Towards a Topology of ‘Doing Gender’: An Analysis of Empirical Research and Its Challenges

Julia C. Nentwich* and Elisabeth K. Kelan

‘Doing gender’ is a much used term in research on gender, work and organizations. However, translating theoretical insight into empirical research is often a challenging endeavour. A lack of clarity with regard to the conceptualization and operationalization of key terms in turn often limits the theoretical and empirical purchase of a concept. The aim of this article is therefore to provide a systematization of empirical approaches to ‘doing gender’. This systematization leads to a topology of five themes that is derived from empirical research in the field. The five themes identified are structures, hierarchies, identity, flexibility and context specificity, and gradual relevance/subversion. Each theme explores a different facet of ‘doing gender’. This topology helps empirical researchers to be more specific about which aspects of ‘doing gender’ they are referring to. This in turn can help to unfold the theoretical potential of the concept of ‘doing gender’.

Keywords: (un)doing gender, identity, ethnomethodology, performativity, empirical studies

Introduction

‘Doing gender’ is now a widely used concept for theorizing and researching gender in organiza- tional studies. By looking at ‘doing gender’, the focus shifts away from treating men and women

as self-evident categories in academic research towards seeing gender as a social practice. Going way back to West and Zimmerman’s seminal article published in 1987, their ‘original idea has taken on a life of its own’ (West and Zimmerman, 2009, p. 113), also in research on gender, work and organi- zation. Besides the early ethnomethodological take on ‘doing gender’, more recent studies have started to elaborate on Butler’s notion of performativity and theorize gender as something that is ‘said and done’ (Martin, 2003), a situated social practice (Butler, 1990, 1993, 2004). Many articles today discuss both West and Zimmerman as well as Butler in relation to ‘doing gender’ (Mavin and Grandy, 2011), indicating that both theories have gained prominence (McDonald, 2012).

However, despite these theoretical developments and obvious heterogeneity in theoretical refer- encing, most empirical studies seem to define the term quite similarly, thereby echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’. This fairly general interpretation of ‘doing gender’ is what Wickes and Emmison (2007) have called ‘ceremonial’ referencing. In their analysis of 149 publications on ‘doing gender’ in the ethnomethodological tradition, they found that almost 73 per cent of the publications only quote the concept for matters of positioning the authors or the text as gender researcher(s), but do not necessarily take up the concept in either the conceptual discussion or the research methodology. ‘Doing gender’ is here appropriated ‘as a way of grounding, legitimating or validating their own research findings’ (Wickes and Emmison, 2007, p. 322) without engaging and developing the theoretical underpinning of the concept.

Address for correspondence: *Julia C. Nentwich, Research Institute for Organizational Psychology, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland; e-mail: [email protected]

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Although we would agree with Wickes and Emmison that doing gender as a concept is often cited for purposes of positioning and legitimating and hence used in ceremonial ways, we suggest a different interpretation of this finding. Concepts travel (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005); they are translated and appropriated in different contexts and are thereby changed, if they meet the needs of a community at a certain point in time. Talking about doing gender, the concept serves as a wildcard for the linguistic and practice turn in gender studies that had evolved throughout the 1990s. Hence, although quoting the concept of doing gender might be a ceremonial act in many papers intended to flag the author’s position within a specific community of researching gender, it still develops some theoretical understanding of what doing gender means and how it is translated into an empirical research design. Our perspective is hence not about theoretical orthodoxy, but investigating the many uses and empirical questions to which research citing the concept of ‘doing gender’ is contributing.

In this article, we analyse how empirical studies investigate the doing of gender in the context of work and organization studies. This empirical take on the question, how doing gender has been conceptualized and operationalized in empirical studies, allows us to depict in what ways the concept has contributed to our knowledge of gender at work and in organizations, as well as the specific challenges faced by empirical research on doing gender.

The article starts with a short review of the theoretical debate on doing gender, highlighting the crucial changes in how gender has been theorized in both the work of West and Zimmerman and Butler. Second, we outline how we analysed the empirical articles in order to develop a ‘topology’ of crucial themes for doing gender research. Third, we discuss the empirical contributions according to this topology, thereby contributing a systematization of how researchers in the field of gender, work and organization have empirically analysed doing gender as well as the challenges their studies are facing. Fourth, we offer a short conclusion discussing the major challenges of this endeavour as well as possible ways forward. Our analysis will enable researchers to conceptualize their studies in a more precise way, thereby also enhancing the theoretical development of the concept.

