Gender Equality and Responsible Business

Expanding CSR Horizons

Kate Grosser, Lauren McCarthy, Maureen A. Kilgour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351286343
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Gender Equality and Responsible Business places gender equality at the heart of the responsible business agenda with the aim of contributing to CSR practice as well as research. Discussion about gender issues in the field of corporate responsibility has focused on workplace issues and corporate boards, which are important areas of work. However, the great benefit of exploring gender issues through a responsible business lens is that this requires us to also examine the wider gender impacts of business in the marketplace – for example, with regard to suppliers, supply chains, and consumers, and with respect to the communities where business operates, and the wider ecological environment – indeed throughout corporate value chains.Through contributions from practitioners in business and civil society, as well as academia, this book broadens the agenda, opening the field to new voices, and facilitates dialogue among and between practitioners and researchers. Contributions within the edited collection elucidate current practice, bring new perspectives, and help us to expand the field of responsible business with regard to gender equality, and beyond.

Part I
Broadening theoretical horizons

1
The obfuscation of gender and feminism in CSR research and the academic community

An essay^*

Laura J. Spence
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

This is a personal essay, a narrative in the feminist tradition, on the low visibility afforded to gender-awareness and feminism in corporate social responsibility. This is considered in two respects. First in terms of the academic field itself and the role which gender plays in the systems and structures of academia, within which the corporate social responsibility and business ethics fields are embedded. The second aspect of this essay is to take a broad look at the contributions of feminist and gender studies to the content of these fields of research and pedagogy. Personal experiences are linked to the extant literature, concluding with some suggestions for the future.

As I sat in my undergraduate class at Bath University where I studied Business Administration in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I remember being quite fascinated by statistics on the gender imbalance in senior management roles and the gender pay gap. These were interesting sociological phenomena to me, but as a young woman who had never felt touched by any discrimination or ceiling to my ambitions on the basis of gender, to my shame I felt a kind of smug pity for those women, and relief that I was in a generation that would not be so affected.

Now, a quarter of a century later, I show my students similar charts relating to current evidence of gender disparity. In 2013 the gender pay gap in the UK was around 15%+ (McVeigh, 2014),¹ with academics getting off relatively lightly. While the situation is not quite as bad as it was when I was a student, nothing has really much changed in the sense that if you are a woman you will likely earn less than a male counterpart. Worryingly, some suggest that we should not expect to see the pay gap among managers disappear this century.² But then it isn’t all about the financial reward; access to opportunity remains a fundamental issue (though these are related): it took until 2014 for every FTSE100 company to have a woman on its board (Farrell, 2014).³ And men quite simply continue to get more promotions than women, who are considered risky appointments at senior levels (Ibarra et al., 2010). Let’s be clear though, my concerns are not just about gender difference (Tronto, 1993), but an alternative lens that gender awareness brings which I have found has traction for the full gamut of business people and students as well as research. I have found feminist theory to explain empirical findings which I could not make sense of using traditional ethical theories, especially in terms of relational perspectives and care as I will discuss below. More broadly, re-reading CSR, organization and moral theory from a feminist perspective has been shown to be enhancing (see for example Held, 1990; Martin 2000; Marshall, 2007).

Definition is important here (Borna and White, 2003). A broad approach to defining sex and gender would be: sex relates to a physiology and gender is a related concept with a cultural overlay to physiology, but involving a process of social construction. These are not dichotomous, unproblematic perspectives, and Martin (1994) argues convincingly that the more compelling perspective to take is one of power inequalities. Gender can perhaps best be understood as redefined and negotiated through practice (van den Brink and Benschop, 2012a, b). Feminism as a concept is a highly contested, often misconstrued project, has a complex history and encompasses a host of versions—feminisms—and critical accounts (Mitchell and Oakley, 1986; Thompson, 1994). I take feminism to be a political and personal commitment to women’s voices, experiences and values, in the face of socialization, institutions, systems and structures that continue to marginalize them. In practice this translates to a deep concern for gender equality in both the public and private spheres, and is an endeavour which is as relevant for men as it is for women. More specifically for this chapter, my take on feminist perspectives on CSR is influenced by Virginia Held’s work on feminist transformations of moral theory which points to the need for theory to take adequate account of the experiences of women. She draws in particular on the influences of the relation between reason and emotion, the distinction between public and private, and the concept of the self as connected to others (Held, 1990).

