http://gas.sagepub.com
Gender & Society
DOI: 10.1177/0891243206289499
2006; 20; 441Gender & Society
Joan Acker
Inequality Regimes: Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations
http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/4/441
The online version of this article can be found at:
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
Sociologists for Women in Society
can be found at:Gender & SocietyAdditional services and information for
http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:
http://gas.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/20/4/441
SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms):
(this article cites 16 articles hosted on theCitations
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Lecture
INEQUALITY REGIMES
Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations1
JOAN ACKER
University of Oregon
In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality,
the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify
barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting
the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of
inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that
result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work organizations are critical locations
for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal
inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts
to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often
opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept
of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand
why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs.
Keywords: gender; class; race; intersectionality; organizations
Much of the social and economic inequality in the United States and other
industrial countries is created in organizations, in the daily activities of
working and organizing the work. Union activists have grounded their demands
in this understanding, as have feminist and civil rights reformers. Class analyses,
at least since Harry Braverman’s 1974 dissection of Labor and Monopoly Capital
have often examined the doing of work, the labor process, to understand how
class inequalities are produced and perpetuated (Burawoy 1979). Feminists have
looked at the gendering of organizations and organizational practices to comprehend
how inequalities between women and men continue in the face of numerous
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I want to thank Don Van Houten with whom I did the research that inspired this
analysis, Barbara Czarniawska who helped me to rewrite the article to make it more comprehensible,
Sandi Morgen who has been an invaluable research partner, and all the many other feminist scholars
whose work has made mine possible.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 20 No. 4, August 2006 441-464
DOI: 10.1177/0891243206289499
© 2006 Sociologists for Women in Society
441
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
442 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
attempts to erase such inequalities (Acker 1990; Collinson and Hearn 1996;
Ferguson 1984; Kanter 1977). Scholars working on race inequality have examined
the production in work organizations of racial disparities that contribute
to society-wide racial discrimination and disadvantage (Brown et al. 2003;
Royster 2003).
Most studies of the production of class, gender, and racial inequalities in organizations
have focused on one or another of these categories, rarely attempting to
study them as complex, mutually reinforcing or contradicting processes.2
But
focusing on one category almost inevitably obscures and oversimplifies other
interpenetrating realities. Feminist scholars of color have argued for 30 years,
with the agreement of most white feminist scholars, that much feminist scholarship
was actually about white middle-class women, ignoring the reality that the
category gender is fundamentally complicated by class, race/ethnicity, and other
differences (Davis 1981; hooks 1984; Joseph 1981). Similar criticisms can be
made of much theory and research on race and class questions: “race,” even when
paired with “ethnicity,” encapsulates multiple social realities always inflected through
gender and class differences. “Class” is also complicated by multiple gendered and
racialized differences. The conclusion to this line of thinking—theory and research
on inequality, dominance, and oppression must pay attention to the intersections
of, at least, race/ethnicity, gender, and class.
The need for intersectional analyses has been, for the past 15 years at least, widely
accepted among feminist scholars (Collins 1995; Crenshaw 1995; Fenstermaker
and West 2002; Weber 2001). How to develop this insight into clear conceptions
of how dimensions of difference or simultaneous inequality-producing processes
actually work has been difficult and is an ongoing project (Holvino 2001; Knapp
2005; McCall 2005; Weber 2001). Different approaches provide complementary
views of these complex processes. For example, Leslie McCall (2001, 2005),
using large data sets, shows how patterns of gender, race, and class inequality
vary with the composition of economic activity in various areas of the United
States. The analysis I suggest contrasts with McCall’s approach, as I propose
looking at specific organizations and the local, ongoing practical activities of
organizing work that, at the same time, reproduce complex inequalities. The organizing
processes that constitute inequality regimes are, of course, related to the
economic decision making that results in dramatically different local and regional
configurations of inequality across the United States. Exploring the connections
between specific inequality regimes and the various economic decisions that
affect local economies would be still another approach to these complex interrelations.
Here, my goal is limited—to develop the analysis of organizational inequality
regimes.
I base this analysis on the voluminous research, including some of my own
(Acker 1989, 1991, 1994; Acker and Van Houten 1974), on the organization
of work and power relations in organizations. This analysis has its origins in my
earlier arguments about the gendering of organizations, reconceptualizing that
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
approach to add class and race and extending the discussion in various ways
(Acker 1990, 1992).3
INEQUALITY REGIMES
All organizations have inequality regimes, defined as loosely interrelated practices,
processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender,
and racial inequalities within particular organizations. The ubiquity of inequality
is obvious: Managers, executives, leaders, and department heads have much more
power and higher pay than secretaries, production workers, students, or even professors.
Even organizations that have explicit egalitarian goals develop inequality
regimes over time, as considerable research on egalitarian feminist organizations
has shown (Ferree and Martin 1995; Scott 2000).
I define inequality in organizations as systematic disparities between participants
in power and control over goals, resources, and outcomes; workplace decisions
such as how to organize work; opportunities for promotion and interesting
work; security in employment and benefits; pay and other monetary rewards;
respect; and pleasures in work and work relations. Organizations vary in the
degree to which these disparities are present and in how severe they are. Equality
rarely exists in control over goals and resources, while pay and other monetary
rewards are usually unequal. Other disparities may be less evident, or a high
degree of equality might exist in particular areas, such as employment security
and benefits.
Inequality regimes are highly various in other ways; they also tend to be fluid
and changing. These regimes are linked to inequality in the surrounding society,
its politics, history, and culture. Particular practices and interpretations develop in
different organizations and subunits. One example is from my study of Swedish
banks in the late 1980s (Acker 1994). My Swedish colleague and I looked at gender
and work processes in six local bank branches. We were investigating the
degree to which the branches had adopted a reorganization plan and a more equitable
distribution of work tasks and decision-making responsibilities that had
been agreed to by both management and the union.4
We found differences on
some dimensions of inequality. One office had almost all women employees and
few status and power differences. Most tasks were rotated or shared, and the
supervision by the male manager was seen by all working in the branch as supportive
and benign. The other offices had clear gender segregation, with men handling
the lucrative business accounts and women handling the everyday, private
customers. In these offices, very little power and decision making were shared,
although there were differences in the degrees to which the employees saw their
workplaces as undemocratic. The one branch office that was most successful in
redistributing tasks and decision making was the one with women employees and
a preexisting participatory ethos.
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 443
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
In the following sections, I discuss in some detail the varying characteristics
of inequality regimes, including the bases of inequality, the shape and degree of
inequality, organizing processes that create and recreate inequalities, the invisibility
of inequalities, the legitimacy of inequalities, and the controls that prevent
protest against inequalities. I also discuss efforts to reduce inequality in organizations,
including consideration of what elements in inequality regimes impede
and/or further change. Finally, I speculate about changes in inequality regimes
that are emerging as a consequence of globalizing processes.
