> And by the way, I know that "gender"  is among the buzz words when we are
> talking about any topic related to the society

Dear Bijan,
there appears to be a rather simplistic understanding of gender, buzz word or not, in this thread. I therefore provide a definition of key terms, drawn from my thesis, about women in design scholarship – a term I coined to describe academic work in design, because of the way in which such work is traditionally divided along gender lines.

First, sex is male/female classification (along scientific biological lines, although this binary classification is blurred with individuals who cannot be simply classified as either male or female).

Second, sex category is individuals' ongoing performances of certain criteria that describe multiple masculinities and femininities. Sex categorisation is often mistakenly understood in binary terms, whereby the feminine is the negative of the masculine, e.g.assertive vs passive; rational vs emotional. Gender on the other hand, is understood as an active verb in which certain actions/practices/processes are gendered, rather than a noun that some people ‘have’. In other words, we enact gender through gendered practices, rather than have or be a gender.

Third, gendering, according to Acker (1990) is the active production and reproduction of certain practices that are accomplished along gender lines. In conference keynotes, for example, the gatekeepers of the practices of peer review and publishing are predominantly male editors and scholars, who decide who is and is not of high enough ‘standard’ to enter the domain. Yet standards are actually kind of arbitrary (think about what is understood as ‘good’ design, not to mention the word itself ‘design’), traditionally determined by a certain kind of masculine scholar, which discriminates against other kinds of masculinities as well as femininities.

The point is that there is no such thing as ‘two genders’, nor women/men – each are social categories that are assigned to certain groups of people through which social order is achieved, and in which we all collude to reproduce. There are instead, multiple feminine and masculine subjectivities which are available in different ways to certain people, which can be understood as gender enactments or performances. To illustrate, Australia’s first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard, was described as ‘barren’ – vilified in the press for the way she spoke, the clothes she wore, her marriage status and decision not to have children. She was assigned a certain kind of femininity, that does not behave according to social expectations about how women should be, to be able to have achieved high office. Our current male prime minister in contrast, represents a certain kind of sporty, ‘man’s man' masculinity that is glorified in Australian society. He is therefore more acceptable in the role of high office because he better fits the social expectation of national leader. These social expectations are the ‘standards’ which have been determined by the long line of previous male prime ministers.

Therefore, addressing gendering does not mean ‘adding women’ or achieving ‘equal numbers’ because the practices that determine and position certain individuals are gendered. Addressing gendering is about changing the practices that actively discriminate against all women and certain men. 
cheers, teena 


For the longer, referenced version, see the excerpt from my thesis:
To define gender, it is necessary to first distinguish between sex, sex category and gender. Sex is classification as male or female, while sex category is the ongoing application of sex criteria through which people identify as male or female (Kelan 2010, p. 179). Gender is,

'…a situated accomplishment of societal members, the local management of conduct in relation to normative conceptions of appropriate attitudes and activities for particular sex categories…gender is not merely an individual attribute but something that is accomplished in interaction with others' (West & Fenstermaker 1995, p. 21).

The distinction between sex and gender enables an understanding of gender as accomplished through social interaction, which de-ontologises gender as ‘fixed in biology…[and] disrupts the idea of biology as destiny’ (Clegg 2008, p. 112). From this perspective, gender is a verb that exercises power, rather than a noun that embodies essentialised attributes (Davies 1996). Gendering is both an active process and also the product of social practices, rather than an individual possession, trait or role. Gender relations are power relations that often take binary form, through which women are positioned as negative to the masculine positive. Through talk, ‘binaries are drawn upon to enact and make sense of gender’ (Hughes 2002, p. 51). In other words, people’s stories both evoke and reproduce gender as they attempt to describe and make sense of their social interactions.

Gender not only organises bodies, but bifurcates the world and its social practices into broad domains based on sexual difference (Gatrell & Swan 2008, p. 4). Through ongoing social processes, practices and discourses, gender is brought into being (produced) and maintained (reproduced) in organisations and institutions (p. 4). In other words, ‘social interaction is a means to ‘do’ gender’ (p. 5). As a relational technology of power, gender inhabits, formulates and gives meaning to organisational practices and discourses, which reproduces institutions, interactions and work practices as gendered (Davies 1996, p. 664). Gender however, is neither fixed nor stable, which means institutional practices and discourses can be ‘challenged, dislodged and transformed in the process of their daily reproduction’ (p. 664). This brings me to ‘doing gender’ at work.

Doing gender

I now outline and make connections between a number of feminist theorisations of ‘doing gender’, central to which is the idea of writing as a textual technology of power. These are: Acker’s (1990) organisational gendering, Smith’s (1987) social relations of ruling, Somerville’s (2007) place stories and Morley’s (2003) micropolitics of power. I begin with organisational gendering.

