Catching Gender in Action: Researching the Dynamics of Gender in Corporations
Lecture: Catching Gender in Action: Researching the Dynamics of Gender in Corporations
Presented by: Patricia Yancey Martin, Daisy Parker Flory Professor of Sociology at Florida State University
Researchers have long documented that occupations and organizations are segregated by sex (e.g. Baron & Bielby 1985; 1986; Bartol 1978). What is less well understood are the processes--the interactional dynamics--through which segregation is produced and sustained. How do gender dynamics in organizations contribute to sex segregation, even when no one intends for them to?
With the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation, Martin spent three years studying the dynamics of gender in US corporations. Her fieldwork which took place in 17 corporations in six states involved interviews, focus groups, observation, and analysis of archival materials (videos, reports, newsletters). In this talk she addresses the difficulties of doing research aimed at discovering gender dynamics and reviews strategies for surmounting them. She reports on aspects of what she came to see as a two-sided dynamic - - gendering practices and the practicing of gender. Through stories of the interactions of Tom, Betsy, and Valerie (among others), Martin highlights the invisibility and the magnitude of gendering dynamics and challenges us to reflect on the gender "in" our own behavior, even when we have no intention of "practicing gender."
Patricia Yancey Martin is Daisy Parker Flory Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Sociology Department at Florida State University and co-editor with Myra
Marx Ferree of Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Womens Movement. She is a longstanding contributor to work on feminist perspectives of
organizations. She was honored by the Southern Sociological Society for her outstanding research on gender with the Katharine Jocher-Belle Boone Beard
Award in 1999. In 2001 she was designated Distinguished Feminist Lecturer by Sociologists for Women in Society. She served as president of the Southern Sociological Society, the largest U. S. regional professional association in sociology, from 2002-2003. Her work has appeared in the journals Organization; SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Gender, Work, & Organization; and Gender & Society. Her forthcoming book, Rape Work: Victims, Gender, and Emotions in Organization & Community Context (2005 Routledge), brings an organizational lens to the study of the "processing" of rape victims, showing
how mainstream organizations instruct--and often require--their members to treat victims "unresponsively," in ways that add to rather than alleviate the trauma of rape.
Professor Martin's visit is hosted by the Management Department, and Organization: the Critical Journal of Organization, Theory & Society (Marta Calas & Linda Smircich, Editors for the Americas)