Las profundidades

Numerous feminist studies have examined women’s experiences to understand how they manage the mismatch between gender image and professional image in masculine and male- dominated work and work settings (Barrett 2002; Bruni and Gherardi 2002; Demaiter and Adams 2009; Dryburgh 1999; Evetts 1998; Gherardi and Poggio 2001; Kanter 1977; Marshall 1993; Miller 2004; Phipps 2002; Powell et al. 2009; Sinclair 2005; Walker 2001; Whittock 2002). These studies have attempted to reveal the challenges faced, negotiations made, and coping strategies developed by the women in their adaptation to such settings in various occupational and organisational contexts. In this section I will examine these strategies and their implications for the gendering of technology-related work.

Many women attempt to cope with the mismatch between their feminine and their profession’s masculine image by downplaying their femininity and acting like ‘one of the boys’

on the job (Barrett 2002; Demaiter and Adams 2009; Powell et al. 2009). Women using this strategy make a constant effort to display masculine traits which an ideal worker is expected to possess. Dryburgh’s (1999) study, for instance, demonstrates that through the professionalisation process women engineers learn how to adapt themselves to the masculine culture of their profession, internalise the masculine engineering identity and show solidarity with their male colleagues in order to reduce the risk of being considered ‘unsuitable’ for this male-dominated profession. In a similar vein, women in Miller’s (2004) and Barrett’s (2002) studies try to avoid a stereotypical feminine image by, for example, proving their endurance via showing that they can take degrading and humiliating jokes and by suppressing their emotions. Some of them also choose to extend masculine displays to their appearance in order to mask sexuality, and tend to have short hair and wear gender-neutral clothes, i.e. unisex trousers, so that they “suspend the markers associated with the imposed limitations of femininity” and look like their male colleagues (Barrett 2002, 164).

backfire and women who overcomply with the masculine image of the profession may be criticised for not being feminine enough. In this double-bind dilemma, women have to “walk a very fine line between being ‘like’ the valued masculine prototype and avoiding any implication that they were not ‘really women’” (Miller 2004, 68; Peterson 2010). Moreover, some examples of acting like ‘one of the boys’ also result in taking an anti-woman approach

more generally. Women adopting this approach do not only actively avoid a stereotypical feminine image, but also explicitly devalue the characteristics and behaviours which are associated with women and femininity. They define themselves as different to ‘other’ women who are not strong, confident and self-sufficient enough to survive in masculine work environments. Although these two strategies enable many women to succeed in the workplace, at the same time they support the masculine image of the technological worker and women’s ‘gender inauthenticity’ for such roles (Powell et al 2009; Walker 2001).

Building a reputation as a professional is another coping strategy, which means proving oneself as a successful and competent technological worker. In this strategy, the emphasis is not on being identified with necessary traits for the job or showing solidarity with the other members of the team, but rather on performing given tasks perfectly and earning the respect of the others (Evetts 1998). In this, women seek to overcome any negative attitudes and assumptions towards themselves by making their professional identity more significant and visible than their gender identity (Powell et al. 2009). To this end, they distance themselves from informal relationships in the workplace, limiting their interaction with their male colleagues to work-related subjects. In Barrett’s (2002) study, for example, women who adopt this strategy choose to separate private and public life and prefer not to discuss the former in the workplace. Also, they avoid situations that might be understood as sexual or too friendly. Whilst this distanced professional stance enables women to earn men’s respect, it also alienates them from informal workplace relationships, which are important sources of support and insider information regarding, for instance, how to handle the job pressure, and when and how to bend workplace rules (see also Bird [2003]; Collinson and Hearn [1994]; Martin [2006] for the significance of informal relationships among colleagues). Also, as Evetts’ (1998) findings show, building a reputation can be extremely difficult in organisations where there is much competition surrounding career progress and promotion, and there are many highly-motivated and achievement-oriented individuals competing for higher positions.

strategy. Women adopting this strategy, which may intersect all the above strategies at some points, argue that being a woman makes no difference to their status in the workplace, and that since they do not look for gender-based problems, they do not find any. In other words, they choose to remain blind to the gendered culture of their work (Marshall 1993). There are also some examples in which women label sexism and gender discrimination as exceptions. Dryburgh (1999) argues that doing this, women ally themselves with their male peers, rather than against them, so that the solidarity among them would not be threatened. Demaiter and Adams (2009) argue that when women talk about these exceptional cases, they document them as problems with isolated individuals, with a tendency to de-emphasise the significance of gender. However, with this strategy, women may, “paradoxically, help to make it difficult to discuss gender openly, because they have invested heavily in its suppression” (Marshall 1993, 100). Moreover, it contributes to a blindness to seeing gender structures acting against women, and to an overall acceptance of the masculine culture of technology-related work (Demaiter and Adams 2009).

