Polazeci od ideje solidarnosti u feministickom diskursu koji se bavi suocavanjem sa prosloscu u Srbiji, rad pokrece pitanje kako i zasto feminizam moze da promislja mnogostruke razlicitosti medju zenama u Srbiji. U radu se raspravlja o idejama solidarnosti, konceptu moralne odgovornosti i suocavanja sa prosloscu na koje referiraju i feministicke teorije i prakse u Srbiji. Rad otvara pitanje o solidarnosti kao o strateskom pojmu i ukazuje na politiku ukljucivanja/iskljucivanja mnogostrukih drugosti u okviru nacionalnog kolektiva. Posebna paznja usmerena je na rodne (...) kategorije i konstrukcije razlicitosti unutar njih koje su ukratko prikazane kroz rezultate analize narativa secanja dve grupe zena u Srbiji - medicinskih sestara i antiratnih aktivistkinja - koji sluze kao ilustracija razlicitosti kojima se problematizuje koncept solidarnosti. Pri tom, ukazano je da subjektiviteti, iskustva i rodne pozicije u medjusobnoj interakciji oblikuju secanja, razlicitosti, ali i odnos prema proslosti. PR Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 43007. (shrink)

This chapter is a critical review of Amy Allen's book The Politics of Our Selves. It briefly reconstructs some of the book's impressive achievements: articulating a synthetic account of gendered subjectivity that accounts for both subjection and autonomy; imaginatively integrating poststructuralist and communicative theories; and, furthering important new interpretations of Butler, Foucault, and Habermas. It also raises critical concerns about Allen's project: her specific conception of autonomy and its justification; her suspicions of the notion of historical progress; her psychological (...) explanation of the continuing power of pernicious norms of gendered subjectivity; the usefulness of psychoanalysis for critical social theory; and, the role of cultural, structural, and materialist explanations and political strategies. (shrink)

Gender diversity is seemingly prevalent among asexual people. Drawing on qualitative research, and focusing on agender identities in particular, this article explores why this might be the case. I argue that previous explanations that center biologistic understandings of sexual development, the liberatory potential of asexuality, or psycho-cognitive conflict, are insufficient. Instead, I offer a sociological perspective in which participants’ agender subjectivities can be understood as arising from an embodied meaning-making process where gender was understood to be fundamentally about (...) sexuality. I emphasize the importance of understanding asexuality and agender in the broader structural context, as particular subjectivities were shaped and sometimes necessitated in navigating hetero-patriarchy. However, these entangled understandings of sexuality and gender were sometimes rendered unintelligible within LGBTQ+ discursive communities, where there is often a rigid ontological distinction between gender and sexuality arising from histories of misrecognition and erasure. I complicate this, arguing that already-invisible subjectivities may be made even more invisible by this distinction. The article illustrates the need to empirically explore the meanings of the categories “gender” and “sexuality,” and the relationship between them, rather than siloing them in our methodological and conceptual frameworks. (shrink)

This article examines the therapeutic self-transformation process in a self-help group in Russia. Drawing on participant observation and interviews, and engaging with debates on therapeutic technologies and the transformation of gender relations, it explores how the self-help group shapes how participants come to understand and act upon themselves. It shows that the process of self-transformation is profoundly gendered, problematising femininity and identifying it as an object of therapeutic intervention. Rather than collectively contesting gendered power and disadvantage, participants are invited (...) to cultivate traditional notions of femininity and masculinity and learn to draw pleasure from them. We argue that this message may be appealing to women because it speaks to their lived experience of exhaustion and precarity, and offers them the prospect of overcoming it through a mythologised heteronormative order. It offers solace and a potential escape route where room for political agency is limited and feminist discourse heavily vilified. Yet the article also shows that participants do not merely internalise the ideological messages of the group, but engage with them in contradictory and ambivalent ways. (shrink)

This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies.

In this book Paddy McQueen examines the role that 'recognition' plays in our struggles to construct an identity and to make sense of ourselves as gendered beings. It analyses how such struggles for gender recognition are shaped by social discourses and power relations, and considers how feminism can best respond to these issues.