Conceptualizing gender as a doing

The expression ‘doing gender’ goes back to Garfinkel’s work on the intersexual Agnes in 1967, and this expression has been refined and developed over the years. While a first conceptualization of the social construction of gender identity was put forward in West and Zimmerman’s ethnomethodo- logical foundation in 1987, Butler’s work on the performativity and materiality of gender developed a poststructuralist notion of gendered subjectivity. With that, gender identity became a more fluid and flexible concept, and the analysis of ‘doing gender’ an analysis of the gendered practices that shows how both stability and instability of how gender identity is ‘done’ as well as ‘undone’.

One central point of ethnomethodological analysis that West and Zimmerman (1987) put forward is to show how gender is created in the situation rather than existing a priori. They thereby emphasize the importance of interaction for an understanding of gender identity as well as inequality. Doing gender is conceptualized as a routine accomplishment in social interactions. In order to be catego- rized as a man or a woman, interactional work has to be done. This work is under constant risk of gender assessment as one is accountable for ‘doing gender’. According to West and Zimmerman, one can never not do gender, because it is such an integral part of individual identity as well as societal structures. West and Zimmerman thereby stress the importance of the ethnomethodological concept of omnirelevance: gender is relevant in every social situation. Furthermore, gender is seen as an important part of societal structures and informing societal hierarchies and power systems. Hence, societal structures and hierarchies as well as inequalities are important to explain how gender identity can be done in a certain interaction.

A second theoretical influence of gender as a doing derives from the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 2004), drawing mainly on poststructuralist theories. In her critique of the feminist construction of the stable subject ‘woman’, Butler develops a critical genealogy of gender categories in which she explores why gender identity is perceived as something stable even though it is enacted in the

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situation. She ‘introduces a concept of decentred subjectivity in which the subject is open-ended and indeterminate except when it is fixed in place by culturally constituted gendered practices’ (Gherardi, 2005, p. 222). Hence, the fluidity and flexibility of identity constructions as well as its context specificity have gained importance.

A central concept in Butler’s work is performativity. There is much debate about what performa- tivity means (Brickell, 2005; Lloyd, 1999; McIlvenny, 2002), but one may summarize it as the process through which gendered subjects are constituted by regulatory notions within a heterosexual matrix. For Butler, subjects are constructed by the positions the discourse allows. Following speech act theory, some of these positions speak to or ‘interpellate’ persons, and in orienting towards these discourses subjects are reinstated. For instance, Butler refers to ‘girling the girl’ as a gendering moment. When a baby is born, the label ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ is assigned to the baby and this calls into being the baby as a gendered being. Thus the baby girl is interpellated; later in life, and in responding to this term, the person creates herself as a woman. In citing these subject positions people render themselves legible but at the same time what is legible as a human being is defined within fairly narrow limits. Which subjects can be formed depends on gender norms, which are restrictive and heterosexual.

Both perspectives of theorizing gender as a social practice conceptualize gender identity as an ongoing activity or a ‘doing’ within everyday life. However, ethnomethodologically grounded studies tend to treat gender as omnirelevant and reproduced in any situation. Hence, they are rather focusing on the persistence of inequalities (Deutsch, 2007), while studies focusing on the performa- tive construction of gendered identity tend to focus on its situated and fluid character and hence questions of change (Butler, 2004; Poggio, 2006). While West and Zimmerman analyse fine-grained naturally occurring interactions, Butler’s conception of ‘doing gender’ focuses more on how gender is performed to real and imagined audiences. In fact, although both traditions developed notions of ‘undoing gender’, again, those concepts tackle different issues (Kelan, 2010). ‘Undoing gender’ in an ethnomethodological understanding challenges the general assumption that gender is ‘omnirel- evant’, meaning that it is relevant in every situation and that we ‘cannot escape gender’ (Hirschauer, 1994, 2001). It points to situations where gender might be not as relevant or even irrelevant for the sense-making process. These latter interactions might become sites of resistance where gender can be undone (Deutsch, 2007).

The ethnomethodological understanding defines ‘undoing as a reduction of gender differences and is hence interested in the gradual relevance of ‘doing gender’. Butler’s understanding of doing gender is slightly different. It focuses on the question of how alternative performances might make it possible ‘to change the dominant gender order and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity’ (Poggio, 2006, p. 227). Therefore, studies relying on Butler’s theorizing tend to tackle possibilities of undoing gender from a perspective of subverting subject positions (Gherardi and Poggio, 2007). Aspects of gradual relevance and subversion have gained importance when researching the social practices of doing gender (Linstead and Brewis, 2004; Martin, 2003, 2006; Nentwich, 2008; Poggio, 2006).

