“I Always Knew I was a Little Girly”: The gendering of skills in management training

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which popular management texts organize individual behavior in gendered ways at work. Taking the ‘Strengths’ program as an example of a popular management text that shapes action, the study finds that even though the text itself makes no explicit reference to gender, it (re)produces and encourages gendered behavior and perpetuates stereotypes about gender and skill. Based on textual analysis, auto-ethnographic accounts, and critical reflection of strengths-based corporate training sessions, the study concludes with a discussion about the ways that organizational texts are consumed through a gendered lens.

Keywords

Auto-ethnographic accounts critical reflection gendered skills organizational communication popular management texts strengths textual analysis

Interesting. You have a very masculine profile. You are very aggressive – like a shark. Watch out for your jobs, everyone, she’s about to take over!

—My new CEO [addressing the staff]

It was my first day of work at a small consulting firm. I’d been hired to write and deliver management training programs for a wide variety of clients. Before my first day, the CEO of my new company asked me to go online and take a “strengths-based” profile test, based on the popular management book StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007) by Tom Rath. I printed the results and brought them in to work as requested. Apparently, my strengths were as follows: (1) Achiever, driven to do something every day; (2) Command, takes control of situations; (3) Communication, uses words to persuade others; (4) Ideation, generates complex ideas; and (5) Woo, the ability to win over new people with confidence. I did not agree with the assessment, and I certainly do not think my profile is necessarily masculine, nor do I see myself as aggressive. However, the firm used the ‘Strengths’ assessment to determine which clients I would serve, which job tasks I should take on, and who would work with me in an assisting role (someone with strengths in areas where I was weak). Furthermore, the combination of my skills was taken by the management team in a positive way as “aggressive,” and “masculine,” qualities the firm valued, and which were regularly brought up with regard to any action I took at work.

The premise of the ‘Strengths’ program is that every employee should work within the areas of their “natural” strengths, which will make them productive, effective, and happy. The ‘Strengths’ program begins with an assessment to determine an individual’s strengths, and instructs individuals to focus their work around their “natural” talents. A strengths-based company would actively put employees in situations that suit their strengths and that would benefit both the company and the individual employee. One of my first projects was to deliver a series of strengths-based trainings for a large client, so that the organization could become a place where individuals worked within their strengths. In the trainings, I would administer an assessment for participants to reveal their strengths. Following, I facilitated reflection and discussion about how each individual did (or did not) work within their strength sets at work. During the trainings, I soon realized that my CEO was not the only person to cast particular strengths as either masculine or feminine. Ultimately, my experiences as a strengths-based employee, and as a strengths-based corporate trainer, led me to conduct a gendered content analysis of all of the ‘Strengths’ program materials. In this article, I use auto-ethnographic accounts (Boyle and Parry, 2007; Jones, 2013) to analyze my own experiences in addition to a critical reflection (Reynolds, 1998) and analysis of the ‘Strengths’ texts.

Despite significant progress, gender inequality and gendered assumptions about organizational roles and skills persist in organizations (Ashcraft, 2018; Blithe, 2015; Buzzanell and Liu, 2005). Expectations about which employees take up which jobs (Acker, 1990), how employees will or should act (West and Zimmerman, 1987), the roles of emotions at work (Wolfe et al., 2018), and “naturally acquired” strengths and skills (Estévez-Abe, 2005) are examples of embedded ideologies about gender and work, which reflect and evoke significant historical power structures of inequality. These types of gendered ideologies are disseminated both discursively and materially. In this study, I examine how organizational trainings and popular management texts inform workers about organizational spaces and (re)produce gender ideologies at work.

I use the concept of strengths/skills (and texts about how individuals at work should behave in relation to their perceived strengths and skills) as an example of an organizational learning platform, which invokes gendered assumptions about work. I argue that people consume popular management and other organizationally disseminated texts in gendered ways even when gender is not explicitly mentioned in the text, and that gender is always set in a particular context, which oscillates in the discursive space between texts and action. Finally, I argue that authors of popular management texts must engage with structures of power and should pay greater attention to the ways that texts are consumed and to how the gender binary preconstitutes gender in organizational life. The unfolding of this argument will contribute to feminist projects of undoing the gender binary in organizations (Butler, 2004; Kelan, 2010; West and Zimmerman, 1987) and can also contribute practically, in organizations, as trainers move forward with delivering identity or “type-based” trainings.

The communicative constitution of organizations and gender

The communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) assumes that organizational life is generated and sustained through communication—everyday interactions, policies, practices, cultures, and so on (Putnam and Nicotera, 2009). CCO allows for deep organizational analysis and can explain the relationship between everyday social practices, expectations, habits, policies, rulings, and organizational cultures. Through a CCO lens, organizations are constructed by the interactions of their members, and once created, become alive, able to recreate structures, rules, culture, and social practices (Ashcraft et al., 2009; McPhee and Iverson, 2009; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Thus, organizations are manifestations of constant negotiation and human interactions (Koschmann, 2012; Weick, 1979).

