Flawed Policy, Failed Politics? Challenging the Sexual Politics of Managing Diversity in Engineering Organizations

Why do EDI policies fail? An inhabited institutions perspective

Purpose

Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies have proliferated in recent decades, but studies have repeatedly noted their inefficacy and adverse effects. To understand the potential root causes of the inefficiency of EDI policies, this study examines how they are inhabited by individuals at the ground level.

Design/methodology/approach

This study draws on data gathered through 23 in-depth interviews with instructors at Progressive U, a large research-intensive Canadian university.

Findings

The data gathered/analyzed suggest that the implementation of EDI policies at Progressive U is hindered by the absence of coercive enforcement mechanisms, skepticism about their authenticity, the over-regulation of work and unresponsive bureaucratic structures.

Originality/value

This study examines the implementation of EDI policies through the prism of the inhabited institutions perspective in organizational sociology, producing insights that help to explain why EDI policies typically fail. In doing so, it produces insights relevant to both academic researchers and practitioners in the field.

Corporate Diversity Programs and Gender Inequality in the Oil and Gas Industry

Since the 1980s, major U.S. corporations have embraced diversity as a management strategy to increase the number of women in top jobs. Diversity management programs include targeted recruitment, hiring, and promotions policies; mentoring programs; affinity groups; and diversity training. Few of these programs have proven effective in achieving gender diversity in the corporate world, despite their widespread popularity. To explore the reasons for this, the authors investigate the experiences of women scientists in the oil and gas industry who are targeted by these programs. In-depth interviews reveal possible reasons why these programs fail to achieve their intended goals. The authors find that these programs can paradoxically reinforce gender inequality and male dominance in the industry. The authors discuss alternative approaches for addressing gender inequality in work organizations and conclude with implications of their findings for corporate approaches to promoting diversity and for future research.

Working hard with gender

Purpose

Manual trades and information technology (IT) are male‐dominated occupations and as such cultivate unique forms of hegemonic masculinity. Women entering these occupations represent a kind of crisis to this gender order in the workplace, making the experiences of these women a useful way of studying how gender regimes are maintained and may be challenged at work. The aim of this paper is to examine how women found doing gender in the male dominated workplaces became a kind of work in itself.

Design/methodology/approach

A life history framework was used for this research, in which 15 women from manual trades and 15 women from IT occupations were interviewed. The in‐depth qualitative method allowed the participants the time and space to communicate the contradictions they experienced doing their gender and doing their gender at work.

Findings

The effort expended because the participants were women and because they were a minority was experienced both as an intense pressure and as significant to their success in their occupations. This indicates that gendered work outside of the formal duties of a job makes the work of those in a gender minority particularly strenuous. This understanding of gender at work as work is important to understanding how efforts to address gender equity in workplaces must work beyond quotas and policy and also address embodied gendered cultures.

Originality/value

While women working in male dominated cultures are often studied in terms of the challenges they face, from this research these challenges are framed as a kind of gendered work in itself. This work is often invisible, usually emotion work and mostly unrecognised. Highlighting the nature of this gendered labour and the pressures it places on women in male dominated work reframes what it means to work and the importance of these invisible forms of labour to maintaining successful production relations.