs this might leave out some (or even most) men and it might attract some women.
Managerial jobs can be seen as more or less manly, loosely coupled to the ratio of the jobholders, and some management positions may demand values and managerial behaviour that are hard to define as male (Billing and
Alvesson, 2000). Different organizations (and even different levels within the organization) may want or need different characteristics, qualifications and management behaviour, depending on, for example, whether the organization is in a competitive business or in the public service sector. The tasks vary and there is a need for people whose qualifications or personalities match the needs of the organization (Greenwald, 2008). There are workplaces where there is a gender mix and also workplaces where women are dominant
and men subordinate (for example, in many Scandinavian public sector organizations). Since the dawn of bureaucracy there have been major changes in organizations and in women’s situation. Bureaucratic initiatives have benefited many women (Konrad and Linnehan, 1999). With the expansion of service and knowledge work there are also fewer jobs and tasks with a very strong masculine image.
The male norm maintains an unhappy association with men’s bodies. This discourse perpetuates differences and even makes them seem natural. This construction might trap people; for example, some women may be confronted with the idea that they ought to adopt different leadership styles because of the assumed difference between women and men. This idea easily constrains women to specific leadership positions, overburdening them with tasks that are believed to be natural for women and perhaps under-burdening them with others, thus restricting them in how they can be managers (Billing and Alvesson, 2000).
It is important to know how the terms of gender are instituted and established as a presupposition but also to trace the moments by which the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged (Butler, 2004). Assuming that gender is a kind of doing (West and Zimmerman, 1987), it is then a practice, within a setting of constraints, which is done with or for others that are not necessarily physical others as they may be imaginary (Butler, 2004): phantoms. As this study shows, the managers interviewed sometimes use gender resources and create differences and sometimes they do not follow gender norms, but resist them. It is not what has been internalized in terms of gender, but rather how action and interaction are guided by strong norms for doing gender in the right way, leading to the confirmation of these norms and
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avoiding sanctions for deviations. It is the level of interacting that is crucial.
The process of doing gender is not limited to the micro-level (in daily interactions) or the meso-level (in organizations); it also takes place at the macrolevel (societal level). Normally this doing is viewed as a matter of complying with established, non-egalitarian patterns, but resisting or bypassing gendered norms, the un-doing of gender (Deutsch, 2007) is also a possibility.
Gender categories are unstable and ambiguous (Calás and Smircich 1992) and what happens at the meso-level and micro-level cannot simply be predicted or understood from a macro level (see Alvesson, 1998; Leidner, 1991).
Most people probably gender themselves and are gendered by others and strive to keep a sense of masculinity or femininity intact, using genderappropriate behaviour and meanings, and do so in order to confirm a gender identity. Almost any look at mass media representations indicates the strength of forces creating identity regulation in gendered ways. But we do not do gender only in hierarchical and discriminatory ways. Defining women primarily as victims of the male norm freezes the intellectual project too categorically. And as argued by Flax (1987), Nicholson (1990) and others, notions like male and female are no longer viewed as fundamental, valid points of departure but are considered to be unstable and ambiguous and attribute a false unity.
There is an expectation of congruency5 when a person’s sex matches the gender label of the job. This equation (between the male body and masculinity and the female body and femininity) tends to disregard other identities.
Acknowledging that there might also be problems with the concept of congruency, I use it in the following to show how the attribution of femininity and masculinity to jobs and bodies is part of doing gender and the conservation of status quo. I agree with Fournier and Smith (2006, p. 159) that
‘denying the power of these dualisms because they are constructed involves pulling the grounds for the critiques from under our feet’.
Congruency between jobs and bodies
The competences traditionally required in management positions have been male gendered (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998; Billing and Alvesson, 1994;
Calás and Smircich, 1991) and jobs that are constructed as masculine are believed to be antithetical to women and congruent with men. I use congruency in the sense that there is a presumed agreement or balance between the individual and the context or job.
Femininity and masculinity are social constructions; cultural ideas of what is regarded as suitable for men and women, including jobs which are congruent with our sex. Constructing jobs as masculine and feminine then reproduces stereotypes and the status quo. The idea we have of gender influences the gendered division of labour. However, most jobs can be
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constructed in any of these terms by emphasizing certain characteristics and downplaying others (Leidner, 1991). Many jobs are not constructed in gender terms; some remain unlabelled and some may be constructed as feminine and filled of by men and vice versa. Attribution of femininity to women (female bodies) as if this were a natural takes place in a normative framework in which the assignment of femininity to femaleness is one mechanism for the production of gender itself (Butler, 2004). We should differentiate between female or male and feminine or masculine, where female or male work refers to work done by women or men, respectively.
Feminine or masculine work is work ascribed the traditional characteristics of women’s or men’s work, respectively.
Job descriptions are not static either and a job’s gender might switch.
Some jobs that were believed to be archetypically women’s (or men’s) jobs a century ago have now changed gender (for example, clerk and secretary)
(Kirkham and Loft, 1993) or have a mixed gender (physicians), and this varies culturally (Alvesson and Billing, 2009). Thus, in the USA 71 per cent of doctors are men, and in Russia 75 per cent of doctors are women (Sweet and Meiksins, 2008).
With regard to women in men’s higher level jobs an incongruence is expected and vice versa for men in women’s jobs. This is the presupposition when we adopt the dichotomous thinking. Whereas men benefit from emphasizing masculinities in women’s jobs (Allan, 1993; Simpson, 2004;
Williams, 1991, 1995) women do not benefit from acting in a feminine way in a managerial job (Fagenson, 1993). On the contrary, Cheng (1996) claims that women who ‘do masculinity’ are the most successful, and that workers, who do masculinity are more successful than others in feminine and masculine occupations. Gherardi (1995) states that women managers are confronted with the expectations of being, on the one hand, managerial (read masculine) enough to be acknowledged as managers and on the other hand, feminine enough to be recognized and acknowledged as women. Doing gender makes our surroundings secure and we can expect sanctions if we do not act in accordance with cultural expectations for our sex (Billing and Alvesson, 1994).
According to Eagly et al. (1992, p. 18), women ‘pay a price in terms of relative negative evaluation if they intrude on traditionally male domains by adopting male-stereotypic leadership styles or occupying male-dominated leadership positions’, whereas they are not devalued when engaging in non-masculine leadership behaviour.
Static and specific definitions and correlations are of no use and must be replaced by such questions as: What is, in the local situation, defined as male and female or masculine and feminine? What is the significance of these definitions when it comes to creating and recreating subjectivity, that is, the self-image of a person? All answers must be understood as uncertain and tentative, not only historically limited, but also locally oriented (Alvesson and
Billing, 2009).
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Organizations may be more interested in other values than what characterized organizations 10–20 years ago. Creativity, emotions, intuition and teamwork are now positive code words (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003;
Fletcher, 2004) along with empathy, social intelligence and communication
(Fondas, 1997). Social responsibility, ethics and environmental issues are also on the agenda today. There is a de-masculinization of leadership and dissolution of the symbolic cultural connection between men and leadership.
However, it may be a mixed blessing if these new values and leadership ideas are labelled as feminine (see Billing and Alvesson, 2000).
To summarize, because of all these changes and the erosion of the automatic link between masculinity and management positions, the door to these positions could be opened for many more women, including those at the top. The situation is different from a couple of decades ago, where gender divisions were more rigid. Although there certainly still are examples where individuals crossing traditional gender lines face sanctions of a more or less serious nature, today such problems probably emerge in more vague, ambivalent and ambiguous ways.
In the following the focus is on how the interviewees talk about themselves, whether and how they construct gender while presenting themselves as managers, what motivated them to be managers and what sort of experiences they had as managers. If there is any incongruence in relation to managerial jobs then this ought to be expressed by the women themselves in arguing that they had to change to fit in and that the job was not aligned to the way in which they see themselves.
The study
The study was based on qualitative interviews with 20 women managers aged between 35–60, working in three different organizations (IT, the finance and banking system and the medical industry, located in Denmark and Sweden).