In this paper, I engage with a recent contextualist account of gender terms proposed by Díaz-León, E. 2016. “Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle.” Hypatia 31 : 245–58. Díaz-León’s main aim is to improve both on previous contextualist and non-contextualist views and solve a certain puzzle for feminists. Central to this task is putting forward a view that allows trans women who did not undergo gender-affirming medical procedures to use the gender terms (...) of their choice to self-identify. My goal is to investigate Díaz-León’s proposal, point out several shortcomings of the view and discuss possible replies on her part. (shrink)

Gender discrimination continues to be a problem in organizations. It is therefore important that organizations use performance evaluation methods that ensure equal opportunities for men and women. This article reports the results of an experiment to investigate whether and, if so, how the gender of the rater and that of the ratee moderate the relationship between the level of subjectivity in performance appraisals and organizational attractiveness. Participants in the experiment were 313 undergraduate students. We predicted, and indeed (...) established, that as the probability increases that employee performance is evaluated by a female manager, women expect more positive outcomes of subjective, but not objective evaluation processes. Our data did not support our expectation that as the probability of being evaluated by a female manager increases, men expect less positive outcomes of subjective evaluation processes. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of why women are over-represented in jobs with objective formula-based reward systems, such as piece-rate systems. They are also of interest to organizations that are looking for more ethical human resource management practices. (shrink)

(1984). Gender Differences in Subject Preference and Perception of Subject Importance among Third Year Secondary School Pupils in Single‐sex and Mixed Comprehensive Schools. Educational Studies: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 243-253.

_Sexual Subjects,_ a psychoanalytic book informed by gender theory, queer theory and feminism, addresses the tensions inherent in writing about lesbians and sexuality in the postmodern age. Adria Schwartz masterfully intertwines clinical anecdotes with engaging theoretical questions that examine the construction of important categories of identity--woman, feminist, mother, lesbian, and homo/hetero/bisexual. Schwartz also addresses specific issues which are problematic but nonetheless meaningful to self-identified lesbians such as roles in gender play, lesbian "bed death," and raising non-traditional families. Written (...) from a psychoanalytic and postmodern perspective, this book is a significant contribution to the work done on the conceptualization of lesbian sexuality and identity. (shrink)

Background: Gender makes a difference in health and physical activity. This research aimed to identify the gender difference in the relationship of PA and subjective happiness among Chinese university students.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted in Shanghai Jiao Tong University from July 7 to 17 in 2021, using an anonymous online self-report questionnaire. The questionnaire included the Chinese version of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire-Short Form, the Subjective Happiness Scale, the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21. The demographic and health-related (...) factors were also reported. Linear regression was carried out to identify the relationship of PA and subjective happiness.Findings: In total, 1,512 students from three comprehensive schools completed the survey. The SHS score was 17.20 ± 3.44, and it was 17.00 ± 3.23 in males, and 17.75 ± 3.93 in females, respectively. There was no gender difference in vigorous, moderate PA, or walk min/week, while female students had longer sedentary behavior hours/day than males. Male students scored higher in each subscale of DASS-21. After controlling for confounders, vigorous PA min/week and sedentary behavior hours/day were significantly positively associated with happiness in male students. In contrast, walk min/week was significantly positively associated with happiness in female students.Interpretation: This research demonstrated a significant gender difference in the association between PA and happiness. Policymakers and college management should pay more attention to PA programs to promote students’ happiness and mental health status. (shrink)

Aren Z. Aizura's Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment is one of the best nonfiction books I have read recently. I was interested in Aizura's work because of the several ways in which this book's subjects resonated with my reflections on gender nonconforming subjects, gender reassignment, and the medical-industrial complex with a focus on interrogating the West/non-West binary. It focuses on trans and gender nonconforming people, issues of mobility, and access to various technologies for bodily (...) modification. This book, divided in two parts, will be of interest to a variety of readers, especially scholars doing feminist studies, queer theory, feminist science and technology... (shrink)

