ABSTRACT Emotional experiences associated specifically with maternal status at work are explored in a comparative case study of Ireland and India. Twenty‐four mothers working in the creative industries in Ireland and the IT sector in India were interviewed. Findings note significant parallels in the mothers' emotional experiences at work despite distinctive cultural and employment contexts. Across both cases, the mothers felt pressure to suppress emotions at work. However, they noted their emotions about work did “leak” out. These emotions were often about the overlap of motherhood, mothering and work, but mostly they were expressed at home because such emotional “leaks” were not permitted at work. Both Indian and Irish mothers were also clear that there was an emotional penalty that accrued to them as a result of their maternal status. Both cohorts documented ongoing tensions and oscillations at the intersection of maternal emotions and work, which ultimately create an additional emotional burden for mothers stemming from their dual status as mothers and workers. The article finds that maternal emotion is a patterned response that is socially structured and organizationally consequential, which shapes how mothers understand themselves as workers and how they are evaluated within workplace contexts.
ABSTRACT Ethnically diverse women remain underrepresented in senior and executive leadership despite many having already demonstrated leadership capability in managerial roles. This study examines how leadership legitimacy is reproduced in ways that constrain their progression from management into senior and executive leadership in corporate Australia. Drawing on 43 semistructured interviews with ethnically diverse women in leadership (EDWIL), organizational representatives, and industry stakeholders across two ASX200 organizations, we use an interpretivist, abductive qualitative design informed by patriarchy, Critical Whiteness, intersectionality, and Ecological Systems Theory. We identify a competence–legitimacy discontinuity at the management‐to‐senior‐leadership threshold: demonstrated capability can be organizationally recognized and utilized without being converted into recognition as legitimate for greater leadership authority. We further theorize relational conferral as the process through which influential organizational actors convert—or fail to convert—recognized competence into endorsement and progression opportunity. Anglo‐male Cultural Logic s explain how these legitimacy judgments are culturally organized through intersecting gendered and racialized norms. Finally, we conceptualize an Ecology of Exclusion , represented through the Eco‐EDWIL model, showing how leadership composition, organizational standards, relational conferral, individual evaluation and adaptation, and progression outcomes become recursively connected. The study thereby reframes exclusion as differential progression within leadership hierarchies rather than exclusion from leadership itself.
ABSTRACT Large tech companies have historically invested heavily in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), fostering reputations as corporate DEI leaders. Despite these investments, this industry has failed to meaningfully address the systemic underrepresentation of women of color. Drawing on theories of progressive neoliberalism and structural whiteness, we argue that corporate diversity management operates based on racially extractive and nonperformative logics. Although white employees are exempted from accountability and engagement, women of color are expected to perform the labor of DEI in the absence of status, authority, or resources. Based on the analysis of 24 in‐depth interviews with women of color employed in the tech industry, we find that women of color serve as both representatives of and laborers for DEI within white organizations. Exploring this positionality reveals the misalignment between public commitments to DEI and the reality of “doing diversity” on the shop floor. We identify four themes that illustrate how women of color navigate the extractive and nonperformative nature of diversity management regime: (1) whiteness as authority and exemption, (2) depoliticized remedies, (3) diversity as legitimacy work, and (4) refusal and repair.
ABSTRACT China's esports game companion industry has evolved from informal companion game practices into a distinctive form of digital labor that combines technical performance with emotionalized and gendered expectations. This article examines the concealed forms of labor embedded in female game companions' practices. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 15 female game companions and participant observation, the study employs and extends the concept of gender labor to analyze the positioning of female game companions within platform‐mediated employment relationships. The findings demonstrate that under conditions of scripted livestreaming and collective imitation, male employers mobilize female companions' gender labor through practices of devaluation and domination, thereby constructing and affirming hegemonic masculinity. In response, female game companions adopt compensatory, avoidance, and feigning‐weakness strategies, reflecting a broader pattern of compromise. Rather than reducing male employers' additional demands for labor, these strategies further intensify the sexualization of companion gaming. Under the joint orchestration of platform mechanisms, such dynamics perpetuate self‐alienation and contribute to embodied distress, including physical pain. Furthermore, this study argues that gender labor is not confined to unpaid domestic or intimate contexts. Within digital labor environments, gender labor not only persists but becomes increasingly obscured under the guise of remuneration. Female digital workers thus face intensified gender bias and gender exploitation, highlighting the urgent need for more robust regulatory frameworks to protect women's labor rights and to promote gender equality in digital economies.