This brief review of the theoretical and partly historical debates around the notion of ‘doing gender’ highlights that there have been important changes in how gender identity is theorized. While gender identity has been theorized as something that is done in a specific situation and no longer an attribute of the individual, recent developments highlighted the performative character of becoming a gendered subject. In fact, gender identity seems to be a much more flexible concept as the meaning of masculinity and femininity seems to shift between contexts, might be irrelevant or downplayed in a situation, or subverted in another.

Theorizing gender identity as something that is said and done resulted in major challenges for empirical studies: If gender is not seen as a fixed category that can be defined prior to the research conducted, the actual practices of constructing or performing that identity have to be analysed. Instead of taking women and men at face value, researchers have to be careful not to reify everyday taken-for-granted assumptions about gender, but to critically investigate how they actually came into being.

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Theoretically, being a man or a woman should be the outcome of a process rather than the starting point. This is, however, easier said than done. For instance, Fournier and Smith (2006) criticize Metcalfe and Linstead (2003) for claiming to undertake a ‘post-structuralist feminist reading’ stress- ing ‘plurality rather than unity’ (Fournier and Smith, 2006, p. 144, cf. Metcalfe and Linstead, 2003, p. 98), while at the same time linking ‘soft managerial practices’ to the ‘feminine’ and teamwork, theorized as privileging control and performance, to the ‘masculine’. Fournier and Smith (2006, p. 144) state that at this point ‘essentialism seems to relentlessly creep back’. The result is a form of ‘clichéd constructivism’ (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000) ‘relying on standard signifiers and theoretical gestures towards the fluidity of gendered identity’ (Fournier and Smith, 2006, p. 142), which seem to be difficult to realize in empirical projects.

These questions are not new and other scholars have tried to explore such issues in the context of masculinity (MacInnes, 1998). Our aim in this article is hence to provide a systematization of how researchers in the field of gender, work and organization have empirically analysed doing gender, how this resulted in different conceptualizations of gender identity and to discuss the possible challenges and pitfalls of empirical studies.

‘Doing gender’ in empirical studies: a critical analysis

After briefly reviewing some theoretical debates and developments of the concept of ‘doing gender’, we now focus on the question of how researchers in the field of gender, work and organization have empirically analysed ‘doing gender’. In order to shed light on the question, how ‘doing gender’ was analysed in empirical studies, we first collected literature on ‘doing gender’ in an organizational and work context through overviews (Ashcraft, 2006; Bruni et al., 2005; Gherardi, 1995; Gildemeister and Wetterer, 1992), conceptual texts (Martin, 2003), and highly relevant and often-cited texts (Gherardi, 1995; Hall, 1993; Kondo, 1990; Leidner, 1991; Williams, 1995). We also searched databases using the search term ‘doing gender’. Our objective was not to provide an exhaustive overview of the available literature such as can be found in Wickes and Emmison’s analysis (2007), but to discuss theoretically driven aspects of employing the concept(s) of doing gender in empirical research in the field of gender, work and organization.

For this reason we deliberately restricted our analysis to articles that first of all are based on empirical research; second, explicitly draw on the notion of ‘doing gender’; and third, apply this concept to a work and/or organizational context. We selected articles published in international journals rather than books, as journal articles tend to present underlying theories and applications concisely. All articles are written in English and appeared in North American or British academic journals, covering the period between 1991 and 2009. This selection resulted in a core body of 17 texts, which were analysed by both authors independently, exploring four questions: (1) What are the article’s aims and how are these aims addressed? (2) How is ‘doing gender’ conceptualized? (3) How is ‘doing gender’ and, as a consequence, ‘gender identity’, operationalized in empirical studies? (4) To what results do these questions lead? During a series of discussions between the two authors, we structured the empirical findings according to the five central themes highly relevant for the under- standing of ‘doing gender’ (see Table 1): (1) structures, (2) hierarchies, (3) identity, (4) flexibility and context specificity, and (5) gradual relevance and subversion. However, this topology is not meant to suggest that studies fit easily into one of the themes. Depending on their research focus, one study might tackle more than one theme. Therefore, we will discuss different aspects of one study under several themes to highlight some of the different angles used.

