Gendered Status Research Articles

Cultivation and Commodification: Regulating Gendered Status and Settler Colonial Title to Land

The processes by which settler colonial rights to manage land were assigned to legal persons were structured by the South Australia Act 1834 and the Real Property Act 1858. Colonial corporations – including the Crown – managed land and natural resources by regulating how rights were held by the family as a gendered, property-holding institution, and by individuals, including women. This article examines the legal processes by which the management of land and resources was directed towards goals of cultivation and commodification in colonial Australia to show how property rights shaped ideas of gendered and nongendered personhood. Changing priorities relating to land ownership led to new modes of transferring property and contributed to a reduction in the significance of gender as a marker of relative legal status between men and women in private law in colonial Australia.

Gendered environmental pathways to sports injury: insights from retired athletes in the UK high-performance context

ObjectiveWomen remain at increased risk for some sports injuries, such as anterior cruciate ligament rupture and concussion. This study applied a gendered environmental approach to identify modifiable features of women’s...

Double standards in status ascriptions? The role of gender, behaviors, and social networks in status orders among adolescents

Abstract We examine the gendered distribution of peer-ascribed status in schools. Using network data from more than 14,000 students in 676 classrooms, we explore gender differences in the ascription of status and the types of behavior rewarded with status. On average, girls receive slightly fewer status ascriptions than boys, and students tend to grant status more frequently within the same gender. Contextual analyses show that classroom demographics can moderate some of these patterns. We also uncover gender-specific differences and similarities in status-related behaviors. Notably, girls engaging in substance use are awarded with slightly more status ascriptions than boys. However, network models reveal that most behaviors affect peer status similarly for both genders, suggesting that previous findings of gender-behavioral differences based on regression analysis may be conflated with network processes. Our study updates long-held notions regarding gendered status orders in schools and highlights the value of a multidimensional approach to status processes. We discuss implications for future social network research on status ascriptions and other relational cognitions and consider how school-based interventions might benefit from our findings.

“Women shouldn’t play rugby” – the gendered and embodied experiences of women players in rugby union

ABSTRACT Drawing on interview data, we use gender and embodiment literature to understand the experiences, attitudes, and behaviours of women rugby players in relation to tackle performance and safety. Sampling, data collection, and data analysis were guided by principles and techniques of the grounded theory method. Participants’ experiences illustrate the processes through which women struggle to claim space in rugby. Constraining gender norms, the inferiorisation of women’s athletic achievements, and inequitable playing conditions are at the centre of this struggle. Organisational support and cultural acceptance are predicated on conformity to masculinist models of performance and behaviour whilst preserving the ideals of femininity. However, women’s embodied persistence and agency can challenge the gendered status quo in rugby and reshape the field of play. Revising rugby structures to include more nuanced models for performance development, including commensurate support for the women’s game both in financial sense and in terms of identity could enhance safety and performance in women’s rugby.

Transmogrification as a Gendered Event: Women in Kona and Hausa Tales

African tales are characteristically told to amuse and to instil moral values in the younger generation. However, Jukun Kona and Hausa female narrators fashion gender-based stories from incidents that go beyond immediate and common happenings to speak of hybridization and transformations from plant/animal to human form with the cryptic mission to criticize the gendered status quo. These female narrators typically weave these tales from their imaginations or draw their ideas from occurrences within their immediate environments to showcase extant predicaments of women. This article uses the close reading technique which affords the facility to draw from the diction, tone, narrative voice, and rhetorical and literary devices in a given text to advance its argument. The evidence, as discovered in Hausa tales recollected from memory and Kona tales collected during fieldwork in 2018, illustrates that transmogrification is drawn on by female narrators to subtly critique communal gendered norms.

“Can women be perceived as good as men in sport? Only when doping!”: when social dominance motives shape judgements of women’s doping suspicions in threat situations

ABSTRACT In this work, we examine whether differences in social dominance orientation (SDO) may lead to the creation of a ‘climate of suspicion’ regarding women’s sporting excellence as well as to negative perceptions of sportswomen in general. We suggest that SDO works as a basic ideological belief system aiming to preserve the hegemony of men in a sport. We employed a scenario methodology in which participants (N = 80) read one of the two alleged sports news website excerpts in which women’s performances threatened (or not) the gendered status quo of sport. It was expected that individuals high in SDO, who are particularly resistant to change, would question women’s sportsmanship more strongly than those who value equality (i.e. those relatively low in SDO). Moreover, we anticipated that high-SDO participants would use more negative traits to describe sportswomen when assigned to a threatening condition. Coherent with the above, our results suggest that the field of sport still implicates a significant amount of gender inequality that marginalize women performances.