Of these 19 were cohabiting or married (one was single) and 17 had children who were mainly teenagers and older. Only a few of the women had young children. They were working at different managerial levels and only a few were at the top level. Their nationality is mentioned if it seemed important. All the interviews were conducted by the author, and each lasted between 1 and
3 hours.
The self-presentation of the interviewees and their retelling of their experiences of being managers may perhaps be very selective, but what they choose to tell in an interview was probably important for who they are today, their present identities. These constructed stories have some relation to the meaning attached to the past and thus may be more a reflection of this meaning than a reflection of past reality itself (Richardson, 1997). Because the storyteller always knows the end of the story there may be some sort of
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justification of where the person is today (Josselson, 1993). The selfpresentation of these women is then a story about the choices they have made throughout their lives and their identities have something to do with the way they positioned themselves in the interview and in regard to their jobs. They reflected upon why something happened and how different events are related to each other and the connection they made between the events creates meaning. The narrative way is to argue and answer the question, ‘what does this mean’? They constructed themselves and their work worlds in gendered and sometimes non-gendered ways.
Becoming and being a woman manager
Managerial jobs have conventionally been understood to be difficult for women to get and function in. Because of a presumed incongruence women have been offered different strategies to overcome their weaknesses to become and work as managers (Billing and Alvesson, 1994). In this study it is difficult to detect incongruency with regard to the demands of the jobs, in the sense that competences were required of these women that it was believed they did not have. They hold managerial positions which they were recruited to, applied for, and sometimes were pressed to take on.
Most of the interviewees regarded their early socialization as important for their career aspirations and most were the oldest or the only child in the family. (I leave out details of their childhood because of lack of space). Most of them talked about having taken responsibility in their early years, being strong, active, very determined, dominant, pushing things forward.
For all the interviewees it was obvious that working full-time (or more) and their work or career was very important for their identity; and more than half said that their family was not enough of a challenge for them. Most of them earned more than their husbands or partners, with whom they shared housework, or they had hired help. Their education background varied (for example, a school teacher, engineer and economist), some had advanced gradually in the organization, others had PhDs and were former researchers and had been pressed to take on the job. The identity of the latter women in particular was less connected to being managers than researchers and they had therefore set a limit to how long they wanted to be in a managerial position. To summarize the experiences of the interviewees, it is possible to talk about four different (ideal) positionings: (a) congruency, (b) congruency and ambivalence, (c) adjustments and resistance and (d) conditional assimilation.
The first congruency position is occupied by the youngest women managers
(who were under 40 years of age), mainly with an engineering or economic educational background.
Eva (34) learned that at her former workplace she earned less than her male colleagues. She confronted her superior manager and said to him, ‘Had I been
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a man, you would have taken for granted that I did a good job and paid me accordingly’. After this her salary was raised.
They all presented themselves as very good at making decisions and taking responsibility and some of them said they had been as tomboys as children.
They talked very positively about their workplace (an IT organization). One
(divorced) manager (Mary, aged 36) with two young children praised the family-friendliness of the organization. She said, ‘this is an organization which is good at taking care of families’6 in contrast to her former workplace.
They described their colleagues as friends, with whom they had fun and competed against other firms, and said that they liked to motivate people and respected their knowledge. They were very oriented toward their colleagues and subordinates and their needs and ideas. The people working in these organizations were younger than in the others in the study. The women thought it was easy to manage men (whom they sometimes called the boys).
Most of their colleagues were men and only one-third were women. It was not unusual for them to go to the pub together after work. One of them said that outside the organization she sometimes was taken to be the secretary, while her (older) male colleague, who was her secretary, was taken to be the manager.7 She thought this was odd.
Most of these younger women managers never thought of themselves as crossing a line or challenging traditional ideas about women and women’s work. Are these women just not gender aware? For some, their situation may change if and when they have children. But for the moment I would claim for these women their engineering identity is in the foreground and their gender identity in the background. They are well educated and are surrounded by creative people who mainly need management to support them in their efforts to be even more creative than their competitors.
Position (b) is also a congruency position. Here, we find the women who were ambivalent about and even reluctant to accept a managerial position.
Mona (48, in the medical industry) was asked if she would take on the job as head of the department in connection to an organizational change:
I was very unsure if I should accept. Suddenly manage people who were former colleagues and make decisions on behalf of the group. I was very unsure, doubtful, but accepted it in the end.
Karin (46) had her doubts as well. ‘They will faint when they hear that I have been appointed. Many have worked here much longer and know the company better’.
These women were former researchers. They used to work in group projects and had then been appointed managers of the project (or the department). They had liked the research part of the job, which they had to quit, and were afraid of not being able to do research again. More of them had doubts about the possibility of retaining their friendship with their colleagues. They
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also disliked parts of the (uninteresting) job demands and they especially thought that administration was a nuisance. Thus, Nina (45, in the medical industry) said:
It is not my goal in this life to be a manager. If they do not accept me as the person I am then I do not want to be a manager. I wouldn’t want to take on the role of managing and be a horrible person [laughs]. I wouldn’t do that, then I would rather do something else, work in the same branch but not as a manager.
Because of the loss of former relationships with colleagues and the lack of new networks many of the managers experienced loneliness. These tensions, combined with the problem that the job was less interesting than their former research job, meant for some that they thought of leaving the job. Most of them had been asked to take on the job and they did not expect to be managers for more than 3 years. Nina also said that in the beginning of her career as a manager she was willing to spend much time on many meetings and discussions before things were decided but after a while she felt that what she calls the male style is more efficient:
Men will say, ‘This is what we’ll do’, where women will say, ‘Are you sure?
We need some more meetings about this’. I believe that women often do not dare to make these unpleasant decisions, which men do. I feel I have changed towards the male way of doing things. Sometimes you just have to decide about things, there can be too many meetings and discussions. You have to make a decision and go on. Otherwise everybody is frustrated.
She emphasizes that women are quick at saying when something is not good enough: ‘Women dare to say stop ... otherwise we go down the wrong track, and perhaps waste a lot of time’. This is an example of how some norms may be worth following and others can be abandoned. It makes sense for Nina to gender these different kinds of behaviour, based on what she has seen men and women say and do. However, culture may play a bigger role than gender.
Swedish managers were much more consensus-oriented than the Danish managers. Perhaps this is also a reason that they were more willing to resign from their position than the Danish women. For the Swedes it was not important to be a manager as they had an attractive alternative, which was to go back to doing research. It should be added that for those Swedish women, the wage difference and status difference between the former position and the managerial is marginal.
Women in position (c) talked about the necessary adjustments that had to be made to fit normative expectations as to how they were to be as managers.
This was mainly in the banking sector, where there is a pronounced gender division of labour, with women in the less prestigious staff divisions and men in the line functions. They were expected to be more understanding, caring and soft.
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These women have a position that is not immediately seen as congruent with their sex. Others perceived a misalignment between their identity and work gender and, partly as a result of communications of others, experienced by the person crossing the gender lines. As social identity theory shows, when an individual is defined (defining herself), as part of a specific social category (for example, that of women) the response is different from that when the person is perceived in another identity (professional, manager)
(Haslam, 2004).
Their reactions to these expectations differed. Some of the women tried to change so that they lived up to gender-stereotypical expectations better while others chose not to. Catherine (head of a bank, 58) said that she got the impression that she should be more feminine and softer in her approach. But she chose not to. She states ‘I am a manager, not a woman manager’.
Catherine: We have these rules and routines and if you are not taking these seriously then I am pretty determined. Then I get the impression that they do not think that I am feminine enough. Then I am too tough.
Interviewer: Is this what they say?
Catherine: No, but I have heard rumours that I — considering I am a woman — you have to be softer. But those who support me say the rules are good. Catherine, however, resists the gendering attempts, retaining her beliefs of what is the right way to act. She is not just a passive conformist seeking acceptance but chooses her own way. If doing gender is managing one’s actions so that the outcome is gender-appropriate then one might say that she was undoing gender.
There were others who accepted the changes they had to make. One woman (50, manager, IT) said:
Of course, you have to adapt to the organization, you work in.... I have become softer. Before I was much more direct, people were scared of me before ... I was very dominant.
She adds that male and female managers are very similar at her workplace:
‘We all have to adapt to organizations, and in some cases, here in IT, an individual may feel that the expectations fit very well with who she really is’.
