Much has been written about the history of the work of men and women in the premodern past. It is now generally acknowledged that early modern ideological assumptions about a strict division of work and space between men and productive work outside the house on the one hand, and women and reproduction and consumption inside the house, on the other, bore little relation to reality. Household work strategies, out of necessity, were diverse. Yet what this (...) class='Hi'>spatial complexity meant in particular households on a day-to-day basis and its consequences for gender relationships is less clear and has received relatively little historical attention. The aim of this paper is to add to our knowledge through a case study of the way that men and women used and organized space for work in the county of Essex during the “long seventeenth century”. Drawing on critiques of the concept of “separate spheres” and the models of economic change to which it relates, together with local/micro historical methods, it places evidence within an appropriate regional context to argue that spatial patterns were enormously varied in early modern England and a number of factors—time, place, occupation, and status, as well as gender—determined them. Understanding of the dynamic, complex, uneven purchase of patriarchy upon the organization, imagination, and experience of space has important implications for approaches to gender relations in early modern England. It raises additional doubts about the utility of the separate spheres analogy, and particularly the use of binary oppositions of male/female and public/private, to describe gender relations and their changes in this period and shows that a deeper understanding demands more research into the local contexts in which the gendered division and meaning of work was negotiated. (shrink)

In First-World-War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient (...) popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters. (shrink)

Contemporary industrialized societies have been confronted with the fact and consequences of women's increased participation in paid employment. Whether this increase has resulted from women's desire for equality or from changing economic circumstances, women and men have been faced with a crisis in the organization of work that concerns dependents, that is, those unable to care for themselves. This is labor that has been largely unpaid, often unrecognized, and yet is indispensable to human society.

Strip clubs have rarely been analyzed in terms of their gendered organization. Instead, the literature on stripping emphasizes interaction-based perspectives that focus on strippers, patrons, and broader macro-structural trends. Although interaction-based perspectives are valuable, they often neglect to consider the context in which these interactions take place, the strip club itself. Such studies also tend to neglect the larger cast of club characters who own, manage, and work. This study explores workplace dynamics in The Lion's Den, a (...) club featuring nude female dancers who perform primarily for male patrons. Informed by feminist and gendered organizational theory, this research utilizes sociologist Joan Acker's framework for studying gendered organizations as a way of augmenting interaction-based perspectives. Applying her approach to a strip club, an overtly gendered setting, this research demonstrates the importance of context in facilitating particular gendered processes, stereotypes, and gendered substructures. (shrink)

This article attempts to establish analogies between the recent introduction into architectural thought of notions such as the human body movement, events and scenarios, and the development of navigation and interaction principles and conventions in the computer world. The study of the human–computer interface contributes to an understanding of the major role of the computer screen as a point of convergence of different representational forms, and the emergence of new ones belonging to the digital culture. The compositional structure of interactive (...) multimedia works is on the one hand a visual, spatial composition and on the other a narrative and navigational structure. (shrink)

In this article, we frame men’s club football as an “extremely gendered” organization to explain the underrepresentation of women leaders within the industry. By analyzing women’s leadership work over a 30-year period, we find that women’s inclusion has been confined to a limited number of occupational areas. These areas are removed, in terms of influence and proximity, from the male players and the playing of football. These findings reveal a gendered substructure within club football that maintains (...) masculine dominance in core football leadership roles and relegates women to a position of peripheral inclusion in leadership roles. Through a discourse analysis of gender pay gap reports, we show that men’s football clubs legitimize women’s peripheral inclusion by naturalizing male dominance at the organizational core. These findings are significant because they demonstrate that men’s football clubs, as masculinity-conferring organizations, have excluded women from core roles to maintain their masculine character while superficially accepting women into roles that do not challenge the association of football with hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, organizational change may be possible only if women are granted greater access to core organizational roles. Here, we offer a new theoretical framework for “extremely gendered” organizations that can be applied to other sporting and male-dominated contexts to analyze women’s access to core leadership roles. (shrink)

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the (...) same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work. (shrink)

This article examines new conceptions of gender and sexuality in China, asking how and why they have become so integral to the organization of service work regimes there. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in three urban Chinese retail settings, this article demonstrates how essentialized conceptions of gender and sexuality powerfully communicate class distinctions in service settings through associations with the imagery of China’s shift from socialism to a marketized society. A shift from the socialist “iron rice bowl” to (...) the “rice bowl of youth” infuses youthful, feminine, urban bodies with value while simultaneously devaluing middle-aged and rural women. This article argues that an essentializing discourse of gender legitimates new inequalities in urban China by masking the class distinctions simultaneously produced. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze survey data from more than 1,000 financial services employees to understand how gender inequality manifests itself in employees' informal networks. I found that even when Black and white women had jobs in which they controlled organizational resources and had ties to powerful employees, they received less work-related help from their network members than did white men. Drawing on status characteristics theory, I explain that network members were less likely to invest in women than in (...) white men because of cultural beliefs that rank women below that of white men. While past research has documented how employers use gender to rank workers and distribute rewards unequally, my research indicates that workers use gender to categorize and rank their network members as well. (shrink)

