Research­ing women and work can be really puzz­ling. There is a series of things I genu­inely don’t under­stand: how it feels to earn your liv­ing in a work­place where you are the only woman or in a small minor­ity; what it’s like fre­quently find­ing your­self the only per­son of your sex in work­place con­texts; the emo­tions gen­er­ated by spend­ing lots of time in ‘between men’ cul­tures, where con­ver­sa­tions tend to focus on mas­cu­line activ­it­ies or are con­duc­ted accord­ing to mas­cu­line norms. In doing aca­demic work I’ve tried to gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of women and work, by mak­ing sex, gender, sexu­al­ity, and gendered inequal­ity part of stu­dents’ lives and under­stand­ings through my teach­ing, along with doing some research into why women leave pres­ti­gi­ous pro­fes­sions like law to go into more sat­is­fy­ing work[1]. More recently, whenever pos­sible, I’ve been mak­ing small changes and dif­fer­ences in my own work­place and work­ing prac­tice (but not through pos­it­ive dis­crim­in­a­tion, dear me no, that would be illegal in the UK). But it doesn’t seem to make much dif­fer­ence, aca­demic work… ima­gine that… or any­thing I do in my own work­ing con­text, busi­ness schools… won­der why…

I think I star­ted to under­stand women and work a little bet­ter when in 2004 I went to visit the Women’s Lib­rary in east Lon­don with my part­ner – it’s in a lovely build­ing in Old Castle St, E1 (a con­ver­ted wash-house, I’ve just found out) in a back­street within sight and sound of the City, but def­in­itely not on the main drag. A loc­a­tion that seems unpleas­antly appro­pri­ate, given the cul­tural hos­til­ity to women in the UK fin­an­cial indus­tries – read­ing Linda McDow­ell’s Cap­ital Cul­ture is one of the most dis­turb­ing intro­duc­tions to gendered dis­crim­in­a­tion or inequal­ity in that milieu. All busi­ness school stu­dents should read it… any­way, I like that the lib­rary is within reach of every­one work­ing in the Gher­kin and the other vari­ous glass and steel phal­lic sym­bols around there.

Being in the lib­rary is a lovely sens­ory exper­i­ence – quiet, calm, pleas­ant. (I’m think­ing here ‘the way lib­rar­ies used to be’ but that makes me sound old and grumpy.) In any event, a very nice place for think­ing. The impres­sion from read­ing pieces on this web­site is that aca­dem­ics inter­ested in the exper­i­ence of work never switch off their brains — Dawn Lyon in a B&B quizz­ing an inno­cent hotel inspector about his work, Lynne Pet­tinger get­ting lost and start­ing to think about work and sound,Tim Stran­gle­man walk­ing around gal­ler­ies think­ing about organ­iz­a­tional death. The exper­i­ence I had in the lib­rary that day was similar.

The exhib­i­tion was a corker — called Office Polit­ics: Women in the Work­place 1860–2004, it was a bril­liantly put together mix­ture of fur­niture (with desks designed spe­cific­ally to ensure women’s mod­esty and pro­tect men’s mar­riages – as an anti­dote, this is good fun: http://www.linux.otherspace.co.uk/officepolitics/), antique office machinery, clothes, self-help books, all sorts of stuff to pos­i­tion women in rela­tion to work, organ­iz­a­tion, men. So much stuff I didn’t know about. And also, a little paper timeline with key events marked over the 150 year period. One event and date stood out for me – 1961, Barclays removes the mar­riage bar.

You’ve prob­ably heard of the mar­riage bar, but I hadn’t. Turns out there used to be a formal rule in lots of organ­iz­a­tions that women had to leave on get­ting mar­ried. No ques­tion, no debate, no excep­tions — marry and you have to go. And the year when the board of Barclays decided this wasn’t really a good idea — 1961 – just 2 years before my mum got mar­ried, not long before I was born. Well within liv­ing memory. In some organ­iz­a­tions you could come back as a tem­por­ary employee without any bene­fits or secur­ity (‘Thank you sir!’), but for most the bar was a bar­rier that couldn’t be jumped or worked around. The For­eign Office was espe­cially reluct­ant to remove it, wait­ing until the Sex Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act in the early 1970s sort of out­lawed its imple­ment­a­tion. Hmm.

