22Nd EGOS Colloquium 2006 the Organizing Society

22Nd EGOS Colloquium 2006 the Organizing Society

28th Annual International Labour Process Conference

RutgersUniversity, March, 15-17, 2010

Special Stream: Representations and realities of Women’s Work

Representations of Women in Popular Management Press: Mind the Gap!

Annick Bourguignon[1] (ESSECBusinessSchool)

Philippe Zarlowski (ESCP Europe)

(Full paper)

1. Introduction

Compensated women’s work has become a characteristic for the socio-economic organization of the production of goods and services in many countries. During the 20th century, women have entered the business world and have gradually come to exercise management and, to a much lesser extent, upper management positions. Women’s work can be approached both as a social fact and as discourse. Various levels of discourse portray, represent and talk about women’s work, thus creating a dialectical relationship between social facts and their construction (Fairclough, 1995, 2001, 2003). In constructing and conveying representations of the world, discourse creates standards and beliefs which orientate individuals’ choices, decision-making in organisations, and more generally societal and political choices. In this respect the photographic discourse plays a leading part. Photographs give the impression of merely mirroring the world, so that the representations conveyed appear to the viewer as fairly neutral and objective, and thus more likely to impact unobtrusively on his/her choices.

Regarding business, women’s photographic representation in annual reports has been abundantly studied (see Preston et al., 1996 and followers), but comparatively, little attention has been paid to their representations in media. In particular, picturing modes of women at work in popular management press and more specifically, in magazines, have not been studied so far. This appears surprising given the potential of such press for the dissemination of representations likely to contribute to the (re)production of social order. Indeed popular managementmagazine press is easily accessible (in press selling boots, or as a joint subscription with membership to a professional association or a daily business newspaper, or freely in management training centres and business schools…).

The research[2] reported in this paper explores the photographic representation of women in popular management magazines. Our focus is mainly on possible differences between women’s and men’s representation – that are likely to foster gender discrimination in the business world. We pay also attention to the extent to which women’s representations adequately mirror realities of women’s work. If not, the gap will provide interesting insight into ideology at stake.

The remainder of this text is organised as follows. Part Two recalls research outcome so far regarding women’s photographical representations. Part Three explains our methodological choices. Part Four present our findings. Part Five discusses these findings and their limitations, as well as how they relate to prior research. The sixth and conclusive Part delineates a research agenda which would extend this exploratory research.

2. Representation of women: prior research

Studies have been conducted on the representation of women, and more recently and generally, of minorities – regarding gender and ethnicity – in corporate communication. Most studies have analyzed how minorities are dealt with in either corporate annual reports (e.g. Benschop and Meihuizen, 2002; Bernardi et al., 2005; Helms Mills, 2005; Adams and Harte, 1988) or, more recently, company websites (Singh and Point, 2006). These media of corporate communication both express and participate to the construction of the organizational identity (Hopwood, 1996;Benshop and Meihuizen, 2002). They have also been viewed as social constructs which through both their form and content reflect the values, ideology or epistemology of the wider social and political context (Graves et al. 1996, Preston et al., 1996, Tinker and Neiman, 1987) while contributing to the reproduction of the latter (Tinker and Neiman, 1987). In this respect, stereotypical representations of gender (and ethnicity) in corporate annual reports and company websites, both reflect and contribute to the reproduction of the prevailing social and organizational roles of men, women and ethnical groups (Benshop and Meihuizen, 2002; Singh and Point, 2006).

While representations of minorities have been approached through texts, tables, graphs, accounts and discourses, very few studies have concentrated on the study of minority in pictures only. Tinker and Neimark (1987) traced the evolution of managerial ideology vis-à-vis women in the annual report of General Motors over a period of sixty years (1916-1976). While references to pictures published in annual reports are included in their analysis, the image of women which is promoted in GM annual reports and its significance in terms of the socio-economic and socio-political role of women is analyzed in the annual report as a whole, texts accompanying pictures being as interesting as pictures as they provide GM view about how pictures should be gazed and interpreted by readers of the annual report (see for instance Tinker and Neimark, 1987: 83).