Work on farms and in restaurants is characterized by highly gendered and racialized divisions of labor, low wages, and persistent inequalities. Gender, race, and ethnicity often determine the spaces where people work in the food system. Although some research focuses on gendered divisions of labor in restaurants and on farms, few efforts look more broadly at intersectional inequalities in food work. Our study examines how inequality is perpetuated through restaurant and farm work in the (...) United States and, specifically, how gender and race/ethnicity influence where people work, their tasks and responsibilities, and their work experiences. In describing restaurant work, people in the restaurant industry typically refer to the front and back of the house to distinguish between different working spaces, jobs, and workers. We use this spatial metaphor of front and back of the house to analyze intersectional inequalities of food work in restaurants and on farms. The data derive from conversations with 63 restaurant and farm owners, managers, and workers in California and Pennsylvania. Our findings suggest that gendered and racialized bodies often define who works in the front and back of the “house,” and that owners and workers often naturalize gender and racial divisions of labor in food work. Despite these patterns, we found evidence of attempts to reduce these inequalities on farms and in restaurants. (shrink)

As political theorists explore work beyond traditional workplaces, how should we understand the vast class of insecure, informal, and unsalaried workers whose existence defies traditional categories of employment? In asking this question, I revisit the political theory of the Marxist feminist and cofounder of the International Wages for Housework movement, Selma James, to explore her “internationalism of the unwaged” and her writings on wagelessness. An example of political theory in service of struggle, James’s internationalism was widely circulated in anticolonial, (...) Black radical, and autonomous Marxist circles in the 1970s. In this article, I argue that it was grounded in three intertwined and mutually reinforcing arguments: an account of how capitalist life is spatially divided into distinct workplaces; an anticapitalist theory of identity that explains social difference as maintained by the international division of labor and labor market hierarchies; and a diagnosis of work organization viewed from the perspective of the wageless worker. I trace how James developed these arguments about the spatial division of labor, hierarchies of identity, and internationalist political struggle and how her view of the common exploitation and division of workers formed the basis of a class-struggle identity politics. Her political theory was an important contribution to women’s international thought and transnational feminist critiques of global forms of domination and exploitation. It also offers a critique of capitalism’s organization of the displacement of work and workers and an account of wagelessness as a work situation, both of which illuminate capitalist organization of work and wageless life today. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new way of measuring progress in international politics, an approach that focuses on the symbolic and ideological work of international organizations. Although such a strategy is not entirely new to the study of International Relations, it has not been a common, accessible way of assessing how well international organizations work to effect change. The more famous methods have been legalistic—investigations of how international organizations have created new international law in the issue-areas under investigation1—and bureaucratic—studies (...) of how international organizations create machinery to deal with the problems2. But in a world where domestic and international discourse is more mediated than ever before by television, radio, the Internet, newspapers, and other means of mass communication, the argument here is that propaganda is a third arena that must be taken into account when exploring the work of international organizations. The international organization in question here is the United Nations, and the issue-area examined is gender equality, a topic that is also variously described as “women's rights,” “women's issues”, or the “women's movement”. The paper explains first why the topic of the UN and women's rights is important, I then examine the propaganda role of the UN in the struggle for gender equality, and the paper concludes with a critical analysis of the UN's propaganda work in relation to this issue. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing public discourse regarding the influence AI will have on the future of work. Simultaneously, considerable critical attention has been given to the implications of AI on gender equality. Far from making precise predictions about the future, this discourse demonstrates that new technologies are instances for renegotiating the relation of gender and work. This paper examines how gender is addressed in news media discourse on AI and the future of work, (...) focusing on Germany. We approach this question from a perspective of feminist technology studies and discourse analysis, exploring a corpus of 178 articles from 2015 to 2021 from German newspapers and newsmagazines. The findings indicate that critical AI and gender knowledge circulates in public discourse in the form of specific discursive frames, thematizing algorithmic bias, automatization and enhancement, and gender stereotypes. As a result, we show that, first, the discourse takes up feminist and scholarly discourse on gender and discusses AI in a way that is informed by social constructivism and standpoint theories. Second, gender appears as a—to some extent intersectional—diversity category which is critical to AI, while at the same time omitting important perspectives. Third, it can be shown that there is a renegotiating of the ideal worker norm taking place, and finally, we argue that the gendered frame of the powerful men developer responsible for AI’s risk is a concept to be challenged. (shrink)