There are no clear boundaries between the coping strategies that I reviewed so far. In all of them, the main concern is avoiding association with feminine traits and characteristics to reduce the ‘gender inauthenticity’ it attributes to women in masculine work and work settings. Yet there is also another set of strategies in which women choose to conform with traditional images of femininity, ensuring men that their superior and privileged position is not being threatened. Women holding this approach adopt some conventional roles which are available for women in that setting, such as ‘the mother’, who is empathetic and cares for others (Kanter 1977) or ‘the daughter’, who needs paternalistic treatment (Miller 2004). Moreover, Barrett’s (2002) findings demonstrate that some women prefer ‘playing dumb’, in order to get their male colleagues’ cooperation and secure their existing position, whilst otherwise they can be seen as a threat and be challenged. Doing this, women are accepted into the male- dominated work environment without much resistance. But they also risk not being respected as competent professionals, since such a ‘role entrapment’ very effectively reinforces the symbolic and structural dualisms between women and men (Kanter 1977).

In this regard it is evident that although these strategies help individual women enter and survive in masculine and male-dominated technology-related professions, they do not produce solutions to the problems women face. They fail to dismantle and destabilise the existing symbolic, structural and individual gender dualisms, which sustain gender inequality

at work.

2.4. Conclusion

In this chapter I reviewed the path that feminist studies on gender and technology-related work have followed in the last four decades, and presented how, along this path, both gender and its relationship with technology and work have been theorised in a number of ways to shed light on women’s status in such work and work settings. Within this, I draw two bodies of work together, from feminist technology studies and feminist organisation studies, suggesting that a comprehensive understanding of women’s disadvantaged position in technology-related work requires exploring the gendering of both technology and work.

As I discussed in the first sections of this chapter, recent studies in both fields parallel each other on some accounts: Both view gender as processual, multiple and complex in character and underline its construction at symbolic, structural and individual levels. Also, both point to the gendered culture of technology-related work and the gendered image of the technological professional worker to explain the problems women experience. Despite these shared concerns, the two fields do not much refer to each other except for some seminal studies, such as Cockburn (1983, 1985). As a result, ‘technology’ seems to remain undertheorised in feminist organisation studies, as does ‘work’ in feminist technology studies (but see Kelan 2008).

In this thesis, however, I suggest that women’s disadvantaged status in technology-related work can be understood neither in isolation from the other concerns of organisational life (e.g. access to power and privilege, definitions of organisational roles and responsibilities, gender relations in the workplace), nor without taking into account the identification of technology with masculinity through some historical and cultural processes (e.g. what is accepted as technology and what is not). In other words, this study is an attempt to see how the symbolic and cultural associations between masculinity and technology are influential in the gendering processes in organisations through which technology-related work is constructed as ‘gender authentic’ for men. With this in mind, I develop Harding’s gender triad as an analytical tool to examine not only the mutual shaping of technology and gender, but also the complex relations between gender, technology and work.

Secondly, as this chapter demonstrated, existing studies on technology-related work have mainly been concerned with male-dominated areas of work, especially the most typical occupations such as engineering and IT. In this, they have questioned the masculine culture of these occupations and the masculine image of the technological worker as the reasons for women’s small representation and disadvantaged status in these areas.

This study aims to contribute to this literature by examining an atypical example of technology-related work. It focuses on the industrial design profession and its distinctive situation in Turkey, where neither a significant numerical gap between male and female industrial designers exists, nor, as I suggested in light of my observations and experiences as a former practitioner in the previous chapter, a strongly masculine professional culture appears. In this case, the question is not why male-dominance persists in a technology- related profession or how women survive in the masculine culture of work, but rather what happens in terms of the experience of gender in/equality, once a technology-related profession does not have a strong sex composition and/or gender typing. I will explore the context of Turkey in detail in Chapter 4. But first, I will focus on the profession that this thesis analyses as an example of technology-related work, introduce the industrial design profession and review the feminist concerns regarding the practice of industrial design in the following chapter.

Chapter 3

Feminist Perspectives on the Profession of Industrial Design

This chapter presents a critical review of feminist design literature. Keeping my focus on the industrial designer’s work, I aim to examine how women and gender issues are discussed within this literature and, whether they show any parallels with studies on gender and technology. Before discussing feminist design studies, I will first introduce the profession of industrial design to illuminate what an industrial designer’s job may include. Afterwards, I will examine the early feminist studies which dealt with the absence of women in the history and practice of design. Then, I will investigate how industrial design is conceptualised as a masculine field of design within the literature, and in what ways women’s participation in this area is explained. Finally, discussing the importance of shifting the focus from the ‘women question in design’ to ‘gendering of design’ for a nuanced analysis of the gender-based problems women face in the field of design, I will present the questions that such a shift makes possible to investigate in a feminist study on industrial designer’s work.