Organizational Behaviour and Gender (2nd edition)

Citation

Olsson, S. (2003), "Organizational Behaviour and Gender (2nd edition)", Women in Management Review, Vol. 18 No. 7, pp. 382-384. https://doi.org/10.1108/09649420310499019

Organizational Behaviour and Gender is a gem of a book. I used the first edition as an undergraduate text until it went out of print a few years ago. The book provides both a scholarly and a readable introduction to gender issues in organizations. While Wilson states that she does not attempt a comprehensive review of literature in the area, the claims of the book are continually founded upon up‐to‐date and leading examples of existing research. This makes the book a particularly valuable resource.

The second edition is more hard‐hitting than the first. While writers such as Halford and Leonard (2001) suggest we have entered a period of social revolution with women increasingly holding substantial positions of power, Wilson’s text comes as a timely reminder that little has changed, and in some cases there has been a decline in the position of women in the workforce. Wilson maintains that organizational theory remains gender‐blind and mainstream management thinking, research and culture is based on male‐oriented perspectives. Little attention is paid to gender relations or to an acknowledgement of women as making up 50 per cent of the workforce.

Wilson shifts the focus onto gender as a key factor in organizational analysis. From this basis she re‐examines the central topics of concern to organizational behaviourists, namely: perception, learning and socialization, motivation, leadership and personality. To these she adds a further topic “strangely absent from organizational theory” (p. 193), the subject of sexuality in the workplace.

In contrast also to the positivist approach that has dominated mainstream organizational and management texts, Wilson adopts a social constructionist position. Social constructionism questions the view that knowledge is based on objective, unbiased observation of the world. A general assumption of a constructionist approach is that “the world out there is constituted in one way or another as people talk, write and argue it” so that reality and knowledge are “in some sense ideological, political and permeated with values” (Schwandt, 2000, p. 198). Gender is a social construct imposed upon biological sex, learned through socialization and educational processes, and continually reinforced by the injunctive norms or social expectations of men and women at all stages of life. In Wilson’s words: “men and women have learned to ‘do’ gender” (p. 175) and as a result they believe in gender differences.

Wilson argues that the traditional association of men with work and women with the home, underlies the dominance of the “male‐as‐norm” view of employment. She uses this “male‐as‐norm” view as a starting point for dispelling the myths that sustain “inequity of opportunity and inequality of outcome” (p. 7) in the workplace. She points out that women’s participation in the workforce has increased over the past few decades to the point where they make up 44 per cent of the UK workforce. At the same time, 83 per cent of part‐time employees are women, and women along with ethnic minority women and men are concentrated in lower status and lower paid jobs. In particular, Wilson refutes the “myths” that equality of opportunity and equal pay for equal work has been ensured by legislation. She reveals the continuance of occupational segregation, vertical segregation and the “sexual demarcation” of work in situations where men and women work in the same industries. She also claims the myth that women’s commitment to work is less than that of men is not only untrue, but, even more seriously, fails to recognise how “women actively balance their time between household production and paid employment” (p. 29). She argues that Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) is neglected as an issue by decision makers and that the “rules” of the organizations, together with gender stereotyping, work against women – with the result that “women are typecast and disadvantaged in the labour market” (p. 34).

At the core of the book is the gender similarities or differences debate and much of the rest of the book goes on to address this question, with a particular focus on women in management. Most immediately, Wilson traces the ways in which gender stereotyping accentuates the differences between men and women to result in the perceptual errors faced by women in organizations. In social constructionist terms, Stubbe et al. (2000, p. 237) state: “Perceptions of men and women are automatically filtered through a gendered lens” and reconstituted within a more general discourse on gender difference. Wilson discusses the research which indicates how such gendered perceptions result in women being evaluated less favourably than men in hiring, promotion and development decisions. In addition, Wilson points to the operation of a double standard whereby “men’s weaknesses are interpreted as strengths or ignored, while supposed female weaknesses are highlighted and used to exclude them” (p. 55).

Underpinning the question of gender differences is the biology versus culture/socialization argument. On the one hand, essentialist views stress gender differences as a natural product of biological difference. On the other hand, social constructionism acknowledges biological difference, but views gender differences as learned by men and women, hence not always resistant to change or inflexible. Wilson shows that the research reveals “more similarities than differences between males and females in the cognitive area” (p. 80), including visual‐spatial ability where traditionally men were thought to have superior abilities. She briefly examines some of the main theories that attempt to explain sex‐role development, from social development theory to social cognition theory. She asserts that sex relates to the label or category of male or female, while gender refers to the social attributes deemed appropriate for members of each sexual group. Gender is constituted, not as a category, but as “a context‐dependent and highly flexible process” (p. 82). Wilson traces the process of learning to be male or female through childhood, school and adulthood pointing to the constant reinforcement of gender differences by the popular magazines and media. The culture and ideology that inform the learning sustain the status quo of male power and advantage.