Doing gender as ‘doing structures’

A first theme in the research on ‘doing gender’ is gendered structures. Gendered structures are embedded in jobs and enable the construction of gender identity. Furthermore, the gender of the job

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‘rubs off on the people who do them’ (Cockburn, 1985, p. 169). In order to fulfil the expectations attached to a job, or in other words to do the job properly, the employee often has to enact a certain gender identity according to these structures. Gendered structures (re)inforce gendered interactions. An example is flight attendants, a job which requires a ‘doing of femininity’ (Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Hochschild, 1983; Tyler and Abbott, 1998). This involves being friendly to passengers and caring for them, engaging in behaviour that is closely linked with femininity in society. Thus a job requires a performance which is often cross-referenced with gender and which entails doing gender identity in a certain way.

A study focusing on structures and doing gender was conducted by Hall (1993) on restaurant employees. Adopting ethnographic and quantitative methods, she looked at how the differentiation between ‘waitressing’ and ‘waitering’ is created. Whereas ‘waitering’ is defined as something men do, ‘waitressing’ is seen as ‘typical women’s work’ because women perform it and because the work activities are considered ‘feminine’ (Hall, 1993, p. 329). Although serving tables is the job

Table 1: ‘Doing gender’ in empirical studies

Relevant themes for ‘doing gender’ research How studies have addressed these aspects

Structures • Hall (1993): construction of differences between ‘waitering’ and ‘waitressing’ through formal elements.

• Leidner (1991): interactive service work — similar activities are gendered differently through reference of the job’s gender.

• Murray (1996): men in childcare, show difficulties of constructing masculinity resulting from the femininity of the job.

Hierarchies • Hall (1993): waitering is valued more highly than waitressing. • Korvajärvi (1998): men’s style of doing work is more in line with the

efficiency goals and valued more highly than women’s styles.

Identity • Murray (1996) and Hall (1993): interactional strategies. • Cross and Bagilhole (2002): discursive strategies through which men

are constructing a masculine identity in female-dominated professions. • Katila and Meriläinen (1999): conflicts arising when women have to

construct professional identities in male-dominated academia. • Pierce (1996): women having to engage in male-connotated behaviour

in order to be ‘good’. • Powell et al. (2009): ‘coping strategies’ for handling female identity in

engineering.

Flexible and context specific

• Leidner: similar activities are gendered differently depending on who does it.

• Pierce (1996): how emotional labour can also be constructed as something masculine in the context of litigation.

• Martin (2001): looking at women’s interpretations of men’s behaviour showing that there are many ways of doing masculinity.

• Pilgeram (2007): different norms in different spaces.

Gradually relevant and subverted

• Gherardi (1994, 1996), Gherardi and Poggio (2001) and Bruni et al. (2004): how the symbolic gender order is enacted in one situation and denied in another.

• Johansson (1998): different interpretations of gender in a specific situation lead to vague and not so clear-cut lines between women and men.

• Hall et al. (2007): gender, here masculinity, can be enacted differently. They emphasize the subject’s agency within normative constraints.

• Pullen and Simpson (2009): masculinity can be undone by drawing on aspects of the job usually seen as female-connotated (caring).

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requirement for both professions, people doing this work are often distinguished through formal elements like uniforms. Through uniforms, table servers become ‘waiters’ and ‘waitresses’, and this is a way through which gender ‘rubs off’ and difference is interactively constructed. Here, struc- tures lead to doing gender through the display of the job’s gender, containing scripts for the interactional doing of gender identity such as wearing a certain uniform.

In a study on scripts in interactive service work, Leidner (1991) found that similar interactions are gendered completely differently in different jobs. People working in fast food restaurants and selling insurance follow similar scripts of service work. For instance, in both types of work, Leidner found that employees commonly had to learn pre-formulated phrases to use when interacting with cus- tomers. Although the actual customer interaction was similar, in this case fast food work was defined as feminine and selling insurance was constructed as masculine. Here, the gender of the task enabled a specific doing of gender identity: masculinity or femininity. In their studies, both Leidner and Hall show how individuals doing a job are doing gender at the same time. Interestingly, the gender of the job often has less to do with the tasks themselves and more to do with the gender ascribed to the job and performed by workers. Both Leidner and Hall assume that women working in a job perceived as ‘feminine’ and men working in a job seen as ‘masculine’ are enacting femininity and masculinity, respectively.