Previous work employing graph theory and nonlinear analysis has found increased spatial and temporal disorder, respectively, of functional brain connectivity in schizophrenia. We present a new method combining graph theory and nonlinear techniques that measures the temporal disorder of functional brain connections. Multichannel electroencephalographic data were windowed and functional networks were reconstructed using the minimum spanning trees of correlation matrices. Using a method based on Shannon entropy, we found elevated connection entropy in gamma activity of patients with schizophrenia; (...) however, gamma connection entropy remained elevated in patients with schizophrenia even after a reduction in symptoms due to treatment with antipsychotics. Our results are consistent with several possibilities: aberrant functional connectivity is epiphenomenal to schizophrenia, aberrant functional connectivity is a central feature but antipsychotics reduce symptoms by an independent mechanism, or connection entropy is not an appropriately sensitive measure of brain abnormalities in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Central to the functioning of colonialism and coloniality is a specific construction of time, in terms of which the spatial ordering of the world also translates into a temporal ordering. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues that there is a specific rhetorical device at work here, namely the ‘denial of coevalness’, which is a colonial distancing strategy through which other worlds are robbed of validity on account of not existing within the same time as the West. In this article, I (...) aim to add to analyses of scholars like Fabian, Chakrabarty and Mignolo by arguing that this colonial temporal ordering, which persists today, is also thoroughly gendered. As a point of departure I use Walter Mignolo’s idea that the denial of coevalness relies on two distinctions, namely nature versus culture, and tradition versus modernity. I argue that the discursive construction of nature (as opposed to culture) and tradition (as opposed to modernity) centres on gendered assumptions and an obsession with control over women’s bodies. In the course of making this argument, I also point out the overlaps, as well as key differences, between woman’s exclusion from Western linear time, on the one hand, and the temporal distancing of the colonised, on the other. In particular, I show how Western linear chronology positions Western women and previously colonised women in vastly different ways. I argue that if one considers the extent to which the denial of coevalness relies on colonial gender discourses, the erasure of indigenous sexuate knowledges that contradict the colonial gender discourses is not one erasure among many, but one of the key erasures that colonial temporality hinges on. A crucial implication of my analysis is that the process of undoing, deconstructing or dismantling the colonial denial of coevalness is also inherently a feminist project. (shrink)

Major neurocognitive changes occur during adolescence, making this phase as one of the most critical developmental period of life. Furthermore, this phase in life is also the time in youth substance use has its onset. Several studies demonstrated the differential associations of alcohol and cannabis use concerning the neurocognitive functioning of both males and females. Past and contemporary literature on gender-specific effects in neuroscience of addiction is predominantly based on cross-sectional datasets and data that is limited in terms of measurement (...) variability. Given the importance of gender-specific effects in addiction studies, and in order to address the two above-mentioned gaps in the literature, the present study aimed to compare neurocognitive functioning of male and female adolescents in the context of cannabis and alcohol use, while employing a longitudinal design with multiple repeated measurements. Participants were 3,826 high school students (47% female; mean age, 12.7), which were recruited from 31 high schools in the greater Montreal area. Participants were requested to complete annual surveys for five consequent years, from 7th to 11th grade, assessing their alcohol/cannabis use and neurocognitive functioning (working memory, delayed recall memory, perceptual reasoning, and inhibition control). The analytical strategy was focused on the longitudinal association between each predictor (female, male) and each of the outcomes (domains of neurocognitive functioning). Multilevel linear models assessed the association of alcohol and cannabis consumption and the four domains of neurocognitive functioning. Results revealed a gender by within-subject interaction, suggesting a weaker effect of yearly fluctuation of cannabis use on working memory among males compared to females. Our findings suggest a different pattern of neurocognitive impairment of female and male working memory after using cannabis over the course of adolescence. Early initiation of cannabis use potentially results in more spatial working memory deficits in female adolescents. This may negatively influence young females’ capacity in academic settings and lead to significant impairment in adulthood, which critically decreases the individual’s quality of life. (shrink)

Research on sexual harassment in the workplace has followed several trajectories: the extent of sexual harassment, labeling sexual harassment, responses to sexual harassment, and contributing factors to sexual harassment. Much of this research has been necessarily applied, leaving theoretical frameworks concerning sexual harassment underdeveloped. This research uses the case of the sexual harassment of temporary workers to develop grounded theory to provide a more structural understanding of sexual harassment. While temporary employment has increased dramatically in the past 15 years, researchers (...) have only recently begun to document the effects of this trend. This research is based on 68 in-depth interviews from two broader studies on clerical temporary work in Chicago and Los Angeles. The researchers find that the organization of temporary work fosters sexual harassment through the magnification of asymmetrical power relationships. (shrink)