Perhaps, the most useful takeaway from the CCO perspective is the argument that seemingly rigid organizational structures are actually malleable; constructed through communication, policies and practices can be reconstructed in different ways. Considering the malleability of organizational structures allows for the possibility to contest, challenge, and dismantle organizational systems, power relationships, and expectations about work. Put simply, communication explains how organizations and our experiences of them come to exist (Blithe et al., 2018). Individual performances by organizational actors at once express, transmit, challenge, and reify existing organizational assumptions. For the purposes of this study, that organizational and gender constructs are constituted through communication means that they can be reconstituted in new ways—an important consideration for scholars and practitioners of management training programs.

Gender is an example of a seemingly rigid discursive construction that organizes individual behaviors in organizations (Ashcraft, 2018). Therefore, in this article, I take a constitutive approach to both organization and gender. Ashcraft and Harris (2014) outline a theoretical framing of gender as communicatively constituted as a new way to analyze gender in organizations. The authors claim,

for discourse scholars in organization studies, and gender organization scholars in particular, “communication” is a productive way to conceptualize and explore the dynamic process of agency evolving in intra-activity … Communication [constitutes] the very existence and relation of work, worker, organization, member, and affiliated phenomena like gender. (p. 138)

Such an approach allows scholars to analyze multiple aspects of organizations, including, for example, gendered performances by individuals, seemingly stable structures, such as gendered job descriptions, and broad organizational phenomena such as gendered occupations or the gender binary. All of these examples (and other gendered features of organizational life) are created and maintained through discursive and material organizational configurations. A constitutive approach moves organizational analyses away from binaries and dualisms to dualities, which instead apply both/and thinking (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996; Schultze and Stabell, 2004). In this light, rather than casting skills as either masculine or feminine, analysis can reveal the complicated ways in which skills are both masculine and feminine at the same time. A constitutive approach to gender can also grapple with multiple theoretical approaches to gender. For example, a constitutive approach can account for gender performances at work (such as those theorized by Fenstermaker and West, 2002, and Mathieu, 2009) and in Butler’s (1993, 1999) poststructuralist performativity model. A constitutive lens will reveal how communication and interaction has made particular performances possible. At the same time, a constitutive model can also account for job roles or organizational structures (Acker, 1990). Perhaps, most importantly, a constitutive model can identify and undo seemingly rigid gender binaries (Halberstam, 1991).

Popular management texts and “making people up”

An integral thread in the fabric of organizational life, popular management texts are produced and consumed in growing mass quantities, informing workers how to manage employees and how to perform as an employee (Carlone, 2001; Keulen and Kroeze, 2012; Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2016; McCabe and Russell, 2017). The consumption of popular management texts—how individuals interpret meaning from the texts—is largely discursive in nature and the texts themselves serve to organize discourse in such a way that they provide prescriptions for how individuals across organizational roles should act (Carlone, 2001; Furusten, 1999; Jackson, 2001). Indeed, popular management texts help shape managerial discourses, drawing attention to particular workplace practices, management trends, and economic relations (Keulen and Kroeze, 2012; Nadesan, 2001). They define what successful business practice looks like and disseminate preferred managerial identities. Carlone (2001) claimed that,

the practices of organizing and managing offered in the genre also lead to new or revitalized forms of organizational identity with corresponding new or revitalized combinations of enablement and constraint. In other words, processes of organizing involve “making people up.” (p. 491)

Currently, popular management texts continue to “make people up” by constructing specific identities for expected organizational performance (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000; Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Hackley, 2003; Nadesan, 1997; Weick, 1995).

Through management texts, organizations can “talk” about organizational issues (Keulen and Kroeze, 2012; Prasad et al., 2011). Drawing from multiple and shared managerial linguistic communities and structure, management texts inform the actions of paid workers and managerial texts. Understanding the ways in which the everyday actions of individuals are in conversation with texts that organize the opportunities and constraints for particular individuals, ideologies, and identities is critical (Carlone, 2001). As individuals consume the representations in texts, they are able to either enact or resist the offered scripts in organizational life (Ashcraft and Mumby, 2004).

Deconstructing the influence texts have on organizational skills is important because skills are not neutral, apolitical constructions. Some skills are valued over others, and attaching particular skills to particular individuals has material consequences in areas such as hiring and career advancement (Bagilhole and White, 2008). Of interest in this article are gendered assumptions promoted explicitly or implicitly in popular management texts that ascribe certain behaviors as appropriate and expected for women and others that are appropriate and expected for men (Lair et al., 2005; Nadesan, 1997).