Another woman experienced a change in her colleagues’ attitudes. They reacted differently after she had become a (bank) manager. She has a working-class background and had problems, for example, when she used irony and wondered why it was acceptable to be ironic before she was appointed as a manager. Some of these women managers were very selfcritical and thought that they would be blamed for being insufficiently direct enough and clear-spoken, and so on. For them it was somewhat of a balance
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between being sufficiently soft and sufficiently clear and direct. The women who talked about themselves as being assertive when they were children seemed to have no problems being direct as adults.
A small group of older (and primarily Danish) women who fall into position (d) did not experience tensions. They talked very positively about what they called a masculine style, for example ‘the ability to make decisions fast and disregard details’. Some of them thought that it was much easier for men to be managers and that they could learn from that. These women could be said to be in a token position, which often means their heightened visibility
(as members of their category) and greater exposure to gender-stereotypical assumptions (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998; Billing and Alvesson, 1994;
Kanter, 1977).
Susanne (55, top manager in the finance sector for over 20 years) talked positively about what she called the masculine culture and said, ‘I am now almost a man’. She also said that she has now learned the rules of the game and is now working on men’s premises. She emphasizes the importance of strategies and efficiency and claims that she chooses her style according to the situation. She says that as a young woman she used to be very shy but that she is now very dominant:
There are not many women in this business. And I realized that I was different because I was a woman. All my colleagues were men ... when I had to negotiate in London there were only men, when we met in this board and that ministry, they were all men, except Alva from the
‘inspection’.
To be assimilated means to adapt to the positive features of the idealized group and to reduce your potential differences and increase your similarity to that group (such as dressing for success). The women who managed to do that were included in the male clubs. Ulla (57, manager for over 20 years) sees herself as superior to the ‘boys’, she works with:
We have a Godfather system. If you get a Godfather, you are part of the club.... It is a male club. I have always been carried by the men. I also take part in the boys’ discussion, then you are part of the group (there are no other women).
When Ulla talks about the men she calls them the ‘boys’, while women are just called ‘women’. Thus she is creating a different gender power balance.
The women in position (d) support their own assimilation. They have tried to reduce their differences with the other male managers and actively sought to be more like them. They have been accepted as members of the male groups and attained a positive social identity via this membership. They thus accept the given rules and norms in the male-dominated organizations and their focus is on what is good for the organization in terms of its efficiency.
They have no problems being managers on the given terms. However, they
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criticize the male managers for abusing their power, for not being good at managing people and for directing too much and being obsessed by status.
They were very critical about this behaviour and thus I suggest that they are only conditionally, not fully assimilated.
According to these women the male managers did not live up to their idealized image of a manager. This then leads us to ask how we can separate the demands of the organization from what is constructed as male. These women privileged what they labelled masculine characteristics because this was necessary for them to conduct their affairs (see Sayer, 2000), but they thought that the male managers they knew failed to live up to their idea of good management.
The four (ideal-typical) positions indicate that women experience a managerial job very differently, dependent on their age, socialization, education, class background, nationality, and different workplaces and departments. This, of course, is the same for men. Men and women exhibit forms of behaviour at work that are a complex mix of orientations, values and styles that are part of their personality, that they have learned over the years during their upbringing and socialization and early work experiences, under pressure to adapt to the structures and contingencies under which they work.
Position (a) and (b) do not cause problems or anxiety. These women have cultural and social capital, which provide them with sufficient stamina to take on the job but also to leave it if it gets too boring. The women in position (c) felt that they had to adjust in unwanted directions and they might not wish to hold on to their leadership position for a very long time. In position (d) the assimilation the women have achieved and accepted meant (total) loyalty to the organization. The latter reversed gender doing in the sense that they named men boys and sometimes they used macho language when talking to men. Discussion
It makes sense to find out where and how is gender important or not important in the specific work context. As Butler (2004) states, a norm has no ontological status. Is has to be acted out to exist as a norm. Women and men contribute to the construction of norms in the daily doing of gender. To say that the male is the norm in management is too general a statement, it assumes a dualism instead of investigating whether a norm is in fact practiced. Leadership positions differ and so do organizational cultures. The local work cultures influence how we are constructed, what people think and believe and which values, norms and ideas are prevalent. It is in the daily practicing or doing of gender that norms will be challenged or supported and
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the manager is created in an interaction process with the colleagues and subordinates. Some of the female managers interviewed felt they needed to distance themselves from other women and from roles ascribed to women. They saw themselves as exceptions to this picture. They said that certain changes had been necessary, like developing characteristics that are mostly ascribed as masculine. In this sense, they confirm that the characteristics ascribed as masculine are important. In the finance sector assimilation was mainly prevalent for older Danish women managers in positions at the highest level. These women may have experienced feelings of uncertainty when they became managers some decades ago. They have crossed traditional gender lines and challenged traditional ideas about what is suitable work behaviour for women. They work in older organizations, which may be more resistant to change. It may have been important for them to act according to the prevalent rules of the game.
Even though some of the interviewees thought that they were well suited for the job before getting it, some found that their colleagues attempted to
‘read’ them as more traditional women. Stereotypical societal and cultural gender norms created expectations for some of the women in managerial positions to behave in accordance with gender-stereotypical ideas of women.
One of the main problems was the classic one: they were expected to create more congruency (in the eyes of their co-workers) by taking on a softer style
(Eagly et al., 1992). In some instances it was also part of their selfunderstanding that perhaps they should be better at listening, being soft and being more social. This was so that it could be acknowledged there was not too big a discrepancy between their biological body and their managerial performance (Parker, 2002). The thesis presented earlier, that our identity may be questioned when we work in what is constructed as gender incongruent areas is confirmed. In some cases there is pressure to change according to peoples’ expectations and individuals may find it difficult to behave as they feel (Billing and Alvesson, 2000). Because many of them have internalized these expectations, this will influence how their colleagues perceive them and probably affect their understandings of themselves. In some cases the women felt that they had to change according to subordinates’ expectations in order to receive acceptance (as women and managers). This is especially true in the banking system, where there is a pronounced division of labour and women were expected to be softer. Now which sort of norm are we here confronted with? To be not quite (soft) enough is a regulation norm, as one is being compared to what is believed to be soft (see Catherine, above). Gherardi
(1995) suggests that women have to balance between on the one hand being managerial and on the other being feminine enough to be acknowledged as women. If they position themselves to meet people’s expectations, they accept the discourses through which women are constituted as women. These discourses are, however, not simple, but contradictory and diverse.
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In the medical industry these managers’ problems were not primarily or obviously gender related: they had more to do with, for example, loyalty to their former co-workers (researchers), versus their loyalty to the top management. For some of these women managers it had been very important, as they said, to stay true to themselves, meaning that they felt they had to distance themselves from parts of the job. For these women the managerial position was a sort of role they had assumed and if the script did not fit they would rather do something else. As long as they could manage two different scripts and these were not too much in opposition to each other they would stay in the job. They would accept small adjustments but no more than that. Some of them felt they had changed in a direction they themselves did not quite like.
For some of them it was necessary to be able to detach themselves from their manager role and they talked about situations where they did not have to be the boss.
In IT, the youngest organization, there were only a few problems. The women here had been part of the workforce from the start (of the organization) and they were also the youngest of the interviewees and felt that they matched this particular organization. They only talked about gendering taking place outside the organization and in former workplaces. These women are more accustomed to interacting cross-sexually throughout their education and may not have the same problems or uncertainties in interacting with people of the opposite sex (see Billing, 2006). The people working there are self-directed and may not need so much management, other than being valued as individuals.
There are generational differences. The habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) of the older women is different from that of younger women and thus they are provided with different dispositions and capabilities to act upon and against gendering. Although they all regarded their job as a sort of lifestyle, not much constrained by family life, the experiences of these managers differed. The older women were in token positions and it is perhaps fair to say that they were reproducing norms set by men. However, in their performances as managers they were also counteracting the dominant norm by exposing and criticizing male managerial behaviour. They characterized themselves as ideal workers and as being more efficient than men. The youngest women worked in flat organizations and performance cultures, where they felt they were equal to their co-workers and if they were met with gendering attempts they flatly resisted them.