In this article, the author traces the transformation of sexual work, or prostitution, in 20th-century Korea. The author stresses the power relations that create and sustain the changing social organization of sexual work. The traditional, state-organized female entertainers, kisaeng, waned with the collapse of the Yi dynasty. During their colonia rule, the Japanese enhanced the commercialization of sexuality and conscripted Korean women as sexual “comforters” for soldiers. In the postwar period, the U.S. military presence played a preponderant (...) role in expanding prostitution. In the 1970s, sex tours, dominated by the Japanese, proliferated. The 1980s witnessed a greater diversification of sexual labor. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick provides a unique contribution to international studies, most especially to contemporary interdisciplinary studies of International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR). Peter provides a significant theoretical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of IL and IR not only as a critical thinker of modern law, but also as a critical thinker of the modern international. On the one hand, his supplementary critical legal thinking contributes to a ‘decolonial deconstructionist’ rethinking of the politics of (...) international law. His close reading of how modern international law (auto)grounds ‘itself’, for instance, offers a strident critique of the racist, imperial, and colonial lines of discrimination involved in the negative (auto)constitution of this (supposedly) universal legal being. On the other hand, he provides a conception of the ‘(inter)national’ which displaces conventional, modern understandings of the legal and political organization of ‘humanity’ and ‘the world’, problematizing their foundational assumptions and spatialized geometrical frames as being based on oppositional dualisms (‘inside/outside’, ‘national/international’, ‘empire/modernity’, ‘theological/secular’, etc.), while offering a deconstructionist engagement with the ‘constitutive outside’ of the modern (inter)national. As a form of postcolonial counter-archive, Peter’s work enacts a decolonial deconstruction of ‘our’ (inter)national ‘selves’, including the (inter)national commonality ‘itself’. Before an incalculable, quasi-ontological heteronomy, a dissymmetrical Law of originary sociability which I (re)articulate here with/as the ‘and’ of the world(s), Peter’s supplementary critical thinking of the (inter)national contributes to imagining the world, humanity, and our social being(s), including law and language, otherwise. (shrink)

Working women in the Caribbean and Latin America are more active in the labor market than their counterparts in most other regions of the world. Yet, they remain much less economically mobile than working men. Using research from a long-term study in Martinique, this article offers a new view of the cross-class construction of women's economic immobility. Research results suggest that irrespective of a woman's socioeconomic status, household structure, education, skills, or freedom from domestic chores, the organization of her (...) work is patterned in ways that preclude economic growth. When women try to “get ahead,” they invest more of their own time; men, by contrast, put others to work. I argue that these and other gender-based patterns of work organization and network management express a hidden but enduring legacy of a patriarchal value system. (shrink)

Gender scholars argued that gendered organizations theory needs updating as organizational logic has shifted amid neoliberal workplace transformations. This qualitative case study of a high-tech firm reveals how features of the traditional work logic remain resilient. I analyze the gendered implications of a high-tech startup restructuring and going public, finding the flexible organization to bureaucratize, implementing specialized jobs and a hierarchy with standardized career ladders. Going public creates conflicting gendered logics that place women at a (...) structural disadvantage, relegating them to low-status, narrow jobs while simultaneously demanding masculine ideal worker norms of visibility and self-promotion. Despite networking, women experience job insecurity and a glass ceiling, while men are assumed ideal workers and advance. By tracing one high-tech firm’s restructuring from a startup to public company, I demonstrate how the collision of new and traditional workplace logics perpetuates gender inequalities. (shrink)

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was (...) successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2. (shrink)

This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative, the Results-Only Work Environment, implemented in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations “accommodate” individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinized ideal worker norm? And what do women’s and men’s responses reveal (...) about the persistent ways that gender structures work and family life? Data demonstrate the ideal worker norm is pervasive and powerful, even as employees begin critically examining expectations regarding work time that have historically privileged men. Employees’ responses to ROWE are also gendered. Women are more enthusiastic, while men are more cautious. Ambivalence about and resistance to change is expressed in different ways depending on gender and occupational status. (shrink)

Previous research has examined growing globalized divisions in domestic labor through the perspective of poor migrant women who perform care work in advanced industrialized societies. This article explores this global trend in reverse, focusing on first-world women who migrate into developing countries and engage with local dynamics of care through volunteer work. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Helping Hands, an organization of expatriate wives that assisted a local state-run orphanage in Beijing, China, I argue (...) that gendered processes of privileged migration caused women to develop a “logic of care” that equated good care solely with maternal nurturance and emotional connection. This logic permeated their volunteer efforts, causing conflicts with Chinese state caregivers who prioritized the performance of reproductive tasks. This case demonstrates the socially constructed nature of logics that underlie care practices and their relationship to increasingly transnational configurations of privilege and inequality. When applied to first-world women’s charitable activities in developing countries, unquestioned gendered logics can reinforce larger global disparities of power through the stratified provision of care. (shrink)