Historical arguments about gendered skills laid the groundwork for a rash of popular management texts about feminine leadership that started emerging in the late 1980s (see for example, Helgesen, 1995, The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership). This work largely argued that feminine leadership styles had advantages over masculine leadership styles in building teams, nurturing workers, empathizing with employees, and so on. However, despite the popularity of feminine leadership in management discourse, applying gender labels to leadership often hides gender inequities (Billing and Alvesson, 2000; Fixmer-Oraiz and Wood, 2019). Other popular management texts suggest that women should take up masculine skills or traits (see for example, Evans, 2000, Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success that Women Need to Learn; and Tannen, 1994, Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work). These works offered suggestions and strategies for women to act more like men at work. Popular management texts organize gender and gender performances in particular ways which contribute to occupational segregation.

Occupational segregation and stereotypes about skills

Studies about occupational segregation reveal that women are highly concentrated into particular occupations, which are paid less than male-dominated occupations. These “pink collar ghettos” (Stallard et al., 1983) or “occupational ghettos” (Charles and Grusky, 2004) are not static, but ebb and flow with conceptions about gender-appropriate work. Currently, women make up the majority in occupations such as education, health, and administrative support jobs (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). Yet, women’s participation in these and most occupations represents a shift in occupational demographic as men exited particular occupations while women entered them.

Occupational segregation is an international phenomenon and accounts for many gender disparities such as the wage and wealth gaps, other economic and noneconomic rewards (Charles and Grusky, 2004) and prestige and earnings (Cejka and Eagley, 1999). The Washington Center for Equitable Growth (WCEG, 2017) claimed that gender-based occupational segregation stems from stereotypes about who has the best natural suiting for particular jobs. The study found that 9 out of 10 of the highest paying jobs—such as engineers, pilots, and CEOs—are overwhelmingly dominated by men. However, 7 out of 10 of the lowest paying occupations (such as child care workers, hostesses, and cashiers) are taken up by women (WCEG, 2017). England et al. (2007) described the feminization of occupations, which explains the fluctuation of occupations as either masculine or feminine, and the corresponding decrease in wages when occupations are feminized. Multiple studies have confirmed that this shift occurs and explains it as either a devaluation based on gender bias in wage setting and skill demands of the occupation (England, 1992; England et al., 2007; Sorensen, 1994; Steinberg, 2001) or that occupations naturally decline in worth and women are attracted to and can get lower status jobs (Reskin and Roos, 1990; Strober, 1984; Strober and Arnold, 1987).

An important link for this study is the reliance on gender stereotypes about skill which exacerbate sex segregation in employment (Cejka and Eagly, 1999). Historically, women’s skills were linked to the domestic sphere, and the assumption that women are better at skills involving carework and empathy stems from the importation of the private sphere into the public workplace. The extent to which women’s paid occupations are perceived as similar to their domestic roles heavily influences which jobs are perceived as women’s work and which are perceived as men’s work. If job tasks are stereotyped as “female,” employers will usually hire women and women will likely be more attracted to the occupation than men (England et al., 2007). Current examples of this link between domestic skills and women’s occupations include dental hygienists, nurses, and elementary school teachers, all of which are occupations dominated by women that involve carework and empathy.

Stereotypes about skill and “appropriate” occupations are not static. Over time, it is clear to see gendered perceptions about skill changing (Mills, 1995). For example, young up-and-coming men used to take up secretary positions, but white women now take up a majority of all office administrative or secretarial positions (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). The cultural view of “secretary” no longer suggests a driven achiever, but rather an individual in a terminal career. Prior to women’s large-scale entrance in the paid workforce in the mid-1960s, most job skills were considered masculine, until women entered the workforce and started engaging in similar skills, infusing new skills into the workplace, and assumptions about who was good at what started to change. Before 1963, paying women less than men for identical tasks was legal, and the assumption that women deserved lower wages than men because they possessed less skill was a regular part of organizational life (England et al., 2007). While wage and employment discrimination is no longer legal, the cultural ideology that women and feminine tasks are less than men and masculine tasks is part of the reason for occupational segregation and wage disparity (England et al., 2007).

As evidenced in this section, the literature about how popular management texts and CCO reveal a particular lens for analyzing the gendering of skill. Popular management texts serve as a constitutive force in organizations that impact how gender is organized. Knowing this, and in light of the harmful effects of continued occupational segregation, I asked: (How) do people make sense of gender in strengths-based management training? Answering this research question can work toward the feminist project of troubling the gender binary as it contributes to gender inequality in organizations. It also works to make important theoretical links between CCO and popular management texts.