Singh and Point’s (2006) analysis of diversity statements issued on websites of listed European companies is also based on textual and other published material. Singh and Point (2006) propose a deconstruction of diversity discourses of companies and their analysis do include other “tools for promoting diversity discourses” (2006: 373) such as symbols, diversity statistics and images. However, pictures are not the focal point in their analysis of the presentation and representation modes of gender and ethnicity. Their analysis indicates, though, that the image which most frequently illustrates diversity statements on company websites is that of a young Asian woman, promoting “the female Asian technical expert” as “the most “desirable” diverse employee” (2006: 373) as Asians are often depicted in white coats and laboratory or hospital workplaces.

Mills identifies the different images of masculinities which have been promoted over time by one company – British Airways – based on a content analysis of various sources, including company newsletters, advertising copy and annual reports. Adams and Harte’s (1998) analysis of “the changing portrayal of the employment of women” is based on a longitudinal analysis of the publication of gender statistics in the annual reports of British banking and retail companies during the period 1935-1993.

Anderson and Imperia (1992), Benshop and Meihuizen (2002), Helms Mills (2005) and West (2005) are part of the few studies based on detailed analysis of pictures, all based on samples of corporate annual reports.The seminal work of Anderson and Imperia (1992) builds on Goffman’s (1979) study of gender advertisements, which notably proposed to analyze the relative size of men and women in photographs, the ritualization of subordination (e.g. women being more likely to be pictured canting, smiling or on floors than men) and function ranking (men being more likely to perform the executive role). Anderson and Impela’s (1992) final sample comprises 119 annual reports from 25 different American airline industry firms.

In their study of gender representations of the corporate annual reports published in 1996 of 30 Dutch companies, Benshop and Meihuizen (2002) provide a detailed analysis of photographs in annual reports, including the relative appearance frequencies of men and women, the roles, locations and clothes of the persons portrayed, their relative physical positions and the relative size of the space they cover.Helms Mills (2005) building on both Tinker and Neimark (1987) and Benshop and Meihuizen (2002) analyzed both images and texts in the annual reports of Nova Scotia Power, a North American electrical company from 1972 to 2001. Helms Mills’ (2005) quantitative analysis of pictures focused on the relative frequency of appearance of men and women.

Finally West (2005) analyzed photographs of persons in a sample of annual reports for the year 2004 for 30 South-African companies and like Helms Mills (2005) focused on the relative frequency of appearance of persons, according to both gender and ethnicityyet.

Comparisons between these studies are difficult to undertake because of variations in time, countries and the analyzed features of pictures and the portrayed persons. In addition to this, studies differ in the provision of their results, counts and frequencies being either displayed in tables for photographs or for the persons portrayed. However their main findings may be summarised as follows.

Women in numbers

In all four studies, women tend to be less frequently portrayed than men both in absolute terms and when controlled for their representation in the company. In Anderson and Imperia’s (1992) sample, out of the 637 non-flight crew employees portrayed, 65% were men.Helms Mills (2005) provides results per time period, with “female images” (presumably, portrayed women) accounting for 8.5% of the portrayed employees between 1972 and 1986, and 16% and 15% between 1987 and 1992 and 1993 and 2001, respectively.Benshop and Meihuizen (2002) find out that the large majority of pictures of persons depicted men subjects only (71%). In this study, the frequency of appearance of persons according to gender is controlled for the proportion of each gender in employment in the company. The overrepresentation of men in a company annual report holds when figures are controlled with the proportion of men in the total employment of the company.In West’s (2005) study, women represent about 41% of the persons portrayed.

Women in social roles and functions

Benshop and Meihuizen’s (2002) study indicates that pictures of persons in annual reports tend to ascribe different social roles to men and women. Men are mainly depicted as employees of the organization (81% of the men depicted) and the probability to be depicted as an employee is significantly lower for women than for men. Consistently, men have a higher probability to be portrayed in their job environments and women have a significantly lower probability of being professionally dressed. Benshop and Meihuizen (2002) thus conclude that “representations of gender in annual reports reinforce the traditional division of labour between men and women”. This result is convergent with Anderson and Imperia’s (1992) which indicate that women are more likely to be depicted in non-work situations.

