Gender and organizations: The (re)production of gender inequalities within Development NGOs

Women's Studies International Forum 31 (2008) 441–448

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Women's Studies International Forum j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / w s i f

Gender and organizations: The (re)production of gender inequalities within Development NGOs ☆ Sandra Dema Universidad de Oviedo, Departamento de Sociología, Spain

a r t i c l e

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Available online 25 October 2008

s y n o p s i s Non-governmental organizations play an important role in development. However, as in other types of social organizations, evidence exists of gender inequalities in their structure and internal functioning. This article, based on qualitative research, addresses the question of inequality within Development NGOs in a developed country, Spain. We analyze the fact that NGOs are regarded as gender neutral and the reasons behind this belief. We also address a twofold issue: on the one hand, the fact that inequality leads to the invisibility of gender issues within NGOs and, on the other, the disproportionate visibility of situations inconsistent with traditional gender norms. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Research studies on gender and organizations, the majority of which refer to the business world, have highlighted many questions related to the way organizations produce and reproduce gender (Kanter, 1977; Connell, 1987; Acker, 1990; Halford & Leonard 2001; Wilson, 2001). Many authors have focused on the theoretical meanings and implications of gender within organizations, such as the idea of gender understood as social practice (West & Zimmerman, 1987; Gherardi, 1994); others have focused on organizational culture (Gherardi, 1995; Wilson, 1997; Mills, 2002); while many more have studied the organizational dynamics generated, such as discriminatory practices and the changes and transformations produced within organizations (Martin, 2006; Goetz, 1997).

☆ An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 5th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference Gender, Work and Organization, held at Keele University, U.K. in June 2007. I wish to express my appreciation to the NGOs that participated in the study for contributing with their time and voices to the development of this research. I also wish to thank the Asturian Cooperation Agency for funding the research on which this paper is based. Finally, I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, as well as to the Editor of the Journal, and to Paul Barnes, who helped to translate this paper. 0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2008.09.007

An important issue addressed in these research studies is both the visibility and invisibility of women in organizations resulting from the situations of inequality in which they find themselves. Numerous studies have focused on the minority presence of women in organizations, mainly in the business world, compared to the number of men, as well as on their reduced access to decision-making posts and on their lesser capacity to make themselves heard (Kanter, 1977; Acker, 1990). However, gender inequalities do not only lead to women's invisibility; paradoxically, precisely the opposite occurs on occasions. As members of a minority group, the presence of women is overestimated, as in the case of ‘token women’ (Kanter, 1977). This concept links up with the idea of Foucault (1976) that power becomes invisible insofar as it forms part of the norm. Certain ambivalence is thus produced between the invisibility and visibility of women in organizations (Simpson & Lewis, 2005). This article focuses on the analysis of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). These organizations undeniably play a very important role as development institutions, with a great potential to reproduce or transform gender relations, in developed as well as in developing countries. However, in contrast with business enterprises or public sector organizations, NGOs have barely been analyzed from the perspective of organizational theory. This may well be because of these theories having arisen with clear links to the business world,