WHAT VARIES? THE COMPONENTS
OF INEQUALITY REGIMES
The Bases of Inequality
The bases for inequality in organizations vary, although class, gender, and race
processes are usually present. “Class,” as I use the term, refers to enduring and
systematic differences in access to and control over resources for provisioning
and survival (Acker 2006; Nelson 1993). Those resources are primarily monetary
in wealthy industrial societies. Some class practices take place as employment
occurs and wages are paid. Thus, class is intrinsic to employment and to most
organizations. In large organizations, hierarchical positions are congruent with
class processes in the wider society. The CEO of the large corporation operates at
the top of the national and often global society. In smaller organizations, the class
structure may not be so congruent with society-wide class relations, but the owner
or the boss still has class power in relations with employees. “Class” is defined
by inequality; thus, “class equality” is an oxymoron (Ferguson 1984).
Gender, as socially constructed differences between men and women and the
beliefs and identities that support difference and inequality, is also present in all
organizations. Gender was, in the not too distant past, almost completely integrated
with class in many organizations. That is, managers were almost always
men; the lower-level white-collar workers were always women. Class relations in
the workplace, such as supervisory practices or wage-setting processes, were
shaped by gendered and sexualized attitudes and assumptions. The managerial
ranks now contain women in many organizations, but secretaries, clerks, servers,
and care providers are still primarily women. Women are beginning to be distributed
in organizational class structures in ways that are similar to the distribution
of men. Gender and class are no longer so perfectly integrated, but gendered and
sexualized assumptions still shape the class situations of women and men in different
ways.5
“Race” refers to socially defined differences based on physical characteristics,
culture, and historical domination and oppression, justified by entrenched beliefs.
Ethnicity may accompany race, or stand alone, as a basis for inequality. Race, too,
444 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
has often been integrated into class hierarchies, but in different patterns than
gender. Historically, in the United States, women and men of color were confined
to the lowest-level jobs or excluded from all but certain organizations. People of
color were totally excluded from the most powerful (white, male) organizations
that were central in shaping the racialized and gendered class structure of the
larger society. For example, the twentieth-century U.S. military was, until after
World War II, a racially segregated organization dominated by white men. Other
examples are the elite universities such as Harvard and Yale.
Other differences are sometimes bases for inequality in organizations. The
most important, I believe, is sexuality. Heterosexuality is assumed in many organizing
processes and in the interactions necessary to these processes. The secretary
is or was the “office wife” (Kanter 1977). Homosexuality is disruptive of
organizing processes because it flouts the assumptions of heterosexuality. It still
carries a stigma that produces disadvantages for lesbians and gays. Other bases of
inequality are religion, age, and physical disability. Again, in the not too distant
past, having the wrong religion such as being a Jew or a Catholic could activate
discriminatory practices. Today, having a Middle Eastern origin or being a
Muslim may have similar consequences. Currently, age seems to be a significant
basis for inequality, as are certain physical inabilities. I believe that although
these other differences are important, they are not, at this time, as thoroughly
embedded in organizing processes as are gender, race, and class.
Shape and Degree of Inequality
The steepness of hierarchy is one dimension of variation in the shape and
degree of inequality. The steepest hierarchies are found in traditional bureaucracies
in contrast to the idealized flat organizations with team structures, in which
most, or at least some, responsibilities and decision-making authority are distributed
among participants. Between these polar types are organizations with varying
degrees of hierarchy and shared decision making. Hierarchies are usually
gendered and racialized, especially at the top. Top hierarchical class positions are
almost always occupied by white men in the United States and European countries.
This is particularly true in large and influential organizations.6
The image of
the successful organization and the image of the successful leader share many of
the same characteristics, such as strength, aggressiveness, and competitiveness.
Some research shows that flat team structures provide professional women more
equality and opportunity than hierarchical bureaucracies, but only if the women
function like men. One study of engineers in Norway (Kvande and Rasmussen
1994) found that women in a small, collegial engineering firm gained recognition
and advancement more easily than in an engineering department in a big bureaucracy.
However, the women in the small firm were expected to put in the same long
hours as their male colleagues and to put their work first, before family responsibilities.
Masculine-stereotyped patterns of on-the-job behavior in team-organized
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 445
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
work may mean that women must make adaptations to expectations that interfere
with family responsibilities and with which they are uncomfortable. In a study of
high-level professional women in a computer development firm, Joanne Martin
and Debra Meyerson (1998) found that the women saw the culture of their work
group as highly masculine, aggressive, competitive, and self-promoting. The
women had invented ways to cope with this work culture, but they felt that they
were partly outsiders who did not belong.
Other research (Barker 1993) suggests that team-organized work may not
reduce gender inequality. Racial inequality may also be maintained as teams are
introduced in the workplace (Vallas 2003). While the organization of teams is
often accompanied by drastic reductions of supervisors’ roles, the power of
higher managerial levels is usually not changed: Class inequalities are only
slightly reduced (Morgen, Acker, and Weigt n.d.).
The degree and pattern of segregation by race and gender is another aspect of
inequality that varies considerably between organizations. Gender and race segregation
of jobs is complex because segregation is hierarchical across jobs at different
class levels of an organization, across jobs at the same level, and within
jobs (Charles and Grusky 2004). Occupations should be distinguished from jobs:
An occupation is a type of work; a job is a particular cluster of tasks in a particular
work organization. For example, emergency room nurse is an occupation; an
emergency room nurse at San Francisco General Hospital is a job. More statistical
data are available about occupations than about jobs, although “job” is the relevant
unit for examining segregation in organizations. We know that within the
broad level of professional and managerial occupations, there is less gender segregation
than 30 years ago, as I have already noted. Desegregation has not progressed
so far in other occupations. However, research indicates that “sex
segregation at the job level is more extensive than sex segregation at the level of
occupations” (Wharton 2005, 97). In addition, even when women and men “are
members of the same occupation, they are likely to work in different jobs and
firms” (Wharton 2005, 97). Racial segregation also persists, is also complex, and
varies by gender.
Jobs and occupations may be internally segregated by both gender and race:
What appears to be a reduction in segregation may only be its reconfiguration.
Reconfiguration and differentiation have occurred as women have entered previously
male-dominated occupations. For example, women doctors are likely to specialize
in pediatrics, not surgery, which is still largely a male domain. I found a
particularly striking example of the internal gender segregation of a job category
in my research on Swedish banks (Acker 1991). Swedish banks all had a single
job classification for beginning bank workers: They were called “aspiranter,” or
those aspiring to a career in banking. This job classification had one description; it
was used in banking industry statistics to indicate that this was one job that was
not gender segregated. However, in bank branches, young women aspiranters had
different tasks than young men. Men’s tasks were varied and brought them into
446 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
contact with different aspects of the business. Men were groomed for managerial
jobs. The women worked as tellers or answered telephone inquiries. They had
contact only with their immediate supervisors and coworkers in the branch. They
were not being groomed for promotion. This was one job with two realities based
on gender.
The size of wage differences in organizations also varies. Wage differences
often vary with the height of the hierarchy: It is the CEOs of the largest corporations
whose salaries far outstrip those of everyone else. In the United States in
2003, the average CEO earned 185 times the earnings of the average worker; the
average earnings of CEOs of big corporations were more than 300 times the earnings
of the average worker (Mishel, Bernstein, and Boushey 2003). White men
tend to earn more than any other gender/race category, although even for white
men, the wages of the bottom 60 percent are stagnant. Within most service-sector
organizations, both white women and women of color are at the bottom of the
wage hierarchy.
