1

Gender & Organizations Concepts & Definitions

Gender
1. Biological determinism: associated with Sigmund Freud who
argues that biology is destiny.
2. Feminisms: a term used to convey the diversity within feminist
theoretical and political views on the oppression of women.
3. Gender Freedom: refers to the choice to change ones appearance
and behaviour despite the sex into which one was born.
4. Gender: usually refers to the binary of male and female appearance
and behaviour. The concept of doing gender (West and Zimmerman
1987), frames gender as malleable, variable, and changing rather
than natural, essential and fixed. Organizations are gendered which
means that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control,
action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and
in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and
feminine (see Acker, 146)
5. Gender neutrality: a claim of objectivity in hegemonic research on
organizations and management, most of which ignores gender.
6. Gender-based Analysis (GBA) is a qualitative and quantitative
method used to eliminate gender-bias problems and contribute to a
better understanding of womens health, gender and development,
governmental social welfare policies, etc
7. Glass Ceiling: an invisible barrier and a form of gender-based
discrimination that limits the advancement of women and minorities,
particularly common in professions such as business, engineering
and politics.
8. Hegemony: the construction and imposition of unified thinking that
serves the interests of dominant groups, homogenizes difference,
and disadvantages non-dominant groups. In other words, it is a word
that describes power relations and domination of one group over
another. Hegemonic is the adjective.
9. Masculinity Studies: just as Womens Studies explains how
femininity is social constructed historically and culturally, Masculinity
Studies seeks to understand masculinity as a social construct.
10.
Masculinity: refers to the social and cultural process which
identifies certain interests and behaviour to bodies with male
genitalia.
11.
Performativity: the theory that gender is a performance-- we
do gender. This is a term associated with American theorist Judith
Butler referring to gender as existing only in its repetition; gender is
performed and thus created; it is not innate.
12.
Pink Ghetto: refers to the over-representation of women in low
income, low status clerical jobs.

13.
Second-Wave: refers to the feminist social movement of the
60s and 70s
14.
Sex/Gender Oppression: refers to theoretical and researchbased scholarship which suggests that women are positioned as
second-class citizens, or the Other, in a gender hierarchy which
supports and reproduces male power, privilege and dominance.
15.
Sex power differential: coined by Joan Acker and van Houten
to describe how the sexual division of labour in organizations (see
lecture January 12th)
16.
Sexualed: having meaning in relation to sexuality rather than
necessarily specifically sexualized (Hearn, Handbook: 300)
17.
Social Constructionism: the nurture part of the
nature/nurture binary; French feminist Simone de Beauvoir famously
argued that woman is made, not born. In other words, societal
expectations mold gender identity
18.
Social Man: a biological female who acts as a social man in
organizations (Acker, 139)
19.
Third- Wave: refers to a new generation of feminist thought
around sexuality and race and is usually dated from the late 80s or
early 90s
20.
Ungendering: A process by which gender is ignored despite
its significance in understanding a specific situation; for example, in
the article The Ultimate Rape Victim Jane Doe argues that the fact
that overwhelmingly men rape women has been altered in rhetoric
designed to prevent government men from being offended.

Postmodernism

21.
Binarism: a system of though in which one concept is defined
by contrasting it with its opposite (e.g. male/female) and their
differences are used to elevate one over the other
22.
Deconstruction: analysis that takes apart socially constructed
categories as a way of seeing how a particular world is constructed
23.
Discourse: a set of assumptions, socially shared and often
unconscious, reflected in language, that positions people who speak
within them, and frame knowledge; groups of statements which
structure the way a thing is thought and the way we act based on
that thinking.
24.
Postmodern conditions: refers to the age we are living in
which involves mass communications, globalization, fixation on
celebrity culture and mass consumerism.
25.
Power: a relational force, not a fixed entity that operates in all
interactions; while it can be oppressive, power can also be enabling
26.
Privilege: Often so pervasive and accepted as to be invisible,
privilege refers to entitlement based on gender, class, race, ability
and geo-political location.

27.
Subjectivity: the contingent and variable sense of self,
conscious and unconscious, both as actor and acted upon.
28.
Woman: a contested category complicated by geo-political
location, race, class, sexuality and the challenges to gender as a
simple binary of male/female

Intersectionality
29.
Additive Formula: adding social categories such as race,
ability and glass to gender without revisioning how these categories
change gendered experience.
30.
Ageism: discrimination based on a persons age.
31.
Class analysis: locates power and conflict in the historical
organization of economics and in social class (Janine Brodie)
32.
Common Sense Racism: a concept associated with Himani
Bannerji to indicate how normalized everyday discrimination against
people of colour has become.
33.
Compulsory Able-Bodiedness: attributed to cultural critic
Robert McCruer; an extension of Adrienne Richs idea of compulsory
heterosexuality referring to the pressure to conform to functional
body norms and how dominant culture positions or talks about
disability as catastrophic.
34.
Inequality regimes: a term coined by Joan Acker in her 2006
book Class Questions, Feminist Answers in which she argues that
organizations are a key mechanism by which social inequalities are
created.
35.
Intersectionality: a concept developed by socialist feminism
but not used widely until the 1990s to refer to how race and class
complicates gender essentialism.
36.
Racialized Others: In Canada, for example, this refers to a
group or nation of people who are seen as different from and inferior
to the mainstream.
37.
Unearned Advantage: refers to how various kinds of privilege
are bestowed upon members of society, such as white skin privilege
(see Peggy McIntosh)

Political Terms
38.
Neo-liberalism: a governmental ideology that erases
structural disadvantage, pathologizes dependence on the state and
constructs equality-seeking movements as antithetical to a new
public good defined in terms of individual responsibility; a political
philosophy which supports market-based governance decisions which
erode Canadas welfare state politics.
39.
Politics: ``Who gets what, when, and how`` (Harold Lasswell)

40.
Power To: power to do something: to meet individual and
collective goals, reach political consensus, exercise democratic rights
(Janine Brodie)
41. Power Over: focus on the institutions and processes that hold
regimes of inequality in place; forces outside our control that
privilege some groups and constrain and silence others (Janine
Brodie)