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whereas NGOs are non-profit organizations, a fact that differentiates them substantially from companies. Moreover, NGOs, which are nowadays key social actors in globalized societies, did not acquire their current numerical or social importance until the 1970s and '80s. It was only in the 1990s when a large body of knowledge, including the gender perspective, began to arise within the field of development theories both in development institutions (Razavi,1997; Eade, & Ligteringen, 2001) and in NGOs (Barrig, 1994; Rao & Stuart, 1997; Wallace, 1998; Murguialday Martinez, del Rio, Anitua, & Maoño, 2000; Navarro, 2000). The underlying premise of this article is that NGOs should be analyzed from a gender perspective and that theories on gender and organizations should be taken into account to explain the complex reality of organizations of this kind. In particular, the article attempts to show the (in)visibility of gender issues by analyzing the discourses produced in NGOs from a developed country, Spain. The Spanish case is of special interest when analyzing these issues. This country has experienced a series of social and political changes over the last thirty years which have transformed it into a modern society, similar to the rest of the European Union. Within the political sphere, Spain has changed from being a dictatorship (from 1939 to 1975) to become a democracy. NGOs have experienced considerable growth within this new political model, linked, on the one hand, to the increase in citizen participation in organisations of this kind versus traditional political parties (Gómez Gil, 2004) and, on the other, to the fact that these organisations provide part of the services that the welfare state cannot assume (Ruiz Olabuénaga, 2000). Within the social sphere, one of the most important developments has been the massive incorporation of women into public life, including access to education, greater involvement in social and political participation and, undoubtedly, their incorporation into paid employment. Since the end of the 1980s, this process has received the backing of public policies aimed at fighting gender inequality. All of this has brought about a rapid process of transformation of gender roles in Spanish society, although major gender inequalities still prevail. In this article, we start out from the premise that analysis of NGO discourses allows us to understand the significance which the organizations give to their own processes and practices, besides being a valuable tool for understanding how gender relations are produced and reproduced within NGOs. Gender inequality has proven to be very resilient. In this respect, the article focuses not only on the explicit level of discourse, but also on the implicit level. With this purpose in mind, a research study was carried out on the basis of indepth interviews with people who belong to diverse Spanish Development NGOs.1 NGOs have particular features that make the analysis of gender issues especially interesting. On the one hand, the discourse of the analyzed NGOs often includes the negation of the existence of gender inequalities within their structure and internal functioning, as well as in their organizational values. On the other hand, the significant presence of women in NGOs leads to the invisibility of gender inequalities. Moreover, the invisibility of women and their problems is reinforced because of the fact that NGOs consider gender issues to be something foreign to themselves, something which has to do more with

developing, rather than developed, countries and something that affects other types of organizations, but not those that are non-profit in nature. If we add to this panorama the socially generalized discourse on equality in Western countries, we find that many organizations make gender issues invisible, not because they reject them, but because they consider the relations between men and women within NGOs to be equal. Gender relations are not static; over the last decade, we have witnessed continuous processes of change and transformation in gender roles in Western countries. One problem that we detected in almost all the analyzed NGOs, even in those most involved in gender issues, is the difficulty in interpreting these new situations, in which women assume traditionally male roles and vice versa. The fact that the people who form part of NGOs overperceive the presence of women when they occupy responsibility posts and that of men when they carry out menial tasks is especially noteworthy. Exchanging roles in these cases is not normalized, but is seen rather as an example in which men lose their power through carrying out devalued activities—women's work— and women assume a (male) power that does not correspond to them either. All these questions will be addressed in this article. The first section presents a description of the methodological aspects of the research study which has served as the basis for developing all these postulations. From the second through to the fourth section, we analyze the invisibility of women in NGOs as a reflection of their inequality within these organizations. The last section focuses on the other effect that gender inequality generates, namely, the excessive visibility of both men and women who assume roles inconsistent with traditional gender norms. In this respect, the article shows that gender inequality does not always produce invisibility, but on occasions leads to the opposite effect, that is to say, the visibility of those who act contrary to gender norms. Methodological aspects The research study used to develop this article was based on thirty-one in-depth interviews at Spanish Non-Governmental Development Organizations. We divided the NGOs into three sizes: small, medium and large, on the basis of the number of members, the technical staff they have, their scope of action and the resources they manage.2 Of the thirty-one interviews carried out, sixteen correspond to medium-sized NGOs, eight to large organizations and seven to small organizations. As regards the gender of the interviewees, nineteen were women and twelve, men. Without expressly seeking it out, this proportion responds to a certain degree to the greater involvement of women in these kinds of organizations. The research study deliberately attempted to gather the diversity of voices present in the NGOs: management, technical staff and volunteers. Accordingly, of the thirty-one interviews carried out, twelve of them correspond to technical staff, that is to say, paid employees of the organizations; another twelve were interviews with managers of the organizations; and the remaining seven interviews correspond to volunteers. Although we intentionally fostered this diversity, we hardly found any differences in the gender discourse in each of the three identified groups. Perhaps the main difference detected consists of the fact that