The severity of power differences varies. Power differences are fundamental to
class, of course, and are linked to hierarchy. Labor unions and professional associations
can act to reduce power differences across class hierarchies.7
However,
these organizations have historically been dominated by white men with the consequence
that white women and people of color have not had increases in organizational
power equal to those of white men. Gender and race are important in
determining power differences within organizational class levels. For example,
managers are not always equal. In some organizations, women managers work
quietly to do the organizational housekeeping, to keep things running, while men
managers rise to heroic heights to solve spectacular problems (Ely and Meyerson
2000). In other organizations, women and men manage in the same ways
(Wacjman 1998). Women managers and professionals often face gendered contradictions
when they attempt to use organizational power in actions similar to
those of men. Women enacting power violate conventions of relative subordination
to men, risking the label of “witches” or “bitches.”
Organizing Processes that Produce Inequality
Organizations vary in the practices and processes that are used to achieve their
goals; these practices and processes also produce class, gender, and racial
inequalities. Considerable research exists exploring how class or gender inequalities
are produced, both formally and informally, as work processes are carried
out (Acker 1989, 1990; Burawoy 1979; Cockburn 1985; Willis 1977). Some
research also examines the processes that result in continuing racial inequalities.
These practices are often guided by textual materials supplied by consultants or
developed by managers influenced by information and/or demands from outside
the organization. To understand exactly how inequalities are reproduced, it is necessary
to examine the details of these textually informed practices.
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 447
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Organizing the general requirements of work. The general requirements of
work in organizations vary among organizations and among organizational levels.
In general, work is organized on the image of a white man who is totally dedicated
to the work and who has no responsibilities for children or family demands
other than earning a living. Eight hours of continuous work away from the living
space, arrival on time, total attention to the work, and long hours if requested are
all expectations that incorporate the image of the unencumbered worker.
Flexibility to bend these expectations is more available to high-level managers,
predominantly men, than to lower-level managers (Jacobs and Gerson 2004).
Some professionals, such as college professors, seem to have considerable flexibility,
although they also work long hours. Lower-level jobs have, on the whole,
little flexibility. Some work is organized as part-time, which may help women to
combine work and family obligations, but in the United States, such work usually
has no benefits such as health care and often has lower pay than full-time work
(Mishel, Bernstein, and Boushey 2003). Because women have more obligations
outside of work than do men, this gendered organization of work is important in
maintaining gender inequality in organizations and, thus, the unequal distribution
of women and men in organizational class hierarchies. Thus, gender, race, and
class inequalities are simultaneously created in the fundamental construction of
the working day and of work obligations.
Organizing class hierarchies. Techniques also vary for organizing class hierarchies
inside work organizations. Bureaucratic, textual techniques for ordering
positions and people are constructed to reproduce existing class, gender, and
racial inequalities (Acker 1989). I have been unable to find much research on
these techniques, but I do have my own observations of such techniques in one
large job classification system from my study of comparable worth (Acker 1989).
Job classification systems describe job tasks and responsibilities and rank jobs
hierarchically. Jobs are then assigned to wage categories with jobs of similar rank
in the same wage category. Our study found that the bulk of sex-typed women’s
jobs, which were in the clerical/secretarial area and included thousands of women
workers, were described less clearly and with less specificity than the bulk of sextyped
men’s jobs, which were spread over a wide range of areas and levels in the
organization. The women’s jobs were grouped into four large categories at the
bottom of the ranking, assigned to the lowest wage ranges; the men’s jobs were
in many more categories extending over a much wider range of wage levels. Our
new evaluation of the clerical/secretarial categories showed that many different
jobs with different tasks and responsibilities, some highly skilled and responsible,
had been lumped together. The result was, we argued, an unjustified gender wage
gap: Although women’s wages were in general lower than those of men, women’s
skilled jobs were paid much less than men’s skilled jobs, reducing even further
the average pay for women when compared with the average pay for men.
Another component in the reproduction of hierarchy was revealed in discussions
448 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
with representatives of Hay Associates, the large consulting firm that provided
the job evaluation system we used in the comparable worth study. These representatives
would not let the job evaluation committees alter the system to compare
the responsibilities of managers’ jobs with the responsibilities of the jobs of
their secretarial assistants. Often, we observed, managers were credited with
responsibility for tasks done by their assistants. The assistants did not get credit
for these tasks in the job evaluation system, and this contributed to their relatively
low wages. But if managers’ and assistants’ jobs could never be compared,
no adjustments for inequities could ever be made. The hierarchy was inviolate in
this system.
In the past 30 years, many organizations have removed some layers of middle
management and relocated some decision making to lower organizational levels.
These changes have been described as getting rid of the inefficiencies of old
bureaucracies, reducing hierarchy and inequality, and empowering lower-level
employees. This happened in two of the organizations I have studied—Swedish
banks in the late 1980s (Acker 1991), discussed above, and the Oregon
Department of Adult and Family Services, responsible for administration of
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and welfare reform (Morgen, Acker,
and Weigt n.d.). In both cases, the decision-making responsibilities of frontline
workers were greatly increased, and their jobs became more demanding and more
interesting. In the welfare agency, ordinary workers had increased participation in
decisions about their local operations. But the larger hierarchy did not change in
either case. The frontline employees were still on the bottom; they had more
responsibility, but not higher salaries. And they had no increased control over
their job security. In both cases, the workers liked the changes in the content of
their jobs, but the hierarchy was still inviolate.
In sum, class hierarchies in organizations, with their embedded gender and
racial patterns, are constantly created and renewed through organizing practices.
Gender and sometimes race, in the form of restricted opportunities and particular
expectations for behavior, are reproduced as different degrees of organizational
class hierarchy and are also reproduced in everyday interactions and bureaucratic
decision making.
Recruitment and hiring. Recruitment and hiring is a process of finding the
worker most suited for a particular position. From the perspectives of employers,
the gender and race of existing jobholders at least partially define who is suitable,
although prospective coworkers may also do such defining (Enarson 1984).
Images of appropriate gendered and racialized bodies influence perceptions and
hiring. White bodies are often preferred, as a great deal of research shows
(Royster 2003). Female bodies are appropriate for some jobs; male bodies for
other jobs.
A distinction should be made between the gendered organization of work and
the gender and racial characteristics of the ideal worker. Although work is organized
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 449
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
on the model of the unencumbered (white) man, and both women and men are
expected to perform according to this model, men are not necessarily the ideal
workers for all jobs. The ideal worker for many jobs is a woman, particularly a
woman who, employers believe, is compliant, who will accept orders and low
wages (Salzinger 2003). This is often a woman of color; immigrant women are
sometimes even more desirable (Hossfeld 1994).
