Introduction to the special issue on gender impacts: consumption, markets, marketing, and marketing organisations

What? Another Gender special issue? Didn’t the #MeToo movement fix all that? Those of us who have been studying gender throughout our careers could perhaps find reasons to celebrate that scholarly work with a focus on gender has become more commonplace. The same could be said for society at large: gender has become a topic that is addressed – and sometimes taken seriously – in more contexts today than a couple of decades ago. So, are we happily celebrating? Will the next GENMAC conference be cleared of all academic content to instead engage in jolly victory dances for a couple of days? No, that is a very unlikely scenario. Is this because gender scholars, especially those with a feminist inclination, are unable to have fun? That stereotype is wholly untrue, we are VERY fun, and we are more focused than ever before on moving a gender agenda (agender?) forward to battle discrimination in a multitude of academic contexts.

Chin-up, gender scholars, positive change is just around the corner. Or not

Unfortunately, the lack of victory dances on behalf of gender marketing scholars can instead be attributed to three issues. First, while gender has become something that is indeed addressed in more instances today it has, in the process, been reduced to a box that needs to be checked. Something to pay lip service to but not really take seriously. Is your journal publishing gender work? Yes, we published that paper a couple of years ago. Check! Is your conference considering gender in allocating responsibilities to faculty members? Yes, we counted the heads and it seems quite even. Check! Have you considered gender in deciding on the readings for your course? Yes, we considered it. Check! Have you sent out a survey to the members of your association measuring various gender related issues such as discrimination, harassment, and silencing? Oh yeah! And it was a really long survey too, has all the official markers of taking the issue very seriously … Check!

Much, albeit not all, gender scholarship is aligned with feminism and thus the political project of striving towards a more equal society it is not enough to merely address gender as a topic or variable. Sure enough, addressing issues of gender and taking them seriously is a good first step, but the larger project of many gender scholars is to use this knowledge for the benefit of society, the benefit here being defined as a more gender equal society. This benefit is not universally accepted within the marketing academy and there are built-in forces, such as homogeneous ERBs, conference chairs and programme committees, gatekeeper journals with less than equal gender representation with their AEs, and reviewers being assigned gender scholarship with no background in the topic, that serve to keep gender equity just out of reach.

Another issue that seems particularly to dog gender in marketing is the degree of self-perceived level of expertise that seems to get baked in to non-gender scholars’ responses to gender-related marketing issues and topics. This expertise is often presented as ‘fact’ via Twitter or other social media platforms. When marketing scholars who are not versed in gender theory give opinions about gendered marketing messages for example, it implies that gender is not an accepted, applicable, or legitimate theoretical lens. When those voices comes from the highest levels of marketing academia, it creates a ripple effect across marketing as a field and ignores the very real issues embedded in marketing and consumer behaviour that dozens of us have spent our careers conceptually and empirically studying. Having a ‘gender’ does not make one a gender scholar much like having a brain does not make someone a neuroscientist. As a result, marketing experts continue to ‘get gender wrong’, marketing professors continue to teach sexist marketing principles, and marketing students continue to make bad decisions when they are engaging in student research and then early in their careers (cf. Dobscha & Knudsen, 2020). Since gender is a contested topic the increased proliferation of discussions of gender, both in the scholarly world and in the world at large, leads to an increased resistance. Every step forward, it seems, is countered by an equally large step forward by those resisting an increased attention to and sensibility about gender issues.

Perilous gender scholarship threatening the (conservative) world order?

An increased resistance to gender scholarship can be noted in politics around the globe where the idea of a dangerous ‘gender ideology’ spreading across the world is invoked by conservatives in many different contexts (Corredor, 2019; Kane, 2018; Linton, 2019; Vaggione, 2020). While the particularities of the ‘gender ideology’ narrative differs somewhat according to the political climate, the core message is that it is spreading and will have devastating effects for individuals, families, the people, and the nation. In these instances the ‘gender ideology’ is portrayed as a perversion that originally emanated from European universities during the 1960s (Corredor, 2019). In the beginning it was an internal university affair, connected to the increased popularity in poststructuralism, but then it started leaking out into the rest of the world. The term ‘gender ideology’ first arose in the Vatican in the mid 90s after the UN had formally approved of reproductive rights and had started using terms such as ‘gender equality’ and ‘gender based violence’ (Corredor, 2019; Rawluszko, 2019; Vaggione, 2020). The Catholic Church saw this as an assault on the biological nuclear family as the core cultural entity and heterosexuality as a legally protected norm (Corredor, 2019; Kuhar, 2015). More than anything, however, the Catholic Church saw this as the definitive breakthrough of the idea of social constructionism, something that they viewed as threatening to their particular world order (Corredor, 2019; Kuhar, 2015). Shortly thereafter a number of books came out, most notably O’Leary’s (2007) The Gender Agenda: Redifining Equality, that claimed that the semantic shifts in the UN documents towards talking about gender illustrated that the organisation had been infiltrated by ‘postmodern feminism’ (Kane, 2018; Linton, 2019). This marked the beginning of a more widespread global anti gender movement (Corredor, 2019; Kuhar, 2015; Rawluszko, 2019; Vaggione, 2020). A few years later, in 2013, a number of Polish bishops came together to protest against the spread of gender ideology and Bishop Pieronek, one of the most famous and influential bishops in Poland, stated that, ‘I would like to add that the ideology of gender presents a threat worse than Nazism and Communism combined’ (Sierakowski, 2014). The idea of ‘gender ideology’ spreading across the world has united an unholy alliance of alt-right, religious right and general conservatives. These groupings might diverge on many ideas, but they could find common ground in their resistance to ‘gender ideology’. In an article in The Guardian Kane (2018) notes that campaigns partly fuelled by the threat of the ‘gender ideology’ have helped win elections in the following places: Poland, France, Italy, Colombia, Spain, USA, Costa Rica, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary (see also Corredor, 2019, for a similar argument).