Women in attitudes

Women are more likely to be depicted in subordinated positions to men or exhibit attitudes which would be associated to subservient behaviours. Anderson and Imperia (1992: 123-124) conclude that “photographs of women were more likely to display behaviours such as smiling, canting, and generally acting in a less serious manner than men”. In Benshop and Meihuizen’s (2002) study, in pictures featuring both men and women, men are portrayed in higher physical positions (e.g. standing while women are sitting) in 47% of these pictures while the reverse is observed in 7% of the pictures only. In addition to this, men occupy a larger area in the picture than women which, according to Benshop and Meihuizen (2002: 630) “emphasises the power gap and the differences in status between men and women”.

Given the relative wealth of studies on the representation of women in annual reports, which, in the wake of Goffman (1979) have drawn on the stream of research of the representation of women in advertisements, there is a scarcity of studies on the representation of women in the business press. Though annual reports and, more recently, company websites, have institutionalized as tools of public relations for companies, it can be argued that their audience and impact remain much more limited than those of mass media of business communication such as the business press and business magazines. Krefting (2002) is one such study of the representation of women in the business press. Her study proposes a critical analysis of discourses about men and women executives on a sample of front page Wall Street Journal accounts of executives of both genders. This analysis of discourse in texts allowed for the tracing of “women’s problematized relationship to executive roles that grounds the glass ceiling phenomenon” (Krefting, 2002: 114). To our knowledge to date, no study of the representation of women has been conducted on a sample of popular management magazines and on a corpus of pictures of persons in those magazines. Given the wide readership of such magazines on the one hand, and the power of pictures and their “claim to truth” (Graves et al., 1996) on the other hand, it can be argued that pictures in the popular management press play a distinctive role in the construction and reproduction of social order, including gender and minority relations (Goffman, 1979; Fairclough, 1995; Krefting, 2002; Singh and Point, 2005).

3. Methodology

Studying the representation of women means (i) defining popular management press and choosing publications and issues forming the sample providing the photographical corpus (ii) deciding features of photographs to be recorded for further analysis. These two steps are reported below.

Sample

We define popular management press as a set of recurrent publications explicitly targeted to managers with their main emphasis on management questions. According to this definition, the publications targeted to both managers and management researchers are not considered as popular management press. Our sample is composed of magazines (since they include many photographs), from which are excluded magazines mainly devoted to economy and economic news with a marginal interest in management topics.

Because ideology is always locally dependent (Bourguignon et al., 2004), we have limited our sample to magazines diffused in the same geographical and cultural area – namely France.

Six magazines only fit with our above definition of popular management magazines[3]. Their availability is comparable: all of them are distributed in selling boots and independent subscription is offered too. Table 1 below provides an overview of the French popular management magazine press.

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6
Publication name / Capital [Capital] / L'Entreprise [Entreprise] / Management [Management] / Challenges [Challenges] / Enjeux Les Echos [Stakes - Echoes] / Entreprendre [Entreprising]
Explicit focus
(Tarif Media,
2005) / economic magazine focusing on executive managers' interests, whether job- or private life-related / magazine of practical, useful and concrete economic information, targeted at enterprise heads and executive managers to help them in the management of their enterprise / magazine of managers in firms. It broaches working life, career and personal life. / economic magazine / magazine of economic analysis, thinking and prospective / magazine dealing with economic news
First issue / Sep-91 / May-85 / Mar-95 / Jan-82 / Apr-92 / Jan-84
Frequence / monthly / monthly / monthly / every 2 weeks / monthly / monthly
Other information / Same press group(Prisma Presse) and editor than Management / Main focus on entrepreneurship / Same press group (Prisma Presse) and editor than Capital / Monthly supplement (however independent) of the daily economic and business newspaper Les Echos,
Subscriptions (Tarif Media, 2005) / 94 874 / 43 293 / 35 193 / NA / 87 192 / 5 941
2004 Total diffusion (Stratégies, 2005) / 366 837 / 89 355 / 86 021 / 256 842 / 146 216 / 23 078
Readers30days
(Tarif Media, 2005) / 2 380 000 / 1 056 000 / 827 000 / 656 000 / 608 000 / NA