ABSTRACT Managing the work‐fertility interface is a major challenge for organizations when implementing fertility policies. These policies cover a broad spectrum of areas including clinical treatments, preservation and storage of eggs and sperm, preimplantation and diagnostics, and non‐clinical family‐building assistance. They also differ from standard work–life policies because of the need for intensive medical integration, strict legal‐privacy issues and high financial outlay by organizations and employees. The implementation of these benefits is additionally made more complex due to their interaction with intersectional, organizational, and macro‐level contexts. To understand these complexities, we integrate gift exchange theory and a contextual intersectionality perspective to propose a “FA i RE” framework. We highlight the theoretical complexities and tensions in using this framework, and we surface important theoretical and practical implications.
ABSTRACT Focusing on the distinctive characteristics of the highly gendered long‐term care (LTC) sector, in this study, we analyze wages and earnings within caring sectors through an integrated theoretical approach that includes theories of ageism, compensating wage differentials, and gender‐based devaluation. To explore potential pay differentials in LTC, we use a multilevel model based on linked employer–employee data covering virtually all employees in Portugal's manufacturing and service sectors. Within caring sectors, we find evidence of a remuneration premium for LTC, although its size is sensitive to model specification. Although this pattern is consistent with partial compensation for the emotional demands associated with caring for older adults, our results also indicate that institutional wage‐setting arrangements play an important role in shaping this premium. Overall, however, a care penalty is evident for caring sectors vis‐à‐vis other sectors in the economy—with occupational penalties extending to sectoral penalties. Notably, the gender pay gap is substantially smaller in LTC than in other sectors, a pattern that coincides with wage compression at the lower end of the distribution, whereas persisting disparities at the top remain consistent with gendered and other structural wage‐setting processes among higher earners. Revealing these remunerational disparities provides policy‐relevant insights to enhance conditions and address LTC workforce needs in aging societies.
ABSTRACT This article explores how black women in Brazil navigate intersecting dimensions of race, gender, and socio‐economic status, illustrating the sociocultural factors that shape their daily experiences, with a focus on female autonomy. Drawing on a qualitative design, we conducted semi‐structured interviews with 97 women, of whom 77 self‐identified as Black ( preta or parda ). From this broader group, we purposefully selected 10 in‐depth narratives, prioritizing regional and age diversity as well as rich personal accounts. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, informed by critical race and feminist theoretical frameworks, enabling a nuanced examination of how structural inequalities and individual agency converge in participants' lives. Our findings reveal the multifaceted ways in which systemic discrimination, community support networks, and identity negotiations intersect, shedding light on patterns of both constraint and resistance. Analytically, the study develops an interpretive lens that integrates personal narratives with broader socio‐political contexts, offering new insights into how individuals mobilize strategies of resistance and empowerment. This work underscores the importance of recognizing the agency and collective strength of black women in contemporary Brazil.
ABSTRACT Most studies of gender‐based violence and harassment (GBVH) focus on white‐collar women's experiences of sexual harassment in highly regulated workplaces in the Global North. However, globally most women work in far less controlled settings. One such setting is Cambodia, where work on construction sites is highly informal. Drawing on survey and interview data collected from workers employed on 23 commercial and 16 residential sites, this article examines perpetrator identity in acts of sexual and non‐sexual workplace GBVH. This analysis confirms that workplace GBVH targeting women is often perpetrated by men in positions of authority but also by coworkers, both male and female. It also identifies different patterns of perpetrator identity according to the severity of the incident, and by whether it was sexual or nonsexual. Further analysis based on the precise type of work women do reveals that immediate team context has a significant impact on patterns of perpetrator identity. Nonsexual forms of GBVH were generated primarily through relations of task‐based dependency, whereas sexual forms were sustained through interactional practices within teams. By demonstrating that perpetration is shaped less by formal hierarchy than by team‐level dynamics, this article challenges conventional accounts of workplace GBVH and extends feminist organizational theory to better account for conditions of informality. These findings challenge conventional narratives around perpetrator identity by demonstrating that the relationship between workplace culture and workplace GBVH is more complex than is generally assumed.
ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of an increasingly complex career development environment, growing career mobility brings both opportunities and challenges to individuals' career advancement: although it expands possibilities for pursuing ideal career paths, it also exacerbates career insecurity and triggers negative psychological states such as learned helplessness. More notably, women also face multiple barriers stemming from societal expectations and workplace constraints, making them more vulnerable to learned helplessness. Career crafting offers a valuable perspective for individuals to build fulfilling careers and alleviate negative emotions, yet existing research has primarily focused on its positive impacts on career‐related and work‐related outcomes, with limited attention paid to the mechanisms that mitigate individuals' negative emotional states. Furthermore, career‐related research must take cultural contexts into account, yet all current scales have been developed based on Western contexts. Therefore, this study addresses these gaps through two separate studies: Study 1, drawing on existing Western scales, validated a localized Chinese career crafting scale via translation and multi‐sample testing ( N 1 = 335, N 2 = 267, N 3 = 246). Study 2 examined the mechanism of career crafting on learned helplessness via resilience using two‐wave longitudinal data ( N = 306). Furthermore, gender plays a significant moderating role in this indirect pathway, revealing that women gain greater benefits from engaging in career crafting than men. This study not only provides a reliable measurement for career crafting research in the Chinese context and enriches the relevant empirical literature but also clarifies the mediating mechanism of resilience and the boundary condition of gender, extending the application of conservation of resource theory and gender role theory to career research. Practically, it offers targeted guidance for individuals, especially women, to accumulate psychological resources, improve adaptive capacity, and proactively shape their career trajectories while coping with negative emotions.
Despite the growing attention to workplace gender equity, organizational culture often reinforces masculine norms that marginalize women and threaten their well-being. One example of this is masculinity contest culture (MCC)-a culture characterized by hyper-masculine norms such as dominance and aggression, where any feminine behaviors are disparaged. This study examines MCC as an organizational-level identity threat for women and whether feminist identity attenuates the association between MCC and psychological distress. Drawing on social identity theory and the transactional model of stress, it was hypothesized that women who more strongly identify as a feminist will report weaker associations between psychological distress and MCC. Data were collected from 209 U.S. women working full-time, in-person across various industries using a multi-wave design. Results indicate that MCC was significantly associated with greater psychological distress measured 2 months later. The interaction between feminist identity and MCC was statistically significant. Simple slopes analyses suggest that the association between MCC and distress is strongest among women low in feminist identity and nonsignificant among those high in feminist identity. Findings highlight the potential of feminist identity to function as a psychological resource for women that may mitigate organizational-level gender threats.
Over the last decade, policy actors have produced a surge of "future of work" reports that reimagine workers through the dual logics of digitalization and human capital. Drawing on 25 policy documents (WEF, World Bank, OECD, EU, and major consultancies) and combining Bacchi and Goodwin's WPR approach with decolonial feminist theory, this paper demonstrates how these imaginaries construct an "ideal future worker" that reinscribes colonial hierarchies through a process we term the coloniality of skill codification. This concept describes the translation of embodied, historical, and relational differences (race, gender, caste, disability, age, and geopolitics) into ostensibly neutral, measurable skill categories that naturalize Global North standards and colonial hierarchy. Our analysis uncovers three interlocking mechanisms: (1) construction of workers as techno-neoliberal skill bundles (relational human-machine codependency), (2) commodification of social difference (inclusion framed as extractable competitive advantage), and (3) technical-statistical indexation (national human capital metrics that rank countries and workforce potential). This paper intervenes in the emerging field of Feminist AI by arguing that the policy discourses surrounding AI and automation in the workplace are actively constructing a new, insidious form of the "ideal worker" that rearticulates colonial-gendered power structures.