Norms are context dependent and they change and develop. At the same time the male norm is a phenomenon developed through history and a reality that is experienced daily for some and therefore is almost impossible to capture theoretically. Using this term easily reproduces the differences between the sexes and we might get caught in the system of binary logics. The term is lacking in nuances, in light of the much more profound forces at work behind our backs. A strong tendency to look for one perspective capable of
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explaining everything is related to the whole idea of assuming something universal about the situation of women and men as the point of departure for a general critique of dominating social relations.
Conclusion
Management jobs have traditionally been understood as being constructed according to male norms and thus creating difficulties for women. These include the material part of their work as well as the stereotypical expectations and perceptions and reactions from others. The taken-for-granted point of departure is that women and men are essentially different, as shown by the ascribed congruency between men and management jobs.
Consequently, there is a tendency to cast women as victims of these dominant depictions. This study tries to challenge such fatalism and calls for more sophisticated ways to interpret women’s experiences in management positions to enhance our understanding of the complexity of everyday organizational processes. Organizational contexts, lines of work and cultures vary and gender discourses are contradictory and ambiguous. They may constrain us or they may do the opposite. Talking about men and women as unproblematic, easily identifiable categories is to take biological identity as a given point of departure instead of acknowledging that gender is unstable and constituted by discourse, meaning that we cannot really say anthing about gender as such. It is a fluid variable, shifting over space and time Butler (1990, 2004). A term like male has no simple or absolute content.
The study has shown that gender categories are sometimes used when the women make sense of their daily experiences but they are not solid. As the narratives drawn from the empirical research demonstrate, the categories are complex and the discourses surrounding the women influence them in their positionings. Sometimes the women accept the discourses. At other times they respond to gendering attempts by challenging and resisting discourses, thus undermining stereotypical gender regulation norms and sometimes turning them upside down.
There are great variations in gender equality and in gender constructions and there are workplaces where women and men are not perceived in accordance with a gender norm. Notably, younger women as well as those with the highest education levels did not face any expectations of conforming to gendered norms. Management is not a coherent job. Norms change as we respond to them, by doing or undoing gender. To insist on using binaries legitimizes the dominance of men instead of questioning it and thus, perversely, performs the very regulatory operation of power we seek to critique.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mats Alvesson, Karen Ashcraft, Hugh Willmott,
Amanda Roan, Katie Sullivan and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
In Denmark 74 per cent of women and 82 per cent of men have waged work. In the age group 25–49 88 per cent of Danish women have waged work (Statistikbanken,
2008). In the USA women comprise 47 per cent of women in the total US labour force (US Department of Labor, 2009).
In Sweden 62 per cent of the managers in the public sector are women (78 per cent of all workers). In the private sector 40 per cent of the workers are women who hold 25 per cent of the managerial positions. However at the top of the private sector only 5 per cent are women (Statistics Sweden, 2008). In the UK the number of women managers has increased from a few per cent in the 1970s to more than one-third at the present time (Eurostat, 2006).
According to UNESCO (Fine et al., 2009) women outnumber men in university enrolments and graduation rates worldwide. In terms of graduation, women outnumber men in 75 of 98 countries.
Engineers are a diversified group and I would not claim that doing engineering is doing gender, as one reviewer suggested. In some engineering specialities (such as building and chemistry) more than one-third of these specialists are women
(Denmark’s Technical University, 2004).
The term, congruency comes from Latin (congruere) and means come together or agree. It should be used as a wider concept than just seeing jobs in gender terms.
I use it here to indicate that an individual feels there is a balance between the self and the job.
Every second week, when Mary took care of the children, she had a normal working week, and every second week, when the children were at their father’s home, she worked at least 60 hours a week. In this organizational culture there was room for flexibility. This kind of workplace has in the last couple of years been ranked in the top five best places to work.
Prestige has historically been allocated to what men do and hence women are not expected to have a higher-prestige position.
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Victims of the Phantom of the
Male Norm? gwao_546 298..317
Yvonne Due Billing*
Managerial jobs have conventionally been understood as male and thus as not being directly suitable for women. The point of departure of this discourse is that women and men are different and that there is congruence between men and managerial jobs. On the basis of a qualitative study of women managers, I argue that there is a need for more sophisticated ways of appreciating the experiences of (many) women in relation to management. Variation, complexity and contradictions may be lost when holding onto essentialist understandings …show more content…
such as the male norm.
Keywords: management, doing gender, the male norm, congruency
Introduction
T
his author questions the continuous use of the male as the norm in management as an appropriate indicator for explaining women’s difficulties in management. This idea rests on a discourse that celebrates differences between men and women and is based upon somewhat rigid ideas of managerial jobs and a belief that organizations are similar in this gender aspect. This discourse supports an understanding of women as ‘others’ (deviants) and, I argue, reduces the complexity of women’s (and men’s) lives and their identities and also ignores the fact that organizations and management jobs differ significantly. Based on a qualitative study of 20 Swedish and
Danish women managers, I argue that their experiences can be dealt with in ways other than reducing them to victims of the male norm phantom.
Firstly, I am going to provide some examples of how the notion of the male as the norm is used in the literature and the difficulties this term presents us with, as it cannot account for the complexities in the experiences of women managers. Next I introduce the concept of congruency to indicate a perceived
Address for correspondence: *Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Department of Sociology PO Box 2099, DK-1014 Copenhagen K; e-mail: ydb@soc.ku.dk
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match between people and their jobs. If, for example, a managerial job is perceived to be incongruent with specific kinds of people then we should expect such people to be reluctant or perhaps ambivalent about accepting a managerial job or, after having accepted such a job, at least, to display some resistance to the norm in that job or to act contrary to the norm and to make some kind of adjustment to their managerial behaviour. If, on the other hand, they are not greatly affected by tacking on such a position then perhaps notion of the male as the norm is too simple a concept to provide a meaningful understanding of what goes on in organizations.
In all organizations there are norms and rules for behaviour, some of which may be gendered in the sense that gendered differences are created.
‘Doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987) cannot be completely avoided: we do gender and sometimes we undo gender (Deutsch, 2007) (that is, conform to or break away from sex stereotypes). I show how some of the women interviewed sometimes use gender categories as discursive resources, for example, to make sense of their daily experiences of doing management and to navigate around gender norms and constrains.
I investigate congruency in relation to their job and the perceptions and experiences of the women interviewed. Having found that it makes sense to categorize their managerial jobs in four different classes, I finally discuss the problems in continuing to use established categories when they no longer resonate with women’s experiences.
The male as the norm?
Organizations have historically been constructed and developed according to expectations that men were the breadwinners and that a bureaucratic career was equivalent to a male career (Witz and Savage, 1992). The development of hierarchical structures took place along gendered lines as women were recruited as cheap labour and were meant to fit into subordinate positions. As stated by Witz and Savage (1992) women’s entry in these jobs made it possible to promote male clerks more quickly. Predetermined career structures were reserved for men, and men’s careers were facilitated by the existence of female supporters, making it possible for men to spend most of their time in the organization. The stereotypical man that set the original norm was a career man with a supportive wife working in the home. This constellation still exists, but it is nowadays less widespread. In Europe most women have paid jobs (Glover and Kirtin, 2006). In the Nordic countries double-career families or dual breadwinners are the most common, as two incomes are needed to provide a reasonable standard of living in response to high taxes.1
Despite the fact that a large number of women work outside the home, there are still more men than women managers. Many women have advanced to the middle levels but there are few at the top.2 This has been seen as the
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result of excluding mechanisms, of the masculine ethic and image these positions convey (for example, Acker, 1990; Kanter, 1977; Wilson, 1998) and of women’s lifestyle preferences (Hakim, 2000).
In this article the focus is not on why fewer women get to the top but on how the interviewees positioned themselves in relation to different managerial jobs and how they experienced becoming and being managers, for example in relation to their former colleagues. The main purpose is to discuss established understandings such as the problem of using the male as the norm when it no longer resonates with many women’s experiences.