Hiring through social networks is one of the ways in which gender and racial
inequalities are maintained in organizations. Affirmative action programs altered
hiring practices in many organizations, requiring open advertising for positions
and selection based on gender- and race-neutral criteria of competence, rather
than selection based on an old boy (white) network. These changes in hiring practices
contributed to the increasing proportions of white women and people of
color in a variety of occupations. However, criteria of competence do not automatically
translate into gender- and race-neutral selection decisions. “Competence”
involves judgment: The race and gender of both the applicant and the decision
makers can affect that judgment, resulting in decisions that white males are the
more competent, more suited to the job than are others. Thus, gender and race as
a basis for hiring or a basis for exclusion have not been eliminated in many organizations,
as continuing patterns of segregation attest.
Wage setting and supervisory practices. Wage setting and supervision are class
practices. They determine the division of surplus between workers and management
and control the work process and workers. Gender and race affect assumptions
about skill, responsibility, and a fair wage for jobs and workers, helping to
produce wage differences (Figart, Mutari, and Power 2002).
Wage setting is often a bureaucratic organizational process, integrated into
the processes of creating hierarchy, as I described above. Many different wagesetting
systems exist, many of them producing gender and race differences in
pay. Differential gender-based evaluations may be embedded in even the most
egalitarian-appearing systems. For example, in my study of Swedish banks in
the 1980s, a pay gap between women and men was increasing within job categories
in spite of gender equality in wage agreements between the union and
employers (Acker 1991). Our research revealed that the gap was increasing
because the wage agreement allowed a small proportion of negotiated increases
to be allocated by local managers to reward particularly high-performing workers.
These small increments went primarily to men; over time, the increases
produced a growing gender gap. In interviews we learned that male employees
were more visible to male managers than were female employees. I suspected
that the male managers also felt that a fair wage for men was actually higher
than a fair wage for women. I drew two implications from these findings: first,
that individualized wage-setting produces inequality, and second, that to understand
wage inequality it is necessary to delve into the details of wage-setting
systems.
450 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Supervisory practices also vary across organizations. Supervisory relations may
be affected by the gender and race of both supervisor and subordinate, in some
cases preserving or reproducing gender or race inequalities. For example, above I
described how women and men in the same aspiranter job classification in Swedish
banks were assigned to different duties by their supervisors. Supervisors probably
shape their behaviors with subordinates in terms of race and gender in many other
work situations, influencing in subtle ways the existing patterns of inequality. Much
of this can be observed in the informal interactions of workplaces.
Informal interactions while “doing the work.” A large literature exists on the
reproduction of gender in interactions in organizations (Reskin 2003; Ridgeway
1997). The production of racial inequalities in workplace interactions has not
been studied so frequently (Vallas 2003), while the reproduction of class relations
in the daily life of organizations has been studied in the labor process tradition,
as I noted above. The informal interactions and practices in which class, race, and
gender inequalities are created in mutually reinforcing processes have not so
often been documented, although class processes are usually implicit in studies
of gendered or racialized inequalities.
As women and men go about their everyday work, they routinely use gender-,
race-, and class-based assumptions about those with whom they interact, as I briefly
noted above in regard to wage setting. Body differences provide clues to the
appropriate assumptions, followed by appropriate behaviors. What is appropriate
varies, of course, in relation to the situation, the organizational culture and history,
and the standpoints of the people judging appropriateness. For example,
managers may expect a certain class deference or respect for authority that varies
with the race and gender of the subordinate; subordinates may assume that their
positions require deference and respect but also find these demands demeaning or
oppressive. Jennifer Pierce (1995), in a study of two law firms, showed how both
gendered and racialized interactions shaped the organizations’ class relations:
Women paralegals were put in the role of supportive, mothering aides, while men
paralegals were cast as junior partners in the firms’ business. African American
employees, primarily women in secretarial positions, were acutely aware of the
ways in which they were routinely categorized and subordinated in interactions
with both paralegals and attorneys. The interaction practices that re-create gender
and racial inequalities are often subtle and unspoken, thus difficult to document.
White men may devalue and exclude white women and people of color by not listening
to them in meetings, by not inviting them to join a group going out for a
drink after work, by not seeking their opinions on workplace problems. Other
practices, such as sexual harassment, are open and obvious to the victim, but not
so obvious to others. In some organizations, such as those in the travel and hospitality
industry, assumptions about good job performance may be sexualized:
Women employees may be expected to behave and dress as sexually attractive
women, particularly with male customers (Adkins 1995).
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 451
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
The Visibility of Inequalities
Visibility of inequality, defined as the degree of awareness of inequalities,
varies in different organizations. Lack of awareness may be intentional or unintentional.
Managers may intentionally hide some forms of inequality, as in the
Swedish banks I studied (Acker 1991). Bank workers said that they had been told
not to discuss their wages with their coworkers. Most seem to have complied,
partly because they had strong feelings that their pay was part of their identity,
reflecting their essential worth. Some said they would rather talk about the details
of their sex lives than talk about their pay.
Visibility varies with the position of the beholder: “One privilege of the privileged
is not to see their privilege.” Men tend not to see their gender privilege;
whites tend not to see their race privilege; ruling class members tend not to see
their class privilege (McIntosh 1995). People in dominant groups generally see
inequality as existing somewhere else, not where they are. However, patterns of
invisibility/visibility in organizations vary with the basis for the inequality.
Gender and gender inequality tend to disappear in organizations or are seen as
something that is beside the point of the organization. Researchers examining
gender inequality have sometimes experienced this disappearance as they have
discussed with managers and workers the ways that organizing practices are gendered
(Ely and Meyerson 2000; Korvajärvi 2003). Other research suggests that
practices that generate gender inequality are sometimes so fleeting or so minor
that they are difficult to see.
Class also tends to be invisible. It is hidden by talk of management, leadership,
or supervision among managers and those who write and teach about organizations
from a management perspective. Workers in lower-level, nonmanagement
positions may be very conscious of inequalities, although they might not identify
these inequities as related to class. Race is usually evident, visible, but segregated,
denied, and avoided. In two of my organization studies, we have asked questions
about race issues in the workplace (Morgen, Acker, and Weigt n.d.). In both of
these studies, white workers on the whole could see no problems with race or
racism, while workers of color had very different views. The one exception was in
an office with a very diverse workforce, located in an area with many minority residents
and high poverty rates. Here, jobs were segregated by race, tensions were
high, and both white and Black workers were well aware of racial incidents.
Another basis of inequality, sexuality, is almost always invisible to the majority
who are heterosexual. Heterosexuality is simply assumed, not questioned.
The Legitimacy of Inequalities
The legitimacy of inequalities also varies between organizations. Some organizations,
such as cooperatives, professional organizations, or voluntary organizations
with democratic goals, may find inequality illegitimate and try to minimize
452 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
it. In other organizations, such as rigid bureaucracies, inequalities are highly
legitimate. Legitimacy of inequality also varies with political and economic conditions.
For example, in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights
and the women’s movements challenged the legitimacy of racial and gender
inequalities, sometimes also challenging class inequality. These challenges
spurred legislation and social programs to reduce inequality, stimulating a decline
in the legitimacy of inequality in many aspects of U.S. life, including work organizations.
Organizations became vulnerable to lawsuits for discrimination and
took defensive measures that included changes in hiring procedures and education
about the illegitimacy of inequality. Inequality remained legitimate in many
ways, but that entrenched legitimacy was shaken, I believe, during this period.
