Abstract
Policies and actions to address gender inequalities are widespread across a range of institutional and organisational contexts. Concerns have been raised about the efficacy and impacts of such measures in the absence of sustained evaluation of these activities. It has been proposed that important contextual factors may propel or inhibit measures to promote gender equality, including a critical mass of women, role models, diverse leaders and inclusive organisational cultures. This paper explores relationships between organisational justice and equality interventions to better understand gaps between equality policies and practices using a comparative case study approach in a male-dominated sector. A combination of questionnaire and interview data analysis with employees in three case organisations in the construction sector are used to outline links between perceptions of gender equality initiatives and organisational justice, and the mechanisms used to reinforce in-group dominance. The findings culminate in the development of an Employee Alignment Model and a discussion of how this relates to the organisational climate for gender equality work. The findings suggest that the development of interactional organisational justice is an important precursor for successful gender equality interventions in organisations. These findings have implications for those looking to minimize unintentional harm of policies or interventions to improve gender equality.
Highlights
The imperative to address gender inequalities has been established as a key social justice issue; this is of particular relevance in the context of the United Kingdom construction industry, where women made up only 14.3% of the construction workforce in 2021 (Office for National Statistics, 2021)
The individual case regression analysis established a relationship between the interactional justice (IJ) measure and Attitudes towards Equality Approaches (AEA) by testing the hypothesis There is a relationship between AEA and Perceptions of 1) Distributive Justice (DJ); 2) Procedural Justice (PJ); and 3) Interactional Justice (IJ)
There were some differences between the cases, in the quantitative analysis the overall Perceptions of Organisational Justice (POJ) and AEA scores for Case B were found to differ from those of Cases A and C, suggesting that Case B had a lower POJ that impacted upon AEA
Summary
Data from the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB 2016) finds the underrepresentation of women in construction is more severe in some roles such as site supervisors 0.7%, site managers 0.9%, engineering professionals 9.8% and notably the trades, where women represent less than 1% of the workforce (Bridges et al, 2020). Gender inequality was identified by Navarro-Astor et al.’s (2017) systematic review, covering 15 years of research, as consistent and multi-level (structural, cultural and personal). Including structural constraints such as inflexible working practices that undermine a return to work after maternity leave (AboagyeNimo et al, 2019) and discriminatory behaviour by employees and managers (Galea et al, 2020)
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