Gender Studies books

Since 2013, company boards in India have been legally required to have at least one female director. However, gender diversity in boardrooms across India remains below the global average, and a number of the women who do serve on boards were appointed largely because they are related to a founder or owner of a company. Since India is recognised as one of the world’s fastest growing emerging economies, it is important to study in detail why gender diversity at board level remains so low. Is this a result of workplace bias, a pipeline issue, or due to other reasons? Gender Equity in the Boardroom: The Case of India offers just this sorely needed study. Drawing upon interviews with board members and executives of both public and private companies, as well as with aspiring female leaders who are currently at mid-management level, and supplementing this with the authors’ own survey of the make-up of 305 Fortune India 500 companies, this book offers incisive insights into questions about board-level gender representation across industries. Offering both rigorous research and analysis as well as suggestions for practical policy changes, this book is essential reading for HRM and leadership scholars, and is also of keen interest to policymakers throughout the world.

Many researchers in recent years have begun to reflect on their gender identity and how this impacts on the research process and discuss how this helps build rapport with participants and creates successful or unsuccessful pieces of qualitative research. However, how does this intersect with other forms of identity, such as class, ethnicity, disability, age, sexuality? In this volume contributors explore these issues by reflecting on their own studies and research careers and address how important or unimportant gender has been in building research relationships. While the gender identity of the respondent/researcher relationship is undoubtedly important, what must also be acknowledged are the attributes which create a good fieldworker and competent social science researchers capable of understanding and engaging in different social situations and thought interaction with different participants.

For over four decades, scholars have been investigating male dominance - both symbolically and numerically -within popular music. The heavier genres of popular music, metal music in particular, have been male dominated spaces, which are difficult to navigate for women participating as fans, musicians, or both. Studies on gender inequality in metal music have convincingly demonstrated how gender dynamics shape the reception of metal music and metal scenes all over the globe. Yet, they shed relatively little light on the extent of and reasons for metal music's male domination from a production perspective. This book fills this gap, offering is a systematic and large-scale overview of gender inequality in metal music production. In other words: how many women - compared to men - are participating in metal bands and what are the causes for the differences in participation?

Using diverse theories and methods including analysis of online data, feminist critical discourse, fieldwork, grounded theory, and queer theory, this edited volume explores gender panic and policy in the United States as well as Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and subnational populations. Contributors consider a range of issues from the meaning of learning to play the traditional female role in order to develop a contemporary heteronormative romantic relationship to the difficulties of fairly accommodating non-binary people in traditionally gendered settings or the problem of implementing a gender-neutral rape law in a prison system that is structurally gendered. Gendered policies pertaining, particularly, to women and their fertility as a result of panics over low birthrates are explored as are issues relating to the validation of and problems with binary gender categories in elite sports. The impact of UN gender equality initiatives including LGBT equality on nation-states is also examined.

Gender inequality/inequity in the academy has been evidenced globally as women outnumber men seeking degrees in institutions of higher education, but remain concentrated in the lower faculty ranks and absent from administrative positions, particularly in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines The chapters in this volume document the gender inequality in higher education in the United States as well as in Australia, Austria, Portugal, South Africa, and Sweden. They explore the reasons for it and test or suggest remedies. Several are based on projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which seeks to address the issue as it is evidenced in STEM disciplines through ADVANCE, a program developed to increase the participation and advancement of women in these disciplines. The authors consider women's situation in the context of a variety of types of educational settings including community colleges, primarily undergraduate institutions, and research-intensive universities.

Gender can be rendered invisible when the gendered nature of institutions is ignored or when the genders of participants in events or movements are not identified. The genders of non-binary and gender-diverse individuals can be erased when gender is conceived of as binary. From an intersectional perspective, genders of people of various classes, castes, races, ethnicities, ages, occupations, or other specific characteristics may be absent from data, erased from public view or rendered invisible by stereotypes or policy decisions. Gender Visibility and Erasure offers a unique way of focusing on gender by identifying the multiple contexts in which issues of visibility, invisibility, and erasure manifest. It is a consideration of who is seen and who is ignored, who has voice and who is silenced, who has agency and who is controlled. Social, cultural, and political factors associated with gender and visibility are also discussed throughout the work. International in perspective, further considerations are made around how gender visibility may change over time in varying contexts such as migration, a program for recruiting lower income girls into STEM fields, academia, government family planning policy, and domestic violence. This 33rd volume of the Advanced Gender Research series, Gender Visibility and Erasure is the ideal work for those studying and researching the in/visibility aspects regarding gender and how this currently and may continue to impact society.