Both differences and similarities exist among class, race, and gender processes
and among the ways in which they are legitimized. Class is fundamentally about
economic inequality. Both gender and race are also defined by inequalities of various
kinds, but I believe that gender and racial differences could still conceivably
exist without inequality. This is, of course, a debatable question. Class is highly
legitimate in U.S. organizations, as class practices, such as paying wages and
maintaining supervisory oversight, are basic to organizing work in capitalist
economies. Class may be seen as legitimate because it is seen as inevitable at the
present time. This has not always been the case for all people in the United States;
there have been periods, such as during the depression of the 1930s and during
the social movements of the 1960s, when large numbers of people questioned
the legitimacy of class subordination.
Gender and race inequality are less legitimate than class. Antidiscrimination
and civil rights laws limiting certain gender and race discriminatory practices
have existed since the 1950s. Organizations claim to be following those laws in
hiring, promotion, and pay. Many organizations have diversity initiatives to
attract workforces that reflect their customer publics. No such laws or voluntary
measures exist to question the basic legitimacy of class practices, although measures
such as the Fair Labor Standards Act could be interpreted as mitigating the
most severe damages from those practices. In spite of antidiscrimination and
affirmative action laws, gender and race inequalities continue in work organizations.
These inequalities are often legitimated through arguments that naturalize
the inequality (Glenn 2002). For example, some employers still see women as
more suited to child care and less suited to demanding careers than men. Beliefs
in biological differences between genders8
and between racial/ethnic groups, in
racial inferiority, and in the superiority of certain masculine traits all legitimate
inequality. Belief in market competition and the natural superiority of those who
succeed in the contest also naturalizes inequality.
Gender and race processes are more legitimate when embedded in legitimate
class processes. For example, the low pay and low status of clerical work is historically
and currently produced as both a class and a gender inequality. Most
people take this for granted as just part of the way in which work is organized.
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 453
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Legitimacy, along with visibility, may vary with the situation of the observer:
Some clerical workers do not see the status and pay of their jobs as fair, while their
bosses would find such an assessment bizarre.9
The advantaged often think their
advantage is richly deserved. They see visible inequalities as perfectly legitimate.
High visibility and low legitimacy of inequalities may enhance the possibilities
for change. Social movements may contribute to both high visibility and low
legitimacy while agitating for change toward greater equality, as I argued above.
Labor unions may also be more successful when visibility is high and legitimacy
of inequalities is low.
Control and Compliance
Organizational controls are, in the first instance, class controls, directed at
maintaining the power of managers, ensuring that employees act to further the
organization’s goals, and getting workers to accept the system of inequality.
Gendered and racialized assumptions and expectations are embedded in the form
and content of controls and in the ways in which they are implemented. Controls
are made possible by hierarchical organizational power, but they also draw on
power derived from hierarchical gender and race relations. They are diverse and
complex, and they impede changes in inequality regimes.
Mechanisms for exerting control and achieving compliance with inequality
vary. Organization theorists have identified many types of control, including
direct controls, unobtrusive or indirect controls, and internalized controls. Direct
controls include bureaucratic rules and various punishments for breaking the
rules. Rewards are also direct controls. Wages, because they are essential for survival
in completely monetized economies, are a powerful form of control (Perrow
2002). Coercion and physical and verbal violence are also direct controls often
used in organizations (Hearn and Parkin 2001). Unobtrusive and indirect controls
include control through technologies, such as monitoring telephone calls or time
spent online or restricting information flows. Selective recruitment of relatively
powerless workers can be a form of control (Acker and Van Houten 1974).
Recruitment of illegal immigrants who are vulnerable to discovery and deportation
and recruitment of women of color who have few employment opportunities
and thus will accept low wages are examples of this kind of control, which preserves
inequality.
Internalized controls include belief in the legitimacy of bureaucratic structures
and rules as well as belief in the legitimacy of male and white privilege.
Organizing relations, such as those between a manager and subordinates, may be
legitimate, taken for granted as the way things naturally and normally are.
Similarly, a belief that there is no point in challenging the fundamental gender,
race, and class nature of things is a form of control. These are internalized, often
invisible controls.10
Pleasure in the work is another internalized control, as are fear
and self-interest. Interests can be categorized as economic, status, and identity
454 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
interests, all of which may be produced as organizing takes place. Identities, constituted
through gendered and racialized images and experiences, are mutually
reproduced along with differences in status and economic advantage. Those with
the most powerful and affluent combination of interests are apt to be able to control
others with the aim of preserving these interests. But their self-interest
becomes a control on their own behavior.
CAN INEQUALITY REGIMES CHANGE?
Inequality regimes can be challenged and changed. However, change is difficult
and change efforts often fail. One reason is that owner and managerial class
interests and the power those interests can mobilize usually outweigh the class,
gender, and race interests of those who suffer inequality. Even where no obvious
economic interests are threatened by changes, men managers and lower-level
employees often insist on maintaining ongoing organizing patterns that perpetuate
inequalities. For example, white masculine identity may be tied to small relative
advantages in workplace power and income. Advantage is hard to give up:
Increasing equality with devalued groups can be seen and felt as an assault on
dignity and masculinity. Several studies have shown that these complicated
motives on the part of white men, in particular, can scuttle efforts at organizational
change, even when top management is supporting such change. For example,
Cynthia Cockburn (1991) analyzed the multiple ways that men resisted
equality efforts in four British organizations in spite of top-level support for these
efforts. In the Oregon pay equity project (Acker 1989), some male unionists could
not believe that women’s work might be as skilled as theirs and thus deserve
higher pay. The men maintained this objection even though their own wages
would not be lowered if the women’s wages were increased. It was as though their
masculine self-respect depended, to a degree, on the differences in pay between
women and men, not the actual level of pay.
Successful change projects seem to have had a number of common characteristics.
First, change efforts that target a limited set of inequality-producing mechanisms
seem to be the most successful. In addition, successful efforts appear to
have combined social movement and legislative support outside the organization
with active support from insiders. In addition, successful efforts often involve
coercion or threat of loss. Both affirmative action and pay equity campaigns had
these characteristics. Affirmative action programs sought to increase the employment
opportunities for women of all races and men of color in organizations and
jobs in which they had very low representation. The federal legislation required
such programs, and similar equality efforts, in organizations that received government
funds. Employers who did not follow the law were vulnerable to loss of
funds. Pay equity projects, intended to erase wage inequality between womenpredominant
jobs and men-predominant jobs of equal value, were authorized
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 455
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
primarily by state and local legislation and took place primarily in public-sector
organizations. In both types of efforts, the mobilization of civil rights and women’s
movement groups was essential to success.