Responding to the Special Issue's call for “new thinking” on gender and governance in developing societies, we introduce our research on the social organization of development knowledge and its ethical implications. Our feminist‐based approach, institutional ethnography, analyses the ruling relations of development and the standpoints represented in knowledge about development and its governance. Our paper offers an alternative to what we see as “the institutional standpoint” prevailing, but taken for granted, in business and society scholarship addressing development. Instead of (...) theorizing development relationships between institutions and their “stakeholders,” we illustrate what can be learned about the social relations of development beginning from the experiences of local subjects. Our analysis of an environmental research and development project in Uzbekistan shows that being missed is knowledge about development subjects that could have revealed what is locally relevant and needed. Instead, we discover gender inequality being constituted, unknowingly, within this project's institutionally generated knowledge and the activities it authorizes. (shrink)

The objective of this study was to investigate and analyze the status and influential factors of gender equality awareness, self-esteem, and subjective well-being in school-age boys and girls. The results can help schools and teachers provide more effective gender equality and mental health education. In the study, 284 valid questionnaires were collected from a total of 323 school-age boys and girls in the Hunan Province, China. The questionnaire covered gender equality awareness, self-esteem, and subjective well-being, with the (...) influencing factors analyzed through multiple linear regression. There was a significant correlation among children’s gender equality awareness in all areas examined, with both boys and girls having the lowest awareness of gender equality in occupational fields. The children’s self-esteem and subjective well-being were significantly correlated as well. Gender equality awareness, self-esteem, and subjective well-being among boys and girls reflected different influential factors. Androgynous traits were conducive to the development of gender equality awareness and self-esteem among the children. Therefore, schools and teachers need to provide gender equality and mental health education according to the specific psychological characteristics of each boy and girl. (shrink)

This article is a call to feminist science and technology studies to engage with debates about the intersectionality of gender with race and class in analyses of women’s relationships with their computers - these debates are well established in the broader field of gender studies, but comparatively absent from studies of gender and technology. Furthermore, in order to understand women’s many and varied technological relationships, it is necessary to explore the diverse ways in which individual women experience (...) their gender, race and class in their relationships with their PCs. The article draws on the stories told by 14 working-class women from ethnic minority communities about the introduction of networked computers in their homes, to argue that we need to account for women’s subjective experiences of the identity intersections that take place in the face of the machine. (shrink)

This important new collection considers Jurgen Habermas's discourse theory from a variety of feminist vantage points. Feminist scholars have been drawn to Habermas's work because it reflects a tradition of emancipatory political thinking rooted in the Enlightenment and engages with the normative aims of emancipatory social movements. The essays in Feminists Read Habermas analyze various aspects of Habermas's work, ranging from his moral theory to political issues of identity and participation. The contributors share a conviction about the potential significance of (...) Habermas's work for feminist reflections on power, norms and subjectivity. (shrink)

This article calls for an examination of the spectral operations of the perceptual architecture of colonization in conjunction with the enactment of a decolonial feminism as proposed by María Lugones. The first section discusses both the notion of ghostly subjectivity from Lugones's early work as well as the echoes of this notion in her recent work on the coloniality of gender that emphasizes the gender/race/sex nexus. Subsequently, through a photographic example, the article presents an analysis of the (...) perceptual operations of specter‐making in practices of colonization in light of Lugones's understanding of the “light” and “dark” sides of the coloniality of gender. This analysis highlights not only the intricate nexus between racialization and gender and sex norms both in the past and in the present context, but it also points to the necessity for of a decolonial feminism attuned to perceptual practices or a decolonial aesthesis. (shrink)

