Nilima Laura Chowdhury

Unconscious bias training has become a popular intervention for eliminating discrimination in the workplace. Particularly recruitment processes are said to become fairer and more objective if gen-der biases are eliminated through training of personnel. However, the concept of gender bias, and particularly the idea that it can be trained away, has also been critiqued as too limited in its focus on individual mental processes, thereby neglecting effects of context, interaction and power. Taking this critique as our starting point, we argue that gender bias needs to be theorised in relation to a specifi c interaction and normative context. Building on cognitive social psychology, critical social psychology and on gender as a social practice we show that gender bias is not only an individual, but a funda-mentally social activity that is embedded within organisational norms and power relations and repro-duced in interaction. By theorising gender bias as a social practice, we expand the concept of gender bias beyond individual cognition. This perspective not only opens up the scope of explanation but is also a vital concept for exploring and combatting bias in recruiting.

While the analysis of depression narratives has become increasingly common practice within critical mental health research, this work rarely investigates how these accounts intersect with particular social identities. The recent emergence of the ‘top girl’ identity, a new cultural slot on offer for young women, is underpinned by the rise of neoliberal and post-feminist discourses in the Western world. To explore whether this new feminine subjectivity is indeed taken up by young women and how it shapes their experience of depression, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 young professional women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Based on a dialogical approach to theorising and researching subjectivity, we identified repetitive inter-relations between different voices-of-the-self and the voices of depression. The most pervasive pattern in the sample consists of what we have termed demanding voices associated with the ‘top girl’ position, which construct depression as an individual deficit thereby discouraging young women from exploring the sociocultural origins of their distress. In contrast, resistant voices emphasise relationality and a (re)connection with meaningful values and, therefore, seem to be productive for individual recovery.

This paper presents three methodological tools for the empirical investigation of undoing gender derived from an ongoing feminist action research project. Building on my previous research on idealised femininities, organisational culture and women’s distress, the project is based on the view that women’s experiences of micro-marginalisations at work produces particular ways of doing (or practising) gender that are harmful for women which I call the make-it-work woman (Chowdhury, 2020). I propose that undoing gender can usefully be understood and empirically investigated as (i) the affective-discursive subversion of identity practices associated with the make-it-work woman ideal, and (ii) instances of critical reflexivity which challenge the common sense status of postfeminist and neoliberal logic. Furthermore, I propose that for organisational change initiatives to be effective, it is vital to identify and address (iii) affective-discursive resistances to the undoing of gender. A thorough, empirically grounded understanding of commonly found patterns of resistance, e.g., the rhetorical devices which are mobilised to justify the (unequal) status quo, allows us to devise strategies for countering them.