Essays On Gender And Governance - United Nations Development ...

Locating Gender in the Governance Discourse
woman corporate image, and has actively initiated policies to
promote women to senior positions, the study indicates that the
career system remains ‘male-oriented’ and that managementinitiated
change programmes have limits. A small number of elite
women have benefited from the changes, but the great expansion
of women’s employment has been in low paid, non-regular jobs
(Lam, 1997:228-29).
This predisposition - seen even in reformed institutions,
whether public or private, and extending to NGOs as well - has
been called the deep structure of organizations. Case-studies of
local government organisations in Britain have pointed to the
gendered structures and cultures of these, reinforcing the argument
that gender relations - like those of class and race - are embedded
in state institutions, and do not only exist somewhere else in society,
i.e., outside the state (Halford, 1992:160). Many organisational
practices which appear to be gender-neutral in fact have different
impacts on men and women. These include: formal procedures of
job evaluation, work and family benefits, system of rewards and
incentives, norms about when meetings are to be held, time spent
at work (persons who have responsibilities outside work being
systematically disadvantaged), etc. (Kolb and Meyerson, 1999:140-
41).
Women generally occupy lower positions in the occupational
hierarchy, and also tend to be concentrated in occupations which
are typically low paid, have little security of employment, and fewer
authority or career opportunities. Apart from the agricultural
occupations, where the concentration of women is notoriously high,
gender-based segregation is found even in non-agricultural
occupations. Thus, there may be a preponderance of women among
primary school teachers, but this is unlikely to be reflected in a
corresponding preponderance among university teachers in the
same country e.g., Finland. In factories, too, the change in the
pattern of manufacturing - from heavy to light, assembly-type
manufacture, and the growth in the information technology
industry - has generated a great demand for women in jobs which
are low paid, non-unionized and typically not adequately covered
by safety and health regulations. Women workers in the exportprocessing
zones, for instance, are overwhelmingly female, earn
20 to 50 per cent less than men who do comparable work, and are
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