Mind mapping the topic of gender
Mind mapping the topic of gender
Joseph Kim-keung Ho
Independent
Trainer
Hong
Kong, China
Abstract: The topic of gender is
a main one in Social Sciences. This article makes use of the mind mapping-based
literature review (MMBLR) approach to render an image on the knowledge
structure of gender. The finding of the review exercise is that its knowledge
structure comprises four main themes, i.e., (a) Descriptions of basic concepts
and information (b) Major underlying theories and thinking, (c) Main research
topics and issues, and (d) Major trends and issues related to practices.
There is also a set of key concepts identified from the gender literature
review. The article offers some academic and
pedagogical values on the topics of gender, literature review and the mind
mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach.
Key words: Gender, literature review, mind
map, the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach
Introduction
Gender
is a main topic in Social Sciences. It is of academic and pedagogical interest
to the writer who has been a lecturer on Social Sciences for some tertiary
education centres in Hong Kong. In this article, the writer presents his
literature review findings on gender using the mind mapping-based literature
review (MMBLR) approach. This approach was proposed by this writer in 2016 and
has been employed to review the literature on a number of topics, such as
supply chain management, strategic management accounting and customer
relationship management (Ho, 2016). The MMBLR approach itself is not
particularly novel since mind mapping has been employed in literature review
since its inception. The overall aims of this exercise are to:
1.
Render an image of the knowledge structure of
gender via the application of the MMBLR approach;
2.
Illustrate how the MMBLR approach can be
applied in literature review on an academic topic, such as gender.
The findings from this literature review exercise
offer academic and pedagogical values to those who are interested in the topics
of gender, literature review and the MMBLR approach. Other than that, this
exercise facilitates this writer’s intellectual learning on these three topics.
The next section makes a brief introduction on the MMBLR approach. After that,
an account of how it is applied to study gender is presented.
On mind
mapping-based literature review
The mind mapping-based literature review
(MMBLR) approach was developed by this writer in 2016 (Ho, 2016). It makes use
of mind mapping as a complementary literature review exercise (see the Literature on mind mapping Facebook page
and the Literature on literature review
Facebook page). The approach is made up of two steps. Step 1 is a thematic
analysis on the literature of the topic chosen for study. Step 2 makes use of
the findings from step 1 to produce a complementary mind map. The MMBLR
approach is a relatively straightforward and brief exercise. The approach is
not particularly original since the idea of using mind maps in literature
review has been well recognized in the mind mapping literature. The MMBLR
approach is also an interpretive exercise in the sense that different reviewers
with different research interest and intellectual background inevitably will
select different ideas, facts and findings in their thematic analysis (i.e.,
step 1 of the MMBLR approach). Also, to conduct the approach, the reviewer
needs to perform a literature search beforehand. Apparently, what a reviewer
gathers from a literature search depends on what library facility, including
e-library, is available to the reviewer. The next section presents the findings
from the MMBLR approach step 1; afterward, a companion mind map is provided
based on the MMBLR approach step 1 findings.
Mind
mapping-based literature review on gender: step 1 findings
Step 1 of the MMBLR approach is a thematic analysis on
the literature of the topic under investigation (Ho, 2016). In our case, this
is the gender topic. The writer gathers some academic articles from some
universities’ e-libraries as well as via the Google Scholar. With the academic
articles collected, the writer conducted a literature review on them to
assemble a set of ideas, viewpoints, concepts and findings (called points
here). The points from the gender literature are then grouped into four themes
here. The key words in the quotations are bolded in order to highlight the key
concepts involved.
Theme
1: Descriptions of basic concepts and information
Point 1.1.
“Gender is referred to as the social
differences between women and men, as opposed to sex, which is the biological
differences between female and male ….. As a result, gender is changeable and
its content and meaning differs from one place to another and overtime …..
Gender here is a system, rather than an individual’s property, which derives
its meaning from an institutionalised system of social practices. Gender, as in
any other system of differences, such as class and race, appears in mutually
reinforcing arenas” (Banihani, Lewis and Syed, 2013);
Point 1.2.
