Men Doing and Undoing Gender at Work: A Review and Research Agenda

• Published date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12146
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Elisabeth K. Kelan

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 20, 544–558 (2018)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12146

Men Doing and Undoing Gender at Work:

A Review and Research Agenda

Elisabeth K. Kelan

Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedford, MK43 0AL, UK

Corresponding author email: Elisabeth.kelan@cranfield.ac.uk

While research on gender in organizations has not only documented sustained gender

inequality, it has also offeredan understanding of how gender is enacted through doing

and undoing gender. An underexplored aspect concerns how men can do and undo

gender to support or hinder gender equality processes in organizations.Doing gender is

then understood as creating gender difference while undoing gender would conversely

mean to reduce gender difference. The formeris supporting gender inequality while the

latter means moving toward gender equality. This article therefore provides a system-

atic review of empirical articles that discuss how men are doing and undoing gender

within an organizational context. It is shown that undoing gender practices of men in

organizations are under-researchedand a research agenda of how men can undo gender

at work is thus developed. This article makes a two-fold contribution: first it offers a

refinement of doing and undoing gender approaches and second, it developsa research

agenda for exploring howmen can undo gender at work.

Introduction

While there has been a lot of focus on women in or-

ganizations, the role of men in organizational gender

equality processes is less well understood. Men are

often seen as hindering women’s progress (Cockburn

1991; McKinsey 2012; Prime and Moss-Racusin

2009) yet a detailed and systematic account of how

their practices are supporting or hindering gender

equality is still missing. While research has anal-

ysed how men enact masculinities (Kerfoot 1992;

Mccabe and Knights 2015; Mellstr¨

om 2004; Simpson

2004), there is much less research that explores the

concerted yet often subconscious actions that men

engage in to exclude women (Martin 2001). Such

research sees gender as social practice or, in other

words, a doing gender (Gherardi 1994; Martin 2003).

There has been ample research to explore doing gen-

der at work (for instance, Eriksson-Zetterquist and

The research is based on a British Academy Mid-Career Fel-

lowship [MD130085]. I would like to thank Patricia Wratil,

Alison Collins, the anonymous reviewers and the editor,

Caroline Gatrell, for their invaluable comments on earlier

versions of this article.

Renemark 2016; Leidner 1991, 1993; Mavin et al.

2014; Tibbals 2007), which has often drawn on dif-

ferent conceptualizations of doing and undoing gen-

der (Kelan 2010). Doing gender can, for instance, be

understood as enacting gender in such a way that it

is in line with gender normative expectations while

undoing gender then means to enact gender in non-

normative ways (Kelan 2010). However, these con-

ceptualizations of doing and undoing gender do not

necessarily make a statement about gender inequality,

i.e. undoing gender does not per se mean that gender

equality is established. Undoing gender then does not

mean that power structures and hierarchies disappear

(van den Brink and Benschop 2012). Another use-

ful conceptualization of undoing gender is employed

by Deutsch (2007), who distinguishes between do-

ing gender as creating gender difference and undoing

gender as reducing gender difference. While the for-

mer leads to gender inequality the latter leads to gen-

der equality. Such a lens on doing and undoing gen-

der is well-suited to explore how men’s practices are

supporting or challenging the existing gender system

or, put differently, how they are doing and undoing

gender.

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