The question then is: In what sense do work practices and norms still reflect the life situations and interests of men? For example, Meyerson and
Kolb (2000) argue that organizations are inherently gendered as work practices and norms reflect men’s life situations. I would argue that few jobs are entirely congruent with the needs of those holding them. Thus, men too may find the content and demands of their job at odds with what they really want.
For many women and men, work organizations may mean constraints and suffering. Conversely, both may experience joy and benefits from everyday organizational life. Most managers of both sexes probably have a lot of interests in common (for example, wanting reasonable time for a private life with or without children).
Some of the constraints on managers in organizations, such as the pressure to give priority to work over family, do not originate solely from male domination but are also contingent upon the workings of capitalism where certain performances seem to be necessary for organizations to produce goods and services effectively and competitively. Perhaps this aspect should not be underestimated. The varieties within the categories of men and women should not be underestimated, either. Modern forms of gender identity are more multifaceted and varied than they were a couple of decades ago.
Although traditional images of women as non-careerist and accompanying self-understandings still exist, in large sectors of contemporary society they no longer dominate. Women’s average share of higher education has for years exceeded that of men.3 The modern, professional, career-oriented woman is a legitimate social identity — even a norm. This does not mean that it is unproblematic for women to adopt it if it breaks too strongly with traditional ideas of femininities.
In the Nordic countries day care facilities are more generous than in many other countries and children should not be seen as a (big) hindrance for women who wish to pursue a career. Many men now take (or have to take) more responsibility as parents, even for very small children, than a couple of decades ago, at least in Nordic countries.
Many different factors may influence who we are and how and what we can be and how much time we can devote to our career. The term, the male norm indicates that gender identity is a major identity signifier. But identity should not be reduced to a gender identity. We may belong to or be assigned
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to different social groups simultaneously.
A woman, a manager and an information technology (IT) employee are all possible examples of social identities. However, the crucial element is not the socially available category but the way in which an individual uses a specific social category as a central marker for selfhood. The IT woman manager may not see herself as ‘a feminine’ person, but as an engineer.4 Another divider is age: many people have experienced age discrimination, whether they are men or women. Considering all the variations is impossible. Although women and men construct differences and similarities and position themselves in relation to gender categories, there are other social forces that also shape the individual. How we see ourselves is not only a question of the sex category we belong to. Identities are created in interaction with others and through the way we talk about ourselves, and we may change over time or feel that we have changed our identity. Identity is under the constant influence from a lot of different factors, not fixed in an essentialist past.
Alvesson and Willmott (2002) use the concepts of identity work and identity regulation. This signals the way in which individuals do identity construction based on interpretations of themselves in the world and also that …show more content…
these interpretations often bear strong imprints of others who exercise power over these interpretations. How we define ourselves is then partly an outcome of how others — those around us — provide rewards and sanctions for what we are.
Many organizations hold meritocratic ideals, by which an attractive candidate for a managerial job is constructed as an individual who is willing to accept the rules of the game. In many organizations the ideal candidate is one who is willing to travel a lot, to be available and to work longer than a normal working week; in short; one who is what Acker (2006) called an ideal worker, who is often, but not necessarily a man. The general condition for competition ideally operates independently of gender. Competitive pressure makes organizations more interested in employing those whom they can take advantage of, whether because of their gender, ethnicity, age or other factors. As Brittain
(1989) suggests, capitalism does not need the demarcation of gender. Organizations and management need to survive in a competitive, sustainable world and therefore people are hired who are willing to, and capable of, accepting demands that may not be family-friendly. This is a problem for many workers and it may hit women more if they have partners (or children or both) with whom they have not been able to negotiate a fair sharing of housework and caring work. If women are doing most of the household and childcare work they have little time for socializing with colleagues and building up relations and networks proving their commitment to the social side of the organization (Eagly and Carli, 2007).
Male domination in organizations is said to result in a symbolically masculine culture and ethic, gendering organizations such that it is difficult for women to be accepted once they have become managers. At the managerial
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level the sex composition is still in favour of men and is believed to set the norm for how one should be as a manager, and for the characteristics and attributes expected in a management position (Acker, 1990).
According to
Eagly and Carli (2007), another hindrance to women managers is that they cannot be accepted in the culture because they do not join male managers in strip clubs or go hunting with them. If the norm includes activities like hunting and visiting strip clubs this might leave out some (or even most) men and it might attract some women.
Managerial jobs can be seen as more or less manly, loosely coupled to the ratio of the jobholders, and some management positions may demand values and managerial behaviour that are hard to define as male (Billing and
Alvesson, 2000). Different organizations (and even different levels within the organization) may want or need different characteristics, qualifications and management behaviour, depending on, for example, whether the organization is in a competitive business or in the public service sector. The tasks vary and there is a need for people whose qualifications or personalities match the needs of the organization (Greenwald, 2008). There are workplaces where there is a gender mix and also workplaces where women are dominant
and men subordinate (for example, in many Scandinavian public sector organizations). Since the dawn of bureaucracy there have been major changes in organizations and in women’s situation. Bureaucratic initiatives have benefited many women (Konrad and Linnehan, 1999). With the expansion of service and knowledge work there are also fewer jobs and tasks with a very strong masculine image.
The male norm maintains an unhappy association with men’s bodies. This discourse perpetuates differences and even makes them seem natural. This construction might trap people; for example, some women may be confronted with the idea that they ought to adopt different leadership styles because of the assumed difference between women and men. This idea easily constrains women to specific leadership positions, overburdening them with tasks that are believed to be natural for women and perhaps under-burdening them with others, thus restricting them in how they can be managers (Billing and Alvesson, 2000).
It is important to know how the terms of gender are instituted and established as a presupposition but also to trace the moments by which the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged (Butler, 2004). Assuming that gender is a kind of doing (West and Zimmerman, 1987), it is then a practice, within a setting of constraints, which is done with or for others that are not necessarily physical others as they may be imaginary (Butler, 2004): phantoms. As this study shows, the managers interviewed sometimes use gender resources and create differences and sometimes they do not follow gender norms, but resist them. It is not what has been internalized in terms of gender, but rather how action and interaction are guided by strong norms for doing gender in the right way, leading to the confirmation of these norms and
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avoiding sanctions for deviations. It is the level of interacting that is crucial.
The process of doing gender is not limited to the micro-level (in daily interactions) or the meso-level (in organizations); it also takes place at the macrolevel (societal level). Normally this doing is viewed as a matter of complying with established, non-egalitarian patterns, but resisting or bypassing gendered norms, the un-doing of gender (Deutsch, 2007) is also a possibility.
Gender categories are unstable and ambiguous (Calás and Smircich 1992) and what happens at the meso-level and micro-level cannot simply be predicted or understood from a macro level (see Alvesson, 1998; Leidner, 1991).
Most people probably gender themselves and are gendered by others and strive to keep a sense of masculinity or femininity intact, using genderappropriate behaviour and meanings, and do so in order to confirm a gender identity. Almost any look at mass media representations indicates the strength of forces creating identity regulation in gendered ways. But we do not do gender only in hierarchical and discriminatory ways. Defining women primarily as victims of the male norm freezes the intellectual project too categorically. And as argued by Flax (1987), Nicholson (1990) and others, notions like male and female are no longer viewed as fundamental, valid points of departure but are considered to be unstable and ambiguous and attribute a false unity.
There is an expectation of congruency5 when a person’s sex matches the gender label of the job. This equation (between the male body and masculinity and the female body and femininity) tends to disregard other identities.
Acknowledging that there might also be problems with the concept of congruency, I use it in the following to show how the attribution of femininity and masculinity to jobs and bodies is part of doing gender and the conservation of status quo. I agree with Fournier and Smith (2006, p. 159) that
‘denying the power of these dualisms because they are constructed involves pulling the grounds for the critiques from under our feet’.
Congruency between jobs and bodies
The competences traditionally required in management positions have been male gendered (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998; Billing and Alvesson, 1994;
Calás and Smircich, 1991) and jobs that are constructed as masculine are believed to be antithetical to women and congruent with men. I use congruency in the sense that there is a presumed agreement or balance between the individual and the context or job.