Methods

Researcher positionality

Before outlining the specific techniques I employed in this study, I discuss my positionality. My analysis of the ‘Strengths’ materials and training sessions are not separate from my personal experiences and feelings about gender, work, and popular management texts. I became particularly attuned to gender discrimination at work when I was fired from a consulting job without notice the day after I announced my first pregnancy at work. I identify as an upper-middle class woman and mother, and this experience at work sparked in me a strong vision for how gender organizes expectations about job performance, and thrust me into what has become my academic focus. This story is important because it reveals how I came to conduct a gender analysis on the ‘Strengths’ materials in the first place. I experienced acute gender discrimination in that moment, and in hundreds of moments since, so my view of gender, assumptions about skills, and work were in place before conducting the study.

I was also predisposed to think about popular management texts before this study. In my role as a corporate trainer and instructional designer of corporate training materials, popular management texts are used profusely. Clients often ask specifically for trainings that follow a particular guru philosophy. I consume these texts in the same way I consume reality television. I find them entertaining and easy to digest, but lacking in depth. At the same time, I recognize that business leaders often prefer popular management texts to academic work. My compromise in practice has been to use material that is in the popular commons, but to infuse it with peer-reviewed academic research. I find that my clients eagerly consume findings from peer-reviewed research that speaks to their jobs, especially when it is presented with connections to the popular management texts and their lived experiences.

Texts

“Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” This is the question that Tom Rath (2007) asks to millions of employees at the beginning of his strengths-based management program. The growing ‘Strengths’ phenomenon in organizational training and development circles is a modern spin on personality testing. Instead of focusing on personality traits, the program instead focuses on the individual “strengths” of each employee. Based on “Strengths Psychology” developed by Donald O. Clifton and Gallop from a 40-year-study of human qualities, the program outlines 34 “strengths” that are identified through the StrengthsFinder assessment. An original bestselling book Now, Discover Your Strengths (Buckingham and Clifton, 2001) spent more than 5 years on the bestseller lists, was translated into more than 20 languages, and “ignited a global conversation” (http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx). StrengthsFinder 2.0 (Rath, 2007) includes an updated version of the StrengthsFinder assessment and promises to help incorporate strengths not only at work but also in the employees’ personal lives.

Each book includes a code that consumers use to access the StrengthsFinder assessment online. The assessment includes 177-paired descriptors and asks the taker to rate the extent to which a descriptor fits best. The participants must select a radial dial along a continuum on which both poles say, “strongly describes me.” One sample pairing asks participants to choose between “My language consists of short, simple words” and “I tend to use many abstract complex words.” Another example is “I like lectures” opposed to “I like group discussions.” A final example is “It is easy for me to put my thoughts into words” opposed to “Many times I am at a ‘loss for words’ to describe my ideas.”

Once the assessment is complete, StrengthsFinder generates reports for the assessment taker. The primary output is the Top Five Themes Report, which outlines the taker’s five biggest strengths, including a description of the strength and “insight” about the strength. Possible strengths include the following: Achiever, Activator, Adaptability, Analytical, Arranger, Belief, Command, Communication, Competition, Connectedness, Context, Deliberative, Developer, Discipline, Empathy, Fairness, Focus, Futuristic, Harmony, Ideation, Inclusiveness, Individualization, Input, Intellection, Learner, Maximizer, Positivity, Relator, Responsibility, Restorative, Self-assurance, Significance, Strategic, or Woo. Also included is the 50 Ideas for Action Report, 10 suggestions for self-improvement for each theme, “based on thousands of best-practice suggestions” (http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx). Other outputs include a strength-based action plan, a Top 5 grid you can use for mapping the strengths of other people, and guides for strengths-based discussions in organizations and home life.

The ‘Strengths’ program critiqued the common conception that with hard work, anyone can be anything he or she wants and points out that, individuals should focus on their natural talents in order to be successful. Thus, for example, one who is not “naturally” good with numbers would likely never be a good statistician and might waste decades trying to achieve such a goal. Rath (2007) suggested that people spend too much time focusing on their weaknesses and should instead focus on the areas where they show natural promise of raw talent. He summed up this philosophy as “You cannot be anything you want to be- but you can be a lot more of who you already are” (p. 9). Rath (2007) presumed that natural talents do not change much over time and noted that it is possible to learn new things, but that talent will enter into the final outcome of such endeavors. For example, if two people are equally lifting weights, the one with natural athletic talent will be much stronger than the one who does not possess natural athletic talent. Thus, even though the weight lifter without the athletic talent will be stronger than before, he or she will never be as strong as the person who lifts weights and has the natural athletic propensity for strength. Rath warned about people who “go not only from the cradle to the cubicle, but then to the casket, without uncovering their greatest talents and potential” (p. 30).

