ABSTRACT Calls to decolonize feminist theory and praxis have become increasingly visible across scholarly and activist arenas. Yet a persistent contradiction remains: feminist institutions increasingly invoke epistemic plurality, wheras the infrastructures through which feminist knowledge is funded, reviewed, and circulated often privilege legibility within dominant settings shaped by whiteness, secular‐liberal norms, and institutional respectability. Although feminist scholarship has illuminated mechanisms of epistemic marginalization, including citation politics and decolonial exclusion, less attention has been paid to how they interact through shared feminist infrastructures to shape epistemic authority. We address this gap through co‐implication, which explains how differently positioned actors who participate within these infrastructures can transform feminist difference into unequal epistemic authority. Mapping these processes through four interacting feminist logics—redistributive, recognitional, relational, and reparative—we show how gains within one logic may be contained, converted, or undermined through another as feminist claims are evaluated, funded, translated, and legitimized. Co‐implication therefore explains how organizational practices can widen participation while leaving agenda‐setting and epistemic authority concentrated. Thus, the paper shifts attention from where feminist actors are positioned to what happens to feminist knowledge and authority as they move through institutional infrastructures and organizational practices.
ABSTRACT Human resource (HR) professionals and office staff are often responsible for competing tasks that quickly accumulate. To increase efficiency, some HR staff are turning to large language models (LLMs) to automate tasks, including creating job postings based on job titles alone. We sought to examine how this practice has the potential to influence applicant pools and hiring outcomes, with attention to gendered effects in organizational settings. Using a broad sample of 48 LLMs, we conducted an algorithm audit to evaluate whether the use of a gender‐neutral or gender‐coded job title would influence the output created by LLMs. We measured salary disparities, unmasked comparative narrative ratings, and BSRI‐informed discursive patterning utilized throughout the job description. We selected 32 jobs and created a female‐coded, male‐coded, and gender‐neutral version of each job title (e.g., firewoman, fireman, and firefighter), studying a total of 4608 job descriptions. In comparing the LLM outputs, we found that for white‐collar job titles, male‐coded job descriptions were assigned higher salaries, but this was not robust across all analyses. Across occupations, advertisements generated from gender‐coded titles received higher unmasked comparative LLM ratings than matched advertisements generated from gender‐neutral titles, with female‐coded advertisements receiving the highest ratings. Minimal optimization appeared to substantially reduce these ratings and perform comparably to maximal optimization, but neither reached the lower ratings observed when generation began with a gender‐neutral title. As the use of AI tools is becoming commonplace, our findings emphasize the need for feminist, organizationally accountable approaches to AI‐assisted HR work. Simple prompt modifications can mitigate, but not fully eliminate, some measured gendered differences in LLM‐generated job descriptions, but they do not eliminate deeper occupationally gendered patterns.
This article examines how the term "career woman" organized newspaper accounts of women's work in Britain between 1985 and 2020. It draws on 283 articles from The Guardian, The Times, and the Daily Mail, using corpus-informed sampling and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis shows how the label repeatedly moved discussion of women's professional lives beyond the workplace through three recurring patterns. Lifestyle coverage ties professional identity to appearance, diet, and bodily self-management. Reporting on workplace inequality often explains unequal pay and progression through women's confidence, ambition, and domestic decisions. Accounts of fertility and motherhood frame career commitment through reproductive delay and loss. Across these contexts, "career woman" works as a gendered category of judgment, making women's authority accountable to expectations of femininity, care, and reproductive timing. The study contributes to gender, work, and organization research by showing how the label "career woman" connects professional ambition and organizational legitimacy with bodily discipline, care, and reproductive timing in British newspaper discourse.
ABSTRACT Using a large cross‐country dataset from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we show that firms with female top managers employ more women, are more likely to provide female employees with job training, childcare support, and maternity benefits, and, in an Islamic‐country context, exhibit lower levels of gender discrimination. The positive effect of female leadership on women's employment is stronger in countries with weaker legal gender equality and limited institutional support for women in business, but weaker in male‐dominated industries. We further find that the share of female employees mediates the negative association between female leadership and firm productivity. Nevertheless, we find that female‐led firms underperform comparable male‐led peers with similar shares of female employees, suggesting that the gender gap in firm performance is still driven by managerial factors other than employee gender composition.
ABSTRACT In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is widely used today, but how it fits into working life is still not well understood. Although research on its physical, emotional and occupational challenges is well established, less is known about how the work experience is impacted by processes at institutional (macro), organizational (meso) and individual (micro) levels. Drawing on the concept of reproductive governance and Gidden's structuration theory, we show how working women in France and Turkey experience IVF within institutional structures that shape the IVF experience. Reproductive governance identifies the institutional setting in which IVF is organized, whereas structuration theory explains how rules and resources gain force in practice. Drawing on 23 semi‐structured interviews and 2.103 publicly available digital narratives, we identify similar difficulties across both countries in combining treatment and employment, despite differences in institutional provision. Formal eligibility and funding did not consistently translate into workplace accommodation, leaving women to coordinate treatment through individual arrangements that could involve personal costs. The article develops a multilevel account of reproductive governance at work and shows that effective support depends on coordinated clinical, organizational, and policy arrangements.