So, what does this have to do with a special issue on gender and marketing, you might ask? While the reaction towards the supposed ‘gender ideology’ was initially directed against the spread of these ideas outside of universities, the opposition has not stopped at this, but are nowadays attacking gender studies also within universities (Arpi & Wyndham, 2020; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). Two of the most prominent examples of this are the forced relocation of the Central European University, known for its gender studies programme, from Budapest to Vienna and the end of state funding for gender studies at Hungarian universities, and the president Jair Bolsonaro’s signing of agreements to combat ‘gender ideology’ at Brazilian universities (Matthews, 2018). But it does not stop there, rather there are discussions about cutting funding of both education and research in many other contexts, including the US (Redden, 2018). Andrea Pető, a professor of gender studies at Central European University, is quoted in Inside Higher Ed (Redden, 2018) saying:

Every undemocratic government wants to control the knowledge production and sexuality, which explains why gender studies become the target in the first place […] Attacks on gender studies as a scientific discipline [have] become a central rhetorical tool of those efforts that try to determine for the wider audience what ‘science’ should mean, and thereby try to create a new consensus of what should be seen as normal, legitimate and scientific.

Building the gender and marketing corpus, bit by bit: contents of the special issue

Given the marginal role that gender scholarship and gender issues are typically given in mainstream academia, we are especially pleased to see that the Journal of Marketing Management is (again!) allocating an entire special issue to gender scholarship. These are indeed important aspects to consider given the many ways in which gender is woven into marketing, markets, and consumption. There are also many ways in which gender has been given scholarly attention within the field of marketing, from the early work of Costa (1994) to more recent work from e.g., Otnes and Tuncay Zayer (2012), Catterall et al. (2013), Arsel et al. (2015), and Dobscha (2019). While marketing scholars have acknowledged the importance of gender as a cultural, political, as well as biological phenomenon (Bettany et al., 2010), other fields, such as sociology, anthropology, media studies, women’s/gender studies, and business disciplines such as management and human resources have embraced the more nuanced, culturally-embedded, politically-charged role that gender plays across the globe. Scholars within the field of marketing have frequently pointed out that despite the growing amount of scholarship dealing with gender related issues, there are still conceptual blind spots. A case in point is Hearn and Hein (2015) who suggest that marketing scholars’ tendency to frame gender in limited ways have led to several ‘missing feminisms’, such as queer theory, critical race, intersectional and transnational feminisms, material-discursive feminism, and critical studies on men and masculinities. Fischer (2015) adds to this list of ‘missing feminisms’ by suggesting that too little attention has been directed at ‘market level gender inequality research’ which focuses on practices that are enacted within particular markets that differentially benefit men versus women in ways that sustain typical gender inequalities. In yet another paper pointing towards overlooked issues Maclaran (2015) suggests that the recent wave of feminist thinking flags up several areas that marketing scholars need to pay closer attention to including i) intersectionality and identity, ii) the pornification of culture, and iii) austerity and the feminisation of poverty. Dobscha (2012) has suggested that are particular points of resistance with regard to gender and marketing scholarship that have prevented previous work from sufficiently dealing with various issues, and Maclaran et al. (2010) have shown how certain embodied elements of the dominant research traditions, or ‘the process of truth making’ (p. 714) tend to invisibly prioritise masculine performances and practices embedded in university culture.

