Treading the (corporate) board: A critical analysis of organisational diversity discourse Alison Clarke A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management Studies Essex Business School University of Essex May 2020 i TABLE OF CONTENTS i DECLARATION iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv ABSTRACT v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Gender binaries and occupational segmentation 18 CHAPTER TWO: Gender ontologies and diversity in feminist organisation 41 studies CHAPTER THREE: Categorical thinking, negative dialectics 79 and inequality CHAPTER FOUR: Researching corporate diversity discourse critically 128 CHAPTER FIVE: Power, merit and subjectivity in corporate diversity discourse 179 CHAPTER SIX: Classification, categorisation and their consequences 228 CONCLUSION 253 Appendix One: Overview of 30 FTSE 100 companies 269 REFERENCES 274 ii LIST OF TABLES Table One: Analysis of studies 155 Table Two: Top 15 FTSE 100 companies, female directors 156 Table Three: Bottom 15 FTSE 100 companies, female directors 157 LIST OF IMAGES AND PHOTOGRAPHS Figure One: NVivo word cloud 172 Figure Two: Image from Centrica webpage 189 Figure Three: Image from Unilever webpage 190 Figure Four: Image from Fresnillo annual report, 2016 192 Figure Five: Image from Fresnillo annual report, 2016 192 Figure Six: Image from Fresnillo diversity webpage 193 Figure Seven: Image from Glencore annual report, 2016 194 Figure Eight: Image from Glencore annual report, 2016 194 Figure Nine: Image from Diageo diversity and inclusion webpage 195 Figure Ten: Image from Coca-Cola HBC AG annual report, 2016 198 Figure Eleven: Image from Marks & Spencer Gender Equality Network 204 webpage Figure Twelve: Image from Diageo web page 205 Figure Thirteen: Image from Diageo web page 213 Figure Fourteen: Image from Diageo web page 214 Figure Fifteen: Image from Diageo annual report, 2016 215 iii Declaration This thesis is a presentation of my own original research. Wherever contributions of others are included, every effort has been made to indicate this clearly by making reference to the literature. iv Acknowledgements My first thanks obviously have to go to my endlessly patient and supportive supervisors – Professor Melissa Tyler and Professor Martyna Śliwa - who have stayed with me every step of the way. It’s hard to express my gratitude for all the guidance, advice and help you have offered me over the last four years. It’s going to be strange not having a series of deadlines after which I wait anxiously for the comments to come back. I fear my life will be quite empty! In a different capacity altogether I’d like to thank my son, Aaron and his wife Catherine, for showing a real and genuine interest in my topic. Our conversations were always fascinating in terms of your insights and contributions. Last, but not least of course, I would like to thank my partner Richard who has not only been there for me throughout the last four years but also during the previous two when I was doing my part-time Masters. I’m not sure I would still be here if it wasn’t for him doing all the shopping and all the cooking, keeping body and soul together. Apart from his practical support, he also listened to me endlessly going through my conference presentations offering his thoughts about what I was saying and how I was saying it. I suspect he knows rather more about Adorno now that he ever thought (or maybe wanted) to know. Thank you. I really do appreciate all you did. v Abstract My aims in this thesis, in terms of analysing the persistence of gendered occupational segmentation in the UK, are three-fold. The first is to explore the extent to which organisational diversity discourse is the outcome of essentialist, binary thinking; the second is to examine whether essentialism can be analysed as a form of identity thinking; and the third is to assess whether and in what ways that analysis can contribute to feminist organisation studies and critical diversity scholarship. To achieve those aims, I carried out a critical discourse analysis of the diversity discourse of 30 FTSE 100 companies, highlighting the essentialism that underpins it, and the ways in which organisations have conflated biological and cultural essentialism. By drawing on Theodor Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics, I argue that this essentialism can be analysed and understood in terms of the identity thinking that permeates organisational discourse such that women are classified and categorised according to their supposed natural, biological characteristics. However, as organisations have mistaken the natural for the cultural and the cultural for the natural, they have come to assume that the object of women’s biology (the body or the natural) equates to the concept of their sexed and gendered characteristics (the social or the cultural). Adorno, on the other hand, argues that under non-identity thinking, “objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder” (Adorno, 1973: 5). I suggest that Adorno’s theory contributes to feminist scholarship by shifting the focus away from the binary thinking inherent within the sex/gender dualism and onto the identity thinking that produced it in the first place. I contribute to critical diversity and feminist organisation studies scholarship by moving away from an analysis of corporate diversity discourse focused largely on difference, vi inclusion and poststructuralism respectively to an analysis highlighting its identarian, subjectivistic and hierarchical nature. 