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the technical staff used a more technical, professionalized discourse. Management staff also showed a more general view of the functioning of the NGO and of its evolution over time. In contrast, volunteers constructed less elaborated discourses, as a consequence of their lower level of involvement and of their greater lack of knowledge concerning the organizations. To carry out the interviews, we developed a five-section script that follows a sequence aimed at facilitating the conversational flow.3 The interviews were recorded and transcribed in full and subjected to computer-assisted treatment using the qualitative analysis software Atlas.ti, which allowed us to codify the interviews. Once codified, a case analysis was performed on each interview (Crompton, 2001; Ragin, 1987), after which all the interviews were systematically compared. In this process, we focused fundamentally on the analysis of the discourse produced in the interviews, following the approach of Krippendorf (1980), with the aim of understanding the meanings of the discourses, as well as the reasons and justifications on which they are based and the processes in which the organizations find themselves immersed. The majority presence of women and the invisibility of gender issues in Development NGOs The NGOs we analyzed are feminized. Women constitute the majority of volunteers and are also a majority among the employees.4 However, the greater numerical presence of women in NGOs does not translate as a balanced sharing out of power in the management of organizations. In the majority of large organizations, the representation structures are mainly led by men, whereas in smaller, poorer organizations with a more flexible organizational conformation, women achieve higher quotas of representation.5 This trend is also reflected in the presence of women and men among the technical staff. Although women constitute a major part of the technical staff of organizations, as the size of the organization grows, the presence of male technical assistants increases.6 The people who were interviewed are aware of the feminization of NGOs, but are unable to find an explanation for this fact: Interviewee: Why are there more women than men in many NGOs? That's an interesting question. I wouldn't know how to provide a specific reason, but that's how it is and there must be a reason for it. (Male manager) The explanation is most likely related to the traditional philanthropic charity role assumed by women, fundamentally those belonging to the upper and middle urban classes. Authors like Walkowitz (1992) have pointed out that, in the late 19th century, philanthropic activities constituted some of the few public activities which were considered appropriate for women, and, as such, allowed them to meet openly in public. This connection between women and philanthropic work may perhaps partly explain why present-day NGOs continue to be feminized spaces deemed appropriate for women. However, this finding of the majority presence of women in NGOs, as compared to what occurs in other social organizations (political parties, business enterprises, trade unions,

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etc.), is often wielded as an argument for denying gender inequality and leads to the invisibility of gender issues: Interviewee: You have to bear in mind that, of all the people who work here, there's only one guy; that's why the gender perspective is overwhelming. (Female technical assistant) What this interviewee is saying is that, since women are a numerical majority among the volunteers and paid staff, they are in favor of gender issues, as if they could not be insensitive to this question. Another interviewee repeats the same idea: Interviewee: Jeez! Well, 90% of us are women, you see… It's not that we talk about it; we impose it (laughing). (Female technical assistant) This technical assistant takes it for granted that everyone in her organization works from a gender perspective simply because the organization is composed almost entirely of women. However, what is striking in this case is the statement that the gender perspective is something that is imposed, an obligation within the NGO. This argument is contradictory: if they all work perspective due to being women, it does not appear very sensible to talk about imposition; when 90% of an organization has a certain opinion and manages to transfer it to the remaining 10%, we are talking about majority and, we might almost say, consensus. Even so, the interviewee understands gender as an imposition. In all likelihood, this sensation of imposition on the part of the interviewee responds precisely to the fact that, despite the overwhelming numerical majority of women, gender is not at all normalized within the organization, not in its structure, its procedures or in the organizational culture. This is why the interviewee feels that she is imposing something that goes against gender norms and hence is not legitimized within the organization. The supposed progressiveness of NGOs and the invisibility of gender issues in developed countries Two other reasons that lead to the invisibility of gender issues within NGOs have to do with two basic misconceptions: firstly, the belief that gender inequality is a problem that fundamentally affects developing countries; secondly, the associated conviction that gender issues are not the incumbency of the internal life of organizations of this type. In the analyzed NGOs, the widespread perception exists that gender inequality is almost exclusively a problem specific to developing countries: Interviewee: If we are still complaining in our country that sex discrimination exists, when we look at this issue in the countries of the South, it is even more present… (Laughing). (Male manager)7 The universal nature of gender inequality is not appreciated in many of the interviews carried out, or, in any event, its importance is played down. The analysis that gender issues are fundamentally a problem of developing countries has indubitable consequences for the NGOs of the North, the most immediate of which is the negation of gender inequalities within these organizations. Coupled to this is the conviction