Personalism is one of the philosophical perspectives which hold that the reality in person and the human person has the highest intrinsic value. This paper makes reference to Louis Janssens' eight criteria in adequate consideration of the human person but further argues that there is need to consider people as situated agents especially within gender relational perspectives. The paper identifies gender as an important social construction that shapes the consideration of the human persons within socio-spatial spheres. The main crux (...) of the paper is that there is a gender context of personalism and this has profound implications for bioethical agendas. Gender is part of the human condition, especially when we philosophically or sociologically engage the notion of equity and equality within the social system, because social realities in the relational perspective are not impartial, impersonal and equal. Gender does not determine morality but it plays a role in morality and expectations from moral agents. Women have been categorised as a sociological group because their integrity, freedom/autonomy and dignity (which are basic concerns of bioethics) are capable of being threatened. A gender perspective provides important incentives for moral theory which searches for possible conceptual imbalances or blind spots in ethical reflections. The paper refers to Sen's faces of gender inequality and expands on the notion that natality inequality is one of the fundamental levels of gender inequality, which in turn is the primary starting agenda in bioethics. The paper avers that the recognition of the fundamental importance of gender to the organization of social reality and the development of personal identities have important practical implications for bioethics. (shrink)

Gender scholars use the metaphor of the “glass escalator” to describe a tendency for men in women-dominated workplaces to be promoted into supervisory positions. More recently, scholars, including the metaphor’s original author, critique the glass escalator metaphor for not addressing the intersections of gender with other relevant identities or the ways that work has changed in the twenty-first century. I apply an intersectional lens to understand how gender and race shape women’s career paths in tech work, where twenty-first (...) century changes to the organization of workplaces are common. I build on theories of raced and gendered labor and the glass escalator to make sense of women’s careers in a contemporary field dominated by men. I find some evidence that white women, but not women of color, experience something similar to a “glass escalator” where they are promoted into management, but those promotions are a smaller step up—more step stool than escalator. These promotions move women out of technical positions and towards business and management, releasing engineering teams from the pressure to fully incorporate women. (shrink)

Based on four years of participant-observation field research and focused interviews with men and women child care workers, the author analyzes how the marking of men workers and their experiences doing child care work show how deeply feminized the work of child care is. When men choose to do child care work, they become suspect. This suspicion manifests in restriction of men's access to children in child care centers. Restricted access of men workers to children implies men's (...) desire for access to children is pathological. In these and other ways, the organization of child care and the accountability of persons to sex category systematically push men away from nurturing responsibilities and bind these responsibilities to women workers. (shrink)

In this study, we elaborate connections among gender, structure, and practice to suggest how social structural relations shape social sexual practice and, in the process, reshape gender relations. Using survey data from a study of a community mobilization intervention, we investigate the connection between institutional arrangements and condom use practice in sexual encounters with commercial clients and intimate partners among 410 women engaged in sex trade in a semiurban town in southern India. Multinomial logistic regression analysis uncovers the effects of (...) 16 measures of gendered structural relations in three contexts—livelihood resources, household circumstances, and community mobilization intervention priorities. We compare women who practice either consistent or inconsistent condom use with both clients and partners with a reference group of women who practice consistent condom use with clients but not with partners. Results reveal the importance of household and community relations for consistent safer sex practice over and above the organization of sex trade. Our analysis advances gender theory in two interrelated ways: We contribute to gender theorizing in the implementation of health interventions, and to gender change more generally by thinking through possibilities emerging from recursive influences between reordered institutional configurations and altered expectations in interaction. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is the study of gender aspects of management and relationship between management characteristic and style of leadership from gender typing in order to improve management efficiency. Theoretical basis. To understand the influence of gender mechanisms on the organization’s governance system, it turns out that there is a difference in the approach of women and men to management and leadership. The main characteristics of male and female leadership style, features in making management decisions regarding (...) work and career are given. Originality of a paper is the further development in the theory of gender processes with application of interdisciplinary approaches in studying the phenomenon of gender, not from the point of view of the interactions between two large social groups, but as a social resource of an organization where men and women represent labor potential, rational use of which is the key to successful management in the organization. The social potential of Ukrainian women can become a valuable resource in a country, a region, and any social organization. Conclusions. In modern society, the unique experience of women’s rule is ignored, indicating that they have significant and little used management potential. An analysis of gender interactions in management processes revealed the active desire of women for career growth and success in individual image. However, the transformation of the gender sphere in an organization reflects the preference of patriarchal relations, which is an obstacle to the advancement of women in the managerial structure and, accordingly, requires them to make significant efforts to achieve equal management opportunities with men. To ensure the effectiveness of the organization, it is necessary to take into account the gender factor and comply with gender balance in management positions. (shrink)

Cis‐regulatory elements govern gene expression programs to determine cell identity during development. Recently, the possibility that multiple enhancers are orchestrated in clusters of enhancers has been suggested. How these elements are arranged in the 3D space to control the activation of a specific promoter remains unclear. Our recent work revealed that the TGFβ pathway drives the assembly of enhancer clusters and precise gene activation during neurogenesis. We discovered that the TGFβ pathway coactivator JMJD3 was essential in maintaining these structures (...) in the 3D space. To do that, JMJD3 required an intrinsically disordered region involved in forming phase‐separated biomolecular condensates found in the enhancer clusters. Our data support the existence of a relationship between 3D‐conformation of the chromatin, biomolecular condensates, and TGFβ‐driven response during mammalian neurogenesis. In this review, we discuss how signaling (TGFβ), epigenetics (JMJD3), and biochemical properties (biomolecular condensates nucleation) are coordinated to modulate the genome structure to guarantee proper neural development. Moreover, we comment on the potential underlying mechanisms and implications of the enhancer‐mediated regulation. Finally, we point out the knowledge gaps that still need to be addressed. (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)