“Gherardi
…. theorized gender as a social practice
that functions to create gender difference. She outlines two practices: symbolic
work, which functions to indicate that gender equality exists, and remedial
work, through which the gender hierarchy is re-established” (Kelan, 2010);
Point 1.3.
“Gender roles consist of both the ideas
individuals have of the opposite gender and the ideas individuals maintain
regarding themselves. Kidder … states that gender roles develop over time in
societies and led to the consensus amongst the population regarding these
roles. As cultural stereotypes of gender and gendered work roles develop,
individuals subscribe to these commonly held ideals” (Cameron
and Nadler, 2013);
Point 1.4.
“Acker … introduced the gendered organisation theory which started with the observation
that organisations are almost always controlled by men who dominate top positions
there. Acker acknowledged the work of previous feminist social scientists ….
who contributed to gender and organisations. However, Acker pointed out that
those scientists’ work used the traditional organisational ideas that assumed
organisations to be gender-neutral and asexual” (Banihani, Lewis and Syed,
2013);
Theme 2: Major underlying theories
and thinking
Point 2.1.
“As work environments
became more diverse, women moved into work roles traditionally occupied by men.
The numerous obstacles they encountered included hostile work climates … and
stereotypical negative behaviors …. Lacking
role models and supportive relationships in organizations …, highly visible
but isolated, often marginalized and denied access to power …, they learned
from experience to practice collaborative and interactive job behaviors to moderate
the effects of gender biases” (Moore, Moore and Moore, 2011);
Point 2.2.
“Compared
to the other two strategies, equal opportunities and positive action, gender mainstreaming turns attention
away from individuals and their rights (equal treatment) or deficiencies and disadvantages
(positive action) towards those systems, processes and norms that generate such
inequalities … and represents a deliberate and systematic approach for
integrating a gender perspective into analysis, procedures and policies” (Bendl
and Schmidt, 2013);
Point 2.3.
“Gender roles regarding masculine
(agentic) and feminine (communal) behaviours expected of men and women can bias
perceptions of employees and managers …. Gender-based incongruent behaviors
(men acting relationally/women acting aggressively) often result in stereotype
based bias in evaluations of performance …. Men are expected to act
aggressively and decisively while women are expected to act more relational and
communal” (Cameron and Nadler, 2013);
Point 2.4.
“As a rule women earn less than men, although
research has shown that they express equal and often greater satisfaction with
their pay and work than men (Young, 1999). This contradiction has been
summarized as the ‘paradox of the
contented female worker’…” (Smith, 2009);
Point 2.5.
“Briefly, the Women and Work Commission
has recently outlined the main causes of the gender pay gap (in all occupations, not just at universities) as being
women’s labour market experience (both its length and the number of interruptions
to paid work), part-time working and occupational segregation” (Smith, 2009);
Point 2.6.
“Doing
gender is conceptualized as a routine accomplishment in social
interactions. In order to be categorized as a man or a woman, interactional
work has to be done. This work is under constant risk of gender assessment as
one is accountable for ‘doing gender’…” (Nentwich and Kelan, 2014);
Point 2.7.
“Individual variables that are proposed
to impact the gender gap in career success can be grouped into three broad
categories: traits, family status variables and human capital” (De Pater, Van
Vianen and Bechtoldt, 2010);
Point 2.8.
“The
organizational variables that were consistently related to the gender gap
in career success are, for instance, industry and occupation … the gender
composition of an organization … and informal social networks … Also, stereotypes
and discrimination against women are commonly proposed explanations for women
not advancing to senior level positions” (De Pater, Van Vianen and Bechtoldt,
2010);
Point 2.9.
“Social
role theory predicts that both women and men will behave in ways that are
positively valued as attributes for their gender in their society, for example
women may perceive that they will receive social approval for “attributes that
are relationship oriented and socially sensitive” …. while men may believe that
they are expected to be self-reliant, aggressive, and successful to receive
approval as “masculine”..” (Fredrick, Tilley and Pauknerová, 2014);
Point 2.10.