Auto-ethnographic accounts

The first source of data for this project emerged from auto-ethnographic accounts from my experience as an employee in a strengths organization. As McDonald (2013) explains, “Auto-ethnographic accounts aim to draw on the experiences of researchers in particular contexts in order to illuminate reflections and foster learning about social phenomena” (p. 134). Researchers disclose aspects of their own identities as data to be used for analysis, which can produce deep knowledge about a construct (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Ellis and Bochner, 2000). I worked as a trainer and instructional designer in a strengths-based firm for 8 months as an employee, and then for 3 years with the firm as a contractor. I contributed some auto-ethnographic accounts of my experiences in this capacity. I recorded the times I felt constrained, privileged, or confused about how everyday life intersected with ‘Strengths’ theory.

While auto-ethnographic accounts describe epiphanies, recollections, and experiences of the self as data, auto-ethnography also describes deep analytic practice of the data. In this way, it is both product (data) and process (analytic method) (Ellis et al., 2011). The insights gained through particular social locations allow researchers to analyze auto-ethnographic data in sophisticated ways that can reveal new insights. Researchers can make claims based on analysis of personal, self experiences that they would not have been able to make without their personal membership or attachment to the research construct. Anderson (2006) describes analytic autoethnography, which requires “(1) complete member researcher (CMR) status, (2) analytic reflexivity, (3) narrative visibility of the researcher’s self, (4) dialogue with informants beyond the self, and (5) commitment to theoretical analysis” (p. 378). Data analysis and the presentation in this article meet these requirements and commitments.

Critical reflection

Critical reflection describes the process that requires deep reflection about experiences with a goal of social justice. Critical reflection (vs reflection) is explicitly emancipatory in nature, questions assumptions, carries a social (instead of an individual) focus, and pays close attention to power relations (Reynolds, 1998). As Reynolds (1998) described, critical reflection is about “confronting the taken-for-granteds, concealed interests, and ideologies which inform managerial thought and action” (p. 184). This technique is particularly useful in learning settings (Burnett and Lingam, 2007; Ng et al., 2004) and is designed to make learning transformative (Baldwin, 2016; Sockman and Sharma, 2008; Yang, 2009).

Through my strengths-based consulting firm in the United States, I delivered strengths-based trainings to a variety of employees. During and after each training session, I kept copious notes about the experience. I recorded notes about the participants’ reactions, questions, and points of particular interest, in addition to my own comments, reactions, and experience with the material. This practice usually helps me improve my delivery of the training material, but in this case, my notes served as an archive of the way participants consumed ‘Strengths’ theory.

For this project, I analyzed my notes using critical reflection for points and places in the training sessions where participants made references to particular strengths as either masculine or feminine. I have tried to represent the quotes as near as possible to the actual words spoken by the participants. These data produced numerous examples of participants’ understanding of skills as gendered.

Participants

I delivered six 90-minute training sessions with a total of 53 participants. The participants held a wide array of job roles, and income diversity is clear across the participants. Most of the participants were considered as “front line” employees or the lowest paid jobs in the organization. However, some low-level managers (8) and high-level managers/executives (3) participated in the trainings. All of the participants identified themselves as either men (20) or women (33). Of the participants, 44 identified themselves as Caucasian,¹ 2 participants identified themselves as African American, and 7 participants identified themselves as Hispanic; 11 participants had some level of college education and 42 participants reported a high school diploma as their highest level of education.

Textual analysis

I coded textual data using qualitative content analysis. Qualitative content analysis focuses on meanings in the text rather than counting instances of a pre-defined construct (Frey et al., 1999). In this tradition of textual analysis, context and latent meanings matter, and findings emerge through content categories in the texts. To begin the textual analysis, I conducted a close reading of Rath’s (2007) StrengthsFinder 2.0, Buckingham and Clifton’s (2001) Now, Discover Your Strengths, and all of the accompanying material for each book, including the assessments and reports. I also included Buckingham’s (2007) video series, Trombone Player Wanted, and the ‘Strengths’ website. I looked for mentions of gender across each of these texts. All of these texts were coded for the use of gender pronouns in case study examples and also coded for descriptions that use the terms masculinity or femininity. I also looked for explicit examples in the text, which would relate skills to either men or women, masculine or feminine.

Data analysis procedures

Data analysis began with coding my personal scratch notes from the strengths trainings and with the generation and subsequent coding of my auto-ethnographic accounts. The analysis proceeded inductively, grounded in data and experience, and happened through iterative waves (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). I formed initial codes and then collapsed, expanded, and divided categories as some themes emerged as more pressing than others.

The critical reflection data and the auto-ethnographic data provided triangulation for data validity; the critical reflection supported the auto-ethnographic accounts and vice versa (Creswell and Miller, 2000). However, the textual analysis provided very different results. In the subsequent sections of this article, I will discuss the results from my analysis, specifically the mismatch between the data sets.

