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The purpose of this paper is to explore the practices utilized by university actors when implementing gender quotas, and study how these practices affect gender equality in academic decision-making bodies.

The study applies a practice theory lens to the case study of a Belgian university implementing a gender quota by performing 26 semi-structured interviews with actors, and collecting and analyzing relevant organizational documents.

This study shows that university actors implement gender quotas through three practices: gender-specific calls, scouting and “playing around”. Identifying this variation in practices helps to understand both actors’ sense-making of compliance with gender quotas and women’s decision-making power in academic bodies.

This study explores how practices interact with the organization’s broader context and its power dynamics. In future studies, adding ethnographic observations would strengthen the practice approach.

The study indicates that implementing gender quotas can foster women’s representation in decision-making, but that a strictly procedural sense-making of gender quotas could also undermine this. Universities should continue implementing gender quotas, further analyze their implementation practices and comprehensively adapt their organizational policies and practices to comply with gender equality goals substantively.

Through a practice theory approach, this paper offers original insight into how actors comply with gender quotas. Uncovering the implementation process in particular, the paper reveals how gender quotas could foster gender equality in academic decision-making.

This paper aims to challenge the alleged gender-neutral character of Argyris and Schön’s theory of organizational learning (1978). While theories in organizational science seem gender neutral at the surface, a closer analysis reveals they are often based on men’s experiences.

This paper uses the method of gender subtext analysis, centering on gendering and its interaction with gender, class and race.

The dichotomous learning scheme of Argyris and Schön, in which a limited learning approach with alleged masculine values and interaction styles is opposed to an ideal learning approach with feminine values and interaction styles, is related to Bendl’s subtexts of feminization and of unconscious exclusion and neglect in organizational theories. To overcome the binary character of the theory, a gradient and contextualized approach to organizational learning is proposed.

This paper is the first to apply gender subtext analysis to theories of organizational learning and, thus, to analyze their gender subtext.

The purpose of this paper is to design and apply a critical framework for assessing the inclusivity of gender diversity training. The framework combines insights from intersectional feminist and postcolonial feminist theory. It is applied to assess whether and how influential gender diversity training manuals question the (re)production of systems of inequality and promote the recognition of varied lived experiences of women particularly in global workplaces.

This qualitative research was done in two stages. First, we designed a critical framework consisting of five elements taking inspiration from intersectional and postcolonial feminist theories. Second, we analysed four gender diversity training manuals from prominent international organizations to assess their inclusivity.

We found that gender diversity training manuals construct a binary understanding of gender, implying that being a woman is a universal experience. Second, the documents take a systemic approach to intersectionality, acknowledging societal systems, but the focus is on oppression as opposed to privilege, obscuring possible complexities of intersecting social categories. Third, the narratives of gender diversity trainings reflect western hegemony in referring to “global norms” and women from the global south.

The paper brings together complex theoretical strands of intersectional and postcolonial feminist theory in the form of a critical framework that can not only be used to assess gender diversity training but also be applied to other gender diversity interventions. Practical suggestions for trainers to develop more inclusive gender diversity trainings are discussed.

The authors conducted 22 in-depth longitudinal interviews with 11 Hungarian migrant workers in the Dutch logistics sector, before and during the COVID-19 crisis, using thematic analysis and visual life diagrams to interpret them.

This study aims to contribute to conservation of resources theory, by exploring how global crises influence the perceived employability of migrant workers in low-wage, precarious work.

The authors find that resources are key in how migrants experience the valence of global crises in their careers and perceive their employability. When unforeseen consequences of the COVID-19 crisis coincided with migrants' resource gain spirals, this instigated a positively valenced career shock, leading to positive perceptions of employability. Coincidence with loss spirals led to negative perceptions.

The authors contribute to careers literature by showing that resources do not only help migrants cope with the impact of career shocks but also directly influence the valence of global crises in their perceived employability and careers.

