GMJA 1013 PENGANTAR SAINS SOSIAL : Gendered Organizations: How Human Resource Management Practices Produce and Reproduce Administrative Man

Gendered Organizations: How Human Resource Management Practices Produce and Reproduce Administrative Man

Introduction

Despite the increasing number of women in the workforce, the norms surrounding division of labor in the domestic sphere and work/life balance have not changed. Structural theory predicts that balancing work and family demands will improve as the proportion of women reaches critical mass, because women will advocate on behalf of such changes. But work/life balance remains elusive.  Gendered organizations theory predicts that norms and practices based on stereotyped male and female workers will persist, regardless of the composition of the workforce. Employing an explicitly transformative framework, we argue that human resources management (HRM) practices produce and reproduce outdated gender norms and frustrate the efforts of all workers to achieve work/life balance. No amount of flextime or on-site daycare programs will produce workplace equity without addressing the underlying reasons why organizations are gendered.

Point of Discussion

Gendered norms based on traditional divisions of labor continue to dictate who gets hired, promoted, and rewarded in the workplace (Acker, 2007). In the study of organizations and work/life balance, structural theorists, most notably Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977/2008), claim that as the proportion of women reaches critical mass, work/life balance will become easier because women traditionally face greater family-care responsibilities and therefore will advocate on behalf of such changes. Critical mass, although not identified as a concrete threshold Kanter, 1977/2008), is around one-third of the workforce. Women comprise fully half of the working population, and although certain occupations and agencies continue to be male- or female-dominated, women have, in fact, achieved critical mass in public service employment (Riccucci, 2009).

In other words, no matter the proportions of women and men, gendered norms and practices maintain traditional ideals about how women and men should work; ideals dating back to the origin of organizations. We argue that human resource management (HRM) practices produce and reproduce outdated ideals and frustrate the efforts of all employees—women and men—to achieve work/life balance, and we provide propositions to guide ongoing research in public human resource management (Perry, 2010).

Although more and more women have entered the formal workforce, proportional parity has failed to bring about gender equity (Guy & Fenley, 2014; Hsieh & Winslow, 2006). Gendered organizations operate with rules, procedures, rituals, and expectations that favor typically masculine traits and either ignore or devalue caregiving. Joan Acker (2007) defines organizational gendering as “pervasive patterns of difference [and] a basic principle of social organization” (p. 5). Gender at the individual level is evident in individual choices to follow behaviors expected of the sex group into which each person is categorized, from clothing and makeup choices, to hair styles, jewelry, and other personal-appearance choices, to patterns of speaking in a meeting, how a meeting is run, how an employee is disciplined, and even to notions of what jobs to hold or careers to pursue. These choices are informed by gender at the group level, as is evident in the behaviors and choices that women and men tend to do. An individual woman or man may choose differently, but at the group level of analysis, certain tendencies arise and are gender coded/gender typed: Men engage in physical labor, have competitive conversational styles (Chen & Chen, 2012; McCloskey, 1999), are assertive or aggressive in decision-making, and serve as authority figures and disciplinarians.

Women typically engage in relationship building and managing, are supportive, and have the interests of the group in mind. Individual preferences toward gendered roles and expectations are translated into routine organizational operations. In this article, we argue that human resource management practices produce and reproduce gendered norms, and we present six propositions based on the literature to guide future hypothesis testing for the purpose of advocating for an action agenda that will improve the work/life balance prospects of all workers, both male and female.

The concept of gendered organizations is a logical consequence of understanding gender as socially constructed. While research on organizations and gender from a structuralist standpoint views the two separately, others understand gender as internal to processes that structure the organization (Hutchinson & Mann, 2006). Perhaps the leading example of structuralism is Rosabeth Moss Kanter's (1977/2008) Men and Women of the Corporation. Kanter interpreted inequalities, such as barriers to women's advancement, as resulting from where women were situated in the hierarchy and their overall numbers within the organization.

 The idea of gendered organizations evolved alongside definitions of gender: As understandings of gender evolved from biological sex to social construction, theories of gendered organizations also evolved to reflect that new definition, including organizations as social processes. Gendering and workplace social processes are manifested in HRM policies and practices. Guy and Spice (2009) discuss gendered human resource practices as left over from decades past when the workforce was male dominated: “The demographics of the workforce have changed faster than the HR practices that govern classification, compensation, and benefits” (p. 244).

The effects of being employed in such an organization can be felt even at the level of the individual employee: “The view of organizations as gender neutral facilitates an individualistic view of relative successes, influence, and power—the view that people succeed because of superior abilities, dedication, and performance” (Acker, 2000, p. 630). Human resource management policies and programs tend to maintain inequalities between women and men. This is rooted in the tendency of organizations to develop processes and practices based on what Acker calls the “ideal worker” or “organizational man” (Acker 1990, p. 145). Denhardt and Perkins equate organizational man with administrative man, a concept that is based on outdated norms of masculinity and penalizes fatherhood as well as motherhood: Women have been disadvantaged because organizations place a higher value on behaviors, styles, and forms of work traditionally associated with men, masculinity, and the public sphere of work, while devaluing, suppressing, or otherwise ignoring those traditionally associated with women, femininity, and the private sphere of home and family. (Ely & Meyerson, 2000b, p. 109).

