A critical review:Gender and human resource management

Gender and equal opportunities
Equal opportunities (EO), gender and the development of different explanations forunderstanding women’s status within work organizations have emerged as importantissues of debate within personnel/human resource management over the last twenty-. veyears. It is timely, after a quarter of a century of EO legislation in the UK, to assesscritically the way that the concept of equal opportunities has been operationalized andto evaluate different human resource management (HRM) initiatives that have beenused in an attempt to promote greater gender equality at work. An understanding of thestrengths and weaknesses of the HRM contribution to gender equality will be achievedby a critical review of how the concept of equal opportunities has been de. ned, drawingon insights from contemporary studies of gender and organization. The books selectedfor this review essay re ect the different positions in the debate on gender and equalopportunities.

Equal opportunities: are women and men the same or different?
The debate concerning ‘sameness and difference’ in understanding gender equality andHRM practice is an important starting point for the discussion. The early EO movementwas founded on principles of social justice and was committed to removing prejudice and discrimination. The anti-discrimination legislation of the 1970s and the equalopportunities movement throughout the 1970s and early 1980s perceived the problem ofinequality to be mainly one of discrimination. The main objective in terms of promotinggreater equality was the elimination of discriminatory organizational and labour-marketpractices. Essentially, this early approach pointed to the similarities between men andwomen at work and it was assumed that, if discrimination and prejudice were removed,equal outcomes for men and women would result. According to Webb (1997), by theearly 1980s a ‘technical’ formula was emerging, with a set of prescriptions to minimizediscrimination. Employers were encouraged to assess applicants on their merits orsuitability for the job and to exclude consideration of their ‘acceptability’.This approach to equal opportunities has, however, been criticized for beingineffective and misconceived. Many organizations found it very easy to ignore orcircumvent the legislation and its prescriptions and it was shown by many thatformalization was no guarantee of fairness (Cockburn, 1989; Collinson et al., 1990;Webb and Liff, 1988). Many commentators have not hidden their disappointment andfrustration with this ‘liberal’ approach when examining the persistent ‘problem’ ofgender and equal opportunities in organizations. There remain signi. cant differences inthe types of jobs that women and men do, the pay they receive, the hours they work, theskills they acquire and their patterns of employment (Equal Opportunities Commission,1997; Opportunity 2000, 1996). Women’s work, more then men’s, is also affected bytheir home lives. Women continue to have primary, if not exclusive, responsibility forchildren (Wilson, 1999) and it is often suggested that women’s domestic responsibilitiesaffect their ability to participate in the labour market (Hochschild, 1997). As Wilson(1995) concluded, men’s and women’s personal lives and work lives are fundamentallylinked, and the practice of work within organizations cannot be viewed i
n a vacuumdivorced from these domestic and social arrangements. This debate on the differencesbetween the work lives and domestic lives of men and women has led to a growth ofinterest in a ‘parity’ agenda (Phillips, 1992; Cockburn, 1991). Cockburn emphasizes theimportance of a discourse of difference on women’s terms. She argues that ‘womenmust feel free to be fully present as women, whether this identity is expressed in termsof bodies, emotions or values, without being marginalised, stereotyped or put down forthis’ (1991: 233). The construction of women as essentially different is the main focusof two of the books in this review. 留学生论文http://www.51lunwen.org/

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