Findings

The collected data produced drastically different findings. The auto-ethnographic and critical reflection data revealed a number of gendered observations and comments. However, the textual analysis revealed no indication of explicit gendering. In this section, I will share some examples from each of the data sources before grappling with the tension of the conflicting findings.

Critical reflection on training notes

Data from the notes of the client training sessions suggested that the strengths are valued in unequal ways and are strongly tied to gender. The course participants in the strengths training continually referenced themselves as typical or atypical gender profiles. In each course, an explicit conversation about gender occurred when participants experienced either a perceived gender mismatch or a strong alignment with predicted gender stereotypes.

Men who were labeled as having what they perceived as a feminine strength frequently commented on the mismatch, either by joking or by denying the validity of the test. For example, one man did not want to share with the group that he was strong in Harmony (someone who does not work well with conflict). He explicitly expressed his embarrassment and claimed that Harmony was clearly a “woman’s” strength. He went on to explain that he was not, in fact, very “harmonious” and that his tendency to avoid conflict had nothing to do with a “lady-version of getting along.” Although some women in the group appeared to scoff at the participant when he claimed to know about a “lady-version of getting along,” nobody challenged the participant’s notion that Harmony was a “woman’s” strength.

In another example, one man joked about his Communication strength and explained that he got his “gift of gab” because he was raised by a single mom and had two sisters. He said to the group, “I always knew I was a little girly. I’ll have to thank my sisters!” This comment was not perceived as hostile in the class setting, and again, nobody in the room contested this man’s assertion that Communication is a “girly” strength. On the contrary, the other participants in the class displayed their agreement through nodding, smiling, and laughing with the participant. A final example of this type of gender commentary was one man’s explanation of his Connectedness strength. This man made a somewhat hostile sounding “joke” that he was going to quit his job as bus driver and join a “girls’ commune” so he could “connect to the earth with all the other hippie girls.” After his comment, this participant expressed his thought that the assessment was completely inaccurate and did not participate during the rest of the afternoon session. This participation was clearly hostile, and while some members laughed and appeared to appreciate his “joke,” other members of the class reacted negatively to the participants’ hostility. However, not one person in the room challenged his claim that Connectedness was a feminine strength.

Women participants also explicitly verbalized their perceived gender mismatches. For example, one woman commented on her Competition strength. She said,

I have three older brothers, so I learned how to be tough and compete from an early age. I used to play football and soccer with them, and they never let me win. I had to legitimately compete. I think this rubbed off on me at work. I like to compete with the boys.

This woman saw the influence of her brothers as a reason why she embodied a “masculine” strength. In a similar way to the reactions described earlier, there was no critical reflection of this woman’s casting of Competition as a masculine strength.

Another woman commented on her Maximizer strength, which described the participant as inclined to make average projects excellent, including the ability to develop other workers. The participant claimed that this strength was something she purposely worked on. She claimed, “I emulate men I admire so I can move up in the company.” She was delighted that the test revealed this strength for her; however, she insisted it was not natural, but something she learned by watching successful men. Although this participant introduced gender in the discussion of her strength, she did not complicate the understanding that developing other employees was a masculine skill.

The participants in this study also commented on gender when they perceived a strong gendered correlation. For example, one woman who had a strength in Belief explained that women are always stronger in their faith. Other women commented similarly on Relator, Positivity, and Empathy strengths in particular, noting that these strengths were more feminine and a “natural” component of most women’s skill repertoire. One man explained that he came from a long line of strong men when discussing his Command strength. There was no critical analysis of gender in these conversations, just off-handed comments about skills as gendered one way or another. The most discussion of gender was perhaps a conversation about boys and sports. One man reflected on his Achiever strength by citing the common practice of forcing boys to achieve through sports (as opposed to less pressure for girls to achieve). He asked if any women ever got the Achiever strength. No women in his session did, and he surmised the reason might be about sports socialization.

In all, during every single session, participants discussed the strengths as either a typical man’s strength or a typical woman’s strength and were alternately proud or embarrassed by misaligned strengths. Gender was always presented in strictly binary terms, and was not problematized. Drawing on gender sometimes happened innocuously, as a common way of understanding why individuals might act in a particular way. Other times, gender was the center of conversation and used either to debase the ‘Strengths’ assessment or to explain the validity of the program. Gender was an important aspect in the way that the participants talked about the ‘Strengths’ program, but there was no critical reflection about how gendered skills would impact people in different and unequal ways, nor was there any critical reflection of how skills might be gender neutral.

Auto-ethnographic accounts

My auto-ethnographic data produced a much different reaction to the strengths trainings. I felt disturbed when I heard participants describe their perceived gender mismatch in the strengths analysis. Consider this except from my field notes:

I wish I could convince [my client] to give a gender course. Everyone is talking about gender, but nobody is TALKING about gender. It is as if everyone agrees that some strengths are feminine, but nobody sees how these same “feminine” strengths are devalued in organizations.