“There are several mechanisms for successful gender-aware management. The starting
point is gender analysis, involving the collection and analysis of
sex-disaggregated data in order to understand whether and why a gender gap exists.
This should be complemented by raising gender awareness, by gender planning,
and by using gender-sensitive indicators for monitoring and evaluation” (Sörlin,
Ohman, Blomstedt, Stenlund and Lindholm, 2011);
Point 2.11.
“There
is evidence that women are now
earning more money and acquiring considerable purchasing power …. Also, women
bring considerable benefits to their professional and managerial jobs such as
different perspectives and experiences while demonstrating leadership skills as
successfully as men do ... There has been some evidence that companies with
more women in top management positions make less risky decisions which protect
them in times of economic challenges, that women are less greedy than men, less
likely to engage in theft, fraud and corruption, are less narcissistic and show
less hubris, again protecting the organization from failure and a poor
reputation” (Burke, Koyyncu, Singh, Alayoglu and Koyuncu,
2012);
Point 2.12.
“Three
factors have been identified as contributing to lower financial security in women. These are the lower levels of
formal education in women over 35 years of age compared to men, more limited labour
force participation across the lifespan among women, and limited superannuation
due to the gap in wages between men and women … However, …. the retirement incomes
of women are projected to improve for younger cohorts due to increased participation
in tertiary education by younger women, which is expected to improve their
employment opportunities in youth and continue into mature age” (Pillay, Tones
and Kelly, 2011);
Point 2.13.
“While
work family conflicts affect marital happiness negatively …, marital satisfaction has been found to
enhance job satisfaction … and reduce occupational strain …. Satisfying marital
relationship and active support from spouses lead to higher self-esteem among
women and less guilt about their role at home as good mothers and wives” (Desai,
Majumdar, Chakraborty and Ghosh, 2011);
Point 2.14.
“Professional
work cultures based on time-intensive work pressures have developed in
accordance with a household structure characterized by a full-time male
breadwinner and a homemaker wife. Male professionals have therefore been able
to increase their work hours as they have taken on substantially fewer
responsibilities at home” (Walsh, 2013);
Point 2.15.
“The impact
of part-time employment on the gender pay gap has been well documented.
There are over four times as many women working part time as men and the pay
gap between women working part time and men working full time (adjusted
appropriately pro rata) is larger than the full-time/fulltime gender pay gap” (Smith,
2009);
Theme 3: Main research topics and
issues
Point 3.1.
“….women’s
ways of constructing themselves and relating to the world is different from
men. Research points to a variety of unique experiences for women with regard
to retirement. For instance, while
professional women often experience the retirement transition as requiring them
to relinquish an essential and enjoyable role, doing so does not necessarily
have negative bearing on their self-esteem, unlike the typical scenario for men”
(August, 2011);
Point 3.2.
“Researchers who have addressed possible gender
differences in challenging experiences
have proposed that women would have fewer challenging job experiences due to
the differential assignment of challenging tasks to male and female
subordinates by their supervisors …. To date, sparse research has actually
examined the validity of this explanation” (De Pater, Van Vianen and Bechtoldt,
2010);
Point 3.3.
“…
the way work engagement is
constructed and investigated in literature, as with many concepts in business
and management literature …, is assumed, implicitly, to be gender-neutral where
women and men can equally demonstrate their engagement in the workplace. Calas
and Smircich … pointed out that the absence of gender reference in the
organisational research does not imply gender neutrality, instead, a male perspective
is often tacitly taken” (Banihani, Lewis and Syed, 2013);
Point 3.4.
“Doing gender’
is now a widely used concept for theorizing and researching gender in
organizational studies. By looking at ‘doing gender’, the focus shifts away
from treating men and women as self-evident categories in academic research
towards seeing gender as a social practice” (Nentwich and Kelan, 2014);
Point 3.5.
“Many scholars have criticized the new career discourse for
overemphasizing individual agency and ignoring the historical, cultural and
social boundaries of careers. From the perspective of gender, this discourse is
far from neutral. On the one hand, the theories and practices of new careers are
more inclusive in making visible the experiences that show the shortfalls of
the model of an uninterrupted career progressing in a linear fashion …. As
feminist research has shown, theories and discourses of career have been based
on the experiences of a limited, elite group of white middle-class men” (LaPointe,
2013);
Point 3.6.