Taking it Like a Man! Reactions of Male Employees to Sexual Harassment in Workplaces

This study investigates how heterosexual working males respond to sexual harassment they encounter at work in an Asian patriarchal culture that prescribes strict gender roles for men and women and supports heterosexual hegemonic masculinity. Using a qualitative research methodology, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 19 men who identified themselves as heterosexual. The findings indicate how the participants have responded to their experiences of sexual harassment, primarily through passivity and avoidance. In addition, on rare occasions, they have also engaged in resistance and reluctant acquiescence. These responses are largely shaped by cultural scripts and ideologies about masculinity and heterosexuality. By acting passively, the participants appear to attempt to preserve and conform to the gendered status quo, protect the perpetrators, avoid rocking the boat and prevent the tables from being turned on them. All in all, the reactions of males to sexual harassment demonstrate how masculinity is actively constructed and maintained in work settings. These findings, therefore, expand and contribute to the broader research area of sexual harassment of heterosexual men in general and, more specifically, to their reactions to sexual harassment in a cultural context that is rarely explored.

Gendering strategic action fields in sports governance.

How do meso-level field relations shape the ways that sports organizations act on gender equality? In this paper, we approach international sports governance as comprised of meso-level fields of strategic action in which male dominance and relations of masculinity are centrally at stake. We focus on the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), showing how the organization's efforts to address gender inequality are shaped by its relations with adjacent actors in the field. These actors jockey to form strategic coalitions as they struggle over the influence and resources to define the field configuration of international cycling, with challenges to the gendered status quo requiring careful management. Based on semi-structured interviews with individuals who held an elected or staff position within the UCI between 2005 and 2020, we show how field relations shaped the work of the UCI Women's Committee during this period as well as the experiences of women who succeeded in accessing decision-making roles. The UCI emerges in our analysis as a central governance unit via which the historical accumulation of advantage to men is preserved. We suggest that studying meso-level fields of strategic action can advance sociological research more broadly on how sports organizations are shaped by their contingent, dynamic, and (gender) unequal context.

Changing the gendered status quo in engineering? The encouraging and discouraging experiences of young women with engineering aspirations.

Young women remain underrepresented among engineering bachelor's degree holders. While there is a relatively large body of extant research on the many factors that curtail young women's interest in pursuing engineering, less is known about high school girls who are on an engineering pathway. Therefore, this study focuses on a select group of precollege young women who express a strong interest in engineering. Specifically, informed by theories of gender as a social system and previous empirical research, this mixed-methods study explores the constellation of significant actors within the daily lives of these young women, to understand from whom and how they are supported in pursuing this gender-atypical field, and simultaneously, from whom and how they are discouraged. To do so, the researchers analyzed survey and interview data from a sample of diverse high school girls who participate in the Society of Women Engineers' (SWE) SWENext programme. Quantitative results indicate that young women report high levels of encouragement from most sources, including parents, teachers, and other young women. However, across various peer contexts, they receive much more support from other young women than from young men. Qualitative results further reveal that parents and teachers stand out in young women's recollections of encouragement, often through advocating their participation in engineering activities or providing mentoring support. In contrast, young men in engineering spaces were recalled as particularly discouraging of their engineering participation, by socially or physically excluding them or refusing to provide recognition. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

With the Best of Intentions

This article contributes to a growing literature on the implementation of shariʿa-derived state legislation in Egypt by exploring how differently positioned divorced mothers navigate Egypt’s highly gendered personal status codes under circumstances where many men are increasingly unable to discharge their part of the ‘patriarchal bargain’ due to a shortage in affordable housing. We highlight two discrepancies between legislative rules and social practice: The first is the divergence between state law and everyday norms, and the second looks at the limits of implementation and compliance in terms of actions taken by courts and other officials. We consider how and why Muslim personal status law reforms have sought to enhance divorced women’s bargaining position in the family where the relevant laws often have unintended, unforeseen and contradictory consequences when it comes to divorced custodian mothers’ access to housing.