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that gender inequalities have no place in organizations of this type: Interviewee: As we are an NGO, well, almost the first thing I tell you is not to be racist, from the moment you leave your house; if not, what an NGO! It forms part of the essence itself of the NGO. If you are talking about not discriminating against a white person, or a black person, or an Arab, or a Muslim, or a Christian, then you needn't discriminate against women either. (Male manager) In the mindset of this informant, it is taken for granted that gender issues form part of the ideology, and even of the foundations or essence, of the NGOs. This fairly generalized view of NGOs situates them to a certain extent on the fringes of society and its problems, as if their condition as NGOs protected them from racism, sexism or any other type of exclusive ideology. This stance conceals the fact that NGOs are structures which, like any other kind of social structure, may reproduce sexist models. It also conceals the fact that their members are not always free of discriminatory attitudes and behaviors. The immediate consequence of this negation of inequality is the rejection of certain strategies aimed at fomenting equality: Interviewee: It's just that, because I have such a different concept, I don't believe in parity, or in positive discrimination, or anything. If we start off from the fact that we are all equal, the thing is that I don't see so many needs related to me and to a male colleague that are different. No, I just don't see it, no. (Female manager) Paradoxically, the rejection of such strategies does not derive from a position that rejects equality, but rather from the conception that equality already exists within the NGO. Are NGOs gender-neutral organizations? The (in)visibility of gender inequality in accessing responsibility posts One of the most widely analyzed issues when studying organizations from a gender perspective is the fact that women do not access responsibility posts under equal conditions. However, those interviewed do not usually expressly identify the obstacles that impede women from gaining said access, although the presence of some factors highlighted by the theoreticians who study organizations from a gender perspective is made explicit in their discourses. Those who have analyzed these issues, above all in the work setting, refer to two types of obstacles that impede the equal presence of women in decision-making posts: external obstacles related to unequal social structures and internal obstacles present within organizations (Kanter, 1977; Writh, 2002). In some cases, the self-limitations of the women themselves within organizations have also been analyzed. These are generally derived from the direct influence of the aforementioned factors on certain women in particular. As mentioned previously, the majority of the contributing discourses present in the analyzed NGOs deny the existence of sexism. NGOs are considered gender-neutral organizations and gender inequalities are understood not to exist within them. Faced with the circumstance that women do not occupy executive posts in these organizations under equal condi-

