Teaching Managers about Masculinities: Are You Kidding?

Abstract

The way forward in the understanding of gender relations in organizations is to turn from a focus on women to a broader focus on men and the construction of masculinities in management. Research on this task has made a substantial and growing contribution, yet management education and teaching poses additional challenges. This article reports the author's experiences in introducing, to management development activities, a focus on masculinities. It describes the author's teaching journey through gender, including the temptation to stay with the `short agenda' of gender education with its focus on equal employment opportunity or palatable arguments for `diversity'. Convinced that teaching gender needs to encompass masculinities, the author examines the obstacles to doing so. The first set of obstacles concerns the content of curricula and, in particular, the apparent incomprehensibility and invisibility of `masculinities'. The second set of issues centres on pedagogies in management education. The author argues that good teaching is, contrary to received wisdom, a full-bodied and sexualized experience which facilitates a process of student identification. However, a female teacher talking about masculinities with a predominantly male group complicates and confounds accepted pedagogical practices. Can masculinities be taught to managers and can they be taught within the framework of management education? And can a woman do it?