Reclaiming Indigenous Economic Development Through Participatory Action Research

ABSTRACT Participatory, gender-sensitive processes are hailed as valuable in ensuring community perspectives shape economic development planning: to assess community needs, aspirations and to identify indicators of development based on local perspectives. In Indigenous communities, such processes may not always be taken up due to research and consultation fatigue or plain scepticism. Women are often silent or less outspoken in public settings, and dominant perspectives tend to occupy most of the space and time allocated to participatory processes. This can lead to distorted understandings of community voices and inadvertently preserve the gendered status quo. A case study based on the community engagement approach taken in partnership with the government of the Toquaht Nation, on Vancouver Island endeavoured in a gender-sensitive consultation process to develop a value-based decision support system for economic development activities. The article details the use of the “Making Connections” method to facilitate discussions about economic development through Toquaht women’s circles. “Making Connections” is a tool to identify and build place-based, people-centred visions and indicators of economic development for community well-being. Based on James Tully’s work on actions for and of freedom, the article introduces this new method as a framework for cooperative community discussions in ways that allow for naming past and current histories of discrimination and disconnection, while honouring people’s strengths, resistance and resilience. The themes and concerns emerging from the women’s circles speak of a richer and more expansive notion of economic development that puts comprehensive well-being at the heart of economic development.

Privilege and Oppression: Exploring the Paradoxical Identity of White Women Administrators in Higher Education

Race is a prominent issue in higher education, which has intensified demands upon postsecondary leadership to acknowledge and respond to increasing racial tensions within campus communities. Many administrators, who are mostly White, are left perplexed regarding how to address such demands. Having leaders who understand bias can potentially support institutional responses to racial tensions. As such, this study focused on the second largest share of college administrators, White women – an identity rooted in both privilege and oppression. White women may better understand the conditions of oppression given their gendered status, yet may also be unaware of the extent of their privilege or its effects on their leadership decisions. Their unique positioning calls for a deeper exploration of the role identity plays in leadership, especially in times of racial discord. Utilizing Putnam’s bridging capital and bonding capital framework, findings highlight where their privilege and oppression emerge in study participants’ leadership, leading to recommendations for future research and practice.

Labour and regional transition: sex-segregation, the absence of gender and the valorisation of masculinised employment in Gippsland, Australia

This paper explores the place of gender in relation to labour and transition in regional development. A ‘gendered lens’ is applied to planning documents relating to the region of Gippsland, Australia. While previous research highlights the importance of accounting for gender in regional development, gendered analyses outside Europe are scarce. We argue that an apparent gender neutrality in planning documents in effect privileges masculinised elements of the economy. It means that current approaches to regional development, at best, reproduce the gendered status quo and, at worst, further re-entrench gender inequality in the region, with consequences for regional labour policy. Our findings have flow on effects for gender relations, and specifically for women, and economic policy in regions undergoing transition in Gippsland. We conclude that any regional policy that does not account for gendered realities and the lived experiences of women, ultimately fails the region.

Dilemmas of an Academic Feminist as Manager in the Neoliberal Academy: Negotiating Institutional Authority, Oppositional Knowledge and Change

While still rare, women are achieving important leadership roles as managers inside universities. This article explores the practical and theoretical dilemmas posed for academic feminists who enter such positions in the age of the rise of the ‘neoliberal academy’. These are familiar dilemmas for feminist bureaucrats – femocrats – working inside political, governmental, judicial and economic institutions but have been less explored with respect to the academy. What can academic feminists do when they take on middle or senior management roles? How do they experience being simultaneously the embodiment of institutional authority (to manage, regulate, quantify, monetise) as managers, as well as a source of oppositional knowledge as feminists? To what extent are there opportunities to work with the grain of an institution to challenge the gendered status quo from within? Or are academic feminists who manage inevitably co-opted and compromised? The article takes an autoethnographic approach to reflect upon the author’s experience as a ‘tempered radical’ in third tier management (as an executive dean and head of school) in a public research-intensive UK university, and to offer lessons about the radical potential of insider strategies of change.

Can gender inequality be created without inter-group discrimination?

Understanding human societies requires knowing how they develop gender hierarchies, which are ubiquitous. We test whether a simple agent-based dynamic process could create gender inequality. Relying on evidence of gendered status concerns, self-construals, and cognitive habits, our model included a gender difference in how responsive male-like and female-like agents are to others’ opinions about the level of esteem for someone. We simulate a population who interact in pairs of randomly selected agents to influence each other about their esteem judgments of self and others. Half the agents are more influenced by their relative status rank during the interaction than the others. Without prejudice, stereotypes, segregation, or categorization, our model produces inter-group inequality of self-esteem and status that is stable, consensual, and exhibits characteristics of glass ceiling effects. Outcomes are not affected by relative group size. We discuss implications for group orientation to dominance and individuals’ motivations to exchange.

Reward interventions: A strategy to Erode social inequality?

