Gender Dynamics in a Masculine Professional Context: The Case of the Portuguese Air Force

Maria Helena Santos,Patrícia Morais,Rita B Correia

doi:10.3390/socsci11020082

Maria Helena Santos, Patrícia Morais + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11020082

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Abstract

This article aims to understand the experiences of women working in the Portuguese Air Force, a traditionally male professional environment, and the perspectives of their male counterparts on the subject, considering women’s minority status and symbolic gender asymmetries in the military. This study draws on 16 semi-structured interviews with Air Force personnel, evenly split by gender. Findings reveal four main themes that convey awareness that the Air Force is still a masculine world, perceptions of gender dynamics in the Air Force, barriers to equality, and strategies to address the situation. Although gender equality is formally in place in the Air Force, women continue to face obstacles that hinder their career advancement and ensure that their professional experiences differ from those of their male counterparts.

Highlights

To the best of our knowledge, there are no qualitative studies that combine tokenism and gender dynamic issues in an integrated way in order to better understand the situation of women in the armed forces, and in this sense, we hope to obtain important and innovative data from the interviews
This article focuses on gender dynamics in the Portuguese Air Force, a male-dominated professional context
Using an approach that combines tokenism and gender dynamics (e.g., Acker 1990; Amâncio 1997; Connell 2006), this article seeks to understand how these findings align with the phenomena of tokenism identified by Kanter (1977, 1993), namely by identifying themes of high visibility, polarization, and assimilation

Summary

Introduction

In the context of the military, many researchers argue that institutional practices are responsible for much of the gendered barriers women face in masculinized workplaces (Kanter 1993; Rimalt 2007). Central to this debate is the claim that organizations mobilize a masculine bias that is embedded in the hierarchical structure of the organization. As a result of conservative policies, social stereotypes, and a cultural framing that has resisted the integration of women, they have been historically under-represented in these institutions (Kronsell 2005; Carreiras 2011; King 2016). The military is a sector of severe gender segregation, both horizontal and vertical, since women are severely underrepresented in number (horizontal segregation) and at leadership positions (vertical or hierarchical segregation); for more on the topic of occupational discrimination, (see Bettio et al 2009)

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