So, marry and go do some domestic and repro­duct­ive labour, or stay single and you can stay in your job. With a col­league from Exeter, Emma Jeanes, I star­ted to do some dig­ging in the Mass Obser­va­tion Archive at the Uni­ver­sity of Sus­sex, an archive that’s been called a ‘struc­ture of feel­ing’ rather than a sys­tem­atic data­set. One diary lodged there, writ­ten between 1938 and 1944, tells a won­der­ful story of a woman work­ing in the civil ser­vice. She fell in love with a mar­ried man, became preg­nant, and told her boss – who promptly asked for her resig­na­tion under the mar­riage bar rules. This woman, who must have been very sparky, refused, on the reas­on­able basis that she wasn’t mar­ried but preg­nant, and there was no rule about preg­nant women hav­ing to leave. Rational argu­ment for a bur­eau­cratic set­ting! She kept her job, gave birth to twins, and con­tin­ued to work for the Civil Ser­vice, by all accounts doing a very good job (in both spheres of life, work and fam­ily – her chil­dren are cur­rently edit­ing her diar­ies for pub­lic­a­tion, when they can find time — they’re both senior aca­dem­ics, at Imper­ial Col­lege and Oxford). Another diar­ist, who stayed single and there­fore kept her job, was brave enough to call her­self a ‘Fem­in­ist’ (with a cap­ital F) in her work­place in 1940s Glas­gow. (Weirdly, this diar­ist lived at the top of the hill my mother was born at the bot­tom of – strange feel­ing to read her diary, as she describes sit­ting on the bus going past my granny’s house.) I really like this woman, from read­ing her diary, because she prods her col­leagues all the time about their views on women and work – mak­ing trouble, caus­ing con­flict, chal­len­ging, then writ­ing it all up. She would have made a good aca­demic or researcher. Her brother did, from what she says – he worked at Glas­gow Uni­ver­sity, first in the engin­eer­ing fac­ulty, then as an indus­trial psy­cho­lo­gist of all things. Whereas his sis­ter seems to have spent her work­ing life as a clerk, writ­ing won­der­ful diar­ies and being a Feminist. 

We’re not entirely sure where this research is head­ing, but it does feel like it’s tak­ing us into inter­est­ing areas empir­ic­ally and the­or­et­ic­ally. We’re find­ing that women writ­ing about their exper­i­ence of work respon­ded to the mar­riage bar in very dif­fer­ent ways. Some argued for it, telling work­mates that it was uneth­ical for a woman to ‘take a man’s job’ when she didn’t need to earn inde­pend­ently; oth­ers were strongly opposed, want­ing to main­tain fin­an­cial and social inde­pend­ence from hus­bands. The women report very dif­fer­ent responses from their male col­leagues, from extremely con­ser­vat­ive to rel­at­ively rad­ical. Above all, read­ing the diar­ies has given us a healthy respect for the vari­ety of human exper­i­ence and response to reg­u­la­tion. In short, as ever, we’re find­ing that a soci­etal and organ­iz­a­tional desire to impose a norm, to cre­ate a divide accord­ing to bio­lo­gical sex, was con­tinu­ally con­tested, cir­cum­ven­ted, and undermined.

We’re on the lookout now for people who actu­ally had to leave work because they got mar­ried. So if you know of any friends or rel­at­ives with this exper­i­ence who would be will­ing to tell their stor­ies, please con­tact either me or Emma Jeanes.

[1] Taylor, S. (2010) ‘Gen­der­ing in the hol­istic milieu: A crit­ical real­ist ana­lysis of homeo­pathic work’, Gender, Work & Organ­iz­a­tion, 17(4).