“Metcalfe and
Linstead … suggest that teamwork
rhetoric and practice prioritize quantifiable teamwork outcomes over the
communicative practices through which team members organize their work. They
argue that teamwork contains masculinist discourses because demonstrating
performance and achievement is thought to be linked to notions of male identity”
(Hawkins, 2013);
Point 3.7.
“Organizational citizenship
behaviors (OCBs) are
positively related to both performance appraisals and organizational outcomes …
Intuitively many aspects of OCBs seem to mirror the communal aspects of female gender
roles such as helping, consideration, and loyalty. Kidder and Parks … suggested
that OCBs map on to gender roles” (Cameron and Nadler, 2013);
Point 3.8.
“Ozanne
states that the career paths of
women and men have converged since the onset of cyclic careers, and Wood … notes
that women may be more adaptable to cyclic careers as their work patterns have historically
included part time work and career breaks” (Pillay, Tones and Kelly, 2011);
Point 3.9.
“Research findings point to enduring
gender differences in career patterns
with men continuing to pursue the traditional and women the boundaryless
career, mostly due to the traditional gender roles …. In terms of career
success, men continue to attain objective success (the traditional criteria of
progression and reward) but women enjoy better psychological mobility (ability
to see alternative career options) and subjective success” (LaPointe, 2013);
Point 3.10.
“The
style in which women lead has been relatively unstudied and few researchers
have examined how they build trust in entrepreneurial teams. Finding in other
settings, however, suggest that while evidence for sex differences in leadership is mixed and depends upon context, in
general, women tend to employ a transformational approach and are more likely
than men to do so …. They behave more democratically than men in leadership situations”
(Moore, Moore and Moore, 2011);
Point 3.11.
“There is much debate about what performativity means …, but one may
summarize it as the process through which gendered subjects are constituted by
regulatory notions within a heterosexual matrix. For Butler, subjects are
constructed by the positions the discourse allows” (Nentwich and Kelan, 2014);
Point 3.12.
“We view media texts as a
fruitful, albeit under-researched resource for analysing how gender and management
are constructed, reconstructed and possibly changed in and through particular
discourses and representations of issues and people” (Tienari, Holgersson,
Meriläinen and Höök, 2009);
Point 3.13.
“Approaches
which see gender as something fluid, dynamic and as something that has to be
done are flourishing in organizational research …. While doing gender is an
approach regularly drawn upon by organizational researchers, the question of how gender can be undone has been less
prominent” (Kelan, 2010);
Point 3.14.
“Research
on gender and organizations has sought to understand how gender remains
surprisingly stable and re-establishes itself …. Many researchers working on
gender and organizations have thus drawn on concepts of gender as a social
practice … These approaches gained prominence with the move away from counting
bodies in organizations, and emphasized instead how gender is socially constructed at work” (Kelan, 2010);
Theme 4: Major trends and issues
related to practices
Point 4.1.
“[In Turkey] Women are paid less than
men in all occupations. Women and men study different subjects in colleges and
university with few women in technical, scientific and business areas. Few
women hold senior management jobs in the private sector, with family having a
limiting effect on women’s careers. Both women and men held negative attitudes
towards women managers. Few organizations undertake initiatives to support the
advancement of qualified women” (Burke, Koyyncu, Singh, Alayoglu
and Koyuncu, 2012);
Point 4.2.
“In order to achieve gender
equality, organizational policies,
including flexible work hours, paid leaves of absence, subsidies for child
care, job sharing, home-based employment, mentoring, networking, and finding
ways to create a better work-life balance must be encouraged …. However, Cooper
Jackson’s … survey of middle managers suggests that the glass ceiling remains
an issue for women. The female respondents in the study did not believe that their
organizations had successfully implemented initiatives to help them overcome barriers
to career advancement” (D’Agostino and Levine, 2010);
Point 4.3.
