Gender Inequity and the Need to Study Change

Organizational gender research is at once plentiful and severely limited. Many organizational gender studies are ‘body counts’ that show where in our societies women have attained positions of power, whether they have been rewarded equally for equivalent paid work, and whether work-family policies and, more importantly, practices have created more gender-, equal allocations of responsibility for childcare, elder care, and housework. A second tradition of gender research has gone beyond the limitations of body counts to document the societal level discourses and the subtle processes of cognition and interaction that reproduce gender inequities at work and at home.