OPUS Scientific Meeting: Fifty years of fighting sex discrimination

Fifty years of fighting sex discrimination:

Undermining entrenched misogynies through recognition and everyday resistance

By Sarah Gilmore, Nancy Harding and Jackie Ford

This paper marks the 50^th anniversary of the passing of the UK’s Sex Discrimination Act (1975). The UK offers an almost unique case study of how such laws are, or are not, translated into practice. The success of the Act is mixed: there has been progress but much more needs to be done. There are many studies exploring what needs to be done: in this study we decided to find out what had contributed to the successes that have been achieved, to find out if there are lessons we can build on. We use a feminist methodology of researching differently within an archive of memories, and the under-utilized work of feminist psychoanalytical theorist Jessica Benjamin. We identify that women engaged in micro-revolutions involving everyday strategies of resistance have slowly, slowly brought about some major changes because the accumulation of tiny changes, over time, builds up to larger differences. The paper, firstly, contributes a theory of women’s agency as quiet revolutionaries, secondly it pushes forward feminist theories of recognition, and finally it advances methods of researching differently.

Presenters

Sarah Gilmore, Nancy Harding and Jackie Ford have worked together on numerous studies for many years.

Sarah Gilmore is a Professor of Organisation Studies and Head of the Management, Employment, and Organisation Section at Cardiff University Business School. Before becoming an academic, she worked for several not-for-profit organisations and was a national officer for one of the largest public sector unions.

Nancy Harding, working at the University of Bath School of Management, needs to change her title to Professor of Human Resource Management. She is not keen on management and hates the idea of people being reduced to ‘resources’ but is quite in favour of the human. She has written books and papers expanding on this complaint.

Jackie Ford is Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at Durham University Business School. Her research interests include critical feminist, psychosocial and interdisciplinary approaches that recognise specific gender, wider diversity and ethical dimensions, and ways in which leadership and management research and practice impact on working lives and identities.

Chaired by

Carlos Remotti- Breton 

Organisational and Leadership consultant. He is the Executive Director of OPUS: an Organisation for Promoting Understanding in Society. Associate Lecturer, Psychosocial Department at Birkbeck University and IAE Business School. Training candidate in psychoanalysis with the British Psychoanalytic Association; Member of the A. K. Rice Institute and ISPSO. Fellow of Harvard Institute of Coaching. Group. He has been the host of The London Social Dreaming Hub