Turning a Blind Eye to Gender at Work: A Call to Action for Management Scholarship

By Candice L. Thomas, Haley R. Cobb & Ryszard J. Koziel

Many organizations and organizational science perspectives adopt a gender-blind perspective – intentionally overlooking gender at work. Similar to calls within social justice movements on the harm that colorblind perspectives can cause for racial equity, we argue that gender blindness is a critical barrier for achieving gender equity and that only by acknowledging gender disparity and gendered experiences can we begin to build a more equitable workplace for all genders.

Despite long standing efforts to the contrary, gender inequity remains a pervasive and troubling reality for women and nonbinary employees. Whether implemented as an ill-advised attempt to overcome gender inequity (e.g., blinding applications; an optimistic interpretation of attributions for gender blinding), as a way to avoid having to deal with gender inequity altogether (what you don’t know you don’t have to fix; a less optimistic interpretation), or as a way to intentionally perpetuate the inequity (a pessimistic interpretation), organizations commonly ignore gender and remove it from organizational policies and practices. Yet, the management literature shows again and again that gender matters at work. Our own personal experiences with gendered roles and societal gender expectations (e.g., women continue to contribute to an overwhelming majority of care work, household labor, and organizational service) also clearly suggest that men and women have unique expectations, experiences, and demands (not to mention non-binary employees, who are dealing with the additional burden of stigma from being outside the normative binary system).

Removing gender from the workplace dialog may help to subvert the ill effects of individual sexists (e.g., blinding applications will help keep a sexist rater from rating women applicants lower due to their gender), but it would only help to reduce systemic gender inequity if all genders experienced the same resources and demands – which is not a reflection of our reality. It is an age-old problem: equality efforts are ineffective if they do not consider the actual needs of the groups. Giving all genders equal treatment (the advertised benefit of gender-blind initiatives) ignores the gendered experiences and barriers within workplaces, education, and society that provide differential demands on men, women, and non-binary employees.

We cannot let this willful removal of gender become a surrogate for actual gender equity efforts and advocacy. Gender blinding, if not sexist in and of itself (which we argue it is in many cases), upholds and perpetuates sexist systems. We therefore call on our fellow management scholars and practitioners to stop ignoring gender – let us collectively open our eyes to gender at work and build more effective ways to be allies for all genders.

Article Details
Ttitle: Turning a Blind Eye to Gender at Work: A Call to Action for Management Scholarship
Authors: Candice L. Thomas, Haley R. Cobb, Ryszard J. Koziel & Christiane Spitzmueller
First Published: April 26th, 2024
DOI: 10.1177/10596011241249514
Group & Organization Management

About the Authors

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Ryszard J. Koziel, M.S., is a graduate student in the IO Psychology PhD program at Saint Louis University. His research interests focus on occupational health psychology applied to contexts of precarious or dirty work, attaining decent work, the work-life interface, work across the lifespan, and social safety policies.

Haley R. Cobb, Ph.D., is an Assistant professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Louisiana State University. Her research centers around the work-nonwork interface and employee well-being. Specifically, Dr. Cobb’s research aims to understand how workers differentiate their personal and professional lives to promote health, productivity, and fulfillment, with consideration for the unhealthy and/or oppressive environments that workers may find themselves in.

Candice L. Thomas, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Industrial & Organizational Psychology at Saint Louis University. Her research lies at the intersection of occupational health psychology, DEI, feminism, and the work-nonwork interface, taking a critical look at the ways in which organizations can better support employees with diverse identities and the ways in which existing workplace structures may be perpetuating inequity for marginalized identity groups