Gender Perspective: An Organizational Myth or An Urgent and Legitimate Change?.

The Gender Perspective, An Organizational Myth or an Urgent and Legitimate Change?

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show that the asymmetries between women and men show the reproduction of gender stereotypes and a sex-gender division of labor that gives an assessment of inferiority or incapacity to women and minorities and that changes in organizations can be due to various causes, not always to the search for equity. The gender gap refers to the conditions of inequality experienced by women and members of the LGBTIQ+ collective in organizations. The basis of the difference is anchored in a mostly androcentric, binary- oriented society that has historically been built around a hegemonic masculinity with waste of resources and a loss of well-being for women and minorities who constitute more than a half of the population. The asymmetries by gender in the legislation are open and subtle, they express omissions, delays and forgetfulness of equal citizen rights. Differences in economics, wages and access to resources, reveal mechanisms of inequality. Structurally anchored, they are reproduced within organizations as part of a daily task, they are expressed in relations of power and violence. Organizational inequality reproduces gender inequality as it occurs in the environment and in the private sphere. Faced with the demands of fairness and justice, the formal structures or plan of activities work under new rules of the game that shape the interaction. The organizational structure includes programs, policies, departments, protocols and administrative processes that function in the organizational day-to-day as routines and that in many cases are based on the need for legitimacy in an organizational field. Hence, in the formal structure or plan of activities they are installed isomorphically as rationalized myths, which are reproduced without necessarily reconfiguring pre-existing relationships by gender or inequity.