Abstract
Mayock describes the current state of play of gender in the workplace, provides a simple definition of “gender shrapnel,” and explains why gender shrapnel is a problem for everyone in the workplace. With an approach that aligns with institutional ethnography, Mayock provides stories about gender in the workplace and interweaves data, thus framing the inner workings of her own institution in terms of national rhetoric surrounding higher education and gender dynamics. This chapter also defines Meyerson’s and Scully’s “tempered radicalism” and outlines the rest of Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace.
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Notes
- 1.
See Bibliography for a long list of resources published over the last five decades, and especially since the early 1990s.
- 2.
In their 2000 article titled “Advancing Gender Equity in Organizations: The Challenge and Importance of Maintaining a Gender Narrative,” Ely and Meyerson emphasize the importance of keeping conversation about gender consistently on the table in organizations and promote narrative as “a central component of organizational change”: “The notion of narrative as a central component of organizational change is based in our understanding of reality as socially constructed, maintained, and modified in large measure through the stories organization members tell about particular persons or events, the sense they make of their own and others’ organizational experiences (Ewick and Silbey, 1995; Ford and Ford, 1995). Narratives, therefore, are not just stories told within social contexts; they are social practices that are constitutive of social contexts. They reproduce, without exposing, the connections of the specific story and persons to the structure of relations and institutions that make the story plausible. As such, they are as likely to bear the imprint of dominant cultural meanings and relations of power as any other social practice.” (603–04)
- 3.
Significant problems in the military are revealed in a 2012 article in The New York Times titled “Men Struggle for Rape Awareness”: “In one study of 3,337 military veterans applying for disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder, 6.5 percent of male combat veterans and 16.5 percent of noncombat veterans reported either in-service or post-service sexual assault. (The rates were far higher for female veterans, 69.0 percent and 86.6 percent respectively.) A Pentagon report released on Thursday found a 64 percent increase in sexual crimes in the Army since 2006, with rape, sexual assault and forcible sodomy the most frequent violent sex crimes committed last year; 95 percent of all victims were women.” These data reveal profound problems with sexual assault and abuse in the military, which of course are intimately linked in cause and effect to a culture of sexual harassment.
- 4.
See Justin Simien’s 2014 film “Dear White People” for a satirical examination of White privilege in the Academy.
- 5.
See Clare Hemmings’ Why Stories Matter. The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory for a useful critique of many of the false dominant narratives embedded in Western feminism.
References
Castañeda, Mari, and Kirsten Isgro (eds.). 2013. Mothers in Academia. New York: Columbia University Press. Print.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989):138–167. Print.
Dear White People. 2014. Dir. Justin Simien, Perf. Tessa Thompson, Tyler James Williams, Teyonah Parris, Dennis Haysbert, Brandon Bell. Code Red, Film.
Ely, Robin J., and Debra E. Meyerson. 2000. Advancing gender equity in organizations: The challenge and importance of maintaining a gender narrative. Organization. The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society 7(4): 589–608. Print.
Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabriella, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris (eds.). 2012. Presumed incompetent. The intersections of race and class for women in academia. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press. Print.
Rabin, Roni Caryn. 2012. Men struggle for rape awareness. The New York Times, 23 Jan 2012. Accessed 25 Jan 2012. Web.
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Mayock, E. (2016). Gendered Stories, Hybrid Methods. In: Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50830-0_1
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