Decades of research illuminates how status beliefs about socially significant characteristics, like gender, fundamentally alter expectations about individual's competence and worth. This process biases opportunity structures and resource distributions, thereby recreating social inequalities in a self-fulfilling fashion. Many social and organizational policies attempt to reduce inequality by increasing disadvantaged groups' access to valued rewards, such as prestigious alma maters, awards, and valued positions. In addition to meaningfully increasing resources, the status these rewards convey should also theoretically increase the status of the particular people who come to possess them. To know whether inversions to reward structures reduce social inequality, however, we must first demonstrate that the status value of rewards alone is an effective intervention. In an experimental test of interventions to gender status inequality, reward markers with relatively higher or lower status value were consistently or inconsistently associated with the gender of the participants' task partners. Results indicate that rewards intervened in the groups' gendered status hierarchy as participants were more likely to be influenced by their partners' rewards than their gender.

Feminist critical friends: dilemmas of feminist engagement with governance and gender reform agendas

This article advances the concept of ‘feminist critical friends’ as a descriptor for those studying the efforts of ‘insider’ gender justice advocates working to transform governance structures and advance gender reform agendas within political, social, economic and military institutions. In refining the concept of feminist critical friendship, we reject perspectives that overstate the failures and ‘co-option’ that comes with engagement, while also resisting voluntarist versions that cede too much influence to feminist insiders. We pay attention to, and take seriously, the small wins that are achieved against the gendered, institutional and political odds, and recognise that sometimes, though not always, these can align to produce significant shifts in the gendered status quo. The article seeks to unpack the who, what, why and how of feminist critical friendship in order to advance this as a productive standpoint for feminist researchers interested in analysing processes of institutional stasis and change.

Conjugality

The wedding is often observed as performing a narrative closure, for instance, as a ritual that acts as a rite of passage to proper sex, or proper gendered and sexuated statuses framed in the terms of heteronormativity and homonormativity. The aims of this article are to sit beside recent scholarship that examines marriage, as well as the law/legal infrastructure and language that offer conjugal rights, that is, social, economic, and legal rights, and confers statuses of personhood to those who have access to them. Bride, regardless of the specific gendered status and personhood occupied within legal, social, and economic terms here, does not (only) refer to the constituted individual who lives or experiences a gendered and sexed position and location but, rather, refers to the ritual process itself that comes to produce a range of positions, scenes, desires, practices intensities, and, finally, confusions around which the expression of liberal subjecthood, or ethnic and national identity, might emerge.

Gendering merit: How the discourse of merit in diversity disclosures supports the gendered status quo on Canadian corporate boards

• Gender diversity disclosures of Canadian public companies are analyzed. • “Merit” and “diversity” are socially constructed to largely exclude women. • Many companies focus on “merit” to justify having fewer women directors. • Disclosures of companies referring to merit are less readable. • Patriarchal structures are revealed in the language of diversity disclosures. The diversity disclosures by Canadian corporations are examined to show how references to ‘merit’ and ‘diversity’ are used strategically by many corporations to support the gendered status quo and to resist pressures to increase the representation of women on boards. References to ‘merit’ and ‘diversity’ in the first mandatory corporate governance diversity disclosures of a sample of corporations from the Toronto Stock Exchange are analyzed using critical discourse analysis to assess the extent to which these disclosures are used to legitimize current board recruitment practices and to maintain the gendered status quo. We find that corporations referring to merit in their disclosures tend to have fewer women directors than corporations that do not mention merit. In addition, we assess the readability of the disclosures. We find that those referring to merit tend to be less readable, suggesting efforts to obfuscate. This research highlights the patriarchal power structures underlying corporate board appointments and shows how these power relationships are revealed in the language corporations choose to use in their diversity disclosures. ‘Gender’, ‘diversity’ and ‘merit’ are socially constructed concepts. Until the gendered roots of the language of merit-based policies are acknowledged, corporations have little incentive to challenge the status quo and engage substantively with diversity. Overcoming corporate resistance to change may require a range of innovative practices by corporations and regulators, up to, and possibly including, mandating levels of women’s representation on corporate boards.

Fearing Such a Lady: University Expansion, Underemployment, and the Hypergamy Ideal in Kampala, Uganda.

In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women's gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly-educated young adults navigate frictions between the hypergamy ideal and these recent transformations in gendered status. Some women reduce the salience of hypergamy by preventing their relationships from becoming serious, while other women intentionally perform the role of submissive housewife while preserving their autonomy. Men reframe their romantic circumstances to underplay their inability to achieve economic hypergamy, portraying educated women as undesirable and characterizing their partners as non-materialistic. These findings reveal how demographic and economic changes reconfigure relationship norms, gendered power dynamics, and family formation processes.