Abstract
Men’s continued domination of the top echelons in society is an indictment of our times. After some 40 years of equal opportunity legislation in most Western countries, progress towards women having an equal share of top jobs remains painfully slow. The latest figures suggest, for example, that only around 5% of CEOs in the United Kingdom’s largest companies are women—a proportion that is similar throughout the West—with long-term trends flat-lining or even pointing to a decline in the numbers of women in top jobs.
Most readers of Organization will be well aware of this situation, at least in abstract, statistical terms. However, one of the many benefits of reading Man-Made is that it brings home with real force and urgency the unfairness of this situation, as well as the negative consequences, for men as well as women, of our world being so thoroughly dominated by men. While recognising the enormous difficulties inherent in doing anything substantive about it, the book also contains some startling ideas for reform.
The backbone of Man-Made is interview data from over 100 women, many of whom occupy highly prestigious jobs in the United Kingdom. Some of the excerpts have the power to shock, especially perhaps those about the low-level sexist abuse that many women (even those in very highest level positions) continue to receive from male colleagues. It also uses its informants’ views to be unremittingly critical of many of the so-called policy ‘answers’ that governments like to invoke, because they can make it appear that politicians care and are doing something about the situation while effectively leaving the status quo intact. For example, the United Kingdom’s Davies Report (which suggested increasing the number of women who sit on Boards as Non-Executive Directors) comes in for a polite savaging. Tutchell and Edmonds point out, quite rightly, that Non-Executives have little real power—the key issue is rather ‘to increase the number of women who are Chief Executives or Finance Directors of large companies’ (p. 189)—citadels of power which remain almost exclusively male. Man-Made is also refreshingly sceptical of the value of the much-vaunted business-case for equality arguments.
While the substantive themes that emerge may not always be particularly novel in terms of the latest critical research in the area, the book’s importance and contribution are, I think, to make its findings accessible to a much wider audience than is usually the case for a research monograph. Not least because of the status of many of the interviewees (some very famous names indeed are included in the list of interviewees), Man-Made is likely to have a readership which includes politicians and even perhaps CEOs. This is all to the good because it is saturated in feminist thinking—and not necessarily of the liberal variety. ‘Equality is about power’ grace the opening page of the preface and set the tone for the whole book. In fact, the final chapter is a fascinating discussion of the future for feminism based on the varied attitudes different informants have towards calling themselves ‘feminists’—a discussion that might be of particular interest to today’s younger generation of would-be feminists. Indeed, Man-Made should make a fine set text for many courses about gender and organization—after all, it is today’s students for whom, primarily, the future world of work might be better. Yet throughout, it wears its theory lightly so that it stays readable and accessible.
Of course, getting the tone right is key for a book like this. Man-Made is clearly trying to alienate as few people as possible while sticking to its radical guns. On the whole I think it succeeds. Nevertheless, perhaps because of its desire to wear theory lightly, there is relatively little wider discussion, say, about the nature of power in corporations. It seems more or less to assume, for example, that increasing the proportion of CEOs who are women would be inherently good for society (and that wider structural constraints would not end up making anyone—male or female—behave in the sorts of dysfunctional and oppressive ways many critical scholars see as typical for corporate CEOs). There is also little interest in intersectionality—with just a brief section on ‘race and class’ (pp. 83–84) included and a smattering of oddly disconcerting references to ‘husbands’. I guess too that some might find the tone a little over-polite towards the male power elite. But these strike me as relatively minor faults, ones that will probably not bother many outside an academic audience too much.
My abiding memory of this book, however, will be its points about positive action at the end of the penultimate chapter. Over the last 100 years, there have only been two periods in which sustained progress has been made for gender equality in the United Kingdom. The first was the era of the Suffragettes in the early part of last century—who successfully obtained the right to vote; the second was the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960s and 1970s—when equal opportunities legislation was first enacted. Outside these two periods, progress has been painfully slow. The lesson of history seems to be that sustained political activism for equality can work—indeed that activism may be necessary to get anything much to happen at all. The puzzle for me, once I had read the whole book, is why there are not more protests going on. Why are we (men as well as women) not protesting more about the gross gender-based injustices that are still rife in society? If more of us were really angry, then change might start to happen quicker. Who knows, perhaps the success of Man-Made might make us angry enough to mark the start of a new protest movement to rank with that of the Suffragettes.