Femininity and masculinity are social constructions; cultural ideas of what is regarded as suitable for men and women, including jobs which are congruent with our sex. Constructing jobs as masculine and feminine then reproduces stereotypes and the status quo. The idea we have of gender influences the gendered division of labour. However, most jobs can be
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constructed in any of these terms by emphasizing certain characteristics and downplaying others (Leidner, 1991). Many jobs are not constructed in gender terms; some remain unlabelled and some may be constructed as feminine and filled of by men and vice versa. Attribution of femininity to women (female bodies) as if this were a natural takes place in a normative framework in which the assignment of femininity to femaleness is one mechanism for the production of gender itself (Butler, 2004). We should differentiate between female or male and feminine or masculine, where female or male work refers to work done by women or men, respectively.
Feminine or masculine work is work ascribed the traditional characteristics of women’s or men’s work, respectively.
Job descriptions are not static either and a job’s gender might switch.
Some jobs that were believed to be archetypically women’s (or men’s) jobs a century ago have now changed gender (for example, clerk and secretary)
(Kirkham and Loft, 1993) or have a mixed gender (physicians), and this varies culturally (Alvesson and Billing, 2009). Thus, in the USA 71 per cent of doctors are men, and in Russia 75 per cent of doctors are women (Sweet and Meiksins, 2008).
With regard to women in men’s higher level jobs an incongruence is expected and vice versa for men in women’s jobs. This is the presupposition when we adopt the dichotomous thinking. Whereas men benefit from emphasizing masculinities in women’s jobs (Allan, 1993; Simpson, 2004;
Williams, 1991, 1995) women do not benefit from acting in a feminine way in a managerial job (Fagenson, 1993). On the contrary, Cheng (1996) claims that women who ‘do masculinity’ are the most successful, and that workers, who do masculinity are more successful than others in feminine and masculine occupations. Gherardi (1995) states that women managers are confronted with the expectations of being, on the one hand, managerial (read masculine) enough to be acknowledged as managers and on the other hand, feminine enough to be recognized and acknowledged as women. Doing gender makes our surroundings secure and we can expect sanctions if we do not act in accordance with cultural expectations for our sex (Billing and Alvesson, 1994).
According to Eagly et al. (1992, p. 18), women ‘pay a price in terms of relative negative evaluation if they intrude on traditionally male domains by adopting male-stereotypic leadership styles or occupying male-dominated leadership positions’, whereas they are not devalued when engaging in non-masculine leadership behaviour.
Static and specific definitions and correlations are of no use and must be replaced by such questions as: What is, in the local situation, defined as male and female or masculine and feminine? What is the significance of these definitions when it comes to creating and recreating subjectivity, that is, the self-image of a person? All answers must be understood as uncertain and tentative, not only historically limited, but also locally oriented (Alvesson and
Billing, 2009).
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Organizations may be more interested in other values than what characterized organizations 10–20 years ago. Creativity, emotions, intuition and teamwork are now positive code words (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003;
Fletcher, 2004) along with empathy, social intelligence and communication
(Fondas, 1997). Social responsibility, ethics and environmental issues are also on the agenda today. There is a de-masculinization of leadership and dissolution of the symbolic cultural connection between men and leadership.
However, it may be a mixed blessing if these new values and leadership ideas are labelled as feminine (see Billing and Alvesson, 2000).
To summarize, because of all these changes and the erosion of the automatic link between masculinity and management positions, the door to these positions could be opened for many more women, including those at the top. The situation is different from a couple of decades ago, where gender divisions were more rigid. Although there certainly still are examples where individuals crossing traditional gender lines face sanctions of a more or less serious nature, today such problems probably emerge in more vague, ambivalent and ambiguous ways.
In the following the focus is on how the interviewees talk about themselves, whether and how they construct gender while presenting themselves as managers, what motivated them to be managers and what sort of experiences they had as managers. If there is any incongruence in relation to managerial jobs then this ought to be expressed by the women themselves in arguing that they had to change to fit in and that the job was not aligned to the way in which they see themselves.
The study
The study was based on qualitative interviews with 20 women managers aged between 35–60, working in three different organizations (IT, the finance and banking system and the medical industry, located in Denmark and Sweden).
Of these 19 were cohabiting or married (one was single) and 17 had children who were mainly teenagers and older. Only a few of the women had young children. They were working at different managerial levels and only a few were at the top level. Their nationality is mentioned if it seemed important. All the interviews were conducted by the author, and each lasted between 1 and
3 hours.
The self-presentation of the interviewees and their retelling of their experiences of being managers may perhaps be very selective, but what they choose to tell in an interview was probably important for who they are today, their present identities. These constructed stories have some relation to the meaning attached to the past and thus may be more a reflection of this meaning than a reflection of past reality itself (Richardson, 1997). Because the storyteller always knows the end of the story there may be some sort of
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justification of where the person is today (Josselson, 1993). The selfpresentation of these women is then a story about the choices they have made throughout their lives and their identities have something to do with the way they positioned themselves in the interview and in regard to their jobs. They reflected upon why something happened and how different events are related to each other and the connection they made between the events creates meaning. The narrative way is to argue and answer the question, ‘what does this mean’? They constructed themselves and their work worlds in gendered and sometimes non-gendered ways.
Becoming and being a woman manager
Managerial jobs have conventionally been understood to be difficult for women to get and function in. Because of a presumed incongruence women have been offered different strategies to overcome their weaknesses to become and work as managers (Billing and Alvesson, 1994). In this study it is difficult to detect incongruency with regard to the demands of the jobs, in the sense that competences were required of these women that it was believed they did not have. They hold managerial positions which they were recruited to, applied for, and sometimes were pressed to take on.
Most of the interviewees regarded their early socialization as important for their career aspirations and most were the oldest or the only child in the family. (I leave out details of their childhood because of lack of space). Most of them talked about having taken responsibility in their early years, being strong, active, very determined, dominant, pushing things forward.
For all the interviewees it was obvious that working full-time (or more) and their work or career was very important for their identity; and more than half said that their family was not enough of a challenge for them. Most of them earned more than their husbands or partners, with whom they shared housework, or they had hired help. Their education background varied (for example, a school teacher, engineer and economist), some had advanced gradually in the organization, others had PhDs and were former researchers and had been pressed to take on the job. The identity of the latter women in particular was less connected to being managers than researchers and they had therefore set a limit to how long they wanted to be in a managerial position. To summarize the experiences of the interviewees, it is possible to talk about four different (ideal) positionings: (a) congruency, (b) congruency and ambivalence, (c) adjustments and resistance and (d) conditional assimilation.
The first congruency position is occupied by the youngest women managers
(who were under 40 years of age), mainly with an engineering or economic educational background.
Eva (34) learned that at her former workplace she earned less than her male colleagues. She confronted her superior manager and said to him, ‘Had I been
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a man, you would have taken for granted that I did a good job and paid me accordingly’. After this her salary was raised.
They all presented themselves as very good at making decisions and taking responsibility and some of them said they had been as tomboys as children.
They talked very positively about their workplace (an IT organization). One
(divorced) manager (Mary, aged 36) with two young children praised the family-friendliness of the organization. She said, ‘this is an organization which is good at taking care of families’6 in contrast to her former workplace.
They described their colleagues as friends, with whom they had fun and competed against other firms, and said that they liked to motivate people and respected their knowledge. They were very oriented toward their colleagues and subordinates and their needs and ideas. The people working in these organizations were younger than in the others in the study. The women thought it was easy to manage men (whom they sometimes called the boys).
Most of their colleagues were men and only one-third were women. It was not unusual for them to go to the pub together after work. One of them said that outside the organization she sometimes was taken to be the secretary, while her (older) male colleague, who was her secretary, was taken to be the manager.7 She thought this was odd.
Most of these younger women managers never thought of themselves as crossing a line or challenging traditional ideas about women and women’s work. Are these women just not gender aware? For some, their situation may change if and when they have children. But for the moment I would claim for these women their engineering identity is in the foreground and their gender identity in the background. They are well educated and are surrounded by creative people who mainly need management to support them in their efforts to be even more creative than their competitors.
Position (b) is also a congruency position. Here, we find the women who were ambivalent about and even reluctant to accept a managerial position.