Interestingly, when the COVID-19 crisis did not co-occur with migrants' resource gain and loss spirals, migrants experienced resource stress (psychological strain induced by the threat or actual loss of resources) and no significant change in their perceptions of employability.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the work of the Dutch government's “Taskforce Part‐time Plus” set up to stimulate longer working hours for particularly Dutch women holding part‐time jobs of less than 24 h per week, to help counteract a predicted structural shortage of manpower.

In 2009, the Taskforce commissioned two studies. The first study comprised three surveys, respectively, among: women holding smaller part‐time jobs; full‐time working men; and employers. The second study focused on the relationship between ambition, working hours and gender. A survey of 7,000 male and female labour‐market participants was combined with qualitative data collection, encompassing focus group interviews with 35 male and female part‐time workers and their managers, and three group model building sessions.

The first study showed that only a small amount of Dutch part‐time working women is willing to work longer hours in the short term. In the second study, the hypothesis that women's lower working hours could be explained by a lack of career ambition was rejected. However, the results showed that women did neither feel challenged, nor supported by their working and household conditions to extend their working hours to realize their ambitions (in the short run).

The paper illustrates that, in the Dutch case and in some contexts, greater equality, diversity and inclusion not only demands support for reduced work‐loads, but rather calls for a new culture in which women's marginal labour‐market participation does not remain unquestioned.

This paper aims to introduce the theme of the special issue – diversity management beyond the business case. It addresses two main questions: first, how increased diversification within workgroups or labour is dealt with via diversity management, and second what the effects are of this increased diversity for group performance.

The different contributions are embedded into two important discussions in the literature: problems with the concept of diversity and problems with outcomes of diversity management.

Reflecting on the contributions to this special issue, it is argued that solely emphasizing business case arguments for supporting the implementation of diversity management may be rather risky. They conclude with a plea for emphasis on arguments of justice and sustainability of the employment relationship and discuss future avenues for research.

The paper shows the difficulty of universally applying the concept of diversity and diversity management. In addition, it shows that the claimed positive impact of diversity management is contingent on several factors.

Interventions to support gender equality in organisations are often unsuccessful. Stakeholders disagree about the causes and problem definition of gender equality or pay lip service to the principle of gender equality, but fail to implement gender equality in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine participatory modelling as an intervention method to support stakeholders in: reaching a shared problem definition and analysis of gender inequality; and identifying and implementing policies to tackle gender inequality.

The authors apply participatory modelling in case studies on impediments to women’s careers in two Dutch universities.

This study shows that participatory modelling supported stakeholders’ identification of the self-reinforcing feedback processes of masculinity of norms, visibility of women and networking of women and the interrelatedness between these processes. Causal loop diagrams visualise how the feedback processes are interrelated and can stabilise or reinforce themselves. Moreover, they allow for the identification of possible interventions.

Further testing of the causal loop diagrams by quantifying the stocks and the flows would validate the feedback processes and the estimated effects of possible interventions.

The integration of the knowledge of researchers and stakeholders in a causal loop diagram supported learning about the issue of gender inequality, hereby contributing to transformative change on gender equality.

The originality of the paper lies in the application of participatory modelling in interventions to support gender equality.

Universities are large, complex and highly hierarchical organisations with deeply engrained gendered values, norms and practices. This chapter reflects on the experiences of two universities in initiating structural change towards gender equality as supported by the TARGET project. A common aspect thereby is the lack of a national policy in higher education and research providing specific support for implementing gender equality policies. The process of audit, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the first gender equality plan (GEP) in each of these universities was conceived as a first step in a long journey, providing a framework for engaging different institutional actors and fostering reflexive, evidence-based policy making. The analysis deals with reflexivity and resistance and seeks to draw lessons from bottom-up and top-down experiences of GEP implementation. It is the result of shared reflection between the GEP ‘implementers’ in the two universities and the team who provided support and acted as ‘critical friends’.