MANAGING WOMEN

1
MANAGING WOMEN?

• Organisational Culture and Identity-Senior Women
  Academics and General Staff.
• Paper presented at the WEXDEV Conference,
• Adelaide April 2006

2
RESEARCH BACKGROUND

• Australian Research Council Industry Linkage
  Grant2001-2003
• Chief Investigators Anne Ross-Smith (UTS) and
  Margaret Peters (UniSA) Senior Research
  Associate Colleen Chesterman (Executive Director,
  WEXDEV)
• 19 organisations from public, private and higher
  education sectors in 5 Australian states
• 255 interviews with senior women and men
  executives 72 in the private sector(51 women/21
  men-2 financial institutions) 102 in the public
  sector (67 women/31 men-12 departments) 81
  higher education (50 women/31 men-5
  universities).

3
RESEARCH BACKGROUND

• This paper covers data gathered from the five
  Australian Technology Network Universities-
  UniSA, UTS (Sydney), RMIT (Melbourne), Curtin
  (WA), and QUT (Queensland).
• Of those interviewed, 46 were academics (22
  women/24 men) 35 general/administrative (28
  women/7 men).
• 51 of the 81 were in the age range 50-59 9 were
  over 60.
• Only 2 were in the age range 30-39-both female
  administrators.

4
Senior Executive Levels?

• All organisations chosen had at least 20 of
  women at senior levels
• Followed Martin et als (1998) argument on
  tipping points
• If an organisation has an unusual prevalence of
  women, this may make visible some phenomena that
  would surface less frequently and less obviously
  than in a more conventional, male dominated
  setting. (1998433)

5
Is it a critical mass or critical acts which
changes managerial cultures?

• Research sought to
• 1. Delineate and understand the structural
  processes and policies which support access of
  women to executive managerial roles and their
  retention in these roles
• 2. Develop exemplars of best practice
• 3. Develop guidelines and protocols for becoming
  employers of choice for women executives.

6
Assumptions, perceptions, myths and stereotypes

• Males dominate management categories-masculine
  management norms
• Feminine ways of managing-discursively
  constructed as care oriented, continuous,
  relational, processual and cyclical (Knights and
  Odih, 1995)
• Borderlessness of the work/life divide
• Increasing surveillance of time, space
• Intensification of work

7
Subjectivity/ies-organisational identities

• Interviews as spaces to critically reflect on the
  practices of the self (or how to escape the
  totalising forces of gendered power structures!)
• The complicated crafting of organisational
  identity
• Modes of subjectivity are constituted within
  discursive practices and lived by the individual
  as if she or he were a fully coherent intentional
  subject (Weedon, 1999104)

8
What did senior women say about being senior
women?

• Women are already/always positioned
  contradictorily in organisations-no different in
  academia.
• Senior womens stories revealed ongoing
  contestations around space, time, and their
  bodies.
• Interviews with both men and women acknowledged
  the tension, ambivalences, contradictions,
  emotions, and lived feelings of doing gendered
  management.

9
Hard and soft management

• Reifying gender
• Managing down, men tend to be more comfortable
  with a command hierarchical approach to
  organisational management and then have to mop up
  the problems that arise from that. Women tend to
  be less forceful, less clear in their
  expectations downwards and then have to mop up
  the consequences of that. I would say the
  consequences are equally expensive in either
  direction.

10
Hard and soft management ctd.,

• Soft fluffy cuddly decision-making, which tends
  to be what you get when you are not willing to do
  the other, causes some pretty interesting
  problems. Every decision is open to challenge, no
  decision is a decision and it means we spin our
  wheels linked to the fact that universities in
  the current financial situation must make tough
  decisions.
• (DVC Male)

11
The language of rationality versus
emotionality

• Rationality-universities are dominant sites for
  reproducing masculine managerial discourses and
  practices, e.g. setting targets, challenges, and
  missions and achieving them through social and
  technical controls.
• Emotionality-feminine discourses and practices of
  managing as relational, nurturing, and
  communicative.

12
Time and space management

• What is often ignored is the gendered time
  sacrifice involved in emotional labour and in
  establishing and managing relations at work as
  well as at home.
• The intensification of workload for all senior
  managers brings with it particular issues for
  women.

13
Performance and audit culture

• The double bind of domestic labour and
  organisational emotional labour
• Visibility-superintendence and self surveillance
• Playing mother
• The care giver
• Continuously negotiating location-ones place.

14
MOTHERING/PARENTING

• Stopping the fights
• It is one step forward, two steps back or maybe
  two steps forward one step back. Just really,
  really deep and entrenched squabbles and fights
  between people that go back, you know, and I can
  remember when they started and stuff like that.
  And you know I always did the sort of Look guys
  we've got a problem here, we really need to solve
  it together Its going to take all of usyou
  know, dah dah dah, and theyd (males) say yeah
  right, were on board and youd go back a bit
  and try and move on.
• (Female PVC)

15
MOTHERING/PARENTING

• Female DVC referring to herself as a parent
• male managers are sort of fairly determined
  about what they want. And it seems to me that if
  they get what they want fairly easily, in a
  fairly unsophisticated way in negotiation, then
  everything is fine. If they find negotiation
  difficult then the first thing they do is come
  back to the parent and ask for parental
  arbitration. They actually do not go off and work
  that through for themselves for some mutual
  cooperative good, they decide it is all too hard
  and they will come and dump it on me for some
  form of adjudication. And that happens a lot.

16
MOTHERING/PARENTING

• Its just like kids and a mother in a family.
  Its really interesting. And the thing is a lot
  of times that they do that, I am thinking of one
  particular person male, they are fairly
  confident of the outcome. Not rightly so, they
  shouldn't be confident of the outcome, but they
  will fall into this parent/child behaviour when
  they are. Its not adult.
• PVC Female

17
BALANCING HOME/WORK

• One of the issues that I have been thinking
  about a lot is the extent to which the culture is
  going to be flexible because obviously I am about
  to return from maternity leave and I have, quite
  obviously, been worrying about the extent to
  whichyou know, suddenly going, you know, myself
  being able to put in the long hours and deliver
  the goods and, you know it hasnt been an issue
  because both my partner and I have both been in
  senior positions and thats been our life, very
  professional focus. And to suddenly realise
  theres this new person in my life that I need to
  accommodate.
• (Female Director)

18
BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES

• Resistances
• Vice Chancellors positions at the moment arent
  doable jobs. Why would you set yourself up for
  it? I mean when you really look at what our VC
  does, how much of that would you want to do? I
  mean, a whole lot of it is drivel and the other
  bit of its SO hard. Its almost not able to be
  done.
• (Female Dean)

19
OUTSIDERS AS INSIDERS

• The narratives of women who have gained
  organisational power reflect that a great deal of
  ambivalence and complexity accompanies the
  occupation of these positions.
• I sometimes feel like a stranger in a foreign
  land even though I am supposedly a major player
  in this land.
• (Female PVC)

20
Simultaneous locations

• Managerial identity and behaviour cannot simply
  be read off the holding of an executive
  position of responsibility.
• Time constraints-womens time needs to be
  understood in relation to others time and daily
  lives.
• The identities they perform have to be understood
  against the background of time and space.

21
Linguistic Framings

• The language men and women use to frame their
  experiences of occupying senior executive
  positions reveals the construction of gender to
  be complex and multiple, conflicted with
  resistances and ambivalences.

22
Findings

• Long term organisational change requires more
  than discursive change it requires structural
  change.
• If flexible work arrangements, family friendly
  policies, networking and mentoring etc are to
  take effect within the organisation, then there
  must be a major restructuring of domestic
  relations.