Toril Moi has argued that recent deconstructive challenges to the concept of gender and to the viability of the sex/gender distinction have brought feminist and queer theory to a place of increasing theoretical abstraction. She suggests that we should abandon the category of gender once and for all, because it is founded on a nature–culture distinction and it tends incorrigibly to essentialize women’s lives. Moi argues that feminist and queer theories should replace the concept of gender (...) with a concept of the lived body derived from existential phenomenology. In this essay I take up and develop this suggestion, and argue that there are several advantages that a category of the lived body has over a category of gender for feminist and queer theories: (1) no nature–culture distinction is necessary but the body can be described as historically and socially specific; (2) it is not necessary to break out a gendered and “raced” part of identity with this category; (3) differences of sexual desire can be described without recourse to an “inner core” of identity or “sexual orientation.” I go on to argue, however, that it is important to retain a concept of gender for a theoretical purpose beyond that which Moi and those she criticizes conceive. In recent years feminist and queer theories have tended to conceive their theorizing as restricted to identity and subjectivity. How large scale social structures differentially position people in relations of privilege and disadvantage has been ignored, relatively. This essay argues then that theorizing structural processes and inequalities is crucial, and that a concept of gender is important for such theorizing. I propose three aspects of gendered social structure that are irreducible to one another: (1) a sexual division of labor (2) normative heterosexuality, and (3) hierarchies of power. In each case I illustrate the social theoretical work these categorizations of gendered structure can and should do. (shrink)

Gender seems to be everywhere in the norms governing our social world: from how to be a good friend and how to walk, to children’s clothes. It is not surprising then that a difficulty in identifying someone’s gender is often a source of discomfort and even anxiety. Numerous theorists, including Judith Butler and Charlotte Witt, have noted that gender is unlike other important social differences, such as professional occupation or religious affiliation. It has a special centrality, ubiquity (...) and importance in social practices. This observation moves us away from the classic philosophical question ‘what is gender?’ towards a more underappreciated one: ‘what is the role of gender’? To answer this question, I introduce the notion of social standing, which refers to our ability to enter into social relations. Social standing distinctions are an important feature of human societies. However, our existing philosophical tools do not adequately capture this notion: it is neither a moral distinction, nor is it reducible to hierarchy. I offer a conception of our entry into social relations as always conditioned by various shared representational assumptions about social subjects. When individuals are anomalous with respect to those assumptions, their social standing is in doubt. This explains important forms of uncommon and peculiar treatment across societies. I argue that forms of social devaluation on the basis of severe and visible disability in our society are central examples of diminished social standing. In our social context, being hard to recognize through the matrix of gender makes one representationally anomalous and imperils one’s social standing. Gender plays a fundamental role because gender legibility is a precondition for full social standing. Gender norms parallel ‘ability norms’ in this respect, linking notions of normalcy in scholarship on gender and in scholarship on disability. Social standing also explains two key phenomena about gender. Firstly, it tells us why our social practices and norms are pervasively gendered. Given the performative and relational nature of gendered positions, this is necessary for constant gender legibility. Secondly, social standing recognition accounts for social anxiety phenomena around gender ambiguity. These phenomena are reactions to anomaly as a threat to our social systems of meaning. In the final part of my dissertation, I consider some political consequences of my view. Understanding this special role of gender allows us to identify a distinct type of backlash to feminist social change that is particularly insidious. It is not driven by the hierarchical investments of the most gender-privileged, but rather by our collective investment in gender as a system of social coordination. I explore 2000s ‘raunch feminism’ to argue for this hypothesis. Gender’s role as a conditioning parameter of social standing puts systematic pressure on all would-be social subjects to be gender legible. This requires that individuals position themselves in recognizably gendered ways within social practices. But when gender differentiation is eroded, this positioning becomes tricky. This gives rise to a disorientation I call ‘meaning vertigo’. Meaning vertigo prompts attempts at reinstating a clear gendered system. In the process, gender equality suffers a serious set-back. To make substantial feminist progress, we must unseat gender from its central position in social domains like sexuality. I suggest that the best way to do this may be by foregrounding other aspects of social identity as systems of social coordination, instead of working on gender directly. (shrink)

This study uses the television show Cash Cab as a natural experiment to investigate gender differences in decision making under uncertainty. As expected, men are much more likely to accept the end-of-game gamble than are women, but men and women appear to weigh performance variables differently when relying on subjective probabilities. At best men base their risky decisions on general aspects of their previous “good” play (not all of which is relevant at the time the decision is made) and (...) at worst fail to condition their risky decisions on any of the relevant information available to them. In sharp contrast, women appear to consider all of the information available to them, including previous “poor” play as well as their most recent confident “good” play, which, by design, is likely the most relevant information to consider. (shrink)

