“So, a lot of times we almost have to exceed the standards to prove o...

In this talk, we answered Bryan et al.’s (2021, p. 963) call “to examine women’s experiences working within the ‘extremely gendered’” organizations to better “understand how women challenge, resist, or maintain ongoing inequality regimes”. The two professional contexts we examine are the military and football. Both can – to a great extent – be referred to as “extremely gendered” organizations (see Acker 1990) despite robust equality-driven changes implemented there in recent years. More specifically, our analytical focus is on the lived experiences of women in the U.S. military and female footballers in Austria. Drawing on the methods of discourse analysis and conversation analysis, we examine open-ended interviews with the US military women and focus-group interviews with the female footballers. The aim is to reveal women’s practices of orienting to and managing their status in “extremely gendered” organizations. We analyse their accounts around proving themselves as indexical of women’s continued minority and thus often implicitly underprivileged status in these organizations. Discourses of proving (see e.g., Pawelczyk 2021), i.e., “rhetorically powerful form(s) of talk” (Kitzinger 2000, p. 124) revolve around women’s continuing struggle with deeply embedded essentialist assumptions of who ‘naturally’ belongs to certain organizations and who needs to make an effort to find acceptance and earn their place.

In our talk, we compared the practices of proving as reported on and accounted for by women functioning in these two settings. The overall purpose of our talk was – beyond such documentation – to raise awareness of gendered institutions and their social actors of the destructive and delimiting power of such discourses for the organization and its (female) members. We also discussed, how discourses of proving reveal and ultimately construct the “extremely gendered” character of contemporary organizations.