The status of women in employment in general and in management in particular has interested researchers in Australia since the mid-1970s, although interest in women's industrial and occupational employment segregation and pay inequality has an even longer history. However, this overview concentrates on developments in the ‘women in management’ field since the 1970s, primarily because of the concerted and concentrated efforts to raise the employment status of women since that time.

The overview also concentrates on the Australian experience, in an attempt to determine if ‘the more things change the more they remain the same’ or if actual change and progress has been made. My credentials for undertaking this retrospective are that I have been researching in the women in management area since the early 1980s and have tracked the main changes, influences and dimensions since that time. Readers who are expecting a critique of the impact of feminism and other ideologies in the area will be disappointed. My research perspective is, and always has been, managerial and organizational. I will thus not be mentioning a whole raft of substantive thinkers and researchers from other perspectives who have contributed to this area over the years. To assist the process of review, I have divided developments into a number of eras to illustrate the progression of both policy and research over the various periods.

Professor Still presents a succinct and insightful piece, reflecting on the development for women in management within Australia over the past three decades. She rightly focuses on women in management rather than to try and map the multitudinous developments of the women/gender in organisation literature that has mushroomed into a sub-discipline of its own over the past three decades.

In considering any parallel development for women in New Zealand it seems compelling to start in the late 19th century. As a result of direct and indirect action by the suffrage movement; fuelled by activities of the women's temperance union, NZ women gained the vote in 1893. Like Australia, the colonial women were perceived very much as Damned Whores and God's Police (Summer, 1994). In these brief reflections, I focus on the last 30 years of changes since the second wave of the feminist movement. In summary, the conclusions are somewhat depressingly similar to Australia; however, there are some noteworthy differences.

There is considerable research showing that gender is deemed irrelevant to organizations and to policy. This paper examines the results of a research project that sought to reverse those ‘rules of relevance’. The project required policy actors in several public sector organizations to undertake a gender analysis of their policies. We found that it was through the collaborative work of doing the gender analysis that policy actors came to see why such an analysis was needed. This necessarily meant seeing the relevance of gender to the policies they dealt with, which could also highlight gender bias in their organizations. Yet, a bureaucratic and gendered division of labour ensured that those who got to do the gender analysis were those in relatively powerless positions, predominantly women. We draw on the ‘turn to practice’ in organizational studies and feminist strategies of ‘sudden seeing’ to consider what our results might offer future projects of gender analysis and organizational intervention.

This paper addresses the theme of the special issue by drawing attention to ways in which gender scholarship can influence management and organizational studies in an analysis of the pathways to senior management. Based on an Australia-wide study of the experiences of women and men in senior management, it adds new empirical data to the body of knowledge on women's career advancement at senior levels of organizations. Many women interviewed expressed reticence and ambivalence about the advancement of their careers and their prospects for promotion, which was called ‘girl disease’ by one woman. Forms of ambivalence varied according to different age and sector cohorts; in particular difficulties were identified in reconciling family responsibilities with the demands of senior level appointments. We analyse expressions of ambivalence and reticence by exploring the tensions between women's gender identity and the organizational factors that shape their ‘managerial’ identity. We conclude by suggesting strategies to improve organizational practices in relation to women's career development and promotion.

This paper contributes to the growing stream of organization research that explores the relationship between professional identities and gender. Our central question pertains to how account managers ‘do gender’ in constructing their professional identities. While account management has been considered a sales occupation with a strong masculine connotation, some indications towards ‘feminization’ have also been observed. Our analysis of 39 interviews with white women and men working as account managers in the Netherlands suggests that these account managers construct a ‘tough salesman’ identity and a ‘co-operative communicator’ identity. These identities have different gender connotations. The ‘co-operative communicator’ identity facilitates a critical dialogue with the – often implicit – masculinity in the ‘tough salesman’ identity norm. We reflect on the effects of these gender connotations both for account managers and for our practice as organization researchers who intend to deconstruct rather than reproduce gender stereotypes in our study of professional identities.

Institutionalised sport offers a context of ‘profitable margins’ for gender and diversity scholars in management and organisation studies to understand the intersections of different identity categories. Sport is about gendered bodies which are sorted into overt, pre-determined categories, such as sex, chronological age, ethnicity and disability. The storyline is illustrative of this as it traces a methodological journey and identifies three challenges that evolved in research aimed at exploring the intersections of gender and age in sport. It will discuss how further contributions can be made by placing self as the subject and object of the research through the use of the method known as memory-work. Memory-work is a method theoretically constructed as non-hierarchical, inclusive research. In this article this method is applied from an individual stance which created tensions and unexpected challenges. Despite its limitations memory-work opens up possibilities to those researchers wanting to adopt a multiple lens within gender and diversity research.

Queer theory is a relatively new theoretical approach in organizational discourse that we think can uncover power relations and normative and hierarchical processes in diversity management discourse. ‘Heteronormativity’ and ‘performativity’, core concepts of queer theory, critique categorization and fixed identities and thereby problematize and broaden perspectives on current diversity management discourse, especially those associated with organizational constructions of diversity dimensions. In this article, we focus on the discursive and intersectional construction of subject positions and identities within organizations by drawing upon a queer theoretical framework to analyze three companies' codes of conduct that claim to create an inclusive work environment. The deconstructive analysis of these discursive artifacts emphasizes the intersectional power dynamics of and between the categories of sex, gender and sexuality, and can be taken as a point of departure for questioning the heteronormative arrangements of diversity management practices.

The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual framework to describe ‘socially responsible diversity management’. This framework seeks to demonstrate that the desired social justice outcomes of affirmative action programs and the business benefits of diversity management programs can be achieved but only by undertaking initiatives at a number of levels. Traditional approaches to afirmative action have been unsuccessful in achieving their goal of equitable labour market outcomes and it is unclear that diversity management programs have contributed to business outcomes. The article argues that neither affirmative action nor diversity management has been able to fully achieve its objectives because of a number of limitations. The article argues that organisations can achieve better business outcomes, as well as equity outcomes associated with a diverse workforce, by adopting a relational, multilevel framework of managing diversity. Such a framework provides for the creation of what is termed ‘socially responsible diversity management’.

From a liberal feminist perspective, we argue that gender can both inform, and should continue to be informed by, social identity studies in efforts to understand and manage subtle sexism in contemporary workplaces. We investigated the presence of a form of subtle sexism, affective aversive sexism, in an Australian male-dominated organization: a police force. To do this we surveyed 159 policemen and examined relationships between individual emotional experience, emotional intensity and emotion regulation. Results indicated that, in a subtle display of intergroup bias, policemen experienced both higher positive and higher negative emotions in the presence of other policemen than of policewomen who, we argue, may be less central in the men's identities and relationships at work. Implications for research, training, and emotion management in the workplace are discussed and it is suggested that liberal feminist research can contribute much to understanding the dynamics that reproduce structural segregation in the workplace.