Basia McDougall MPhil.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

specifically at working mothers written by women, for example: mumandworking.co.uk;netmums.co.uk; workingmumsday.co.uk. mumsincontrol.co.uk; motheratwork.co.uk etc. Thecontent of such websites is broadly similar and increasingly vocal. workingmums.co.uk istypical: the first blog discussion point reads: “Flexible working: a female myth or are men justnot aware of the benefits?” The sites, some of which are franchises, also commonly addresswork-life balance issues; naming ‘good’ companies to work for and offer advice regardingrights, especially regarding flexible work. Interestingly, there are similar sites for workingfathers for example: fatherhood institute.org but these are far fewer in number. Notably, the‘Fatherhood Institute’ (2012) reflects the gender pay gap as an issue for men too:The fact that men's earnings are generally a higher proportion of the family incomethan women's can limit the time men are able to spend with their children. Differentpatterns emerge where women earn more. (Fatherhood Institute 2012 [online])Such comments indicate that there is more to the simplistic figures offered by the ONSsummaries (Pike 2012) and illustrated in figure 2. The gender pay is narrowing but this couldbe due to a skewed sample. The fact that women are frequently and openly exposed toconcepts such as the ‘glass ceiling’ for example may discourage them from applying for jobswhere discrimination is known to exist - or be discouraged to seek higher responsibility andstatus, where again, it is acknowledged that women are in the minority, for example CEOroles. This perspective of the gender pay gap concentrates statistics better reflectingorganisations which do carry out pay surveys and suggest a false improvement in thegender pay gap - a potential type 1 error.The UK lags behind other European countries with regards fairness in a number of familyrelated measures (Williams 2010). It could be argued that websites and reports reflect whatwomen (and men) are interested in and reflects their current issues and needs. Such trawlsthrough the internet however, without a systematic methodology, simply add anecdotalevidence.One way in which to address the contradiction between organisational values of equality andpolicy outcome is to apply the concept of ‘doublethink’ (El-Sawad, Arnold and Cohen 2004).Simply put, the notion of doublethink is where two contradictory narratives are offered by thesame individual, seemingly unaware of the contradiction. The El-Sawad et al. paper evenoffers two examples of gender discrimination in their small sample: one view reflecting theequal opportunities policy and one view, the opposite reality. It might be argued that womenalso demonstrate double-think – adopting a different set of values in the workplace, asemployees. An alternative explanation could be to hypothesise an association between anorganisation’s personality (Brown 2010) and the experience a woman may have within24