The systems psychodynamics of gendered hiring: Personal anxieties and defensive organizational practices within the New Zealand film industry

Abstract

This article uses systems psychodynamic concepts to explore the creation and reproduction of gendered inequality within the New Zealand film industry. The article focuses on the ways in which senior film production workers’ anxieties about hiring, or working with, women influence the process of assembling project teams. It suggests that the process of choosing team members creates considerable anxiety for both senior film production workers with responsibility for hiring and lower-status team members who need to rely on them to create high-functioning teams. The industry ideal of the autonomous creative worker is implicitly gendered, conforming more closely to traditional concepts of the unencumbered male worker than traditional ideals of femininity and motherhood. The antithesis between these representations creates anxiety, raising unconscious fears that women as a category are less trustworthy workers. Consequently, discriminatory hiring practices that diminish these anxieties become collectively accepted as rational responses to organizational problems and embedded within the social system as collectively endorsed defences against anxiety. Given that project-based employment is temporary, this pattern of discrimination against women is regularly repeated and contributes to entrenched gender inequality within the film industry. Qualitative data from interviews with 12 male and 13 female film production workers is presented to illustrate this analysis.