When the political climate changed, beginning in the 1980s, pressures against
such equality-producing initiatives grew.11
By 2006, affirmative action programs
had become mere bureaucratic paper shuffling in most organizations, undermined
by a lack of outside enforcement and inside activism and by legal attacks by white
men claiming reverse discrimination.12
Pay equity efforts were undermined
by industrial restructuring, attacks on labor unions, delegitimation of the public
sector, and legal attacks.13
Industrial restructuring began to undermine bluecollar,
well-paid, male employment and to turn unions away from pay equity to
the problems of their white male members and the defense of unions themselves
against employer attacks. Unions had been prime actors in the pay equity movement;
their relative weakening undermined the movement. Furthermore, government
organizations came under attack in the era of private-sector, free market
celebration, and funds for various programs including wage reforms were cut.
When pay equity campaigns succeeded, wage gains were often modest, as, for
example, the Oregon case showed (Acker 1989). The modest gains that did occur
resulted from political compromise to keep costs down: The potential costs of
raising clerical and other service workers’ pay to comparable levels with skilled
blue-collar workers or the pay of female-typed professions to the pay of maletyped
professions were enormous. These potential costs were, I believe, the
underlying reasons for legal challenges to pay equity (Nelson and Bridges 1999).
Real pay equity extending into the private sector would have imposed huge
increases in labor costs at the very time that employers were cutting their workforces,
turning to temporary workers, outsourcing, and off-shoring jobs to save on
labor costs.
The history of pay equity projects reveals a fundamental contradiction facing
many efforts to reform inequality regimes: The goals of inequality reduction or
elimination are the opposite of some of the goals of employing organizations, particularly
in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the
private sector, management wants to reduce costs, increase profit, and distribute
as much as possible of the profit to top management and shareholders. In the public
sector, management wants to reduce costs and minimize taxes. Reducing costs
involves reducing wages, not raising them, as pay equity would require. While
wage inequality is not the only form of inequality, eliminating that inequality may
be basic to dealing with other forms as well.
Another lesson of this history is that a focus on delimited areas of inequality,
such as gender and racial imbalance in job categories or pay gaps between
female and male jobs of equal value, do nothing to address underlying organizational
class inequality. Both of these models of intervention work within the
organizational class structure: Affirmative action intends to remove racial and
gender barriers to entry into existing hierarchical positions; pay equity efforts
456 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
compare male and female jobs and sometimes white predominant jobs and
other-than-white predominant jobs within organizational class levels, not across
those levels.14
These interventions also fail to address other underlying processes of inequality
regimes: the male model of organizing or the persistent gendering and racialization
of interactions in the workplace. Family-friendly policies provide only
temporary relief for some people from the male model of organizing. The use of
family-friendly policies, primarily by women when they have young children, or
the use of part-time work, again primarily involving women, may increase gender
inequalities in organizations (Glass 2004). Such measures may reinforce, not undermine,
the male model of organizing by defining those who conform to it as serious,
committed workers and those who do not as rather peripheral and probably unworthy
of promotions and pay increases (Hochschild 1997).
Diversity programs and policies seem to be often aimed at some of the more
subtle discriminatory processes dividing organizational participants along lines
of race/ethnicity and sometimes gender through education and consciousness
raising. Diversity programs replaced, in many organizations, the affirmative
action programs that came under attack. As Kelly and Dobbin (1998) point out,
diversity programs lack the timetables, goals, and other proactive measures of
affirmative action and may be more acceptable to management for that reason.
But that may also be a reason that diversity training will not basically alter
assumptions and actions that are rooted in the legitimation of systems of organizational
power and reward that favor whites, particularly white men. The
legitimacy of inequality, fear of retaliation, and cynicism limit support for
change. The invisibility of inequality to those with privilege does not give way
easily to entreaties to see what is going on. The intimate entwining of privilege
with gendered and racialized identity makes privilege particularly difficult to
unsettle.
Change projects focused on gendered behaviors that are dysfunctional for the
organization provide examples of the almost unshakable fusion of gendered identities
and workplace organizing practices. For example, Robin Ely and Debra
Meyerson (2000) describe a change project aimed at discovering why a company
had difficulty retaining high-level women managers and difficulty increasing the
proportion of women in upper management. The researcher/change agents documented
a culture and organizing practices at the executive level that rewarded
stereotypical “heroic” male problem-solving behaviors, tended to denigrate
women who attempted to be heroes, and failed to reward the mundane organization
building most often done by women. Although members of the management
group could see that these ways of behaving were dysfunctional for the organization,
they did not make the links between these organizing practices, gender,
and the underrepresentation of women. In their eyes, the low representation of
women in top jobs was still due to the failure of individual women, not to system
processes.
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 457
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
GLOBALIZATION, RESTRUCTURING,
AND CHANGE IN INEQUALITY REGIMES
Organizational restructuring of the past 30 years has contributed to increasing
variation in inequality regimes. Restructuring, new technology, and the globalization
of production contribute to rising competitive pressures in private-sector
organizations and budget woes in public-sector organizations, making challenges
to inequality regimes less likely to be undertaken than during the 1960s to the
1980s. The following are some of the ways in which variations in U.S. inequality
regimes seem to have increased. These are speculations because, in my view,
there is not yet sufficient evidence as to how general or how lasting these changes
might be.
The shape and degree of inequality seem to have become more varied. Old,
traditional bureaucracies with career ladders still exist. Relatively new organizations,
such as Wal-Mart, also have such hierarchical structures. At the same
time, in many organizations, certain inequalities are externalized in new segmented
organizing forms as both production and services are carried out in
other, low-wage countries, often in organizations that are in a formal, legal
sense separate organizations. If these production units are seen as part of the
core organizations, earnings inequalities are increasing rapidly in many different
organizations. But wage inequalities are also increasing within core U.S.based
sectors of organizations.
White working- and middle-class men, as well as white women and all people
of color, have been affected by restructuring, downsizing, and the export of jobs
to low-wage countries. White men’s advantage seems threatened by these changes,
but at least one study shows that white men find new employment after layoffs
and downsizing more rapidly than people in other gender/race categories and that
they find better jobs (Spalter-Roth and Deitch 1999). And a substantial wage gap
still exists between women and men. Moreover, white men still dominate local
and global organizations. In other words, inequality regimes still seem to place
white men in advantaged positions in spite of the erosion of advantages for middleand
lower-level men workers.
Inequalities of power within organizations, particularly in the United States, also
seem to be increasing with the present dominance of global corporations and their
free market ideology, the decline in the size and influence of labor unions, and the
increase in job insecurity as downsizing and reorganization continue. The increase
in contingent and temporary workers who have less participation in decisions and
less security than regular workers also increases power inequality. Unions still exercise
some power, but they exist in only a very small minority of private-sector organizations
and a somewhat larger minority of public-sector unions.
Organizing processes that create and re-create inequalities may have become
more subtle, but in some cases, they have become more difficult to challenge. For
example, the unencumbered male worker as the model for the organization of
458 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
daily work and the model of the excellent employee seems to have been strengthened.
Professionals and managers, in particular, work long hours and often are
evaluated on their “face time” at work and their willingness to put work and the
organization before family and friends (Hochschild 1997; Jacobs and Gerson
2004). New technology makes it possible to do some jobs anywhere and to be in
touch with colleagues and managers at all hours of day and night. Other workers
lower in organizational hierarchies are expected to work as the employer
demands, overtime or at odd hours. Such often excessive or unpredictable
demands are easier to meet for those without daily family responsibilities. Other
gendered aspects of organizing processes may be less obvious than before sex and
racial discrimination emerged as legal issues. For example, employers can no
longer legally exclude young women on the grounds that they may have babies
and leave the job, nor can they openly exclude consideration of people of color.
