Introduction: Theoretical Insights into the Practices of Revealing and Concealing Gender within Organizations

Issues of visibility and invisibility are becoming increasingly apparent in gender research in organizations. Such work is based on a recognition of the significance of (in)visibility in understanding experiences of advantage and disadvantage in work contexts — and how these experiences can impact on identity, attitudes, culture and careers. From a variety of perspectives, such work has highlighted how visibility and invisibility ‘play out’ in organizations — revealing the often hidden and gendered processes of organizing and how these processes can be concealed within norms, practices and values. Thus, early research in organization studies critiqued the gender blind orientation to theorizing about work and organization (e.g. Linstead, 2000; Wilson, 1996) which universalized male subjectivity and sought to make visible women’s experiences in organizations. More recent work has helped to make visible those ‘suppressed’ aspects of organizational life, hidden by dominant management and masculine discourses, such as violence and sexuality (e.g. Hearn and Parkin, 2001). Other work has explored the problems women face as highly visible ‘tokens’ in different male dominated contexts (Cross and Bagilhole, 2002; Kanter, 1977; Simpson, 2000); how traditionally feminine skills are ‘disappeared’ into the embodied dispositions of women (Fletcher, 1999; Tyler and Abbott, 1998; Taylor and Tyler, 1998); how equal opportunity policies, through a rhetoric of meritocracy and gender justice, can serve to conceal continuing gender disadvantage.