Meantime, I am fortunate to have a well-paid job I love as a Professor of Business Ethics. I also work part-time which in my case allows a degree of work–life balance and the chance to be closely involved in the lives of our children. There are times when family and work commitments conflict, but between two fairly flexible academic careers, a good support network and two adaptable, lively kids, intractable clashes have so far been the exception rather than the rule (Carlson and Kaemar, 2000). So my own life thus far has been by some measures somewhat of a gender success story. Now mid-career, it is beholden on me to reflect more on others. My concern is especially for junior colleagues entering the academic profession, and that they understand the power inequalities in the world they are joining. I want to do something to help stack the odds in favour of equality of choice, voice, opportunity and recognition. That is my motivation for this chapter.

In this essay, I outline some of my observations on the state of play of gender in the CSR field, by which I mean the individual academics, professional academic societies, journals and conferences concerned with business and society issues. There are two main aspects to the chapter. The first is the role of gender in the systems and structures of academia, within which the corporate social responsibility and business ethics fields are embedded. To a degree this updates Judi Marshall’s (2007) work on the gendering of leadership in CSR. Ironically, Judi was one of my tutors at Bath University. I am proud to follow in her footsteps though only wish it were not necessary. The second aspect of this chapter is to take a broad look at the contributions of feminist and gender studies to the content of these fields of research and pedagogy, mirroring somewhat an approach taken by others in looking at management and organization studies (Broadbridge and Simpson, 2011; Martin, 2000).

Despite strong women contributors and some excellent CSR research, I unfortunately come to the conclusion that gender awareness and feminist approaches have a disappointingly low profile in CSR. Things, as people are wont to point out, are slowly changing, but I for one haven’t got the patience to see the situation improve at a snail’s pace. So this is my attempt to speak up, speak out and raise some of the issues as I see them through this personalized account. The style is one of a narrative essay, because so much of what I draw on has been personally experienced rather than embedded in previous scholarship, though I have made links to the wider literature. This is also entirely in keeping with feminist research and self-reflective inquiry (Marshall, 2007, p. 166). None of my experiences is unique, but this topic has not been widely documented for the CSR case specifically. It is my hope that some of the claims and observations provoke thought and reflection and can be investigated more systematically in future research.

Gender diversity and awareness in the CSR academic community

I want to start this section by reflecting on two prevailing extremes in CSR research and how they may have relevance for the academic field of study itself. First that CSR is imbued with ethical exceptionalism, and second that it is fundamentally instrumental. First, if corporate social responsibility and business ethics are concerned with fairness, justice, responsibility to ourselves and others, which does not seem wildly unreasonable, then a logical extension would be an inclusive, egalitarian approach to how we conduct our scholarly activity. Indeed, some have argued that a kind of ethical exceptionalism is embedded within CSR such that arguments in and around the pursuit of social responsibility must be a moral good (Spence and Vallentin, 2013). It is not too great a stretch to imagine that the community of CSR scholars is organized with attention to good, socially responsible practice, not least including equality of opportunity, as is commonly articulated in corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Taking the second, instrumental, approach in contrast, others argue that CSR is strategic in nature and a potential source of competitive advantage (e.g. Burke and Logsdon, 1996; Porter and Kramer, 2006). In this second scenario, our scholarly activities should be strictly goal oriented in nature, designed to further the cause of individuals within it and potentially the field of CSR by association, seeking to promote its position in the panoply of academic fields and subfields. Such a focus on individual academic achievement is heavily gendered, where masculinities and male dominance are evident in terms of leadership and management (Martin, 1994). This is reflected in discourses of individualism, authoritarianism, paternalism, entrepreneurialism and careerism (Collinson and Hearn, 1994). Developing this, Van den Brink and Benschop (2012a) present convincing evidence that academic excellence is an evasive social construct that is inherently gendered, favouring men over women. We might have expected to find masculinist dominance in traditional trades such as construction (Denissen, 2010), but it is also alive and kicking in the ivory towers of academia. Martin (1994) identifies reasons for this as including: reification of the public–private dichotomy which allows for the failure to deal with the intertwined nature of home and work life; asymmetries in social relations at work which marginalize women; bias in performance assessment, especially prevalent in confidential processes; and the resilience of gendered asymmetries in faculty life.

