Abstract
Mayock discusses the history of gender dynamics over the past 25 years, examines how different employees think about and adopt approaches to gender in the workplace, and then analyzes the fruits of careful work on gender in the workplace.
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Notes
- 1.
This phenomenon relates to Deborah Cameron’s assertions about pre-adolescents who begin to participate in the “heterosexual market”: “Although they are still pre-adolescent, and in most cases not yet interested in sex as such, their interest in the trappings of adult heterosexuality is driven by what Eckert points out is an overriding social imperative among children: the need to demonstrate maturity by moving away from the ‘babyish’ behaviour of the past. For pre-adolescents, this entails cultivating more ‘adult’ forms of masculinity and femininity that obey the heterosexual principle ‘opposites attract’. Though both sexes engage in this project, it changes the girls’ lives more profoundly. Boys cultivate a more adult masculinity through the same activities that were important to them before—for instance, sporting activities that show off their physical strength and athletic skill. For girls, on the other hand, cultivating a more adult femininity means replacing the activities and accomplishments of childhood with a different set of preoccupations” (70). The parallel in the academic workplace is that the qualities that get men and women to successful positions in the workplace continue to be recognized and admired in men, but, at the time at which women achieve tenure, are undervalued or not at all appreciated in women. Women are overtly or subtly encouraged to mute these qualities.
- 2.
In many cases, tenure provides the luxury of unfettered speech and of feminist activism, but at a cost. I always have in mind that I am in a luxurious position in which I can continue to work in a job, most parts of which I like, and can speak out as I do. Chapter 3 of Judith A. Levine’s Ain’t No Trust. How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters provides narratives and data of cases in which women share few or none of these advantages.
- 3.
In her February 15, 2007, New York Times op-ed piece, Judith Warner addresses the value of emotional intelligence within the context of the ousted President Larry Summers and the new President Drew Gilpin Faust at Harvard: “The selection of Faust seems to be about much more than the replacement of a man by a woman. It appears rather to be about the promotion of a certain kind of person: a person who can, at least minimally, show respect for other people’s feelings. Who can do the little dance of ego-flattery and mirroring it takes to make other people feel acknowledged, recognized and appreciated. This ability is very often considered the specialty of women. But in today’s world, it isn’t a gender thing. It’s a human thing. To insist otherwise is to cut Faust off at the knees just as she’s poised to spring into history.”
References
Friedan, Betty. 1983. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell/Laurel. Print.
Warner, Judith. 2007. Compassion gets a promotion. The New York Times, 15 Feb 2007. Accessed 16 Feb 2007. Web.
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Mayock, E. (2016). Back When I Wasn’t a Feminist. In: Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50830-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50830-0_2
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