Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-Based New Media Work in Euro (original) (raw)

Creative Differences: The performativity of gender in the digital media sector

The digital media sector is a site for competing claims about women’s equality in employment. On the one hand, commentators have claimed that the digital media sector is exemplary as an open and egalitarian domain for all workers, including women. On the other hand, feminist researchers have identified persistent inequalities in the quality and quantity of women’s participation in this sector. I use this apparent paradox as a starting point to develop an analysis of the performativity of gender in the digital media sector in the North West of England, during the period 2001–2007. Previous feminist research has addressed this paradox by arguing that gender inequalities in the creative and digital industries are obscured by emancipatory accounts of new forms of work. I take an alternative route. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, I investigate how positive articulations of work in the digital media sector might ‘perform’ gender inequalities. The theory of gender performativity employed in this study views gender as produced through repetitive discursive practices. In this study I analyse qualitative data from four sites in the ‘discursive field’ of the digital media sector. These data consist of: 1) statements in policy documentation from UK government agencies; 2) textual and visual representations of workers in careers and recruitment literature; 3) field notes from a participant observation of a digital industries training event; and 4) interviews with 23 female and male industry brokers and practitioners working in and around the digital media sector. I distinguish four apparently progressive articulations of work and women’s participation in these sites. These address changing skills requirements, shifting images of work and workers, and increased recognition and valuing of ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ for creativity in the digital industries. I denaturalise these pervasive articulations by showing the discursive practices involved in their formation. I argue that there are shifts away from the sector’s previous characterisation as an exclusively technical, ‘geeky’ and male domain and that there has recently been a proliferation of possible worker subject positions in this work domain. Moreover, in a context of increasing attention to creativity, women are identified as ‘different’ and thus as potentially valuable creative workers. Yet, despite these shifts, women workers continue to be marginalised through repeated differentiation from some of the most valued subject positions in the sector. While women are seen to bring ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ into the digital media sector, they also bring gender. Differences attributed to women are consistently devalued and are seldom recognised as ‘creative differences’. My thesis contributes an analysis of gender to debates about work in the creative economy. It also contributes to the development of feminist investigations of gender, work and organisation by providing a case study of the discursive construction of ideal and normalised workers in the creative work domain of the digital media sector.

Creative industry and gender: Reflections on a non-obvious combination

Comunicacion Y Sociedad, 2014

The interface between grassroots appropriation and corporate control of digital media and social platforms has become a heated subject of political debate and an important topic of research within new media theory 1. A large amount of this literature is devoted to the conceptualization and classification of what can be referred to as "creative industries". This special issue of Comunicazioni sociali-Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies-as the title suggests-focuses on "engendered" theories and discussions of creative industries, particularly those emerging from within the framework of digital and informational technology. The essays included in this issue contribute to this scholarship, focusing on practices and activities from different disciplines and arts.

Call for papers: Gender Differentiation in Media Industries

Call for Papers In the last thirty years feminist media scholarship has analysed media systems as environments reproducing patriarchal structures that work against gender equality in the media. Results of research at the national and global scales have reported similar results: women are less likely to work in top managerial positions in the media, on the average women journalists are paid less than male, larger numbers of women are engaged in precarious jobs than their male counterparts. Similarly persistent are inequalities in media representation where portraying women is often rife with stereotypes and pursuant of imaginings of women's domesticity. In addition, studies have shown how audiences have been constructed on perceptions that idealize women's roles in the private sphere, reproducing women as consumers. Feminist media studies have long been based on the idea that women's interests in the media are different that those of males. Consequently, research has demonstrated that women, when in leadership positions, can reform predominately masculine conventions or, in journalistic work, produce " different " news. Recently some scholars have been critical towards such " optimism " arguing that it contributes to naturalization of stereotypical gender roles, and have shown that women can work to reproduce the masculine newsroom culture same as males do. This conference is interested to explore various dimensions of gender differentiation in contemporary media industry as they are reproduced at the level of media production, representation and consumption. The aim is in shifting the focus from researching relative underrepresentation of women in the media to analyse structures and practices of engendered media systems ˗ a shift from what to why. As a corpus of existing literature addressing gender in media at the " European periphery " is thinner if compared to studies elsewhere, we particularly welcome contributions addressing situations in Central-Eastern-South European countries (but not exclusively). We specifically target studies addressing gender in television and online media (but are not limited to these). In particular, we are interested in contributions addressing: - Feminization of media work, - Media work environments and gender roles, - Media policy from a gender perspective, - Epistemologies addressing gender and media (political economy of communication, cultural studies, feminist analysis etc.), - Attempts at reconciliation between “material” and “cultural” analysis, - Gender representation in media texts, - Intersectionality approach and masculinity studies in media system analysis, - Gender differences in imagining audiences, - Gender and media consumption.

