Ques 8 Part II: Gender

As I mentioned before, I also believe that gender is a huge issue at AMG. This is because the environment of AMG, and car companies in general, consists of mainly “manly” characteristics. While I was working as an intern this summer, there were only 6 female interns compared to the 17 male interns. It was very intimidating at times and there were several instances were I doubted my ability to function in a car company atmosphere because I am a woman. I can tell however, that this is a feeling that not only the female interns felt, however.

Identity is defined as how individuals position themselves in the world through language and action. Alvesson and Wilmott, describe several specific practices that organizations use to “make” members’ identities, including:
1. Defining the person directly: Those who are described as midlevel managers, as opposed to senior-level managers, have their leadership capacities curtailed, by definition.
2. Defining a person by defining others: Many organizational members create positive identities by contrasting their positions with the positions of others.
3. Providing a specific vocabulary of motives: Organizations often explicitly describe the motivations that drive their ideal employees.
4. Explicating morals and values: Organizational cultures routinely offer employees an explicit set of guiding values such as innovation, customer service, or efficiency that they may use to craft and/or regulate their identities at work.
5. Knowledge and skills: Having access to specific knowledge or the skills necessary to execute a specific process or practice enables organizational members to define themselves in particular ways.
6. Group categorization and affiliation: When organizations foster feelings of “us” and, often less explicitly, “them,” they generate feelings of community, belonging, and loyalty.
7. Hierarchical location: One of the central ways that we answer the question “Who am I?” is by figuring out the superiority/subordination dynamics between ourselves and others. Those relations are often both symbolically and materially reinforced in organizations.
8. Establishing and clarifying a distinct set of rules of the game: Organizational communication creates and naturalizes rules and taken-for-granted ways of doing and being.
9. Defining the context: Organizational leaders often define the environment in which employees operate. When globalization, excessive competition, and rapid and unpredictable change are said to mark the environment, then organizations tend to value those who are adaptable, aggressive and entrepreneurial.

Gender is a “socialized but relatively fixed identity…organized around biological sex and which fosters fairly predictable styles, therefore are outgrowths of gendered socialization and are made manifest in organizational contexts. Sociologist Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation provides a comprehensive view of how gendered identities, learned in childhood, drive men and women’s conversational styles. Men treat conversations as a hierarchically ordered space in which they can demonstrate and vie for status; women treat conversations as a web-like space in which they can demonstrate and vie for connections.

Men seek status by engaging in raport talk, a style of speaking that emphasizes:
• demonstrations of knowledge, skill and ability
• instrumentality
• conversational command
• direct and assertive expressions
• abstract terms over personal experience Women use conversations to build relationships using rapport talk. Rapport talk emphasizes:
• demonstrating equality through matching experiences
• providing support responsiveness
• conversational maintenance
• tentativeness
• personal, concrete details

Tannen claims that when women share their troubles with a conversational partner, they often hope to hear messages of support, reciprocity and connection. When sharing their stories with other women, they often receive precisely those messages, however, when sharing problems with male conversational partners, women often receive solutions and directives. Similarly, when men engage in troubles talk with women, they are often disappointed with women’s tendencies to immediately match troubles.

Power and ideology impact how various aspects of one’s social identity are valued. Within most organizational settings, “members tend to enact dominant norms and communication styles during everyday interactions. As a result, organization members may negatively judge persons who do not meet (or do not seem to meet) expectations related to white, middle-class values and attitudes.” While organizations have traditionally favored masculinity, issues of class, race and age and ability impact how individual men as able to enact a valued identity at work. Negotiating multiple identities simultaneously is an ongoing project for most individuals. That negotiation process often takes on heightened importance for some organizational members, particularly for those who are other than the assumed norm.

Overall, the women at AMG general definitely take on more manly features, actions and even ways of talk. My boss was a prime example of this. Although she was a very strong woman (as I mentioned she was only one of two women who held managerial positions within the offices at SPLO), she made herself strong by taking on more masculine qualities in order to adapt better with her environment.

Although I do give her credit for putting herself in a position like this, I believe that overall it may be hurting her feminine qualities. For instance, she very rarely wore female style clothing. She adorned herself in blazers, trouser pants and had her hair cut very short and stiff. Her personality was also on the rough and tough side and she didn’t seem to take trouble from anybody. I think that in order to better herself in the AMG general atmosphere, she shouldn’t have lost sight of what and who she really was. This goes for all of the women who hold managerial positions. I believe that this can better AMG general because in turn, it may soften the rough and tough attitude of AMG and the Hummer and open itself up to a vast new consumer audience.