ABSTRACT
Discrimination and bias in the workplace are major sources of harm with moral, emotional, political, and economic dimensions. This chapter presents and analyses instances of gender bias in the workplace taken from a qualitative study with women surgeons. Recent work on epistemic injustice provides a theoretical lens for analysing the harmful impact of identity stereotypes in these cases. However, we argue that there are limitations to the epistemic injustice approach. Among the problems we encountered when trying to analyse these cases through an epistemic injustice framework was that an unintuitive distinction emerged in the theoretical explanation between harms deemed to be epistemic injustices and other harms suffered by women surgeons as a result of the same discriminatory events. We were also concerned that the epistemic injustice framework offered a quite narrow set of responses to address these social identity injustices. In this chapter, we analyse how cases from the empirical study challenge the epistemic injustice framing. We argue that Axel Honneth’s recognition theory – especially as applied to the sphere of work by philosophers such as Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith, and Christophe Dejours – might better characterise the harms involved. We found that the broader “capture” of recognition theory delivers a more unified analysis of harms experienced by women surgeons at work, that includes, but is not limited to, epistemic injustices. Further, we believe that recognition theory can inform a broader set of responses that are better suited to addressing social identity injustices in the context of women’s work in surgery.