“India has the largest population of
employed women … and the largest number of certified women professionals in information
technology, finance, and healthcare services just after the USA. However, as
she moves from being a “carer ” to a “provider ”, a woman, burdened with centuries
of conditioning, still finds it difficult to attain the much desirable change
in her self-perception” (Desai, Majumdar, Chakraborty and Ghosh,
2011);
Point 4.4.
“Men
and women work in different professions and different positions and do not have
equal career opportunities or possibilities to combinework and family …. The
injustice and inefficiency that results from the gender-based division of labour affects virtually all women, men,
and children in a society, though not all in the same way …. Consequently,
diminishing the gender gap should be a priority for human resource management
in many kinds of organizations” (Sörlin, Ohman, Blomstedt,
Stenlund and Lindholm, 2011);
Point 4.5.
“National reports … indicate that the
conception and understanding of gender
mainstreaming differs widely among and within the EU member states, varying
from diverse approaches in gender equality policies to governmental reform” (Bendl
and Schmidt, 2013);
Point 4.6.
“Sweden and Finland provide an
interesting setting for analysing controversial
gender-related issues. On the one hand, they appear similar as they are
typically grouped together in cross-cultural comparisons, united by the ‘Nordic
welfare state model’ …. They cultivate a gender egalitarian image in societal
discourses ….. On the other hand, feminist research has pointed to persistent
inequality and segregation and to the constant reconstruction of asymmetrical
power relations between men and women in Nordic organizations” (Tienari, Holgersson,
Meriläinen and Höök, 2009);
Point 4.7.
“The gendered
segmentation of the medical profession largely reflects temporal variations
in medical work. Female doctors have been attracted to those medical
specialties that are characterized by regular and predictable working hours,
thereby facilitating a more satisfactory integration of their work and non-work
activities” (Walsh, 2013);
Each of the four themes has a set of
associated points (i.e., idea, viewpoints, concepts and findings). Together
they provide an organized way to comprehend the knowledge structure of the gender
topic. The bolded key words in the quotation reveal, based on the writer’s
intellectual judgement, the key concepts examined in the gender literature. The
referencing indicated on the points identified informs the readers where to
find the academic articles to learn more about the details on these points.
Readers are also referred to the Literature
on gender and feminism Facebook page for additional information on this
topic. The process of conducting the thematic analysis is an exploratory as
well as synthetic learning endeavour on the topic’s literature. Once the
structure of the themes, sub-themes[1]
and their associated points are finalized, the reviewer is in a position to
move forward to step 2 of the MMBLR approach. The MMBLR approach step 2
finding, i.e., a companion mind map on gender, is presented in the next
section.
Mind
mapping-based literature review on gender: step 2 (mind mapping) output
By adopting the findings from the MMBLR
approach step 1 on gender, the writer constructs a companion mind map shown as
Figure 1.
Referring to the mind map on gender, the
topic label is shown right at the centre of the map as a large blob. Four main
branches are attached to it, corresponding to the four themes identified in the
thematic analysis. The links and ending nodes with key phrases represent the
points from the thematic analysis. The key phrases have also been bolded in the
quotations provided in the thematic analysis. As a whole, the mind map renders
an image of the knowledge structure on gender based on the thematic analysis
findings. Constructing the mind map is part of the learning process on
literature review. The mind mapping process is speedy and entertaining. The
resultant mind map also serves as a useful presentation and teaching material.
This mind mapping experience confirms the writer’s previous experience using on
the MMBLR approach (Ho, 2016). Readers are also referred to the Literature on literature review Facebook
page and the Literature on mind
mapping Facebook page for additional information on these two topics.
Concluding
remarks
The MMBLR approach to study gender provided
here is mainly for its practice illustration as its procedures have been
refined via a number of its employment on an array of topics (Ho, 2016). No
major additional MMBLR steps nor notions have been introduced in this article.
In this respect, the exercise reported here primarily offers some pedagogical
value as well as some systematic and stimulated learning on gender in the field
of Social Sciences. Nevertheless, the thematic findings and the image of the
knowledge structure on gender in the form of a mind map should also be of
academic value to those who research on this topic.
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