In order to understand how these gendered norms and practices operate, it is helpful first to examine how they are created and fostered within an organization. Scholars often trace the gendering of an organization to aspects of its founding moments. Baron, Hannan, Hsu, and Kocak (2007) highlight the foundation laid by male and female roles in the organization at the time of its inception: “The initial sexual division of labor within firms may represent one of the most influential organizational founding conditions and serve as a mechanism by which cultural blueprints and early structures and practices shape subsequent organizational development” (p. 59).

The importance of the founding moment lies not only in gender segregation, but also in the gendered norms, processes, policies, and practices that shape every day within an organization, though not overtly. “Blatantly biased actions are viewed as illegitimate because western values frame them as wrong, but subtle forms of practicing gender are not widely viewed as wrong” (Martin, 2003, p. 361). Subtle forms of practicing gender produce the workplace processes and practices that produce and reproduce historical or existing inequalities (Riccucci, 2009). They can be found in HRM activities such as recruitment and hiring, performance evaluation and job descriptions, and rewarding face time or presenteeism. It is to these that we now turn.

One way that organizational gendering manifests and perpetuates is through recruitment and

hiring. From an increased likelihood of interviewing women for low-paying positions to hiring men more often for high-paying positions, gender can strongly impact who gets recruited and who gets overlooked (Fernandez & Mors, 2008). Gender-stereotyped hiring criteria, emphasizing stereotypically masculine or feminine traits, can disadvantage applicants who do not appear to fulfill the stereotypes (Gorman, 2005; Pratto, Stallworth, Sidanius, & Siers, 1997).

However, the transparency generated by bureaucratized, formal processes for recruitment and hiring can increase women's opportunities to be hired in nontraditional occupations, mitigating occupational segregation and increasing women's potential for advancement. Unfortunately, bureaucratized, formal processes for recruitment and hiring, rather than being neutral, can reinforce the male-worker norm (Acker, 1990), and informal paths for recruitment can provide an opportunity for biases to play a role (Acker, 2007). Kmec (2005, p. 326) details how reliance on informal networks can introduce bias: Informal network recruitment, namely employer reliance on current employees to generate contacts, facilitates employer discretion and exposes the hiring process to the stereotyping and favoritism that tend to accompany discretion . Although the reliance on current employees to generate referrals may benefit employers, this recruitment strategy can bias the hiring process against applications in nontraditional sex groups and maintain sex traditional employment.

This evidence leads to our first proposition, which although well established in the literature, we introduce here as a gendered HR practice that can thwart equity even in a gender-balanced organization: Proposition 1:

Informal, word-of-mouth processes for hiring and promoting perpetuate

gendered divisions of labor in an organization. Formal processes of recruitment and hiring are not immune from gender bias. Skuratowicz and Hunter (2004) subtly conveyed organizational attitudes about gender roles by using pictures and videos showing men in supervisory positions and women in lower, nonsupervisory positions in order to inform workers about new positions. Camilla Stivers (2002) challenges the gender-neutral image of public administration in Gender Images in Public Administration.

Organizations can reveal their gendered nature in other human resource functions, like performance evaluations and job descriptions. Baron et al. (2007) highlight the importance of implementation for determining the effectiveness of bureaucratic safeguards against bias: “Job evaluation, formalized performance appraisals, and the like can be implemented in ways that simply objectify and obscure [occupational segregation by gender] or in ways that have the opposite effect” (p. 40). Performance evaluations play a central role in determining who moves up within an organization, who wields power in the organization, and who is permitted to shape procedures and processes in the organization, making them an extremely important component

of gendering in organizations.

Beverly Metcalfe (2008) interviewed female human resource development (HRD) professionals in the private sector who conduct training sessions for their companies. She observed how “‘achievement’, ‘control’, ‘measurable results’ and ‘performance goals’ are key signifiers of HRD outcomes. The harder aspects of performance are given pre-eminence and represent an instrumental and unemotional work orientation associated with dominant masculinities, discussions of ‘relationship building’, ‘nurturing’ and ‘communication’ are subsumed symbolically and culturally” (p. 454). Determining whether relational/emotional skills are valued the same as more rational skills in Illinois state agency performance evaluations, Mastracci, Newman, and Guy (2006) did not find widespread recognition of emotional labor as a central element of work. Rather, emotional labor, when recognized, was markedly subordinate to rational skills in evaluation instruments (Lu & Guy, 2014; Yang & Guy, 2015).

The failure to incorporate what is stereotypically thought of as behavior characteristic of women into performance evaluations is troubling because it implicitly prizes behaviors stereotypically associated with men over those associated with women. Transparency and formalized bureaucratic rules and procedures can, as in hiring, act to mitigate bias in performance appraisals, but as Mastracci, Newman, and Guy (2006) indicate, senior leaders in charge of creating performance evaluation instruments must be conscious of the potential for bias at play within the confines of formalized human resources practices. This confirms the findings of Bowman (2010) and Ridgeway and Smith-Lovin (1996), who revealed how performance evaluation criteria reflect the behavior and actions of past jobholders and are applied to newcomers whether they fit the profile of previous jobholders or not. In keeping with the findings of Ridgeway and Smith-Lovin (1996), evaluators must be made aware that they may have biases produced by spillovers from previous practices.

