“We are in a masculine profession…”

Constructing gender identities in a consortium of two multinational engineering companies

Authors

  • Jo Angouri University of the West of England

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v5i2.373

Keywords:

gender identities, male-dominated workplaces, multinational companies

Abstract

The paper discusses the construction gender identities in a complex white-collar workplace. Recent work has repeatedly suggested that gender is not something people have or are but something people do. Despite this rich body of work, gender is still often operationalised as biological sex and is employed as an explanatory variable to account for perceived differences in interaction. By analogy, the paper also addresses the multinational profile of modern workplaces and also problematises the widely held assumption that people from different countries ‘do work’ in distinct ways. The paper draws on recordings of real life routine meetings and interview data. Special attention is paid to Chloe the only senior female member of the team. The analysis shows that the employees draw on both normatively masculine and feminine interactional styles according to the context of the interaction and the co-constructed norms of their community. However the industry is still perceived and constructed as by and large a ‘masculine’ domain.

Author Biography

  • Jo Angouri, University of the West of England

    Jo AngouriI is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, UK. Her areas of research specialisation are sociopragmatics and discourse analysis. Her current research focus is language in workplace and health care settings. She has published work on meeting talk, professional identity, workplace written discourse and (foreign) language use and language policy in the corporate workplace. Her work includes a comparative analysis of discourse in business meetings. She is a core network member on the ESRC funded Discourse Analysis Network.

Published

2011-12-20

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Angouri, J. (2011). “We are in a masculine profession…”: Constructing gender identities in a consortium of two multinational engineering companies. Gender and Language, 5(2), 373-403. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v5i2.373