Table 1: The French popular management magazine press – overview

Information regarding diffusion, subscription and readinghas been derived from annual press surveys (Stratégies, 2005; Tarif Media, 2005). Diffusion figures represent the total quantities distributed, either by subscription, unit sale (selling boots) or free distribution (e.g. in training centres).The important difference between diffusion and readership witnesses for the fact that an issue is usually read by several persons.The “other information” line is sourced in additional personal observation. The table is sorted according to the number of readers (decreasing). Five publications out of six enjoy a very wide diffusion (from more than 2 million readers to 600000) while the last one appears more confidential in terms of subscription, diffusion and reading. These figures suggest that our hypothesis that PM press would be worth investigating since it was largely diffused was reasonable.

Our sample of investigation results from successive choices, or more exactly successive exclusions. First, we have excluded the confidential publication (Entreprendre, publication 6). Second, we have excluded L'Entreprise(column 2) because its target (managers with an entrepreneurship project, realised or not) was more specialised than other publications’ one. Finally, since Capital and Challenges were quite similar, we decided to retain Capital whose readers are in a proportion of nearly four to one, compared to Challenges.

Our final sample is composed of:

1 / 3 / 5
Publication name / Capital [Capital] / Management [Management] / Enjeux Les Echos
[Stakes - Echoes]
Explicit focus
(Tarif Media, 2005) / economic magazine focusing on executive managers' interests, whether job- or private life-related / magazine of managers in firms. It broaches working life, career and personal life. / magazine of economic analysis, thinking and prospective
First issue / Sep-91 / Mar-95 / Apr-92
Frequence / monthly / monthly / monthly
Other information / Same press group(Prisma Presse) and editor than Management / Same press group (Prisma Presse) and editor than Capital / Monthly supplement (however independent) of the daily economic and business newspaper Les Echos
Subscriptions
(Tarif Media, 2005) / 94 874 / 35 193 / 87 192
2004 Total diffusion
(Stratégies, 2005) / 366 837 / 86 021 / 146 216
Readers in 30 days
(Tarif Media, 2005) / 2 380 000 / 827 000 / 608 000
Among them
men / 58,90% / 61,00% / 59,10%
women / 41,10% / 39,00% / 40,90%
15-24 / 15,20% / 21,10% / 16,20%
25-34 / 22,10% / 25,80% / 16,90%
35-49 / 32,30% / 32,10% / 36,90%
50-64 / 23,30% / 18,10% / 27,80%
>65 / 7,10% / 2,90% / 2,20%

Table 2: Our sample – Three French popular management magazines

Each of the three publications is widely read. There is no significant difference between readers regarding gender (about 60% male and 40% female). Management readers appear to be a bit younger: 21% under 25 (versus about 16 for the two others) and 80% under 50 (versus 70%).And 7% of Capital readers are over 64 (versus only 2% for the two others). The fact that Capital and Management belong to the same press group and have the same chief-editor is an interesting point for investigation. Beyond their similar explicit focus Management appears more practical with articles (for instance, “How to manage your stress”, “Backache: which treatments?”, or even tests like “Which kind of stressed person are you?”, “Which sport do you need?”) which are more the type of popular non-economic press. Conversely Capital appears more business and economy oriented, with some practical articles too but systematically related to the economic world (for instance real estate questions).

It is generally accepted in academic fields particularly interested in pictures (semiotics, communication) that patterns of communication and signification are locally (i.e. in a given place, media, etc.) reproduced, so that a great number of observations is not necessary to give access to meaning. So our sample is limited to two issues (January and April), for each of two years of publication (namely 2004 and 2005[4]) and each of the three publications. Our sample is thus limited to 12 issues, for which we dispose of a very detailed analysis.