The concept of reproductive labor is central to an analysis of gender inequality, including understanding the devaluation of cleaning, cooking, child care, and other “women's work” in the paid labor force. This article presents historical census data that detail transformations of paid reproductive labor during the twentieth century. Changes in the organization of cooking and cleaning tasks in the paid labor market have led to shifts in the demographics of workers engaged in these tasks. As the context for (...) cleaning and cooking work shifted from the dominance of private household servants to include more institutional forms, the gender balance of this reproductive labor workforce has been transformed, while racial-ethnic hierarchies have remained entrenched. This article highlights the challenges to understanding occupational segregation and the devaluation of reproductive labor in a way that analyzes gender and race-ethnicity in an intersectional way and integrates cultural and structural explanations of occupational degradation. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the economic, social, environmental and cultural changes taking place in Bolsena, Italy, where agricultural livelihoods have rapidly diminished in the last two decades. I examine how gender dynamics have shifted with the changing values and livelihoods of Bolsena through three women’s narratives detailing their gendered experiences of environment, community and self. I reflect on these changes with Sabrina, who is engaged in a feminist community-based organization; Anna, who is running an alternative wine bar; (...) and Isabella, a jeweler, who is engaged in ecofeminist practices. My analysis is based on concepts developed by feminist political ecology: specifically, the theory of rooted networks from Dianne Rocheleau, Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures (and the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham on new economic imaginaries emerging from the politics of place. I aim to think with, reflect upon and provoke from the “otherwise”, taking into account the lived relations entwining nature and gender. My article looks at the interconnections of gender, environment and livelihoods, attentive to the daily needs, embodied interactions and labours of these three women as part of a reappropriation, reconstruction and reinvention of Bolsena’s lifeworld. By listening to the stories of their everyday lives and struggles, I show the dynamic potential of the politics of place and the efforts to build diverse economies and more ethical economic and ecological relationships based on gender-aware subjectivities and values. (shrink)

Personalism is one of the philosophical perspectives which hold that the reality in person and the human person has the highest intrinsic value. This paper makes reference to Louis Janssens' eight criteria in adequate consideration of the human person but further argues that there is need to consider people as situated agents especially within gender relational perspectives. The paper identifies gender as an important social construction that shapes the consideration of the human persons within socio‐spatial spheres. The main crux (...) of the paper is that there is a gender context of personalism and this has profound implications for bioethical agendas. Gender is part of the human condition, especially when we philosophically or sociologically engage the notion of equity and equality within the social system, because social realities in the relational perspective are not impartial, impersonal and equal. Gender does not determine morality but it plays a role in morality and expectations from moral agents. Women have been categorised as a sociological group because their integrity, freedom/autonomy and dignity (which are basic concerns of bioethics) are capable of being threatened. A gender perspective provides important incentives for moral theory which searches for possible conceptual imbalances or blind spots in ethical reflections. The paper refers to Sen's faces of gender inequality and expands on the notion that natality inequality is one of the fundamental levels of gender inequality, which in turn is the primary starting agenda in bioethics. The paper avers that the recognition of the fundamental importance of gender to the organization of social reality and the development of personal identities have important practical implications for bioethics. (shrink)

The enduring significance of gender and how it intersects with class in the organization of parenting, domestic and professional work has been obscured in contemporary neoliberal contexts. This article examines how Greek academic women conceptualize and enact motherhood and the classed and gendered strategies they adopt to reconcile ‘good’ motherhood with notions of the ‘good’ academic professional. It draws on semi-structured interviews about the career narratives of 15 women in Greek medical schools in the aftermath of the (...) Greek recession. The analysis presented in this article is informed by a feminist post-structuralist paradigm and an emic approach to intersectionality. Motherhood emerged in the data as a dynamic concept, and a network of practices both constrained and enabled by gendered and classed family and work cultures. Drawing on a neoliberal ‘DIY’ and ‘having it all’ discourse, Greek mothers claimed that they could achieve almost anything professionally, if they organized their private lives sensibly. They drew on idealized discourses of motherhood, but they also contradicted these notions by doing non-traditional forms of motherhood, such as remote or transnational motherhood, afforded by their privileged social positioning and academic careers. Further research is required to investigate configurations of classed motherhood in less prestigious professions. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe Spatial Learning Task of Lhermitte and Signoret is an object-location arbitrary associative learning task. The task was originally developed to evaluate adults with severe amnesia. It is currently used in populations where the memory system either is not yet fully developed or where it has been compromised (e.g. epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, electroconvulsive therapy, cerebrovascular disease and dementia). Normative data have been published for paediatric cohorts and for older adults, however no data exist for the intervening adult years.MethodHere, (...) we address this gap, collecting normative data from 101 adults aged 18–45.ResultsOur data indicate that performance on the Spatial Learning Task is not influenced by age, gender, level of education or overall IQ. Less than 10% of the variance in learning scores is associated with variability in verbal memory. Ninety percent of participants achieved perfect scores on two successive trials (T2Cr) within five or fewer trials on the Spatial Learning Task. A T2Cr score of 6 is suggestive of impairment and a T2Cr score of 7 or more is statistically abnormal.ConclusionThese data expand the clinical utility of the Spatial Learning Task in the adult population. Future work should examine performance in lower IQ cohorts, including intellectual disability, and explore sensitivity to disease factors such as laterality of mesial temporal lobe damage. (shrink)

