Gender researchers challenge new boundaries

Crossing borders. Not just when it comes to gender, but also different species on Earth, and the question of where our bodies begin and end. Today’s gender research has come a long way since the advent of traditional feminist research.

Margrit Schildrik

Social power relationships, where women are subordinate to men, have traditionally been the focus of feminist research, or gender research. Today this field needs to be given more breadth and depth. Gender researchers have taken their methods and theories to new and sometimes unexplored fields. Different forms of sexuality and power relationships between people and animals are a couple of examples.

One example of method development is the concept of intersectionality. This can be said to be a reaction to early feminism’s rather one-dimensional view of humans as being either women or men. Or, as Margrit Shildrick, newly appointed professor at Gender Studies, puts it:

“In the beginning you had to distinguish the category of woman in order to make visible the unequal power relationships in society.

However in conjunction with the post-structuralist and postmodern thought of the 1980s came the trend of “deconstructing”; breaking down concepts and categories and thinking about what they really stand for.
Those mental exercises led to two opposing trends in today’s gender research:
• introducing and working with many categories at the same time – known as intersectionality
• abolishing the categories as such, which is attempted in post-humanist gender studies (see separate article).

Nina Lykke

Nina Lykke, professor and supervisor at the Division of Gender Studies at Linköping University (LiU), is the scientist in Sweden who has been involved in introducing the concept of intersectionality. She leads a research group at Linköping and Örebro universities, which has received a grant of SEK 10 million from the Swedish Research Council to develop the concept theoretically and methodologically. The question is how research can categorise people in order to be able to capture multidimensional reality as accurately as possible.

Lykke explains, “We want to settle accounts with the kind of research that is based on refining and specialising, based on a single life dimension or social categorisation.

It is not just about researching people based on several categorisations, but also about doing so in a cohesive way. It is about interwoven categories, social categories that cannot be separated.”

In an article on intersectionality, she writes: “The categorisations are seen as mutually permeating, penetrating each other with no possibility of being separated analytically.” The categories that are often mentioned are gender, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

The women’s rights movement has long struggled to define what the women of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have in common, if anything. Which comes first, class or gender? Nina Lykke’s answer is: Both and many more.

Jeff Hearn

Her colleague, professor Jeff Hearn, problematizes the concept further:

“We can also ask ourselves if the categories we use are fixed or if they change over time. And we can look at other types of intersections, like different aspects of life: professional, private and political."

However including too many subjects in the same study is not feasible.

“Gender, class and age, for example – that’s more than enough for a study.”

He used the intersectional method in a study of women and men in senior management positions, with the focus on how they manage their everyday life. The study includes seven multinational companies based in Finland. Top management positions at these companies, or the route to them, require longer or shorter foreign postings and a lot of travel. These requirements, writes Jeff Hearn, are not discussed from a gender perspective, not even at the companies that have concrete equality ambitions.

A total of 40 senior managers were interviewed from the seven companies, half were women and half men. The men consistently had a stay at home wife or a wife that worked less, while the women were either single or had a careerist husband. The men had more children, 2.5 compared to 1.05 for the women on average. Several of the women had no children, which was not the case for any of the men.

All saw it as natural that the women retained the main responsibility for the children and family, and for the career women this meant they had to perform a “juggling act”, assisted by grandparents, friends and neighbours.

Some of the men consciously bought their freedom, or as a man in the study said: ‘My wife takes care of the household and the children and my role is to bring home the money’. Other statements from other male senior managers:
• “My wife is happy. She has never been especially ambitious professionally...”
• “With my wife’s education she didn’t have a particularly impressive career ahead of her anyway.
• “The wages in the healthcare sector are low...”

Hearn continues, “These are people in management positions of major global companies, companies that often have clear policies regarding equality.

“The question is how they can be applied to the demands that are made of the senior managers,” says Jeff Hearn. “Social power relationships where women are subordinate to men are still an extremely current research theme and social phenomenon.”