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Suddenly Visible: Meetings and Gender in Organizations

Thunus, Sophie;Standaert, Willem
(2022) 38th EGOS Colloquium: The Beauty of Imperfection — Location: Vienna (5.July.2022)

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Abstract
Meetings are ubiquitous in organizations. They are often central to change processes that aim to make them more inclusive. However, we run meeting in the same way for more than a century, and the role of meetings in reproducing gender inequality has not been questioned. In 2020, the worldwide and rapid shift to virtual meetings, following the lockdown implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, suddenly made meetings much more visible. In this context, we launched a survey in five Belgian Universities, to understand how their experience of virtual meetings differed from their experience of face-to-face meetings, before the lockdown. The findings we present in this article are based on the analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data provided by 814 respondents of different hierarchical ranks in the academic, scientific, and administrative bodies. Our findings unveiled that women participate in less meeting than men and that this gap has increased during the pandemic. They also reveal that female employees have more difficulties to speak up in meetings than men. These difficulties increased following the shift to virtual meetings. Moreover, our finding suggest that female employees have a different experience of the meeting context: while they stress that virtual meetings reduce the weight of inequalities embodied in the material structure of organizations, they also regret meeting in the private sphere, marked by an inequal division of the burden of care. By drawing on these findings, which we relate to the five processes of the gendering of organizations defined by Joan Acker (1990), we argue that meetings can be construed as witnesses that enable to “see” gender inequalities in organizations and to understand how the gendering of organizations occurs (Acker 1990). We also contend that meetings, conceived as makers, play an active part in the gendering of organizations.
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Thunus, S., & Standaert, W. (2022). Suddenly Visible: Meetings and Gender in Organizations. 38th EGOS Colloquium: The Beauty of Imperfection, Vienna. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/229962