A subject’s relationship with work is by no means “neutral” as regards selfdevelopment. What becomes of the psychical relationship with work does not depend solely on the individual’s particular characteristics as a person, in particular their gender; it depends also on the nature and organization of work. In order to analyse the importance of work in the development of the psychic erotic economics, I refer to the psychotherapy of a young woman that took place towards (...) the end of her adolescence. This will enable me to show how work can have a positive impact on mental development. Then, in order to illustrate how work may destroy mental functioning, I briefly analyse examples taken from investigations I undertook in France in companies where several workplace suicides had taken place. (shrink)

This article analyzes how women in residential real estate sales interweave their work and family activities. It is presented as a case study of the effects of flexible scheduling on the tasks of managing paid and domestic work. Women are attracted to real estate sales because they perceive that it will enable them to combine their paid and unpaid labor in a relatively comfortable way as a result of the flexibility of setting their own work schedules. They (...) find that the work requires long hours and significant adaptations in the division of household labor. The findings demonstrate that flexibility itself is not adequate for accomodating the demands of families and wage work. Additional changes in the organization of both types of work, as well as ideological changes in the ownership of family-related tasks are required to alleviate the difficulties women face in integrating family and work responsibilities. (shrink)

There are two well-known truths about Japan: one is that Japan is one of the most advanced economies, which takes pride in its highly advanced technology, social infrastructure and system; the other is that Japan ranks lowest at women’s social participation among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Even though the Japanese government has initiated programs to promote female participation and advancement in society, these initiatives have not yet borne remarkable fruit. This study intends to address this issue (...) by investigating the effectiveness of female leadership in Japan, specifically its effect on organizations’ gender diversity and inclusion climate and employees’ task-related positive attitudes. Synthesizing social information processing theory and social identity theory, the study examines 306 Japanese employees working with their female supervisors in medium- and large-sized manufacturing companies. The findings show that female ambidextrous leadership contributes to shape and strengthen a gender D&I climate and ultimately enhances employees’ hope on their work. In addition, the positive effect of a gender D&I climate on employees’ hope is the same for all employees regardless of gender. The findings clarify the role of female leadership and the underlying psychological mechanism through which female leadership influences employees’ positive work attitudes. This first empirical study in Japan contributes to the research on female leadership and D&I management. (shrink)

. A partial analogy exists between the lifespan neuropsychological development of individuals and the biological evolution of species: In both of these major categories of growth, progressive emergence of wholes transcends inherently limited part‐processes. The remarkably small purview of each moment of consciousness experienced by an individual may be a crucial aspect of maintaining organization in that individual's cognitive development, protecting it from combinatorial chaos. In this essay I summarize experimental psychology research showing that working memory capacity comprises the (...) so‐called magical number 7±2 items, not only for words and digits but for spatial items and other sorts of cognitive materials, and not only in humans but also in other species. This is so to such an extent that 7±2 may be a “constant of nature.” The small quantity range 7±2 independent items, which builds upon a more elementary, instantaneous working memory capacity of three or four items, is surprisingly independent of the time duration of a cognitive task. Moreover, it is largely independent of ontogeny. Explanations of these powerful facts about working memory are offered here within both a functionalistic framework and a framework of hypothetical neural processes. At the neural level, working memory dynamics may comprise certain brain wave harmonics or topological relationships in the sheetlike cortex. Within the functionalistic framework, I suggest an additional analogy, pertaining to cultural evolution, with Tom Gilbert's work on risk analysis and “the global problematic” that follows from unforeseen consequences of the expansiveness of human ambition. Several connections are drawn with ideas presented by participants in the Chicago Religion and Science Group about how theologies and sciences try to understand the possibility of adaptive exercises of human freedom in the face of the extreme finiteness of each human individual. (shrink)