tions, two types of discourse are constructed. When the barriers impeding women from accessing responsibility posts are subtle in nature, inequalities become invisible. In contrast, if these barriers are explicit, inequality is perceived, it becomes visible, but a justification for it is often sought. An example of how the barriers that impede women from accessing decision-making posts are not identified and, hence, become invisible, arises in the discourse of the following female technical assistant belonging to an organization whose Board of Directors is and has always been made up entirely of men: Interviewee: I have no idea why there are no women on the Board of Directors. The people who make up the Board met one day and it happened like that, but it is not because a woman couldn't be a member of the Board; far from it! Because the person who acted as the driving force at that moment was a man. But as I said, in our organization in the Dominican Republic, it's a woman. (Female technical assistant) As we can see, although the directors of this NGO are all men, this circumstance does not constitute a problem for the interviewee, who mentions that a women is in charge of the organization in another country to show us that women can also manage to occupy this kind of post. This is not an isolated example. In many of the analyzed NGOs, people think, as this informant does, that women do not occupy decision-making posts because they do not want to and not because they cannot. This type of discourse makes gender relations invisible and attempts to show that the scant presence of women in decision-making is a consequence of individual choices. The interviewee also mentions another key element, informal networks, via which men access decision-making posts. Informal networks have been analyzed in the labor market as one of the key obstacles that prevent women from accessing management posts (Kanter, 1977). However, they also act in non-profit organizations, although, as we can see, they are not identified as a barrier that hinders the equal participation of women in their structure. In the analyzed discourses, it is perceived that people are aware of everything that is included in the sphere of the explicit, but not of the subtle. This is doubly dangerous; on the one hand, due to the fact that discourse illustrates the social norm and power becomes invisible insofar as it forms part of the norm (Foucault, 1976) and, on the other, to the fact that the nature of gender inequalities is more and more subtle and barely visible compared with direct, evident discrimination, which is either legally prohibited or against which there exists social consensus. When the barriers that impede women from accessing responsibility posts are explicit, they become visible. This is the case of some NGOs which, due to their historical tradition, have been linked to the Catholic Church: Interviewee: There are certain posts that have to be male in accordance with the statutes, such as Executive Officer, who has to be a priest. We know that the Catholic Church does not accept women priests at this moment in time, and so this is marked. I do feel that major discrimination exists at a hierarchical level towards women and this then means that positions of trust have been and are still being given to men, right? (Male manager)

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Interviewee: Up until now, we've had a president who was always a man and that in itself indicates… I think that we have women of great worth, but, well, if it's a man and if he were a priest, even better (laughing). (Female volunteer) In these organizations, the posts on the Board of Directors are only occupied by men linked to the Catholic hierarchy. In the former, as we can see, this is a requirement that is specified in the organization's statutes, while in the latter, we are faced with non-formalized common practices. These impediments to women accessing decision-making posts in NGOs do not appear exclusively in organizations related to the Church. We may also identify them in some NGOs linked to educational centers or professional associations. In some of these organizations, led mainly by male professionals, many of whom are people of renowned prestige in their professional field, women cannot access responsibility posts under equal conditions, especially if they are young and have not attained recognition or prestige in the eyes of their colleagues. In these NGOs, in which there are strong male leaders, the dynamics that are generated keep women away from decision-making processes and from participating fully in the life of the organization. We also detect an added problem in such organizations: the people belonging to them have not identified these organizational barriers, in contrast to what occurs in some of the NGOs linked to the Church, where, as we have just seen, they do perceive them and even criticize them. Few discourses explicitly reject the idea that men are the ones who mainly occupy management posts. This may be related to the fact that it is difficult for points of view which differ from the norm to arise. As Martin (1990) points out, silence exists around gender conflicts. This means that there are few discourses that reveal issues that lie outside the norm. The visibility of those situations contrary to gender norms Simpson and Lewis (2005) propose two differentiated levels of conceptualization of voice and (in)visibility, namely, a ‘surface’ level and a ‘deep’ level. At a surface level, they refer to the more evident lack or invisibility of women when these are excluded from a particular sphere. At a deep level, however, following the approach of Foucault (1976), they consider power to also generate invisibility and what is visible is precisely that which lies outside the (male) norm. If we analyze the discourse generated within NGOs from this approach, we can see how the (in)visibility of gender issues acts at both levels. It is common on the explicit level of discourse of the NGOs to deny that the functions which men and women carry out within the organization are related to traditional gender roles: Interviewee: Well, I basically don't think that there is such a thing as women's work. I don't understand anything about that (laughing). But I don't see any kind of distinction between the work of a man and of a woman. (Female volunteer) Interviewee: In this organization there are volunteers, there are paid workers. There are men and women and practically everyone does the same, gets paid the same, deals with and participates in the same things. The fact of

