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.

What is AMG?

The organization that I have spent sufficient time at is AM General, the makers of the Hummer and HUMVEE vehicles. For the past two summers, I have worked 40-hour weeks at SPLO (Service Parts and Logistics Operations). SPLO is a branch of the AM General family that has a warehouse which supports an inventory of over 30,000 part numbers and on-hand inventory of over 15,000 parts. The Field Service Representatives are the customer’s direct link to AM General. They provide up-to-date technical expertise and hands on training to customers all over the world. The SPLO facility is also the location of the training program which helps improve vehicle performance and extends the vehicle’s service life.

While at SPLO, I worked specifically with the RECAP program. As a program that was only on its second year when I first joined in, I was able to make serious contributions to the various different test runs of the project. The RECAP program deals with refurbishing HUMVEES that have certain unusable parts. Unlike the RESET program that they are attempting to also start, the RECAP program takes apart the trucks but then puts them back together with the same parts, replacing the unusable ones at the same time.

Since the RECAP program was brand new, there was only one person working on it directly. Denise Richards was my boss for the past two summers and having her direct me as well as teach me about how such a powerful vehicle manufacturer can work was very insightful. It was not just insightful due to the fact that I learned to use several new systems like SAP, an inventory program used all over the world, it was also insightful because Denise was only one of two women holding a higher level position. Another very interesting thing about SPLO, and AM General as a whole, was the fact that they were a very structured, traditional and hierarchical company. I believe that in some ways, this is very harmful to not only AM General, but also all other companies that go by those particular standards. Thus, the two things that I would change most about AM General are the lack of females holding managerial positions and the strict hierarchical system throughout the company.