But informal exclusion and unspoken denigration are still widespread and still
difficult to document and to confront.
The visibility of inequality to those in positions of power does not seem to
have changed. However, the legitimacy of inequality in the eyes of those with
money and power does seem to have changed: Inequality is more legitimate. In a
culture that glorifies individual material success and applauds extreme competitive
behavior in pursuit of success, inequality becomes a sign of success for those
who win.
Controls that ensure compliance with inequality regimes have also become
more effective and perhaps more various. With threats of downsizing and offshoring,
decreasing availability of well-paying jobs for clerical, service, and manual
workers, and undermining of union strength and welfare state supports,
protections against the loss of a living wage are eroded and employees become
more vulnerable to the control of the wage system itself. That is, fear of loss of
livelihood controls those who might challenge inequality.
CONCLUSION
I had two goals in writing this article. The first was to develop a conceptual
strategy for analyzing the mutual production of gender, race, and class inequalities
in work organizations. I have suggested the idea of inequality regimes, interlinked
organizing processes that produce patterns of complex inequalities. These
processes and patterns vary in different organizations; the severity of inequalities,
their visibility and legitimacy, and the possibilities for change toward less
inequality also vary from organization to organization. In the United States at the
present time, almost all organizations have two characteristics that rarely vary:
Class inequality, inflected through gendered and racialized beliefs and practices,
is the normal and natural bedrock of organizing, and white men are the normal
and natural top leaders.
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 459
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
My second goal was to better understand why so many organizational equality
projects have had only modest success or have failed altogether. Looking at
organizations as inequality regimes may give some clues about why change projects
designed to increase equality are so often less than successful. Change
toward greater equality is possible, but difficult, because of entrenched economic
(class) interests, the legitimacy of class interests, and allegiances to gendered and
racialized identities and advantages. When class identities and interests are integrated
with gender and racial identities and interests, opposition may be most
virulent to any moves to alter the combined advantages. However, top male executives
who are secure in their multiple advantages and privileges may be more
supportive of reducing inequalities than male middle managers who may lose
proportionately more through equality organizing.
Greater equality inside organizations is difficult to achieve during a period,
such as the early years of the twenty-first century, in which employers are pushing
for more inequality in pay, medical care, and retirement benefits and are
using various tactics, such as downsizing and outsourcing, to reduce labor costs.
Another major impediment to change within inequality regimes is the absence
of broad social movements outside organizations agitating for such changes. In
spite of all these difficulties, efforts at reducing inequality continue. Government
regulatory agencies, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in particular,
are still enforcing antidiscrimination laws that prohibit discrimination
against specific individuals (see www.eeoc.gov/stats/). Resolutions of complaints
through the courts may mandate some organizational policy changes, but
these seem to be minimal. Campaigns to alter some inequality regimes are under
way. For example, a class action lawsuit on behalf of Wal-Mart’s 1.3 million
women workers is making its way through the courts (Featherstone 2004). The
visibility of inequality seems to be increasing, and its legitimacy decreasing.
Perhaps this is the opening move in a much larger, energetic attack on inequality
regimes.
NOTES
1. Some of the analysis in this article is based on chapter 5 in my book Class Questions: Feminist
Answers (Acker 2006). I began to develop the concept of inequality regimes in a series of papers
beginning in 1999 (see Acker 2000).
2. An outstanding exception to this generalization is Cynthia Cockburn’s (1991) In the Way of
Women: Men’s Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations. Cockburn’s study of gender equality programs
in four large British organizations integrates understanding of class processes and racial discrimination
in her analysis of efforts to achieve sex equality.
3. I base my analysis primarily on organizations in the United States. However, I also use
research that I and others have done in Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where inequality issues in organizations
are quite similar to those in the United States.
4. At that time, the employees of all banks in Sweden were organized by the same union,
Svenskabankmannaforbundet. Thus, a union-management agreement applied to all banks, although
460 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
they were separate enterprises. Also, at that time, the union cooperated with management on issues of
organization of work. In our study, we did observations and interviews in branches of the two largest
Swedish banks.
5. See Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s (1977) Men and Women of the Corporation for an early analysis
of the gendered realities faced by managerial women, realities of the workplace that made top jobs
more difficult for women than for men. These gendered class realities still exist 30 years later,
although they may not be as widespread as in 1977.
6. Women have never been more than a tiny fraction of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. In
2004, eight women were 1.6 percent of the CEOs of these companies (see http://www.catalyst.org/
files/fact/COTE%20Factsheet%202002updated.pdf).
7. In some European and Scandinavian countries in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a push for
workplace democracy by social democratic parties and labor confederations that resulted in a number
of innovations to give workers, usually through their unions, more voice in organizing decisions. In
Sweden, for example, a codetermination law was passed in the late 1970s encouraging the signing of
labor-management contracts on employee/union participation in many company and workplace issues
(Forsebäck 1980). No such broad initiatives occurred in the United States.
8. An example of such naturalization of inequality occurred in 2005 when Lawrence Summers,
then president of Harvard, explained the low representation of women in science by saying that
women did not have the natural ability to do mathematics that men had. The local and national uproar
over this explanation of inequality indicates how illegitimate such arguments have become.
9. The film 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and others captured this alternative view from
below. Its great success suggests a wide and sympathetic audience that understood the critique of
workplace relations.
10. Charles Perrow (1986) calls these “premise controls,” the underlying assumptions about the
way things are.
11. For a review and assessment of legislation and court antidiscrimination cases related to racial
inequality, see Brown et al. (2003, chap. 5).
12. For an analysis of affirmative action and women’s employment, see Reskin (1998).
13. Figart, Mutari, and Power (2002) discuss several reasons for the demise of comparable worth,
including the privatization of many public services. See also Nelson and Bridges (1999) for a discussion
that includes an analysis of court cases undermining pay equity.
14. Cynthia Cockburn (1991) also makes this point.
REFERENCES
Acker, Joan. 1989. Doing comparable worth: Gender, class and pay equity. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
———. 1990. Hierarchies, jobs, and bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender & Society
4:139-58.
———. 1991. Thinking about wages: The gendered wage gap in Swedish banks. Gender & Society
5:390-407.
———. 1992. Gendering organizational theory. In Gendering organizational theory, edited by A. J.
Mills and P. Tancred. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
———. 1994. The gender regime of Swedish banks. Scandinavian Journal of Management 10:117-30.
———. 2000. Revisiting class: Thinking from gender, race and organizations. Social Politics (summer):
192-214.
———. 2006. Class questions: Feminist answers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Acker, Joan, and Donald Van Houten. 1974. Differential recruitment and control: The sex structuring
of organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly 19:152-63.
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 461
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Adkins, Lisa. 1995. Gendered work. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
Barker, James R. 1993. Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams.
Administrative Science Quarterly 38:408-37.