ABSTRACT Workers without children represent a growing yet persistently overlooked population in contemporary workplaces. This introductory article to the Special Issue on childfree workers establishes the conceptual rationale for this collection, arguing that the dominant work‐family paradigm has marginalized the experiences of those without children by conflating ‘work‐family’ with ‘work‐life’. We adopt the term childfree to resist deficit framings, while acknowledging important distinctions between voluntary and involuntary childlessness alongside the intersecting influences of gender, race, sexuality, and class. Drawing on demographic trends, particularly across Western contexts, we highlight the urgency of enhanced theoretical and empirical attention to this population. We introduce and synthesize four empirical and conceptual paper contributions that comprise this Special Issue, addressing infertility, pregnancy loss, voluntary childfreeness, and prospective motherhood penalties, collectively demonstrating that childfree experiences are shaped by intersecting systems of moral normativity, organizational pronatalist assumptions, and structural inequality. We conclude by outlining key directions for future research and offering practical guidance for organizations seeking to foster more equitable and inclusive workplaces across diverse life circumstances.
ABSTRACT Josie Cox, Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality . This is a journalistic account of the women's fight for economic equality in the United States from the Second World War to the present. The strength of the review is Cox's narrative power in describing the historical, legal, and cultural forces shaping gendered labor dynamics. This review critically discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the book from a feminist economic perspective, with particular emphasis on care work, legal frameworks, and intersectional struggles. The review situates the book in broader discussions of wage inequality, cultural patriarchy, and the political economy of reproductive labor.
ABSTRACT Hardship Duty by Stephanie Bonnes is reviewed. The book analyzes 50 interviews of U.S. servicewomen and focuses on their experiences of sexual violence. The author has made important theoretical contributions that are transferable to other institutions and organizations. She also provides thorough recommendations for reform.
ABSTRACT This commentary unsettles the “add‐women‐and‐stir” perspective and re‐centers gendered power in family firms as a question of governance, not headcounts. We see family firms as gendered regimes where kinship, ownership, and succession intertwine with broader societal gender norms to maintain patriarchal settlements. Building on feminist analyses of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity, we advance a willingness–ability–authority framework to illuminate how managers and family members navigate gender equality in these organizations. We argue that willingness tends to be shaped by masculinity‐contest norms that frame equality work as status‐threatening, whereas ability can be constrained by kin coalitions, heir‐first legitimacy, and informal governance structures. We argue that discourses of ESG and “family values” risk remaining symbolic unless reforms meaningfully redistribute decision rights over pay, promotion, and succession. In this commentary, we set an agenda for future research around (i) the “ideal‐heir” scripts, (ii) feminized glue work that sustains legitimacy without jurisdiction, (iii) temporal dynamics of rupture and return across generations, and (iv) intersectional variation across class, ethnicity, religion, and family forms. We suggest the value of feminist methodologies in research on family firms through institutional ethnography, memory‐work, and participatory action research, in order not only to map chains of ruling but also to co‐produce institutionally grounded interventions. This commentary calls for shifting from counting women to examining the governance arrangements that structure authority, and therefore moves the field toward genuinely gender‐equitable family firms aligned with SDG 5.
ABSTRACT Time comes a wooing for each of us long before we encounter the vocabulary to name what it does. Chronos, in Greek mythology, devours his children, a reminder that time is not a neutral backdrop but a force that disciplines and decides what survives. Contemporary organizations institutionalize their own version of Chronos through promotion clocks, responsiveness norms, and performance cycles that reward speed, continuity, and linear progression. Yet time is unequally distributed. Women and girls perform approximately 16 billion hours of unpaid care work each day globally, and the gender gap in unpaid work is projected to persist for decades. Institutional clocks are designed for uninterrupted bodies and uninterrupted careers, while many lives are structured by care, disability, bureaucratic sequencing, and fluctuating capacity. This commentary advances temporal injustice as an inequality regime through which tempo, continuity, and responsiveness are converted into merit. Drawing on crip theory, the commentary positions crip time as an analytic lens that exposes how ableist temporal expectations are embedded in standards of productivity, legitimacy, and merit. The temporal injustice, crip time, and gender nexus is developed through four dimensions: chrononormativity and temporal structuring; gendered care and the privatization of temporal costs; bureaucratic time and organizational checkpoints; and embodied accumulation and temporal cartographies.