As I considered the participants’ perception of gender/strength mismatch, I felt frustrated that the “feminized” strengths seemed to correlate with lower status in organizations.

In analyzing my own notes, I realize that I too was able to see how the participants were able to put strengths into neat gender categories. I too could easily fall into binary thinking about how skills and strengths are gendered. At the time, as a gender scholar, I saw a flaw in ‘Strengths’ methodology. Because people were supposed to work within their strengths, I saw it as problematic that gender was only haphazardly implicated in the way that the participants understood and consumed the ‘Strengths’ materials. It seemed clear to me that not all people had the same ability to control their work environment, and that gender likely disadvantaged white women, women of color, and nonbinary individuals significantly more than men. In my auto-ethnographic notes, I wrote, “I need to do an analysis of the books to see how Rath and his colleagues treat gender. How are people supposed to reconcile gender skill mismatch?”

Textual analysis

The findings from the textual analysis revealed only a short discussion about gender. In all of the “regular” material, gender is not mentioned at all. However, in the appendix of Now, Discover Your Strengths, the authors answer the question, “do StrengthsFinder theme scores vary according to race, sex, or age?” (p. 254). The text claims that “score differences are trivial … and only statistically significant in a few cases” (pp. 254–255). The authors argue further that the statistical significance is irrelevant anyway, because they have a large sample size, and because “no one theme is better than another,” so it does not matter if the strengths reveal gendered patterns (p. 255). Gender or sex differences are not mentioned in any other materials. Despite my certainty that this program was entrenched in gender, the main texts simply did not mention gender, and instead presented the strengths as abilities that any human might or might not have. Examples in the text pull from men and women (no nonbinary examples), use he or she/they pronouns randomly, and there is no hint that skills might be valued over each other.

Rather than explicitly linking skills to gender, the ‘Strengths’ texts instead argue that strengths are “natural” attributes and abilities that any human might or might not have. For example, Rath (2007) shared an example of a star salesperson who becomes a sales manager:

She interviews other managers to gain insight, reads every book on management she can find, and stays late every night trying to get the job done- at the expense of her family and even her health. Then, a few years into the job, she realizes that she doesn’t have the natural talent to develop other people. Not only is this a waste of her time, but chances are, she could have increased her contribution even more if she had stayed in the sales role- a role in which she naturally excelled. (p. 6)

While this example reveals gender stereotypes with regard to the sales manager’s hard work “at the expense of her family,” it does not present the skills or strengths as gendered. Strengths are presented as natural for one human or another. Other examples feature men working in areas in which they are not strong.

The texts do not engage the history of skills as gendered or valued in different and unequal ways and take the approach that every worker has attributes that are natural and valuable. The texts promote valuing all skills equally and argue that the important factor in determining which skills are valued is realizing which skills are natural and enjoyable for each individual. Working with one’s natural strengths and talents is values, regardless of which strength the individual might have. In another example, Rath explained,

Overcoming deficits is an essential part of the fabric of our culture. Our books, movies, and folklore are filled with stories of the underdog who beats on-in-a-million odds. And this leads us to celebrate those who triumph over their lack of natural ability even more than we recognize those who capitalize on their innate talents. (p. 5)

The authors go on to argue that it is essential to reject the underdog story and instead work to enhance our “natural” gifts.

Grappling with data mismatch and consuming the binary

Binary logics, such as those which distinguishes masculine from feminine, rationality from emotionality, mind from body, and public from private are problematic. These binary systems are constituted through communication and have typically functioned to favor men and the masculine (Kelan, 2008). Individual gender performances (either binary or nonbinary) reify binary thinking and become part of the communication that constitutes macro discourses about gender. While early research articulated binaries as a means of uncovering inequality (Halberstam, 1991) and it was a major feat for feminists when sex and gender were recognized as separate categories (Smith, 2002), the idea that gender is something we do, as something produced through interaction has since emerged as a more useful framework for studying inequality. I argue here that it is also a useful way to study binaries, particularly from a constitutive frame. A constitutive perspective brings stronger social transformative power; for if binary logics were constituted through interaction, they can be reconstituted. A constitutive approach to gender allows for the undoing of seemingly rigid structures, such as binary logics.