Brown, M. K., M. Carnoy, E. Currie, T. Duster, D. B. Oppenheimer, M. M. Shultz, and D. Wellman.
2003. White-washing race: The myth of a color-blind society. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing consent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Charles, Maria, and David B. Grusky. 2004. Occupational ghettos: The worldwide segregation of
women and men. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cockburn, Cynthia. 1985. Machinery of dominance. London: Pluto.
———. 1991. In the way of women: Men’s resistance to sex equality in organizations. Ithaca, NY:
ILR Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1995. Comment on West and Fenstermaker. Gender & Society 9:491-94.
Collinson, David L., and Jeff Hearn, eds. 1996. Men as managers, managers as men. London: Sage.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1995. Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and
violence against women of color. In Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement,
edited by K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas. New York: New Press.
Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, race & class. New York: Vintage.
Ely, Robin J., and Debra E. Meyerson. 2000. Advancing gender equity in organizations: The challenge
and importance of maintaining a gender narrative. Organization 7:589-608.
Enarson, Elaine. 1984. Woods-working women: Sexual integration in the U.S. Forest Service.
Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Featherstone, Liza. 2004. Selling women short: The landmark battle for workers’ rights at Wal-Mart.
New York: Basic Books.
Fenstermaker, Sarah, and Candace West, eds. 2002. Doing gender, doing difference: Inequality, power,
and institutional change. New York: Routledge.
Ferguson, Kathy E. 1984. The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Ferree, Myra Max, and PatriciaYancey Martin, eds. 1995. Feminist organizations. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Figart, D. M., E. Mutari, and M. Power. 2002. Living wages, equal wages. London: Routledge.
Forsebäck, Lennart. 1980. Industrial relations and employment in Sweden. Uppsala, Sweden: Almqvist
& Wiksell.
Glass, Jennifer. 2004. Blessing or curse? Work-family policies and mother’s wage growth over time.
Work and Occupations 31:367-94.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2002. Unequal freedom: How race and gender shaped American citizenship
and labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hearn, Jeff, and Wendy Parkin. 2001. Gender, sexuality and violence in organizations. London: Sage.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1997. The time bind: When work becomes home & home becomes work.
New York: Metropolitan Books.
Holvino, Evangelina. 2001. Complicating gender: The simultaneity of race, gender, and class in organization
change(ing). Working paper no. 14, Center for Gender in Organizations, Simmons
Graduate School of Management, Boston.
hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist theory: From margin to center. Boston: South End.
Hossfeld, Karen J. 1994. Hiring immigrant women: Silicon Valley’s “simple formula”. In Women of
color in U.S. society, edited by M. B. Zinn and B. T. Dill. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Jacobs, Jerry A., and Kathleen Gerson. 2004. The time divide: Work, family, and gender inequality.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Joseph, Gloria. 1981. The incompatible ménage á trois: Marxism, feminism and racism. In Women
and revolution: The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism, edited by L. Sargent. Boston:
South End.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 1977. Men and women of the corporation. New York: Basic Books.
462 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Kelly, Erin, and Frank Dobbin. 1998. How affirmative action became diversity management: Employer
response to antidiscrimination law, 1961 to 1996. American Behavioral Scientist 41:960-85.
Knapp, Gudrun-Axeli. 2005. Race, class, gender. European Journal of Women’s Studies 12:249-65.
Korvajärvi, Päivi. 2003. “Doing gender”—Theoretical and methodological considerations. In Where
have all the structures gone? Doing gender in organisations, examples from Finland, Norway and
Sweden, edited by E. Gunnarsson, S. Andersson, A. V. Rosell, A. Lehto, and M. SalminenKarlsson.
Stockholm, Sweden: Center for Women’s Studies, Stockholm University.
Kvande, Elin, and Bente Rasmussen. 1994. Men in male-dominated organizations and their encounter
with women intruders. Scandinavian Journal of Management 10:163-74.
Martin, Joanne, and Debra Meyerson. 1998. Women and power: Conformity, resistance, and disorganized
coaction. In Power and influence in organizations, edited by R. Kramer and M. Neale.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
McCall, Leslie. 2001. Complex inequality: Gender, class, and race in the new economy. New York:
Routledge.
———. 2005. The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
30:1771-1800.
McIntosh, Peggy. 1995. White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences
through work in women’s studies. In Race, class, and gender: An anthology, 2nd ed.,
edited by M. L. Andersen and P. H. Collins. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Mishel, L., J. Bernstein, and H. Boushey. 2003. The state of working America 2002/2003. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Morgen, S., J. Acker, and J. Weigt. n.d. Neo-liberalism on the ground: Practising welfare reform.
Nelson, Julie A. 1993. The study of choice or the study of provisioning? Gender and the definition of
economics. In Beyond economic man: Feminist theory and economics, edited by M. A. Ferber and
J. A. Nelson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nelson, Robert L., and William P. Bridges. 1999. Legalizing gender inequality: Courts, markets, and
unequal pay for women in America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Perrow, Charles. 1986. A society of organizations. Theory and Society 20:725-62.
———. 2002. Organizing America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pierce, Jennifer L. 1995. Gender trials: Emotional lives in contemporary law firms. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Reskin, Barbara. 1998. The realities of affirmative action in employment. Washington, DC: American
Sociological Association.
———. 2003. Including mechanisms in our models of ascriptive inequality. American Sociological
Review 68:1-21.
Ridgeway, Cecilia. 1997. Interaction and the conservation of gender inequality. American
Sociological Review 62:218-35.
Royster, Deirdre A. 2003. Race and the invisible hand: How white networks exclude Black men from
blue-collar jobs. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Salzinger, Leslie. 2003. Genders in production: Making workers in Mexico’s global factories. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Scott, Ellen. 2000. Everyone against racism: Agency and the production of meaning in the anti racism
practices of two feminist organizations. Theory and Society 29:785-819.
Spalter-Roth, Roberta, and Cynthia Deitch. 1999. I don’t feel right-sized; I feel out-of-work sized.
Work and Occupations 26:446-82.
Vallas, Steven P. 2003. Why teamwork fails: Obstacles to workplace change in four manufacturing
plants. American Sociological Review 68:223-50.
Wacjman, Judy. 1998. Managing like a man. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Weber, Lynn. 2001. Understanding race, class, gender, and sexuality. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Wharton, Amy S. 2005. The sociology of gender. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to labor. Farnborough, UK: Saxon House.
Acker / INEQUALITY REGIMES 463
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Joan Acker is a professor emerita in the Department of Sociology, University of Oregon. She
has written on class, women and work, gender and organizations, and feminist theory. She has
been awarded the American Sociological Association (ASA) Career of Distinguished Scholarship
Award and the ASA Jessie Bernard Award for feminist scholarship. Her new book is Class
Questions: Feminist Answers (2006, Rowman & Littlefield). Her most recent empirical
research is a large, collaborative study of welfare reform in the state of Oregon, Oregon
Families Who Left Temporary Assistance to Needy Families or Food Stamps: A Study of
Economic and Family Well-Being from 1998 to 2000.
464 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2006
at SAGE Publications on September 24, 2008http://gas.sagepub.comDownloaded from