25 Years On: Reflecting on the Past and Looking to the Future in Gender and Management Research
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Adelina Broadbridge,Ruth Simpson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00758.x |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
25 Years On: Reflecting on the Past and
Looking to the Future in Gender and
Management Research
Adelina Broadbridge and Ruth Simpson
1
Institute for Socio Management, School of Management, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK, and
1
Brunel Business School, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK
Email: a.m.broadbridge@stir.ac.uk; R.Simpson@brunel.ac.uk
This paper celebrates the progress that has been made in gender and management
research over the last 25 years and outlines some current challenges faced. The British
Journal of Management has disseminated many of the key debates, from empirical and
theoretical work, that have helped to both frame and reflect developments in the field –
and this paper charts some of this diverse terrain. Challenges include current
conceptualizations that gender issues have been ‘solved’ with a tendency towards
‘gender denial’ in understandings of work based disadvantage. Future areas of research
are identified including the need to continue to monitor and publicize gender difference;
to clarify and conceptualize emerging gendered hierarchies and new forms of gendered
power; and to reveal hidden, gendered practices and processes currently concealed
within norms, customs and values.
Introduction
In this paper, in celebration of 25 years of the
British Journal of Management (BJM), we present
an overview of the substantial progress that has
been made in the field of gender in management
research as well as, less optimistically, of some of
the ‘struggles for survival’ that we suggest have
recently occurred. While the term ‘sex’ refers to
people’s biological characteristics that denote
their physiological make-up and reproductive
status, gender refers to the socio-cultural con-
structions of sex differences and the beliefs about
what is appropriate for, or typical of, one sex
more than the other including feelings, behaviour
and interests. Gender therefore refers to the
social role associations with being male or female
(Powell and Graves, 2003).
Since its inception in the late 1970s, work on
gender has become increasingly diverse encom-
passing areas such as leadership, power and
authority relations, careers and career barriers,
gendered organizational cultures, emotions,
entrepreneurship, work–life balance in addition
to critical studies on men and masculinities.
Much of this work has been disseminated
through BJM – both framing and reflecting
developments in the field. Thus, in a special issue
on state-of-the-art review papers, one of the first
papers providing a critical review of gender
research was published by Judi Marshall in
December 1995. Other papers in BJM during
that decade charted various aspects of gender in
management including the barriers women face
in their careers (Ashburner, 1991); differences
between men and women in decision making
behaviours (Johnson and Powell, 1994); charac-
teristics of male and female small and medium
sized businesses (Mukhtar, 1998); career barriers
of ‘token’ women managers (Simpson, 1997); and
gender differences in notions of career success
(Sturges, 1999).
With increasing recognition that gender over-
arches other areas, more recently work published
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 470–483 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00758.x
r2011 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management r2011 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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