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being a woman there implies absolutely nothing. Let's see, the girl who's working there doesn't take out the rubbish nor does this boy take the paperwork to the bank. It's something that is fully assumed to start off with. There are a load of people working here and each one of us has something to do, though based on your possibilities, on your qualities, on your drive. But nothing else. The fact of being a man or a woman in my organization doesn't even come into question. (Female Manager) These interviewees state that there are no gender differences in their organizations. They deny that men and women carry out functions related to their traditional gender roles. As we can see, the understanding of both interviewees is that in their organization women and men have not embodied gender (Butler, 1999). They share a view in which a universal form of being in the NGO would exist, outside gender.8 However, if we analyze the deeper processes through which (in)visibility is produced and reproduced, one of the issues that we detect is the difficulty in interpreting new situations in which women assume traditionally male roles and vice versa. Gender relations are not static; over the last decades we have witnessed a rapid process of transformation of gender roles, particularly rapid in the case of Spain. Some interviewees refer to the change of gender roles within the NGOs. In the following two excerpts, two women comment on the fact that women are the ones who assume leadership positions in their organization, while men are relegated to menial tasks: Interviewee: In fact, the women are more the bosses. What the men there do, well, is run errands (laughing). (Female manager) Interviewee: The men are the ones in charge of cleaning the office. Every year a couple of lads take turns with the cleaning; we women don't raise a finger in that respect. So, yes, there is a difference. If you talk about accounts and serious things, only we women do that. The treasurer is a woman, the coordinating chairperson is a woman, the project spokesperson is a woman. . . They [men] spend more time there, I'm sorry to say, but perhaps a bit more in the background [. . .] They are the ones who clean up. (Female technical assistant) This exchange of roles which both interviewees present goes against the social norm. But what is noteworthy in this case is that, despite the fact that the two women admit to being aware of gender issues, they both ridicule the activities of the men. Instead of expressing that there may be an important symbolic component in the fact that men have started to do jobs such as cleaning communal spaces and women to assume responsibility posts, that sharing gender roles is a step forward towards equality, the interviewees express a certain degree of rejection by joking about the position of the men. What is happening in this case is that these persons, as in the instances Gherardi (1995) identified in her research, use resources such as joking or irony to express the ambiguity of gender norms. Furthermore, the exchange of roles in this case is not normalized, but is seen as an example in which men lose their power and assume devalued activities: women's work. It would be as if, in the domestic sphere, we found it funny for a

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man to wash the dishes or take care of the children, when, in fact, the reaction to this change on the part of people who are sensitive to these issues, as the interviewees are, should be favorable to this type of work being shared equally. Despite their gender awareness, on the scale of values of these interviewees, traditionally female activities are devalued and male activities have value. Hence, those who carry out the former lose value, while those who perform the latter acquire value and importance. In the second excerpt, the interviewee refers to an occasional activity that men do once a year, namely, the cleaning of the NGO's offices. What the interviewee does not say is who normally does the cleaning, but, if she does not mention it, women probably do it—as voluntary or paid work—and therefore go unnoticed. Despite the infrequency of the activity, the interviewee lends it enormous importance. This excessive visibility is common when there is an alteration of roles and men do work that is traditionally performed by women and vice versa. When men do some housework, the social perception is that they do much more than they actually do. This issue has been analyzed by Risman and Johnson-Sumerford (1998), who propose that gender is considered to be the appropriate reference. That is to say, in this case men are not being compared with women, but rather with men as a whole, and vice versa. If we transpose this scheme to the opposite case, when women carry out traditionally male roles, the same process of visibility is generated. Some interviews repeat the idea that women are the bosses because they have achieved a level of power in the organizations: Interviewee: In fact, we women are the bosses here (laughing). In the day-to-day work, at least. (Female technical assistant)

