Executive women, gendered behaviour and adaptive social structures

Abstract

This chapter highlights how gender is an enduring point of difference in social relations within and outside places of work. To understand gender relations, individual gendering is an important marker of behaviour, as are individual(s) interaction with others and the structures that provide a framework for this interaction to occur. Individuals interact on a constant basis (human agency), suggesting that agency is constantly produced and reproduced by structure, and that structure is influenced by agency. All structures are social in nature – such as government institutions, organisations, society, family, tribes and more. Actors (e.g. organisational members) continuously interpret their own and others’ lives as social structures act on people and people act on social structures (Giddens 1984). To study or investigate gender per se can be perennially tricky, since gendered behaviour is not something produced or reproduced by itself. Rather, gender is probably best understood when one considers the phenomenon along with race and class (Acker 2006; Andersen 2005), and when one considers that gender is a socially constructed stratification system.