The presence of women in high-level positions in companies has become a prominent issue in recent years, and several studies have investigated their influence on a company's performance and risk. We extend this literature by analyzing the impacts of women's management on the firm value and bankruptcy risk across different cultures and periods of economic recessions. With a data sample of 918 companies that constitute essential stock market indices from 20 different nationalities from 2010 to 2022, we show that when women are in important leadership positions, the firm value increases, and the risk of bankruptcy reduces. Furthermore, the results suggest that the positive (negative) association between gender diversity and firm value (bankruptcy risk) is relatively stronger in countries with lower levels of gender equality, which reflect a compensatory governance role and/or a selection effect among women who overcome stronger institutional and cultural barriers to leadership positions. We also find evidence that female leadership is associated with greater firm resilience during periods of economic recession, reflected in higher firm value and lower bankruptcy risk.
This study develops and evaluates preliminary psychometric evidence for the Organizational Gender Backlash Scale (OGB-S), a candidate measure of gendered organizational practices through which women's authority, competence, legitimacy, and access to strategic resources are challenged when they occupy or exercise leadership in masculine-coded domains. As exploratory nomological evidence, the study examines whether OGB is associated with leadership-related psychological and health strain and symbolic career self-limitation among women leaders. A non-probabilistic, purposive sample of 271 women holding formal or informal leadership positions in Peruvian organizations participated in the study. The OGB-S was evaluated as a theoretically specified set of organizational backlash indicators covering hostility/cognitive invalidation, sabotage/obstruction, exclusion, and gender stereotyping/role policing. The revised analytical strategy follows a preliminary validity-evidence sequence: ordinal CFA model comparisons for internal structure, reliability estimation, item-functioning analyses conditional on the supported structure, exploratory spatial and network mapping, and nomological associations with leadership-related strain and symbolic career self-limitation. The complementary analyses are interpreted as exploratory or nomological evidence, not as substitutes for CFA-based structural validation. Ordinal CFA did not support strict unidimensionality or a completed validation claim. None of the tested CFA specifications reached conventional close-fit thresholds because RMSEA remained elevated across models. The one-factor model for the 16 theoretically specified core items showed acceptable incremental fit but elevated absolute misfit (CFI = 0.957, TLI = 0.951, RMSEA = 0.119, SRMR = 0.061). A correlated four-factor model improved fit (CFI = 0.976, TLI = 0.970, RMSEA = 0.093, SRMR = 0.049), and a second-order model remained plausible but still short of close fit (CFI = 0.973, TLI = 0.967, RMSEA = 0.097, SRMR = 0.052). Reliability was high (alpha = 0.947; omega total = 0.964; Schmid-Leiman omega hierarchical = 0.842). These findings support preliminary coherence and relative multidimensional structure, not definitive construct validation or readiness for applied diagnostic use. In the two-stage PLS-PM exploratory nomological model, OGB was positively associated with leadership-related strain (beta = 0.597) and with symbolic career self-limitation through strain (indirect beta = 0.311), accounting for 35.7% of variance in strain and 55.0% in self-limitation. The study operationalizes Organizational Gender Backlash as role-contingent practices reported by women leaders themselves, extending backlash research beyond experimental penalties and proxy outcomes. It offers the OGB-S as an initial measurement framework for studying how women's authority is challenged after they enter or exercise leadership roles. Consistent with the CFA evidence, the scale should be treated as a preliminary instrument requiring further item refinement, replication, and external validation.