see if some man comes along… (Laughing) (Female technical assistant) This interviewee states that the men do not have the right to speak or vote; she increases women's power while decreasing that of men, even though this is not real. She undervalues the men in her organization on account of there being very few among so many women and tries to show that the women are the ones who give the orders, even though this is questionable, since they only possess a third of the representation on the board of directors. Moreover, there is no explicit reference to men's power in any of the organizations governed by male members, which constitute the majority. Men also perceive this change in roles and allow themselves to joke about the presence of women in their organizations: Interviewee: We are on the right track now here, women have got us well-trained, they have us under control. And, as I say, the Board of Directors, it being 50%. . . I mean, we don't have any gender problems. (Male manager) Interviewee: Another woman used to occupy the post of chairperson. Female regime that runs the organization (laughing). (Male manager) These male interviewees joke about the circumstance of women entering the hierarchy of organizations; when these posts are occupied by men, as in the majority of the analyzed NGOs, they do not make jokes of this kind. It is the norm. In the discourses analyzed no mention is made regarding men or women doing tasks related to their traditional gender roles. These activities are invisible, as they are coherent with the social norm of gender inequality, still present in NGOs. Conclusions

In this interview, it is clear that women do the work. However, it does not seem that they really give the orders as such, definitely not in the proportion that would correspond to them, bearing in mind their numerical weight. In this organization, composed mainly of women, there were never any women on the executive staff until the last elections to the Board of Directors. In this board meeting, women achieved one third of the representation, but only one of the women elected has the right to speak and vote versus four men. When this circumstance is revealed, the interviewee ends up recognizing that they do not give the orders as much as she had previously stated half-jokingly: Interviewer: Those who make the decisions are mainly men? Interviewee: Yes, they are men. (Female technical assistant) Something similar occurs in another NGO; the women wish to show that they have much more power than they really do: Interviewee: [A gender policy] is not necessary, I'm telling you (laughing). Unless we throw out the few men that are left (laughing), that poor 10% that don't have the right to speak or vote, as I call them. [. . .] Like, we already say, let's

This article has attempted to show how NGOs deal with gender issues and that both gender and organizational theories could be used to understand organizations of this kind. Moreover, we have tried to show how some of the theoretical approaches emerging from these theories, such as the concept of gender (in)visibility, function empirically in NGOs. The ambivalence of the term “(in)visibility” is present in the discourses and practices of NGOs. On the one hand, we analyzed one of the facets of invisibility, namely the fact that there is a tendency not to perceive gender issues in NGOs. This results in organizations of this kind considering themselves to be gender neutral. The majority presence of women in NGOs does not lead to their equal presence in decision-making posts or to a capacity to express their demands in accordance with their participation in these organizations. In fact, it appears that a situation is generated in which the majority presence of women contrasts with the invisibility of gender inequalities. The mass presence of women in NGOs seems to favor the invisibility of gender inequalities. We also attempted to highlight another of the facets of invisibility, namely, the fact that whatever is consistent with gender norms is not perceived either. The gender norms that operate socially are norms of both equality and inequality. For some decades now, equality has constituted a social norm

