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This editorial aims to introduce the special issue on meritocracy, difference and choice.

The first part is a commentary on key issues in the study of the notions of meritocracy, difference and choice. The second part presents the six papers in the special issue.

Five of the six papers in this special issue explore the work experiences of women managers/directors in senior positions within a variety of organizations. All of these papers demonstrate that despite their economic empowerment, these women are still strongly connected to the domestic realm through their continued entanglement in the traditional roles of mother and homemaker. This has led them to interpret their work situation either through a consideration of what they understand by the notion of merit or a presentation of their situation through the lens of choice. A further paper which explores the experiences of sex workers exposes the gendered nature of agency, highlighting the limitations on “choice” that different types of workers experience.

The authors comment on how contemporary notions of merit and choice individualise women's experience within organisations, ignoring the structural and systemic elements inherent to women's continued disadvantage. This allows “blame” for women's absence in the upper echelons of organisations to lie with women themselves, explaining this in terms of their lack of skills or the traditional “choices” they make. The six papers which make up the special issue explore how women's “choices” are constrained, how the contemporary discourses of merit and choice conceal issues of structure and organizational process and how women struggle to make sense of their own and others' experiences.

The issues discussed in the papers have important implications for understanding women's experience of work and organizations. They highlight the need to introduce a structural and systemic element to the understanding of how women experience work at senior (and other) levels of organizations, why they take the decision to leave a senior position and why women appear to “choose” not to seek senior positions.

Gender and Management: An International Journal invited this special issue on meritocracy, difference and choice to draw attention to the ways in which women draw on these discourses as a means of understanding their organizational situations and how use of these discourses acts to conceal the structural and systemic element connected to their work experiences.

Professor Ruth Simpson has been a key contributor to the field of gender and organization studies (GOS) over the past 25 years. She has influenced debates on women in management, the gender of management education, masculinity and management and the “doing” of gender in organizational life. In this paper i review our joint work – informed by a poststructuralist feminist perspective – which considers the complex struggles around normativity in relation to management and entrepreneurship.

This review is based on a consideration of four pieces of work completed between 2005 and 2012, including (Simpson and Lewis, 2005, 2007) and (Lewis and Simpson, 2010, 2012).

Drawing on the concepts of voice and visibility, the research examines how the ability to exemplify the norm in relation to management and entrepreneurship must be constantly secured and how processes of inclusion and exclusion in relation to the norm are characterised by relentless agitation and turmoil.

We (Ruth and Patricia) developed the conceptual framework of the (In)visibility vortex as a means of connecting the individual to organizational processes, discourses and cultural norms

Utilizing the 1995 Adult Education Interview compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, this study examined the determinants of training participation among adult female employees. Drawing on Sterns’s (1986) model of individual decision-making about training, we hypothesized that baby boomer cohorts of women would have higher rates of training participation than younger and older cohorts of women. This hypothesis was confirmed by results on age group variables. We also confirmed that both mandatory continuing education requirements and technological innovation in clerical occupations increased the likelihood of overall training participation among baby boomers, while only mandatory continuing education requirements significantly affected the overall training likelihoods of older and younger cohorts. Findings for disaggregated categories of training suggest that employer-support may be critical to female training participation, especially in lower wage occupations.

Drawing on a sample of 313 human resource professionals who graduated from a university‐based Master’s degree program in human resources over a 20‐year period, this study examines how the rewards and emotional labour content of jobs varied by gender within the field of human resources. After controlling for experience, results indicated no significant gender differences in either the intrinsic or extrinsic rewards available to human resource professionals. However, the emotional labor content of jobs differed significantly. Women were more likely to engage in emotional labor behaviors that conform with stereotypical “feminine” forms of emotional expression, while men were more likely to adopt a stereotypical “masculine” form of emotional expression.