Reproducing gender inequalities? A critique of realist assumptions underpinning personnel selection research and practice

Abstract

Occupational discrimination and segregation along gendered lines continue to be seen as problematic throughout the UK and the USA. Women continue to be attracted to occupations that are considered to be women's work, such as clerical, secretarial and personal service work, and inequalities persist even when women enter traditional male domains such as management. Work psychology's chief, though indirect, contribution to this field has been through personnel selection research, where methods aimed at helping organizations to make more fair and unbiased selection decisions have been carefully examined. Our aim in this paper is to argue that, on their own, such methods can make very little difference to the position of women (and other minorities) in work organizations. The processes that are fundamental to organizational attraction and adjustment cannot, we contend, be understood adequately through reductionist approaches that treat organizational and individual characteristics as context independent realities. Drawing on critical management research and using the specific example of police work, we argue that work roles and work identities can be more fruitfully understood as social constructions that, when deconstructed , illuminate more powerfully how processes that lead to the relative subordination of women (and other groups) are both reproduced and challenged.

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