Exploring Gender, Management Education and Careers: Speaking in the silences

Abstract

In a research project following the careers of a group of women graduates, the authors have sought to extend the feminist conversation and education begun in a university course called 'Women and Management'. Some of these conversations include critical reflections on gender, career theory, and managerialism. Many of the project participants aspire to or have undertaken managerial careers. Inevitably there are silences within the project: often they are silences which reflect the silences within management and management education discourses. Some of those silences are to do with class differences, employment difference and differences in ethnicity. Others are to do with the private lives of the women involved and the difficulty of speaking about things that are unspeakable in management terms or organisational contexts. Part of the challenge for the authors as researchers has been to understand and work in honourable ways with those silences.