Without the guidance of written rules and procedures, staff often fell back on the expectations and values they held as individuals.” Formalized processes can be instituted in any organization, but larger organizations tend to be more bureaucratic: “Establishment size (number of employees) is positively associated with formalization because large establishments are more likely than small ones to have a personnel system or full-time human resources department to enforce equitable hiring practices that support sex equity” (Kmec, 2005, p. 329). Use of third-party entities to recruit and identify potential job candidates, or the use of impartial screening devices like the federal government's website USAJobs, or using the civil service system decreases sex-typing of candidates into jobs and thereby decreases occupational segregation by gender: “Research in the United States also suggests that gender segregation and wage inequality are often less marked in labor market sectors (such as government)and organizations that use formal procedures governing hiring, evaluation, and promotion” (Britton, 2000, p. 423). Prior findings on performance evaluations and job descriptions lead to additional propositions:

Proposition 3: Formalized performance evaluation processes allow evidence of employee performance to guide promotion and advancement rather than biased norms; where informal processes predominate, gendered divisions of labor will endure. However, formal performance evaluation procedures must take care to avoid gendered stereotypes of work that can exacerbate, rather than mitigate, workplace inequities:

Proposition 4: Where task accomplishment is emphasized over relationship building and maintenance in performance evaluations and job descriptions, gendered divisions of labor will endure.

Proposition 5: Routine audits of performance evaluation instruments and job descriptions can root out gendered assumptions and mitigate gendered divisions of labor.

As women began to enter the workforce in greater numbers in the 1970s, many organizations responded by implementing work/life balance policies intended to facilitate women's ability to adequately address both work and home responsibilities. At that time, work/life balance policies were primarily aimed at women, and often were referred to as “family friendly” or “work/ family” policies, tacitly connecting them to women's role as caregivers to their families (Brannen et al., 1994; Lewis, 2010). This became a gendered workplace norm that may not be visible in policy but nonetheless exists in many organizations, fostering the perception by many workers that these policies are really intended for women (Scheibl & Dex, 1998; Smithson & Stokoe, 2005).

Paid sick leave was formally available to all employees, but one had to discuss with one's supervisor the nature of one's illness in order to receive it. Young women, whose supervisor in every instance was a man, were often too embarrassed to discuss with him such illnesses as menstrual cramps. As a result, they received fewer authorized leaves. Unauthorized leaves were unpaid, and people who received too many of them risked being labeled “slackers.” Requiring employees to discuss their reason for wanting leave creates an informal obstacle to use, especially when a gender dynamic, such as the one in the preceding example, is present.

Constant physical presence at work, on the other hand, when not a requirement of the job, as is the case for nurses, police officers, and security guards, is a deeply masculinist gendered practice that discriminates against fatherhood as well (Burnett, Gatrell, Cooper, & Sparrow, 2013), because it is premised on separate spheres of home and work, the demand for physical availability, and the value of so-called face time. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) acknowledges the problematic potential of presenteeism, “the practice of sitting at one's desk without working, [which] can be just as problematic as absenteeism” (Berry, 2011, p. 8). Presenteeism is a gendered workplace practice because it affects male and female workers differently, and is more often detrimental to women. Patricia Yancey Martin (2003) observed the disparate effects of presenteeism through the experience of a female engineer working in a male-dominated workplace, whose “boss told her she was ‘not gregarious enough’ ” (Martin, 2003, p. 350):

Conclusion

DeLysa Burnier (2003) calls for a transformation of the field of public administration through a deeper interrogation of gender. Hutchinson and Mann (2004) similarly call for a feminist re-visioning of public administration. Human resource management practices represent but a small slice of the field, but changes in HRM practices affect the working lives of public administration professionals. The purpose of this article was to demonstrate how HRM practices reproduce gendered norms.

Knowing that gendered organizations and their gendered practices are not a function of sex representation, but rather are deeply engrained roles and expectations, we can no longer use statistics on the growth of women in full-time employment or examples of women in upper management as proxies for fairer and more humane workplaces. Public sector human resource managers can no longer presume workplace equity based on the number of male and female workers in their agencies. Rather, a wholesale investigation and reorganization of the workplace and its expectations of workers is needed. Work culture must acknowledge that women, as well as men, have lives outside the cubicle and allow professional ambition to include flextime and family leave, too. It costs little to incorporate life-friendly policies, but they are invaluable to parents, employee caregivers, and those who need to make time for self-care. Dismantling the organization man will lead to a new workplace where humans will thrive and thus their work will flourish. This can happen in future research that recasts our propositions as testable hypotheses to examine gendered organizations, either empirically (Horiuchi, 2005) or interpretively (Burnier, 2005), by capturing the narratives of public sector workers seeking balance between their work roles and care roles.