Mona (48, in the medical industry) was asked if she would take on the job as head of the department in connection to an organizational change:
I was very unsure if I should accept. Suddenly manage people who were former colleagues and make decisions on behalf of the group. I was very unsure, doubtful, but accepted it in the end.
Karin (46) had her doubts as well. ‘They will faint when they hear that I have been appointed. Many have worked here much longer and know the company better’.
These women were former researchers. They used to work in group projects and had then been appointed managers of the project (or the department). They had liked the research part of the job, which they had to quit, and were afraid of not being able to do research again. More of them had doubts about the possibility of retaining their friendship with their colleagues. They
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also disliked parts of the (uninteresting) job demands and they especially thought that administration was a nuisance. Thus, Nina (45, in the medical industry) said:
It is not my goal in this life to be a manager. If they do not accept me as the person I am then I do not want to be a manager. I wouldn’t want to take on the role of managing and be a horrible person [laughs]. I wouldn’t do that, then I would rather do something else, work in the same branch but not as a manager.
Because of the loss of former relationships with colleagues and the lack of new networks many of the managers experienced loneliness. These tensions, combined with the problem that the job was less interesting than their former research job, meant for some that they thought of leaving the job. Most of them had been asked to take on the job and they did not expect to be managers for more than 3 years. Nina also said that in the beginning of her career as a manager she was willing to spend much time on many meetings and discussions before things were decided but after a while she felt that what she calls the male style is more efficient:
Men will say, ‘This is what we’ll do’, where women will say, ‘Are you sure?
We need some more meetings about this’. I believe that women often do not dare to make these unpleasant decisions, which men do. I feel I have changed towards the male way of doing things. Sometimes you just have to decide about things, there can be too many meetings and discussions. You have to make a decision and go on. Otherwise everybody is frustrated.
She emphasizes that women are quick at saying when something is not good enough: ‘Women dare to say stop ... otherwise we go down the wrong track, and perhaps waste a lot of time’. This is an example of how some norms may be worth following and others can be abandoned. It makes sense for Nina to gender these different kinds of behaviour, based on what she has seen men and women say and do. However, culture may play a bigger role than gender.
Swedish managers were much more consensus-oriented than the Danish managers. Perhaps this is also a reason that they were more willing to resign from their position than the Danish women. For the Swedes it was not important to be a manager as they had an attractive alternative, which was to go back to doing research. It should be added that for those Swedish women, the wage difference and status difference between the former position and the managerial is marginal.
Women in position (c) talked about the necessary adjustments that had to be made to fit normative expectations as to how they were to be as managers.
This was mainly in the banking sector, where there is a pronounced gender division of labour, with women in the less prestigious staff divisions and men in the line functions. They were expected to be more understanding, caring and soft.
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These women have a position that is not immediately seen as congruent with their sex. Others perceived a misalignment between their identity and work gender and, partly as a result of communications of others, experienced by the person crossing the gender lines. As social identity theory shows, when an individual is defined (defining herself), as part of a specific social category (for example, that of women) the response is different from that when the person is perceived in another identity (professional, manager)
(Haslam, 2004).
Their reactions to these expectations differed. Some of the women tried to change so that they lived up to gender-stereotypical expectations better while others chose not to. Catherine (head of a bank, 58) said that she got the impression that she should be more feminine and softer in her approach. But she chose not to. She states ‘I am a manager, not a woman manager’.
Catherine: We have these rules and routines and if you are not taking these seriously then I am pretty determined. Then I get the impression that they do not think that I am feminine enough. Then I am too tough.
Interviewer: Is this what they say?
Catherine: No, but I have heard rumours that I — considering I am a woman — you have to be softer. But those who support me say the rules are good. Catherine, however, resists the gendering attempts, retaining her beliefs of what is the right way to act. She is not just a passive conformist seeking acceptance but chooses her own way. If doing gender is managing one’s actions so that the outcome is gender-appropriate then one might say that she was undoing gender.
There were others who accepted the changes they had to make. One woman (50, manager, IT) said:
Of course, you have to adapt to the organization, you work in.... I have become softer. Before I was much more direct, people were scared of me before ... I was very dominant.
She adds that male and female managers are very similar at her workplace:
‘We all have to adapt to organizations, and in some cases, here in IT, an individual may feel that the expectations fit very well with who she really is’.
Another woman experienced a change in her colleagues’ attitudes. They reacted differently after she had become a (bank) manager. She has a working-class background and had problems, for example, when she used irony and wondered why it was acceptable to be ironic before she was appointed as a manager. Some of these women managers were very selfcritical and thought that they would be blamed for being insufficiently direct enough and clear-spoken, and so on. For them it was somewhat of a balance
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between being sufficiently soft and sufficiently clear and direct. The women who talked about themselves as being assertive when they were children seemed to have no problems being direct as adults.
A small group of older (and primarily Danish) women who fall into position (d) did not experience tensions. They talked very positively about what they called a masculine style, for example ‘the ability to make decisions fast and disregard details’. Some of them thought that it was much easier for men to be managers and that they could learn from that. These women could be said to be in a token position, which often means their heightened visibility
(as members of their category) and greater exposure to gender-stereotypical assumptions (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998; Billing and Alvesson, 1994;
Kanter, 1977).
Susanne (55, top manager in the finance sector for over 20 years) talked positively about what she called the masculine culture and said, ‘I am now almost a man’. She also said that she has now learned the rules of the game and is now working on men’s premises. She emphasizes the importance of strategies and efficiency and claims that she chooses her style according to the situation. She says that as a young woman she used to be very shy but that she is now very dominant:
There are not many women in this business. And I realized that I was different because I was a woman. All my colleagues were men ... when I had to negotiate in London there were only men, when we met in this board and that ministry, they were all men, except Alva from the
‘inspection’.
To be assimilated means to adapt to the positive features of the idealized group and to reduce your potential differences and increase your similarity to that group (such as dressing for success). The women who managed to do that were included in the male clubs. Ulla (57, manager for over 20 years) sees herself as superior to the ‘boys’, she works with:
We have a Godfather system. If you get a Godfather, you are part of the club.... It is a male club. I have always been carried by the men. I also take part in the boys’ discussion, then you are part of the group (there are no other women).
When Ulla talks about the men she calls them the ‘boys’, while women are just called ‘women’. Thus she is creating a different gender power balance.
The women in position (d) support their own assimilation. They have tried to reduce their differences with the other male managers and actively sought to be more like them. They have been accepted as members of the male groups and attained a positive social identity via this membership. They thus accept the given rules and norms in the male-dominated organizations and their focus is on what is good for the organization in terms of its efficiency.
They have no problems being managers on the given terms. However, they
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criticize the male managers for abusing their power, for not being good at managing people and for directing too much and being obsessed by status.
They were very critical about this behaviour and thus I suggest that they are only conditionally, not fully assimilated.
According to these women the male managers did not live up to their idealized image of a manager. This then leads us to ask how we can separate the demands of the organization from what is constructed as male. These women privileged what they labelled masculine characteristics because this was necessary for them to conduct their affairs (see Sayer, 2000), but they thought that the male managers they knew failed to live up to their idea of good management.
The four (ideal-typical) positions indicate that women experience a managerial job very differently, dependent on their age, socialization, education, class background, nationality, and different workplaces and departments. This, of course, is the same for men. Men and women exhibit forms of behaviour at work that are a complex mix of orientations, values and styles that are part of their personality, that they have learned over the years during their upbringing and socialization and early work experiences, under pressure to adapt to the structures and contingencies under which they work.