There is debate about whether the post-Fordist or high-performance work organization can overcome the disadvantages women encounter in traditional gendered organizations. Some authors argue that substituting a performance logic for control by the clock offers opportunities for combining work and family life in a more natural way. Critics respond that these organizational reforms do not address the nonresponsibility of firms for caring duties at a more fundamental level. The authors address this debate through an analysis of (...) overtime work, using data from a survey of 1,114 employees in 30 Dutch organizations. The findings reveal that post-Fordist work is associated with more overtime hours than traditional forms of work and that far from challenging gendered organization, it reproduces and exacerbates the traditional male model of work. (shrink)

The concept of levels of organization, despite its widespread scientific currency, has recently been criticized by a number of philosophers of science. This paper diagnoses the main source of problems facing theories of levels. On this basis, the problems with the usual criteria for distinguishing levels are evaluated: compositional relations, organizational types, and spatial scales. Drawing on some work on hierarchies in ecology, I argue in favor of an alternative conception of levels defined by the criterion of (...) rates or time scales of processes. (shrink)

Recently, the study of gender has focused on processes by which gender is brought into social relations through interaction. This article explores implications of a two-sided dynamic—gendering practices and practicing of gender—for understanding gendering processes in formal organizations. Using stories from interviews and participant observation in multinational corporations, the author explores the practicing of gender at work. She defines practicing gender as a moving phenomenon that is done quickly, directionally, and nonreflexively; is informed by liminal awareness; and is in (...) concert with others. She notes how other conceptions of gender dynamics and practice inform the analysis and argues that adequate conceptualization of harmful aspects of gendering practices/practicing will require attention to agency, intentionality, awareness, and reflexivity; positions, power, and experience; and choice, accountability, and audience. She calls for incorporating the “sayings and doings” of gender into organization theory and research. (shrink)

Analysis of the DNA sequence associated with the nuclear matrix has made it possible to identify several types of DNA matrix association. Permanent attachment sites are detected in both transcriptionally active and inactive nuclei. Furthermore, replication origins have been shown to be permanently attached to the nuclear matrix. In transcriptionally active nuclei, expressed genes are also associated with the nuclear matrix. Finally, a special group of attachment sites is described; these sites are believed to maintain the fixed positions of individual (...) chromosomes in interphase nuclei. (shrink)

BackgroundClinical ethics support aims to support health care professionals in dealing with ethical issues in clinical practice. Although the prevalence of CES is increasing, it does meet challenges and pressing questions regarding implementation and organization. In this paper we present a specific way of organizing CES, which we have called integrative CES, and argue that this approach meets some of the challenges regarding implementation and organization.MethodsThis integrative approach was developed in an iterative process, combining actual experiences in a (...) case study in which we offered CES to a team that provides transgender health care and reflecting on the theoretical underpinnings of our work stemming from pragmatism, hermeneutics and organizational and educational sciences.ResultsIn this paper we describe five key characteristics of an integrative approach to CES; 1. Positioning CES more within care practices, 2. Involving new perspectives, 3. Creating co-ownership of CES, 4. Paying attention to follow up, and 5. Developing innovative CES activities through an emerging design.ConclusionsIn the discussion we compare this approach to the integrated approach to CES developed in the US and the hub and spokes strategy developed in Canada. Furthermore, we reflect on how an integrative approach to CES can help to handle some of the challenges of current CES. (shrink)

Space Gender Knowledge is an innovative and comprehensive introduction to the geographies of gender and the gendered nature of spatial relations. It examines the major issues raised by women's movements and academic feminism, and outlines the main shifts in feminist geographical work, from the geography of women to the impact of post-structuralism. In making their selection, the editors have drawn on a wide range of interdisciplinary material, ranging across spatial scales from the body to the globe. (...) The book presents influential arguments for the importance of the intersection between space and gender. Looking both at geography and beyond the discipline, it explores the gendered construction of space and the spatial construction of gender. Divided into a number of conceptual sections, each prefaced by an editorial introduction, this reader includes extracts from both landmark texts and less well-known works, making it an indispensable introduction to this dynamic field of study. (shrink)

This article pursues two central goals. First, I seek to advance the sustained study of occupational identity as a pivotal mechanism for organizing work and, thus, as a productive means of integrating the aims of two scholarly movements: 1) the ‘dislocation’ of organization and 2) the renewed emphasis on work in organization studies. Specifically, I propose the study of evolving relations between occupational image discourse and role communication, and my analysis of US commercial airline pilots enacts (...) the potential of such research. The analysis demonstrates how contemporary pilots draw on the deliberate historical construction of airline pilots as elite, fatherly professionals to make sense of their work, explicitly invoking gender discourse as a rational and emotional warrant for their labor and, in so doing, implicitly articulating sexuality, race, and class discourses. Accordingly, the second major goal of the article is to promote inquiry into how discourses of difference function to organize occupational identity and, thus, to produce the division and hierarchy of labor. With this move, I seek to bring a more constitutive view of discourse and communication, as well as a focus on intersection and interplay among discourses of difference, to the study of occupational identity and segregation. (shrink)