Men are previlged more in different activities than women . How can you justify?
Answers
Explanation:
Many writers on gender inequality in public sector organisations (Mills
and Tancred 1992; Hearn 1992; Alvesson and Billing 1997) demon-
strate the structural and institutional dimensions of gender inequality
and their embodiment in organisational culture and policies. Such
approaches emphasise the importance of locating gender inequality
within the context of collective arrangements. However, many of these
theorists do not explore adequately the responsibility of members of
privileged groups for maintaining these social arrangements. Perhaps
they consider this perpetuation of privilege to be self-evident. But it
is this very self-evidence that itself lessens in part the responsibility
that members of such groups have to challenge these unequal arrange-
ments.
One concept that would seem to provide a basis for holding privi-
leged groups responsible is that of discrimination, whether this be in the
form of class, race, sexuality, age or gender discrimination. There has
certainly been an explosion of literature dealing with the experiences ofdiscrimination. However, while much of this literature acknowledges
the structural basis of discrimination, discrimination is usually repre-
sented in terms of personal attitudes and prejudices. Thus one uses
terms like “racist” and “sexist” to describe people who discriminate
against others. Such terms focus on the behaviour of individuals and
ignore the wider context in which discrimination takes place. Rather
than identifying the ways in which the individual’s behaviour is socially
reinforced and normalised, in these interpretations we tend to blame
the individual for being prejudiced (Wildman and Davis 2000). In this
way these descriptions often hide the fl ipside of discrimination, which
is privilege and how it is institutionally produced and supported.
A new vocabulary is needed to understand the ways in which men
as a group benefi t from gender inequality. The concept of privilege is a
more useful way to name male dominance than the concepts of discrim-
ination, women’s disadvantage or diversity. Over ten years ago, Eveline
(1994) asked why there was no demand for men to justify their “advan-
tage”. She noted that while men’s advantage was assumed in feminist
analysis, it did not become “ rhetorical fi gure of speech”(Eveline 1994,
While there has been considerable literature since then, most
notably by Hearn and Collinson, in naming men as men in organisa-
tional analysis, gendering managers as men
(Collinson and Hearn 1996) and analysing hegemonic masculinity and
multiple masculinities in organisations (Hearn and Collinson 2006), few
writers have used the language of privilege and advantage to analyse
men’s resistance to gender equality. Our paper endeavours to make a
contribution to that endeavour
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