Among the reasons for lack of change to sexual inequalities, Wilson includes women’s reluctance, or at least ambivalence: “about helping change come about” (p. 96). Wilson herself argues for biology, but not biological determinism. She suggests that women seem to accede in their own oppression because they are socialized to believe they are different. While she argues that neither men or women are a homogenous mass, a certain ambivalence is suggested in her reiteration of Cockburn’s (1991) view that women need to maintain “this idea of women’s difference in play, but on women’s terms” and that what is needed “is not in fact equality but equivalence, not sameness, for individual women and men, but parity for women as a sex, of for groups of women in their specificity” (p. 105).

In turning to the topic of motivation to work, Wilson declares that little attention has been paid to the importance of sex differences in motivation. She considers the work of three major theorists in the area: Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg and David McClelland. She argues that much of the research carried out on motivation has treated males as the norm, and failed to account for, or sometimes to even test, women.

Research which has tested men and women in comparable positions, including male and female “high flyers”, has found the motivations of men and women to be similar. Wilson points to the different pressures for women with families and suggests that more research is needed to explore the meaning women assign to motivation.

A particularly strong feature of the book is the chapter on leadership. Wilson provides a scholarly synopsis of developments in leadership theory from trait theories, which focus on characteristics of the leader, to behavioural and style theories, which are concerned with what leaders do. Her discussion includes the comparison of autocratic and democratic leadership, directive and participative approaches, and power. She also sets forth the concept of the androgynous manager, one who exhibits a blend of so‐called masculine and feminine styles, but in this edition of the book she includes in a later chapter some of the critiques of this concept. The chapter includes a discussion of the research which shows men’s tendency to identify with transactional leadership and women’s tendency to identify with transformational leadership approaches.

Perhaps more contentious is Wilson’s chapter on personality. As she points out, a social constructionist view questions whether you can demonstrate the existence of personality as a unified or stable aspect of an individual. Instead, the notion of constituting and negotiating differing and situation‐specific identities, including gender identities, suggests how identity is more to do with ongoing processes and purposes than with “nature”. Wilson’s particular focus is on gender identity. She argues: “The reason we have a common belief in gender differences in personality is because men and women have learned to ‘do gender’. There appears to be a strong belief in sex differences, particularly those congruent with stereotypes” (p. 175). This chapter re‐examines and challenges some of the stereotypes enacted as gender identities. For example, Wilson points out there is little empirical support for Gilligan’s (1982) ideas on gender differences in moral reasoning, as subsequent research shows that men and women use both care‐based and justice‐based reasoning, depending on the situation. An equally fascinating example concerns the stereotype that women are more emotional than men. Wilson states that there is little evidence to support this view, but that women are more likely to express emotions that express vulnerability, whereas “men have learned to see the expressing of emotions of ‘weakness’ will bring them negative consequences” (p. 182). Just as they have learned to do gender, so men and women have learned to “do” emotion.

Wilson’s final topic is sexuality in organizations. She claims that the dominance of heterosexuality is taken to be a given in most writing on sexuality in organizations and remains largely unquestioned. By contrast, Wilson suggests how heterosexuality is an expression of power and powerlessness, of sex as male dominance and female submission. She discusses how men deploy their sexuality at work far more than women, yet women’s sexuality is often used as a commercial or organizational resource. This chapter includes sections on managing the body, workplace romance, violence and bullying, and sexual harassment.

Finally, Wilson posits three lenses which she claims sustain gender inequalities in the workplace: androcentrism or male‐centredness, which positions women as “other”; gender polarization; and biological essentialism. She argues that these three lenses continue to reproduce male power through discourses and social institutions, which constitute men and women as different and unequal. She asserts that “far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities” (p. 238).

Wilson’s text is both thought‐provoking and scholarly. I hope it finds a place alongside mainstream texts in organizational behaviour courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It not only provides a much‐needed critical perspective on organizational theory, it also helps men and women to understand the complexities of gender socialization and gender relations in the workplace.