1 INTRODUCTION Somewhat unusually perhaps, I start this thesis by briefly explaining what it is not about before setting out its focus, rationale and theoretical underpinning. The reason is that, as a piece of research about gendered occupational segmentation in the UK, I want to clarify early on where I have drawn certain boundaries. Firstly, therefore, it is not a work of philosophy although it draws heavily on theoretical ideas. Secondly, it is not a feminist analysis per se, although much of it is predicated on critical, feminist theory. Finally it is not a practical treatise that provides suggestions for managers about how to address gender inequality more effectively. Rather, it is a philosophically informed critique of corporate diversity discourse, located within feminist organisation studies, based on the ontological premise that gendered occupational segmentation in the UK is driven by essentialism, which is underpinned by identity thinking. This phenomenon manifests itself in two main ways. The first is horizontally, which is when women are disproportionately concentrated in particular, low-paid sectors of the economy; and the second is vertically when they are under- represented in high-status jobs and over-represented in lower status work (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2017). Both types of segmentation contribute to gender inequality by concentrating women predominantly into the lowest ranks of a narrow, poorly-paid range of sectors (Brynin and Perales, 2016; Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2017; Perales, 2013). Although I address vertical segmentation in terms of highlighting the under-representation of women on corporate boards and in senior management to some extent, this focus is very much a springboard (a hook, if you will) from which to discuss segmentation more generally, for instance in relation to the gender pay gap and the low valuation 2 attached to women’s work, in order to answer the central research question. That is, why inequality in the form of gendered occupational segmentation has persisted in the UK despite the enactment of equal pay and sex discrimination legislation almost half a century ago and the introduction of corporate equality discourse over three decades ago. Although things have improved over that time – particularly in relation to the number of women on corporate boards – gendered occupational segmentation in the UK remains highly defined. There are no shortage of labour market explanations to account for this phenomenon, ranging from Marxist (Engels, 1972) and human capital theories (Becker, 1964), focusing mainly on structural relationships within the labour market; to patriarchy theories (Hartmann, 1976; Hartmann and Markusen, 1980) focusing mainly on issues of gender (Wharton, 1991). As many of these theories assumed that markets are gender neutral, it fell to feminist sociologists and organisation studies scholars to analyse, in the first instance, the specific implications for women of the separation of the public from the private sphere which developed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hawkesworth, 2006; Pateman, 1989; Walby, 1990), and subsequently the effects of industrialisation. Although women started to enter the labour market in significant numbers in the twentieth century, this notion of a natural separation of spheres weakened their position not only because of a belief that women should not be paid the same as men, but that it was natural for women to predominate in sectors such as the caring, cleaning and service industries as these reflected their historically developed domestic skills (Abbott et al., 2005; Pateman, 1989). In other words, gendered work patterns and unequal pay became rationalised on the basis that they reflected the biological role of women as actual or potential mothers (Abbott et al., 2005). 3 In this way, labour market theories tend to overlook the constraints imposed on individual actors, particularly women (Wharton, 1991), and instead focus on the role of the individuals themselves. For instance, Hakim (2000) attributes women’s position in the labour market to the choices that women themselves make at an individual level. These include preferring to work part time and taking career breaks after having children (Hakim, 2000). Although feminist critics acknowledge that individuals and groups make choices, they also argue that they are made within labour market structures that are based on an assumption of organisational gender neutrality (Acker, 1990). As such they fail to recognise the impact that gendered structures and processes have on women such that they may be constrained and/or compelled to work differently from the “ideal worker” (Benschop and Van den Brink, 2018: 2; Cha, 2013: 161).