Phantom Of The Male Norm

Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 18 No. 3 May 2011 doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2010.00546.x Are Women in Management
Victims of the Phantom of the
Male Norm? gwao_546 298..317

Yvonne Due Billing*
Managerial jobs have conventionally been understood as male and thus as not being directly suitable for women. The point of departure of this discourse is that women and men are different and that there is congruence between men and managerial jobs. On the basis of a qualitative study of women managers, I argue that there is a need for more sophisticated ways of appreciating the experiences of (many) women in relation to management. Variation, complexity and contradictions may be lost when holding onto essentialist understandings
A woman, a manager and an information technology (IT) employee are all possible examples of social identities. However, the crucial element is not the socially available category but the way in which an individual uses a specific social category as a central marker for selfhood. The IT woman manager may not see herself as ‘a feminine’ person, but as an engineer.4 Another divider is age: many people have experienced age discrimination, whether they are men or women. Considering all the variations is impossible. Although women and men construct differences and similarities and position themselves in relation to gender categories, there are other social forces that also shape the individual. How we see ourselves is not only a question of the sex category we belong to. Identities are created in interaction with others and through the way we talk about ourselves, and we may change over time or feel that we have changed our identity. Identity is under the constant influence from a lot of different factors, not fixed in an essentialist past.
Alvesson and Willmott (2002) use the concepts of identity work and identity regulation. This signals the way in which individuals do identity construction based on interpretations of themselves in the world and also that
According to
Eagly and Carli (2007), another hindrance to women managers is that they cannot be accepted in the culture because they do not join male managers in strip clubs or go hunting with them. If the norm includes activities like hunting and visiting strip clubs this might leave out some (or even most) men and it might attract some women.
Managerial jobs can be seen as more or less manly, loosely coupled to the ratio of the jobholders, and some management positions may demand values and managerial behaviour that are hard to define as male (Billing and
Alvesson, 2000). Different organizations (and even different levels within the organization) may want or need different characteristics, qualifications and management behaviour, depending on, for example, whether the organization is in a competitive business or in the public service sector. The tasks vary and there is a need for people whose qualifications or personalities match the needs of the organization (Greenwald, 2008). There are workplaces where there is a gender mix and also workplaces where women are dominant