The 6th Nordic Working Life Conference, Elsinore, Denmark, April 25th-27th 2012
CHANGING WORLD OF WORK
Workshop/Stream: Diversity management and promotion of equality – contested terrain
The paradoxes of gendered knowledge: Everyday practices of gender
mainstreaming in occupational health projects
Gunilla Olofsdotter
PhD in Sociology
Department of Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Sweden
Angelika Sjöstedt Landén
PhD student in Ethnology
Department of Culture and Media Studies. Umeå University, Sweden
The aim of this study is to explore how the concept of gender mainstreaming and gender
knowledge was employed in everyday practices in a project financed by EU and the Social
Fund. The aim of the project was to construct a model for occupational health service in
order to reduce sick leave rates among employees in a municipality. The activities in the
project were divided in two different programs directed towards managers and employees
in long term sick-leave. In all activities aspects of gender equality and gender mainstreaming
should be highlighted, analyzed and problematised.
The increase of long periods of sick leave in Sweden constitutes an acute problem for
public economy, labor market and for individuals on sick leave. It has also become a
‘gendered’ issue in debate and policy, because men and women’s sick leave rates follow
different patterns. Women in the public sector has first and foremost answered for the largest
increase in reporting in sick since the late 1990s and their sick-leave periods are longer than
for men. Although gender has been identified as important in this context, it has too often
been overlooked in official as well as scholarly debate.
Several sources of data were analyzed. We have followed project practices by conducting
focus group interviews, analyzing documents produced within the project and also taken
part in activities such as conferences and seminars.
Each program consisted of group meetings, workshops and seminars, followed by an
extended period of coaching (individually and in groups). The content of the leadership
training program was focused towards reflective practices, academic reading and writing
and seminar culture. They were analyzing power regimes and structural inequalities on a
societal level. The participants in the rehabilitation program were instead educated in a
model for motivating changes in their behavior based on Cognitive Behavior Therapy.
Our results shows that in the project as a whole, gender knowledge were itself
incorporated in various systems of stratification. The access to academically oriented gender
knowledge and gender practices became reserved for the managers thus located to the top
positions of the organization. The type of gender knowledge reserved for the participants in
the Rehabilitation program was not incorporated into academic structures of seminaries with
critical examination of texts and situations as it was for the leaders. Instead the practices
were more of commonsensical character and sometimes addressed as one of many other
possible explanations to why the participants in the rehab program were sick. The inability
of individuals to manage the gender roles given to them was thereby in focus for
problematisation, not how gender could structure every day work of unequal relations. Our
results demonstrate how gender knowledge was used as a way to reproduce inequality and
class distinctions between people in different positions in working life. This kind of
knowledge therefore became a privilege of the already privileged.