Making Gender

This book examines key themes relevant to advancing women in organizations and the need for individual and organizational mechanisms to foster career agility, with a constant focus on how to bridge research to practice. Providing insights on gender inclusion, mentoring, team diversity, and female leadership, Creating Gender-Inclusive Organizations provides actual hands-on advice from experts on how to leverage human resource and organizational strategies to advance women and close the gender gap. It is a must-read for management leaders, HR professionals, and gender and diversity organizational scholars of all levels.

In this collection of new and previously published essays, Sherry Ortner draws on her more than two decades of work in feminist anthropology to offer a major reconsideration of culture and gender. Making Gender is rich in theoretical insights and ethnographic examples, offering a stimulating synthesis of the field by one of its founders and foremost theorists.

The author traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. THE INVENTION OF WOMEN demonstrates that biology as a rationale for organizing the social world is a Western construction not applicable in Yoruban culture where social organization was determined by relative age.

Drawing on postmodernist scepticism about what we know and how we know it and on recent developments in the philosophy of science and feminist theory, this book offers a new perspective on the meaning of gender, one that is not determined by the traditional focus on male-female differences.

In theory, the EU’s ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ policy should mark it out as a trail-blazer in gender equality, but gender equality activists in Europe confront a knotty problem; most civil servants and policy makers can’t understand how to ‘mainstream’ gender. Making Gender Equality Happen argues that we should take this problem seriously. In this book Cavaghan uncovers the social processes that make gender appear irrelevant to so many policy makers using a new method, gender knowledge contestation analysis. Building on this new perspective Cavaghan identifies: barriers to effective gender mainstreaming; mechanisms of resistance to gender mainstreaming; and the steps towards positive change, which gender mainstreaming can yield, even when results stop short of ‘transformation’. These findings present fresh perspectives for policy makers and activists aiming to make gender equality happen. Cavaghan’s new method also opens fresh avenues in feminist EU studies, which are particularly relevant in the wake of the financial crisis, as the EU seems to be stepping away from its commitments to gender equality.

Making Gender endeavours to understand how the HPV vaccine became gendered within the Canadian policy landscape – when the virus is gender blind and is linked to cancer in all genders – and how women’s experiences with this "gendered risk" have been folded into their vaccine decision-making. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Michelle Wyndham-West explores the creation and circulation of gendered risk as it was deployed in pharmaceutical and policy discourses surrounding the roll-out of the HPV vaccine. The book contextualizes the background for how gendered risk was mediated by two groups of women: mothers negotiating the vaccine for their daughters in school-based immunization programs and university students who experienced frequent HPV infections. The book explores these women’s efforts to be good mothers and strong young women entering adulthood who felt vulnerable in sexual health negotiation. As a result, Making Gender reveals how vaccine decision-making took an ontological form, as an inherently social and cultural process embedded in women’s experiences.

Making Gender, Making War is a unique interdisciplinary edited collection which explores the social construction of gender, war-making and peacekeeping. It highlights the institutions and processes involved in the making of gender in terms of both men and women, masculinity and femininity. The "war question for feminism" marks a thematic red thread throughout; it is a call to students and scholars of feminism to take seriously and engage with the task of analyzing war. Contributors analyze how war-making is intertwined with the making of gender in a diversity of empirical case studies, organized around four themes: gender, violence and militarism; how the making of gender is connected to a (re)making of the nation through military practices; UN SCR 1325 and gender mainstreaming in institutional practices; and gender subjectivities in the organization of violence, exploring the notion of violent women and non-violent men.

This book offers and tests a novel theory of when and how gender quota laws change policy.