So we have the contrasting ideas that the CSR field is ethically exceptional on the one hand—one CSR manager called it the “feminine” side of the business⁴—or just another, instrumentally driven masculinist aspect of management practice and scholarship, on the other. Unsurprisingly, in my experience both are at play. In order to engage with the most well respected, mainstream literature and protagonists, the CSR field and its inhabitants play the academic game, in which there is a “predominance of white men as leaders” (Marshall, 2007, p. 168), and engage with CSR as if it were gender neutral (Coleman, 2002, cited in Marshall, 2007). Nevertheless, I have yet to come across a CSR academic who didn’t fairly openly admit to hopes and intentions to do some actual good, make a positive contribution and maybe even enable business to be more socially responsible (Tams and Marshall, 2011). Like many of my colleagues, I am hoping to make a good career out of changing the world for the better although these are not always easy goals to integrate (Winkler, 2014). Indeed, when I acknowledged to a group of CSR PhD students the need for junior scholars to be aware of journal rankings and to be a bit strategic about forging a solid foundation for their career, one well-established professor accused me of scholarly prostitution, of selling out by putting career ambitions above the inherent work and purpose of CSR research.

So tempers can run high in our field. We can be criticized both for being activists without sufficient scholarship and for being too instrumental in forwarding our own careers without due deference to achieving positive social change. I have published articles, blogs and book chapters that fall into both of these categories. Judi Marshall (2007) noted in her work on the gendering of leadership in CSR that some chose to effect change from outside of the system as activists, while others engage with the issues as a “tempered radical” (see Meyerson and Scully, 1995), working within the problematic system to achieve lasting change (Marshall, 2007, p. 171). For now at least, I would put myself in the category of a tempered radical, signing up to all the systems and structures of academic progress yet trying to influence them for greater social justice as I go, not least in terms of gender awareness and balance in the CSR field. It isn’t lost on me that I have survived and prospered thus far in the system I now try to challenge, which gives me food for thought myself. And of course while I may be a member of the CSR field, recruitment and promotion systems are run by administrators and academics who are probably not part of that community.

What does all this mean for gender diversity in the scholarly community of CSR? Though data on the CSR field specifically is hard to come by, Van den Brink and Benschop (2012b) have shown clearly that in an academic context, the promotion rate of women is lower than that of men across academic disciplines. From my many years of observation, this appears also to be the case in CSR, despite there being a very strong, vibrant presence of female early career researchers. That is not to say that we don’t have women full professors; we do, and compared with some science fields we are awash with them. Occasionally there is pretty good gender parity at CSR events. For example, at one international workshop of senior scholars in the related sustainability field in 2014, I noticed that there were way more women than men, and was wondering how to address that in this essay which I was working on at that time. I decided to check the numbers exactly, only to discover that there were still more men than women at the event, but the near-parity of genders gave the illusion that there were a majority of women; an impression confirmed by others. Interesting, that we are so used to seeing a male majority that equity starts to look like imbalance in the other direction.

So the wider gender bias discussed at the beginning of this chapter also, at an anecdotal level at least, holds true for CSR (Marshall, 2007). There are some perhaps counterintuitive exceptions. I have found that women are highly visible in the professional academic bodies, offering service to the CSR community through being on executive committees of the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management, the Society for Business Ethics, the European Business Ethics Network, the International Association for Business in Society and the International Society for Business, Economics and Ethics (three of which I myself have served on). Some might argue that such service roles sit comfortably with women because of the traditional gendered nature of women’s obligations to meet domestic service as well as employment responsibilities (Pearson, 2007). Indeed some have—contentiously—suggested that the moral person for women is one who helps and serves others (Gilligan, 1982; White, 1992). Simone de Beauvoir (2010) was more disparaging about the idea of service being associated with women. She reflected on the traditional role of women as working in the home, responsible for domestic labour (i.e. domestic service) and for doing her duty in the bedroom. I can almost imagine de Beauvoir adding “professional service” to her take on women as service providers, offering support to others through their roles on professional society boards, as well as looking after others in the home (see also Marshall, 2000).

Joanne Martin (1994) notes that, in addition to the expected issues around work–life balance and the multiple roles performed by women in higher education that may divert them from personal career progression, they may also be subject to additional tasks which their male counterparts need not perform. As a scarce commodity in sen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Broadening theoretical horizons
• Part II: Insights from gender and responsible business practice
• Part III: Case studies
• About the editors