ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Come into my office and, please, do sit down. If you take a peek around, you can learn quite a bit about me. For instance, I have a child and a man in my life. The walls of my neighbours’ offices are equally, or possibly even more, chatty about their family relations, especially their roles as fathers (see Fig. 7.1). Reviewing the applications for five jobs filled between 1994-98 in her geography department in the United States, Joni Seager (2000) found that twice as many male applicants revealed their marital status in their application, and those writing references for them often introduced the applicant’s wife as an asset (for example, ‘Simon is a friendly and well-liked individual with a charming wife’). You might ask yourself, have you ever seen in a workplace such extravagant displays of homosexual family romance?