Time for a change: women, work, and gender equality in TV production

Media, Culture & Society, 2021

This article uses Acker’s concept of inequality regimes to analyze qualitative research findings on work-life balance and gender equality for women in British television production. Female survey respondents, focus group participants, and interviewees spoke of their subjective experience of gendered work practices which disadvantage women as women. These findings build on existing research showing gender disadvantage in the industry, leading to loss of human capital and a narrowing of the range of creative experience. They also show that growing numbers of women are seeking alternative modes of production, at a time of increased awareness of inequality. Such alternatives suggest that change is possible, although it is strongly constrained by organizational logics and subject to continued resistance, in line with Acker’s framework of analysis. Visibility of inequalities is the key to supporting change.

The New Economy and the Work-Life Balance: Conceptual Explorations and a Case Study of New Media

Gender, Work & Organization, 2003

Given the varied claims made about the new economy and its implications for the organization of work and life, this article critically evaluates some conceptualizations of the new economy and then explores how the new media sector has materialized and been experienced by people working in Brighton and Hove, a new media hub. New technologies and patterns of working allow the temporal and spatial boundaries of paid work to be extended, potentially allowing more people, especially those with caring responsibilities, to become involved, possibly leading to a reduction in gender inequality. This article, based on 55 in-depth interviews with new media owners, managers and some employees in small and micro enterprises, evaluates this claim. Reference is made to the gender-differentiated patterns of ownership and earnings; flexible working patterns, long hours and homeworking and considers whether these working patterns are compatible with a work-life balance. The results indicate that while new media creates new opportunities for people to combine interesting paid work with caring responsibilities, a marked gender imbalance remains.

Engendering media work: Institutionalizing the norms of entrepreneurial subjectivity

Journalism

The article analyses how contemporary processes of media production involving temporary work contracts for journalists, long working hours, the demand for unconditional commitment to work and so on push women into unequal position compared to male employees. Attention is paid to ‘engendered’ work in ‘greedy’ media organizations characterized by precarization of work and the related devaluation of journalism as a profession. Rather than detecting the extent of power and position of women in the media, we adopt the materialist analysis of mechanisms that mask gender inequality and contribute to ‘capitalizing’ on gender for the imperative of media productivity. The study was conducted in Slovenia, in Eastern European, post-socialist context, and comprised 33 individual interviews with media managers and workers at three television stations (public TV SLO, and commercial POP TV and Planet TV). In the analysis, we focus on how journalists, by internalizing the disciplining norms of ‘entr...

Media Industries, Work and Life

Convergence culture, as a concept, articulates a shift in the way global media industries operate, and how people as audiences interact with them. It recognizes contemporary media culture as a primarily participatory culture. In turn, this assumption renders notions of production and consumption of (mass, mediated) culture not just theoretically problematic – as has been established earlier in disciplines as varied as communication studies, cultural geography, and media anthropology – but also less than useful on a practical level when making sense of the role media play in people’s everyday lives. This paper explores the practical applications of convergence culture from the perspectives of media workers, suggesting not so much the use of “new” categories, but rather an alignment of production, mediation and consumption as constituent practices in all experience of (in) media life.

The Nature of Work in the Media Industries: A Literature Review and Future Directions

Journalism and Media, 2022

Media work is a culture-making activity affecting the ways people understand the world and, therefore, workers in the media industries have a critical role in shaping collective memories, traditions, and belief systems. While studies regarding the characteristics impacting the nature of work in the media industries have significantly been increasing over the last years, the literature in this area remains highly fragmented. This paper begins to address that shortcoming by conducting an in-depth review of 36 scholarly papers in influential journals published from 2006 to 2020 to provide a comprehensive view of the literature and its approaches. This study elaborates on the concept of media work by organizing previous efforts into five subthemes, including commonalities, contested terrain, gendered profession, emerging practices, and influencing factors. Previous research has emphasized that media workers’ subjective experiences need to be explored further and more in-depth; however, ...

Individualization, gender and cultural work

Gender, Work & Organization, 2011

In the 'new' economy the virtues of creative and cultural industry production are widely promoted and idealized. For women, set free from their 'feudal chains', the 'cool creative and egalitarian' cultural economyparticularly in areas such new media, music, design and fashion -appears to offer paths to workplace freedom. But is this really so? Using evidence from the digital 'new media' sector, this article builds on the work of Lash and Adkins that suggests that the ostensibly detraditionalized cultural economy continues to play host to some markedly regressive traditional social structures. In particular it is shown how the new media sector exhibits some clear continuity with the old economy in terms of some enduring gender inequality and discrimination. However, more positively, evidence is presented of how women have been able to take advantage of individualized workplace structures and develop more autonomous and reflexive workplace roles.