In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work.jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational (...) thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference. (shrink)

In the deviance literature, sexual assaults at work have not been given the sustained attention that harm to property or violation of production guidelines has received. This omission suggests that sexual harassment is considered normative and that when women fail to accommodate this reality, it is the survivor rather than the perpetrator who is considered deviant. This article reports on 64 cases of attempted or completed rape in a sample of heterosexual and lesbian women workers in a wide range of (...) occupations. Two atypical responses, quitting the job or filing a complaint as a result of a workplace sexual assault, highlight the process by which informal deviance defining occurs in everyday interactions at work. (shrink)

Despite increasing numbers of women lawyers, gender segregation within the legal profession in the United States continues. The present article examines interorganizational differences in the employment of 34 men and 34 women lawyers in 12 in-house legal departments that varied by size and industry in corporations located in the northeast United States. There were differences among the firms with respect to the number, position, and salary of men and women lawyers. The findings suggest that women in-house counsel do not enter (...) the same type of practice or organizations, obtain the same positions, or earn the same salaries as men. The differential employment patterns, the article concludes, stem largely from organizational contingencies, such as a firm's market position, perceived needs, the kinds of rewards and training offered, and recruitment strategies. It also suggests that men's and women's differential location in the labor pool results not from their own career choices but from employer's hiring and work-allocation decisions that provide them with different experiences and expertise, which in turn constrain future employment options. (shrink)