Position (a) and (b) do not cause problems or anxiety. These women have cultural and social capital, which provide them with sufficient stamina to take on the job but also to leave it if it gets too boring. The women in position (c) felt that they had to adjust in unwanted directions and they might not wish to hold on to their leadership position for a very long time. In position (d) the assimilation the women have achieved and accepted meant (total) loyalty to the organization. The latter reversed gender doing in the sense that they named men boys and sometimes they used macho language when talking to men. Discussion
It makes sense to find out where and how is gender important or not important in the specific work context. As Butler (2004) states, a norm has no ontological status. Is has to be acted out to exist as a norm. Women and men contribute to the construction of norms in the daily doing of gender. To say that the male is the norm in management is too general a statement, it assumes a dualism instead of investigating whether a norm is in fact practiced. Leadership positions differ and so do organizational cultures. The local work cultures influence how we are constructed, what people think and believe and which values, norms and ideas are prevalent. It is in the daily practicing or doing of gender that norms will be challenged or supported and
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the manager is created in an interaction process with the colleagues and subordinates. Some of the female managers interviewed felt they needed to distance themselves from other women and from roles ascribed to women. They saw themselves as exceptions to this picture. They said that certain changes had been necessary, like developing characteristics that are mostly ascribed as masculine. In this sense, they confirm that the characteristics ascribed as masculine are important. In the finance sector assimilation was mainly prevalent for older Danish women managers in positions at the highest level. These women may have experienced feelings of uncertainty when they became managers some decades ago. They have crossed traditional gender lines and challenged traditional ideas about what is suitable work behaviour for women. They work in older organizations, which may be more resistant to change. It may have been important for them to act according to the prevalent rules of the game.
Even though some of the interviewees thought that they were well suited for the job before getting it, some found that their colleagues attempted to
‘read’ them as more traditional women. Stereotypical societal and cultural gender norms created expectations for some of the women in managerial positions to behave in accordance with gender-stereotypical ideas of women.
One of the main problems was the classic one: they were expected to create more congruency (in the eyes of their co-workers) by taking on a softer style
(Eagly et al., 1992). In some instances it was also part of their selfunderstanding that perhaps they should be better at listening, being soft and being more social. This was so that it could be acknowledged there was not too big a discrepancy between their biological body and their managerial performance (Parker, 2002). The thesis presented earlier, that our identity may be questioned when we work in what is constructed as gender incongruent areas is confirmed. In some cases there is pressure to change according to peoples’ expectations and individuals may find it difficult to behave as they feel (Billing and Alvesson, 2000). Because many of them have internalized these expectations, this will influence how their colleagues perceive them and probably affect their understandings of themselves. In some cases the women felt that they had to change according to subordinates’ expectations in order to receive acceptance (as women and managers). This is especially true in the banking system, where there is a pronounced division of labour and women were expected to be softer. Now which sort of norm are we here confronted with? To be not quite (soft) enough is a regulation norm, as one is being compared to what is believed to be soft (see Catherine, above). Gherardi
(1995) suggests that women have to balance between on the one hand being managerial and on the other being feminine enough to be acknowledged as women. If they position themselves to meet people’s expectations, they accept the discourses through which women are constituted as women. These discourses are, however, not simple, but contradictory and diverse.
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In the medical industry these managers’ problems were not primarily or obviously gender related: they had more to do with, for example, loyalty to their former co-workers (researchers), versus their loyalty to the top management. For some of these women managers it had been very important, as they said, to stay true to themselves, meaning that they felt they had to distance themselves from parts of the job. For these women the managerial position was a sort of role they had assumed and if the script did not fit they would rather do something else. As long as they could manage two different scripts and these were not too much in opposition to each other they would stay in the job. They would accept small adjustments but no more than that. Some of them felt they had changed in a direction they themselves did not quite like.
For some of them it was necessary to be able to detach themselves from their manager role and they talked about situations where they did not have to be the boss.
In IT, the youngest organization, there were only a few problems. The women here had been part of the workforce from the start (of the organization) and they were also the youngest of the interviewees and felt that they matched this particular organization. They only talked about gendering taking place outside the organization and in former workplaces. These women are more accustomed to interacting cross-sexually throughout their education and may not have the same problems or uncertainties in interacting with people of the opposite sex (see Billing, 2006). The people working there are self-directed and may not need so much management, other than being valued as individuals.
There are generational differences. The habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) of the older women is different from that of younger women and thus they are provided with different dispositions and capabilities to act upon and against gendering. Although they all regarded their job as a sort of lifestyle, not much constrained by family life, the experiences of these managers differed. The older women were in token positions and it is perhaps fair to say that they were reproducing norms set by men. However, in their performances as managers they were also counteracting the dominant norm by exposing and criticizing male managerial behaviour. They characterized themselves as ideal workers and as being more efficient than men. The youngest women worked in flat organizations and performance cultures, where they felt they were equal to their co-workers and if they were met with gendering attempts they flatly resisted them.
Norms are context dependent and they change and develop. At the same time the male norm is a phenomenon developed through history and a reality that is experienced daily for some and therefore is almost impossible to capture theoretically. Using this term easily reproduces the differences between the sexes and we might get caught in the system of binary logics. The term is lacking in nuances, in light of the much more profound forces at work behind our backs. A strong tendency to look for one perspective capable of
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explaining everything is related to the whole idea of assuming something universal about the situation of women and men as the point of departure for a general critique of dominating social relations.
Conclusion
Management jobs have traditionally been understood as being constructed according to male norms and thus creating difficulties for women. These include the material part of their work as well as the stereotypical expectations and perceptions and reactions from others. The taken-for-granted point of departure is that women and men are essentially different, as shown by the ascribed congruency between men and management jobs.
Consequently, there is a tendency to cast women as victims of these dominant depictions. This study tries to challenge such fatalism and calls for more sophisticated ways to interpret women’s experiences in management positions to enhance our understanding of the complexity of everyday organizational processes. Organizational contexts, lines of work and cultures vary and gender discourses are contradictory and ambiguous. They may constrain us or they may do the opposite. Talking about men and women as unproblematic, easily identifiable categories is to take biological identity as a given point of departure instead of acknowledging that gender is unstable and constituted by discourse, meaning that we cannot really say anthing about gender as such. It is a fluid variable, shifting over space and time Butler (1990, 2004). A term like male has no simple or absolute content.
The study has shown that gender categories are sometimes used when the women make sense of their daily experiences but they are not solid. As the narratives drawn from the empirical research demonstrate, the categories are complex and the discourses surrounding the women influence them in their positionings. Sometimes the women accept the discourses. At other times they respond to gendering attempts by challenging and resisting discourses, thus undermining stereotypical gender regulation norms and sometimes turning them upside down.
There are great variations in gender equality and in gender constructions and there are workplaces where women and men are not perceived in accordance with a gender norm. Notably, younger women as well as those with the highest education levels did not face any expectations of conforming to gendered norms. Management is not a coherent job. Norms change as we respond to them, by doing or undoing gender. To insist on using binaries legitimizes the dominance of men instead of questioning it and thus, perversely, performs the very regulatory operation of power we seek to critique.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mats Alvesson, Karen Ashcraft, Hugh Willmott,
Amanda Roan, Katie Sullivan and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
In Denmark 74 per cent of women and 82 per cent of men have waged work. In the age group 25–49 88 per cent of Danish women have waged work (Statistikbanken,
2008). In the USA women comprise 47 per cent of women in the total US labour force (US Department of Labor, 2009).
In Sweden 62 per cent of the managers in the public sector are women (78 per cent of all workers). In the private sector 40 per cent of the workers are women who hold 25 per cent of the managerial positions. However at the top of the private sector only 5 per cent are women (Statistics Sweden, 2008). In the UK the number of women managers has increased from a few per cent in the 1970s to more than one-third at the present time (Eurostat, 2006).
According to UNESCO (Fine et al., 2009) women outnumber men in university enrolments and graduation rates worldwide. In terms of graduation, women outnumber men in 75 of 98 countries.
Engineers are a diversified group and I would not claim that doing engineering is doing gender, as one reviewer suggested. In some engineering specialities (such as building and chemistry) more than one-third of these specialists are women
(Denmark’s Technical University, 2004).
The term, congruency comes from Latin (congruere) and means come together or agree. It should be used as a wider concept than just seeing jobs in gender terms.
I use it here to indicate that an individual feels there is a balance between the self and the job.
Every second week, when Mary took care of the children, she had a normal working week, and every second week, when the children were at their father’s home, she worked at least 60 hours a week. In this organizational culture there was room for flexibility. This kind of workplace has in the last couple of years been ranked in the top five best places to work.
Prestige has historically been allocated to what men do and hence women are not expected to have a higher-prestige position.
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