The World Bank’s premise that “gender equality is good business” characterizes the current gender and economic development model. Policymakers and development practitioners promote and encourage women’s entrepreneurialism from the conviction that increasing women’s market-based opportunities is key to lifting women, their families, and communities out of poverty, resulting in the construction of a gendered entrepreneurial subject. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with home-based garment workers in Ahmedabad, India, this article questions the portrayal of women informal workers as (...) entrepreneurs. Employing a social reproduction framework, I argue that the exploitative characteristics of informal work are falsely interpreted as features of entrepreneurialism. Because work is completed in the worker’s own home, work and care become a mutual burden in which woman’s sense of providing for her family is impeded by both these roles. A feminist social reproduction framework of embodied labor links women’s responsibility for and contribution to family well-being with women’s marginalized economic position. Examining home-based work through this lens reveals the contradiction of the entrepreneurialism discourse. (shrink)

From birth to 15 months infants and caregivers form a fundamentally intersubjective, dyadic unit within which the infant’s ability to recognize gender/sex in the world develops. Between about 18 and 36 months the infant accumulates an increasingly clear and subjective sense of self as female or male. We know little about how the precursors to gender/sex identity form during the intersubjective period, nor how they transform into an independent sense of self by 3 years of age. In this (...) Theory and Hypothesis article I offer a general framework for thinking about this problem. I propose that through repetition and patterning, the dyadic interactions in which infants and caregivers engage imbue the infant with an embodied, i.e., sensori-motor understanding of gender/sex. During this developmental period (which I label Phase 1) gender/sex is primarily an intersubjective project. From 15 to 18 months (which I label Phase 2) there are few reports of newly appearing gender/sex behavioral differences, and I hypothesize that this absence reflects a period of developmental instability during which there is a transition from gender/sex as primarily inter-subjective to gender/sex as primarily subjective. Beginning at 18 months (i.e., the start of Phase 3), a toddler’s subjective sense of self as having a gender/sex emerges, and it solidifies by 3 years of age. I propose a dynamic systems perspective to track how infants first assimilate gender/sex information during the intersubjective period (birth to 15 months); then explore what changes might occur during a hypothesized phase transition (15 to 18 months), and finally, review the emergence and initial stabilization of individual subjectivity-the period from 18 to 36 months. The critical questions explored focus on how to model and translate data from very different experimental disciplines, especially neuroscience, physiology, developmental psychology and cognitive development. I close by proposing the formation of a research consortium on gender/sex development during the first 3 years after birth. (shrink)

This article analyzes the construction of female subjectivity in the specific context of audiovisual cyberspaces in Spain dedicated to the struggle against violence against women. Looking at the YouTube channels of two virtual feminist communities that deal with violence against women, the authors analyze how the victim-subject is configured in terms of agency and activism. The authors adopt a multimodal model of studying the sign complexes of the videos as semiotic artifacts that produce meaning. Sign complexes are always engaged (...) because representation is never neutral because what is represented in sign is meant to realize the values and positions of those who make the sign. In this article, the authors understand feminist activism in the fight against violence targeting women as constructing in its discourse not only the activist process, but also the subject of this activism: the victim-subject of gender-based violence. The analysis engages in the discussion about the various ways in which this subject is interpellated by the audiovisual texts in terms of agency. As a result, this study proposes the necessity to devise new ways of articulating this subject as a political and agential one. (shrink)

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging (...) with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency. (shrink)