The ‘Strengths’ program is tangled in binary logic. The purpose of the assessment is to categorize employees by strength. Although the materials do not explicitly mention gender, people draw upon their existing stereotypical binary views of what is masculine or feminine, and what type of skills or work are associated with men and women (Lindgren and Packendorff, 2006). Thus emerges a paradox: acknowledging the gendering of skill highlights categories and reconstitutes binary thinking, yet ignoring the gendering of skill is irresponsible because individuals consistently rely on binary logics in the valuation of skill which remains highly gendered in practice. As such, I argue here that organizational studies must account for an invisible consumption of the gender binary, which has been preconstituted in every organizational context. To further complicate the interplay between text and action in organizational studies is the fluid nature of the way the gender binary is consumed. While the binary itself remains seemingly static, allowing for two and only two gender categories, skill slides through the binary at various points in history, along with occupations and shifting trends in “women’s” and “men’s” work.

The findings from this study suggest that the ways people consume popular management texts is an important bridge between texts as they are developed, and the ways that individuals consuming the texts behave. The ‘Strengths’ program materials do not mention gender. However, talking about strengths or skills as if they are somehow free from gendered stereotypes does not eliminate the gendered power structures which inform how individuals understand their own actions at work. Silences and textual omissions carry meaning (Mills, 1995). Popular management texts have the ability to give voice to particular ideologies and to silence others, which can de-emphasize inequality (Nadesan, 2001). Popular management texts, in particular, prescribe ways of acting at work to achieve success, framed in ways that appear straightforward. However, this study has indicated that how workers consume these texts is equally important to the text itself. If texts are silent about organizing power structures, such as gender or race, readers will still invoke them in application.

Schultze and Stabell (2004) described dialogic discourse as a way to capture the double-edged nature of knowledge. Applying their framework to the present analysis of the ‘Strengths’ program reveals how individuals come to know themselves (and to act accordingly) based on their previous notions of what it means to be normal. Thus presenting participants in strengths trainings with new information that conflicts with their previously held beliefs about gender creates a tension that individuals must grapple with in self-reflection. How they ultimately make sense of knowledge is an exercise in managing multiple discourses which includes self discipline, self reflection, and a “never-ending process of self-discovery” (Schultze and Stabell, 2004: 566).

As such, I argue that analyzing how people consume popular management texts is necessary to fully understand the impact of these works. If popular management texts are part of and indicative of societal discourses, the ways in which people consume them is more important than what is on the actual page. Studying how these works are produced, what they say or do not say, and how they are consumed is necessary in order to fully grasp the implications of these texts on the actual lives of individuals in organizations. Perhaps, this is one way to conduct a more nuanced assessment of how gender, race, class, and other social identity categories are woven into organizations and assumptions about skills.

Moving forward with gender analyses and text

This project sought to understand the ways that popular management texts perpetuated gendered notions about strengths and skills. Although the ‘Strengths’ program itself never explicitly attempted to gender the strengths and promoted all the strengths as equal, it still functioned to “make people up” because individuals consumed the texts through preconceived notions about appropriate behavior in relation to the gender binary and through historical understandings of skills as gendered. As such, moving beyond texts to analyze the ways that they are consumed in particular moments of time is a more thorough way to conduct gender analyses. Such an effort is worthwhile in the continual effort to secure greater gender equality at work.

Some implications arise from this work. First, consultants and corporate trainers can think about how their materials will be consumed and what is left out of materials. Reflecting back on my delivery of the strengths trainings, I could have prepared discussion questions about why participants thought strengths were gendered in one way or another, and what that means in organizational practice. Allowing space for important, related topics (such as gender), even when the content does not specifically address these areas, would be quite beneficial. In addition, after observing that participants held such strong attachment to strengths as gendered constructs, I could have strongly suggested additional trainings to the client, using participant comments as data to support the need for additional sessions. Regardless of topic, if trainers listen to how material is consumed, they can more fully address silences, gaps, and related content introduced by participants.

At the same time, scholars embracing textual analysis, particular of popular management texts, should be attuned to what is left off the pages. Why silences, omissions, and interpretations matter? How are audiences consuming texts? Including these items in textual analyses will produce richer data about organizational life.

A final practical implication lies in the writing of popular management texts. Many popular management authors are scholars. Scholars who produce popular management texts can and should be accountable for what they omit from their work. Although popular management texts are typically designed to streamline content and focus on storytelling, it is possible to make visible seemingly invisible related content. Authors should take into account the consequences of their work—even conscious and unintended consequences (Mills, 1995). Using member checks for content before publication, for example, can help reveal how texts are consumed and what additional content could be included.

Gender analyses of popular management, organizational texts, or other organizational discourses are complicated and messy. However, because popular management texts are so influential to the everyday lives of employees, it is a worthwhile endeavor to attempt a sophisticated and intricate study of these texts, which should certainly include the texts themselves, but also how and when they are produced, what they do not say, and the ways in which they are consumed. As organizations increasingly experience the so-called “feminization” of work, and as women take up more leadership roles in organizations, keeping current with shifting constructions of gender is necessary.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sarah Jane Blithe

Notes

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