ABSTRACT
Interviews – using questions to create talk, discussion and text – are commonly used methods in social sciences, especially in qualitative research and in studying the inequality between men and women in organizations. Surprisingly, gender issues sometimes disappear when a researcher tries to capture them by means of interviews (Calás and Czarniawska, 1998). This is sometimes the case even in the interviews of female respondents, whose life-context, if assessed in advance, would imply that the topic of inequality should play a major role in their positioning in the organization and in their career histories (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1994a: 95-98). In addition, in interviews with male managers, a question regarding gender inequity at the workplace is likely to be followed by a polite, defensive or, occasionally, an embarrassed silence (Aaltio-Marjosola, 1994: 147-162). Sometimes it feels as if the topic is of more interest to the researcher than to the interviewees themselves: gender disappears during the study. This is the tendency towards ‘hidden’ gender, found also in a study based on interviews among office personnel, and leading to questions of whether the ways of solving problems related to gender discrimination are more real than the problems themselves (Kinnunen and Korvajärvi, 1995: 89). Is this a part of the ceremony of ‘doing gender’: of pronouncing the non-existence of gender inequality in society (Korvajärvi, 1998: 145), enforced by talk in informal as well as in formal organizational contexts? Or how should we interpret these findings of hidden gender?