Drawing on empirical research from two focus groups, this article investigates the narratives and discourses that emerged around pregnancy, technology, birth and motherhood. In so doing, the article engages in some long-standing debates within feminism around embodied and maternal subjectivity, agency and identity. Seen here, the focus groups serve initially to remind us of the pervasiveness of gender inequality and the continual ambiguity of, and anxieties around, maternal subjectivity. The focus groups reconfigure these issues through a technological (...) lens, which in turn seems to offer new spaces where agency can be (momentarily, problematically) claimed. This in turn extends existing debates in new directions through the particular framework of technology that is variously figured here as an object, as information and as imaginary digital space. All of these constructions, however, become problematic as they—despite their promises—nevertheless ultimately and profoundly return the women to an emplaced, embodied subjectivity that has been at the heart of feminist debate for so long. (shrink)

Abstract Under the realm of neurocultures the concept of the cerebral subject emerges as the central category to define the self, socio-cultural interaction and behaviour. The brain is the reference for explaining cognitive processes and behaviour but at the same time the plastic brain is situated in current paradigms of (self)optimization on the market of meritocracy by means of neurotechnologies. This paper explores whether neurotechnological apparatuses may—due to their hybridity and malleability—bear potentials for a change in gender based attributions (...) that have been historically legitimized by apparently natural differences between women and men. Or, in contrast, which gendered ascriptions are (again) produced in theories and applications according to the normative demands for the bio-techno-social cerebral subject situated in neoliberal power relations. An exploration of three main fields of current developments, the neurotechnological apparatus of brain-computer-interfaces, the technologies for brain tuning and the discourses in neuroeconomics, reveals first insights on these gender aspects in reliance with the ethical/political debate. Moreover, this paper concretizes questions for further research on gender and ethical aspects in the field of neurotechnologies. Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s12152-011-9129-1 Authors Sigrid Schmitz, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna, Alserstraße 23/22, 1080 Vienna, Austria Journal Neuroethics Online ISSN 1874-5504 Print ISSN 1874-5490. (shrink)

Despite the invaluable role that women play in the peacebuilding process, statistics still show this as a male-dominated field. Since media narratives have the power to frame reality providing the public with preferred lenses to understand it, this study asks, How do media narratives frame the role of Afghan women in conflict resolution? To address this question, we combine Frame Theory (Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58) and Critical Discourse Analysis (...) (van Dijk, T. A. (2015). Critical discourse analysis. In D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 466–485). Wiley Blackwell) to explore media narratives before and after the Taliban came into power in August 2021. The samples include 32 articles published between 2018 and 2022 on different sources ranging from traditional news outlets to magazines, newsrooms, intergovernmental organizations, and think tanks. Findings show that media narratives perpetuate unfair gendered expectations, failing to effectively render the irreplaceable role of women in peacebuilding. Frames confirm the double bind of hegemonic femininity (Schneiker, A. (2021). The UN and women's marginalization in peace negotiations. International Affairs, 97(4), 1165–1182) as women are subject to different expectations – the exception presents them as courageous, yet the norm frames them as being too vulnerable and without a voice. (shrink)

Background Teamwork in emergency medical services is a very important factor in efforts to improve patient safety. The potential differences of staff gender on communication, patient safety, and teamwork were omitted. The aim of this study is to evaluate these inadequately examined areas. Methods A descriptive and anonymous study was conducted with an online questionnaire targeting emergency physicians and paramedics. The participants were asked about teamwork, communication, patient safety and handling of errors. Results Seven hundred fourteen prehospital professionals from (...) all over Germany participated. A total of 65.7% of the women harmed a patient (men 72.9%), and 52.6% were ashamed when mistakes were made (men 31.7%). 19.0% of the female participants considered their communication skills to be very good, compared to 81% of the men. More women than men did not want to appear incompetent (28.4%, 15.5%) and therefore did not speak openly about mistakes. Both genders saw the character of their colleagues as a reason for poor team communication (women 89.4%, men 84.9.%). Under high stress, communication decreased (women 35.9%, men 31.0%) and expression became inaccurate (women 18.7%, men 20.1%). Conclusions Team communication problems and teamwork in rescue services are independent of gender. Women seem to have more difficulty with open communication about mistakes because they seem to be subject to higher expectations. Work organization should be adapted to women’s needs to enable more effective error management. We conclude that it is necessary to promote a positive error and communication culture to increase patient safety. (shrink)