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that is gradually imposing itself. However, we are still experiencing a period of transition from one gender norm to the other, and tensions between the two norms are being generated in this transition. In this article, we have attempted to make these tensions visible through the analysis of the discourse of the people we interviewed. Although on the explicit level we found that a favorable discourse is constructed regarding gender equality, the norm of reference on the implicit level is still inequality. On the explicit level, many of the discourses produced in NGOs, and even in society in general, consider equality to be the norm and that, moreover, equal gender relations have been achieved due to the presence of women in the public sphere. Wherever women have managed to establish themselves, there is a belief that the space is free of inequality and gender issues are normalized. In the cases in which inequality is very evident and becomes visible, we found discourses that attempt to justify this circumstance by means of different formulas. These include the belief that the gender inequalities that remain are an issue that will be solved with time or that the fact that women do not access certain spaces through personal choice and not because they cannot. However, on the implicit, or underlying level, inequalities continue to operate via subtle mechanisms that impede people from becoming aware of them, for the reason that these inequalities are not made explicit or visible. An element that allowed us to evidence the presence of the norm of gender inequality is the contrast observed in the discourses regarding the change in traditional male and female roles that has taken place in some NGOs. In the discourses of the organizations in which there has been no alteration of gender roles and men and women mainly continue to occupy the posts that they have always occupied, these roles are not mentioned. In contrast, in those organizations in which some kind of change in traditional gender roles has taken place, such as the fact that men carry out cleaning tasks and women occupy decision-making posts, this change in roles becomes disproportionately visible. This shows that the social changes in gender roles that are beginning to take place within some organizations are not normalized and enter into conflict with traditional gender norms. However, precisely by highlighting the existence of behaviors contrary to this gender norm, a discourse is constructed that attempts to justify the idea that gender inequalities no longer exist. End Notes 1 The complete results of the research have been published in Dema Moreno (dir.) (2007). 2 Small organizations would have less than ten employees and less than a hundred members. They are generally local or regional in scope and they have scant resources. Large organizations would have more than fifty employees and more than a thousand members, their scope would generally be national, and even international, in nature and they would have significant resources. Medium-sized organizations would be between these two; they would have between ten and fifty employees, between a hundred and a thousand members and moderate resources. 3 In the first section, general questions were asked concerning the characteristics of the NGOs, such as their size, degree of dependence or independence, type of activities they develop, and the sectors and geographical areas in which they intervene. The focus of the different questions asked in the second section was to allow the interviewees to explain their theoretical conceptions of gender relations and the link

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between gender and development. The third section was designed to detect the extent to which the NGOs have developed gender issues within their own organizations. In this third section we were interested in knowing whether they have set up processes for integrating gender in their organizations' statutes and policy guidelines and whether they have created structures to incorporate gender issues, such as gender groups, for instance. We likewise wished to determine the male to female ratio in all the structural levels of the NGOs (technical, voluntary and management staff). The goal of the fourth section was to gather information on cooperation projects and on how the gender perspective is integrated in the different phases of the life cycle of these projects. Finally, other types of activities that the NGOs usually carry out to a lesser extent were also addressed, such as awareness-raising and lobbying, as well as the ways in which the gender perspective is integrated in these activities. 4 The distribution of women to men in the NGOs under study is 67% female volunteers versus 33% male volunteers and 80% female technical assistants versus 20% male technical assistants. 5 In the set of NGOs participating in the study, women occupy 42% of executive posts, versus the 58% occupied by men. However, this situation of near parity only occurs in small and medium-sized organizations; in large organizations, women occupy 25% of such posts and men, the remaining 75%. Nonetheless, the difference between what occurs in profit and nonprofit organizations is substantial; for instance, the percentage of women on the Boards of Directors of large Spanish companies does not reach 5% and on many of these Boards there is no woman at all (Alemany, 2006, pp. 45–46). 6 Almost all the technical staff in small organizations are women, as are 78% of those working in medium-sized organizations. In contrast, in large NGOs there is one female technical assistant for every three male technical assistants. 7 The denomination of countries of the North and countries of the South is commonly accepted in the sphere of cooperation for development and is used to refer to industrialized countries versus developing countries. Other expressions have been used over time such as the First World and the Third World, centre-periphery, developed and under-developed countries, etc. Rather than a geographical difference, the North–South denomination expresses social inequality related to the level of development and the welfare conditions of the population of different countries. 8 Regarding the social construction of gender and the link between sex and gender, a fairly controversial issue from the theoretical point of view, we refer the reader to Turbet (2003).

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