Disputes over gender, doping, and eligibility in Olympic sport are widely covered in sport studies and in the mainstream media. Less well known are the functions of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and the threat it poses to athletes’ rights by depriving them of access to their own countries’ court systems. CAS loosely follows the model of international arbitration tribunals. As in forced arbitration outside of sport, employees – in this case, high performance athletes – sign contracts agreeing to arbitration rather than litigation as the sole means of dispute resolution.  Promoting the concept of sport exceptionalism, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) justifies the power it exercises through CAS by claiming that sport must be autonomous and self-regulating, with disputes settled by specialist arbitrators. Arguments in support of this position point to lex sportiva (global sports law) as a valid legal principle in sport-related disputes, which, it is claimed, cannot be understood or resolved by non-specialists. Self-regulation works effectively to protect the Olympic industry brand by keeping disputes ‘in the family’.  This critical analysis of CAS's history and functions demonstrates how athletes’ rights are threatened by the forced arbitration process at CAS. In particular, CAS decisions involving female and gender-variant athletes, and racialized men and women, reflect numerous injustices. As well as the chronic problem of CAS’s lack of independence, other issues examined here include confidentiality, lex sportiva, non-precedential awards, the closed list of specialist arbitrators, and, in doping cases, questions concerning strict liability and burden of proof.

The intrepid team of researchers who brought you Custard, Culverts and Cake: Academics on Life in The Archers return with a hard-hitting exposé on the lives of the women of Ambridge. In this new book, the Archers Academics are joined by former The Archers editor, Alison Hindell and real-life Academic Archer Dr Charlotte Connor (a.k.a. Susan Carter), to examine the power of gossip in Ambridge, portrayals of love, marriage, and motherhood, female education and career expectations, women's mental health and the hard-won right of women to play cricket.  Gender, Sex and Gossip in Ambridge gives the reader a deeper understanding of the real life issues covered in the programme, an insight into the residents of Ambridge, and validation that hours of listening to The Archers is, in fact, academic research.

Researchers, practitioners, and parents have increasingly become concerned about issues related to sex, gender, and sexuality among children and adolescents. With access to the Internet, young people around the globe can readily obtain virtually any and all information they seek concerning sex and sexuality. In many cultures, the clothing and fashions of children, adolescents, and young adults are increasingly merging, leaving little clear distinction between them, and creating what some consider to be the ‘sexualization’ of children’s and adolescents’ clothing. Coinciding with such changes, young people are more openly expressing their own gender identity, often leading to considerable social debate about feminine and masculine identities, and also transgender identities.  This collection provides unique insight into identity formation for contemporary youth and examines the evolving norms concerning sex, gender, and sexuality in the lives of children and adolescents addressing topics including the development of gender identity, sexual behavior among youth, LGBT youth, transgender youth, parental and peer influences upon the development of gender and gender identity and dating violence.

This collection examines the ongoing shared struggles of diverse groups of women in Canada and beyond focusing on a diverse range of themes including movements, spaces and rights; inclusion, equity and policies; reproductive labour, work and economy; health, culture and violence; and sports and bodies. Situating Canada as a western society with avowed egalitarian ideals, and based on a ‘shared but different’ approach, this book highlights the intersectional dimensions of gendered lives and feminist actions for change in both western and non-western contexts.  Gender issues and feminist struggles are interconnected internationally and this book examines the Canadian case alongside other countries across Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australasia and Europe to explore the global currents of gender and feminism and its practice. The centrality of gender and the need for feminist praxis remain highly relevant in the 21st Century, whether in western or non-western societies, and this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the international currents for gender equality, empowerment and social justice.