ABSTRACT
What the many strains of feminism have in common are two simple premises, Sheila Mclntyre writes: ‘[W]ithin and by means of male dominated social institutions in our culture, women are unequal to men, and such inequality is both unjust and changeable.’6 Everything we know about gender and authority in organisations suggests that women are likely to be denied status, yet carry responsibility.7 Women are cast into gender segregated roles, labelled as subordinates, which belie the crucial skills and contributions they bring to the group task. This is seen in families (the mother, the housewife); in offices (the secretary (the office-wife));8 in hospitals (the nurse, the midwife); and in criminal organisations (the monkey and the mule). Behind each role-label lurks a contradictory message-women have to be kept in place; they have the potential to disrupt the order of things by getting out of place, ‘wearing the trousers’ in the relationship, so to speak. They cannot be credited when things go right; they will be blamed when things go wrong.