Broadly underpinning Acker’s (1990) theorisation is a critique of the assumed gender-neutrality of organisational logic and processes. Acker argues that ‘the abstraction of the ‘individual’ from the body’ (p. 150) frames the organisation of work into jobs, occupations and hierarchies as separate to the people who do the work. ‘A job’, for Acker, denotes a particular set of tasks, responsibilities and position within an organisational hierarchy. The abstract job is filled by a disembodied worker who ‘exists only for the work’ (p. 148). The worker is ‘the male worker whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another woman takes care of his personal needs and his children’ (p. 149). Thus, ‘a job’ is a gendered concept, which ‘already contains the gender-based division of labour and the separation between the public and private spheres’ (p. 149). Jobs are organised hierarchically. The logic of job hierarchies is derived from the assumption that those who are committed to paid employment are ‘naturally’ suited to responsibility and authority, while those whose commitments are divided are relegated to the lower ranks of the hierarchy (pp. 149–50). In short, organisational gendering is:

Rational-technical, ostensibly gender-neutral, control systems are built upon and conceal a gendered substructure (Smith 1988) in which men’s bodies fill the abstract jobs. Use of such abstract systems continually reproduces the underlying gender assumptions and the subordinate or excluded place of women (p. 154).

Acker draws on Smith, in this excerpt, to articulate the ‘gendered substructure’ of work organisation as ‘the pervasive and powerful, impersonal, textually mediated relations of ruling’ (p. 155). Smith’s (1987) theorisation of the social relations of ruling explains how gender assumptions structure institutional practices that organise and maintain the subordination or exclusion of women in particular work settings. I now explain relations of ruling.

Smith argues that gendering is accomplished by texts. Texts organise and regulate people’s everyday work interactions and practices. Smith calls this accomplishment the ‘relations of ruling’, which are the modes and forms of objectified consciousness and social organisation constituted by discourse ‘externally to particular people and places’ (p. 13), referencing Acker’s abstract job and disembodied worker. The relations of ruling separate subjects from the particular settings of everyday worlds by displacing local bodily existence and elevating consciousness to the universalised mode of institutional discourse (p. 14). Institutional discourses organise meaning and hence organise the world (Lee 1992, p. 10). Social institutions such as universities produce discourses that delineate subject positions for people to occupy, which determine what they can or cannot say and do. Thus discourse is a form of social regulation of meaning and action (p. 10). Discourse organises the ways in which knowledge and power operate in and through local sites, making it possible to live the effect of these relations while not seeing the ruling practices that produce and regulate them (Luke & Gore 1992, p. 194).

People experience their everyday working lives by socially interacting with others in actual places. Yet their work is articulated and regulated by the institution, rather than organised by, and in relation to, the body (Smith 1987, p. 11). This organisation is mediated, both on the local scale and beyond, by texts that connect local sites to each other (p. 29). Smith argues that through the medium of language, ideas move between individuals and the realm of the social through discourse, which makes people’s local sayings observable as talk. While talk is observable in specific local sites, discourse travels beyond local sites through texts. Local sites are connected through discursive networks that extend the social relations of ruling across geographical space and historical time, although this is not visible on the local scale (p. 44). This brings me to Somerville’s concept of place stories (2007).

Personal stories, as I previously argued, are understood as embodied knowledge production through which people come to know the world by being in particular places. Somerville’s concept of place, in this thesis, translates personal stories to place stories. Place stories enable a description of how particular individuals live and interact with people, practices and discourses in the material environments in which they work. Place stories also enable an articulation of how women are simultaneously subject to and by the broader social relations of ruling that constitute, coordinate and regulate their daily activities. The university, for example, is both a physical place where people work, and a site for certain kinds of discursive practices. Place stories about women’s working lives in universities thus embody the ‘intensely social dimension of intellectual work’ (Hey & Morley 2011, p. 170) by which gendering is accomplished. I now return to Acker (1990) to frame my analysis of women’s place stories.

Acker has identified five levels of organisational gendering. The first involves divisions along gender lines of labour, allowed behaviours, locations in physical space and positionings in power networks, as well as the structural maintenance of these divisions. The second level is symbolic gendering, which is the construction of symbols and imagery that explain, express, legitimise and reinforce gender divisions. The third level is the interactional patterns between women and men, women and women, and men and men that enact dominance and submission. The fourth level incorporates the components of identity, including work choice, language, dress, and the presentation of the self as a viable member of the gendered organisation. The fifth level encompasses the ongoing organisational processes that create, conceptualise and reproduce social structures in work activities on a daily basis. The latter is reflected in Morley’s (2003) micropolitics of power that circulates within the gendered organisational culture in universities.

For Morley, gender manifests in multiple ways to promote men’s authority, and elide and devalue women’s worth, qualifications and knowledge in the labour market of the university. This is achieved through horizontal and vertical segregation that divides academic work along gender lines. Briefly, segregation places women in junior academic positions, adjunct roles, teaching and administrative work, and under-represented as knowledge producers. This limits their access to promotion, remuneration, certain social networks, supervision and mentoring.

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