Here, gender identity is done through engaging in a job that is either ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. However, what happens if women work in male-dominated fields or men in female-dominated fields? Studies on men and women in non-traditional occupations have explored this question (Bagilhole and Cross, 2006; Cameron, 2001; Cross and Bagilhole, 2002; Powell et al., 2009; Williams, 1989, 1993, 1995). For example, Murray (1996) shows that a mismatch between the gender identity of the person and the job’s gender is no challenge to the stereotypical gender assignment of the job but raises difficulties for the individuals at work. She looks at men working in a job not associated with men: childcare. Her focus is on how childcare is gendered as feminine regardless of whether a woman or a man is performing the job. She points out that the association of this work with ‘femininity’ means that men can never meet the standards that are expected. Often, men can only engage in certain tasks and are recommitted to them by ‘boundary work’. At the same time they are often praised for doing their job, as men are not expected to do a feminine-connoted task well. Through engaging in tasks requiring them to do what is constructed as ‘femininity’, men are perceived as violating the normative expectations of masculinity. It is thus difficult for men working in childcare to pass as ‘real men’. This is because they are in danger of being gender inauthentic when engaging in a ‘female job’. This example shows clearly how gendered assumptions about jobs lead to a specific form of ‘doing femininity’ or ‘masculinity’.

All these studies explore practices of ‘doing gender’ in order to explain how occupations become gendered. Gender is part of the occupational or organizational structures and forces certain kinds of gendered interactions, either a ‘doing of masculinity’ or a ‘doing of femininity’. In some cases, the gender of the job is inscribed in the definition of the occupation. In other cases, almost any aspect of the job might be constructed as gendered. The practice might come in the form of a gendered uniform (Hall, 1993) or engaging in a task ascribed stereotypically to being either masculine or feminine. However, what often remains unclear is how a job became gendered in the first place or how the tasks performed are said to be ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ (cf. Fournier and Smith, 2006). The gender of the job is in some instances ascribed because of the number of men or women working in it; in other cases minority and majority relations are not even mentioned. In general, it is assumed that a job ‘has’ a certain gender as do the persons performing it. Here, one ‘does’ gender when doing the job and the gender of both the individual and the job are constructed while doing the job. However, what is described as a practice of ‘doing structure’ becomes a static and well-established structure when translated to the research design. Some critical reflection on the dualisms applied by the research itself might be necessary. Future research should at least reflect why the occupation or field researched is seen as a ‘female’ or a ‘masculine’ dominated field and focus on the consequences for the doing of gender, respectively.

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Doing gender as ‘doing hierarchies’

The second theme we want to emphasize is gendered hierarchies. Although it is rather similar to the first theme of structures, we included hierarchies as a separate focus because it helps to see the asymmetry of gender hierarchies and also sheds light on some different effects of doing gender as well as empirical challenges. ‘Doing gender’ here means ‘doing of hierarchies’ which eventually leads to inequality. Research focusing on hierarchies looks at the symbolism attached to certain activities in which the ‘masculine’ is seen as superior to the ‘feminine’. Whatever is gendered ‘feminine’ tends to be devalued; whatever is gendered ‘masculine’ receives higher status, and is perceived as more professional and as representing competence (Heilman, 2001; Ridgeway, 1997). Hence, due to the hierarchy, ‘doing masculinity’ and ‘doing femininity’ are different practices with different results.

In comparing ‘waitering’ with ‘waitressing’, Hall (1993) showed that the term ‘waiter’ and the task of ‘waitering’ are valued more highly than ‘waitress’ and ‘waitressing’. Even women engaging in the task of ‘waitering’ can obtain a higher status compared to their female colleagues who are doing ‘waitressing.’ In a study on an employment office, Korvajärvi (1998) highlighted similar practices. Here women and men used different styles to get their work done. While women focused on helping clients and interacting with them, men focused on a quick turnover of people. At the same time, men’s style of doing work was more in line with the efficiency goals of the organization and as such valued more highly than the women’s style. ‘Doing gender’ is linked to activating symbolic hierar- chies and in these symbolic hierarchies the ‘masculine’ is valued over the ‘feminine’.

In these studies, the doing of gender is analysed as practices of subordination and domination. Again, the logic of the hierarchy is associated with masculinity and femininity. Gender is done through drawing on the symbolic hierarchies and re-establishing them when ‘doing masculinity’ or ‘femininity.’ Whereas the subordinate position in this logic is ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’ becomes the dominant. As Hall’s research shows, the sex category seems less important compared to the gendered job enacted in the doing of hierarchies: individual women can obtain a higher status when practising ‘waitering’ instead of ‘waitressing’.

However, the analogy between femininity and masculinity and subordination and domination seems all too often taken for granted in research about &#x20

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