Abstract
Despite many interventions designed to change the gender demographics of positional leadership roles in organizations and professions, women continue to be under-represented in most arenas. Here we explore gender equality (GE) interventions through the example of positive discrimination quotas in politics to develop an understanding of resistance to them. Our case is the British Labour Party, analysing interviews with the people who designed, implemented and resisted the system of all-women shortlists. We develop the notion of ‘oblique resistance’ to describe an indirect form of resistance to the erosion of patriarchal power, which never directly confronts the issue of GE, yet actively undermines it. Oblique resistance is practised in three key ways: through appeals to ethics, by marking territory and in appeals to convention. We conclude by considering the conceptual and practical implications of oblique resistance, when direct and more overt resistance to GE is increasingly socially unacceptable.
Highlights
The emergence of oblique resistanceDespite decades of legislative and organizational effort in promoting workplace gender equality (GE), ‘glass walls, ceilings and cliffs continue to disadvantage working women’ (Beirne and Wilson, 2016: 221)
To explain the paradox of these practices being accepted in the context of strong social norms of equality, we develop the notion of oblique resistance
We propose that oblique resistance is manifest in three discursive practices – appeals to ethics, territory and convention – each of which shows tangential resistance to GE while defending patriarchal power structures
Summary
Despite decades of legislative and organizational effort in promoting workplace gender equality (GE), ‘glass walls, ceilings and cliffs continue to disadvantage working women’ (Beirne and Wilson, 2016: 221). There is still, a clear resistance, objecting to positive discrimination on the grounds of ethics This usually manifested as a claim for the importance of meritocracy, often under the guise of care for women selected via AWSs, suggesting protection from hostility responsibility. Enactments of status where local men asserted positional power in constituencies were especially common AWSs were often implemented in constituencies that had never elected a woman, and frequently in places that had been reliant on ‘dirty’ industries with an attendant gendered division of labour These conventions operated in an automated way that reproduced gendered norms of who looked and sounded like an MP, who was expected to gain from being an elected politician, and who activist subalterns should be. Conventional forms of resistance encapsulate a wide range of practices and spheres, from formal processes of party selections to family units, but never directly oppose GE in principle
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