In the call for papers we specifically asked for contributions that would address some of these gaps identified by previous work in the field, particularly the various ‘missing feminisms’ pointed to above (Fischer, 2015; Hearn & Hein, 2015; Maclaran, 2015; Maclaran et al., 2010). We received a broad array of submissions for this special issue spanning various theoretical and methodological approaches as well as empirical contexts. This is a testament to the richness of the work that is currently being conducted on these important issues. Still we note that there is a dearth of papers from non-Western and empirical perspectives which is unfortunate since the lived experience differs greatly between different subject positions and contexts (Joy et al., 2015). We believe that the papers chosen for inclusion in this special issue nicely complement the work published previously in special issues in this journal (Arsel et al., 2015) as well as other journals (Bettany et al., 2010). We are especially pleased to see that the work presented here focuses on exploring the impacts that gender has on consumers’ everyday lives within the cultural and social environments in which they are embedded. Collected under the general theme of ‘Gender Impacts: Consumption, Markets, Marketing, and Marketing Organisations’ we are proud to present six papers that live up to the high academic standards of the Journal of Marketing Management and thereby push the boundaries of gender scholarship in the field of marketing. While the papers span a number of different theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches, they are all united by their ambition to draw on previous insights both from within the field of marketing and the area of gender studies more broadly.

In the article ‘Complex contradictions in a contemporary idealised feminine body project’, Shelagh Ferguson, Jan Brace-Govan, and Bridget Welsh critically investigate the consequences of the proliferation in social media of a particular idealised female body, the ‘athletic ideal’. From this focus on representations of idealised bodies in social media, Rachel Campbell, Olivia Freeman, and Valerie Gannon turn to representations in advertising. In the article ‘From overt threat to invisible presence: discursive shifts in representations of gender in menstrual product advertising’ the authors use the brand Always to chart how discursive shifts have occured over time in representations of gender. Riikka Murto stays on the topic of menstruation in the article ‘Gender categorisation in representational market practice’, where she takes a market studies approach in analysing a menstrual tracking app, and illustrates how gender can be seen as a rhetorical and practical series of accomplishments circumscribing gendered subjects. The next article, ‘Men’s consumer identities and their consumption norms in the perceived, conceived, and lived spaces of spas’, by Edita Petrylaite and David Hart, shifts focus to issues of masculinity and the complex interweavings of gender, consumption, and marketspaces. The two remaining articles redirect attention from the domain of consumption to that of the workplace. The article ‘Advertising: Should creative women be expected to “fake it”’, by Helen Thompson-Whiteside, Sarah Turnbull and Liza Howe-Walsh examine the gender impression management experiences of 25 female creative directors. Finally, Laurel Steinfield, in the article ‘1, 2, 3, 4. I declare … empowerment? A material-discursive analysis of the marketisation, measurement, and marketing of women’s economic empowerment’ analyzes the interactions among human/corporate actors, tangible/intangible nonhuman elements and discursive/material devices that make possible a particular type of women’s economic empowerment.

While we are very happy with the six articles that contain the core of this special issue, we nevertheless decided to seize the opportunity to make additional room for other voices. We therefore invited a number of shorter commentaries from scholars in the field that have relevant insights that do not necessarily fit into the conventional article format. The special issue thus contains shorter commentaries by Abigail Nappier Cherup, Hounaida A. El Jurdi & Nacima Ourahmoune, Lauren Gurrieri, Lisa Peñaloza, Jonathan E. Schroeder, Alexander S. Rose, and Linda Tuncay Zayer, with topics ranging from navigating the job market to reaching beyond academia with our gender-relevant insights. These commentaries come from a wide-range of voices, from Ph.D. students to full professors, scholars from across the globe, including Australia, Lebanon, France, and the USA. They also represent established voices within gender as well as voices from those outside the ‘gender bubble’. We are especially proud of these commentaries and encourage future special issue editors to include them in their volumes.

The pursuit continues …

We started our special issue introduction rather blithely. Perhaps this choice in tone is a defence mechanism to the despair many of us are feeling in our home countries and home universities. Gender issues seem to continue to either be downplayed or misplayed (e.g., evolutionary psychology articles are published in our top journals while legitimate gender scholarship is rejected). Marketers continue to underplay, overplay, or misplay the gender card. Yet there are wins happening in pockets around the globe. Finland, for example, just followed the example of Sweden in having a comprehensive parental leave policy as this has proven to be an effective means towards gender equality (Magra, 2020; Molander et al., 2019). The #MeToo movement is leading to convictions at the highest level of media, political, and cultural institutions, including shaking up the Swedish Academy responsible for giving out the Nobel Prize in literature (Donadio, 2018). And the newly minted JCR editorial board has at least initially signalled that gender scholarship can once again, after an almost 30 year period of almost no critical gender work, find a home there. Yet, gender remains at the heart of our most discriminatory policies in academia, including access to grants, representation on editorial boards, lopsided service assignments, and disturbingly, harassment of female students by male professors, including unwanted touching or forced social interactions. And more basically, gender and marketing continued to be dominated by gender issues.

We see ourselves as editors of this special issue, but more importantly, as stewards of our discipline and as part of an active community (GENMAC) of fierce activists against sexism, both professional and personal, that continues to permeate ever facet of our academic lives. Please join our cause by joining GENMAC at www.genmac.co and get involved in transforming gender scholarship within the field of marketing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).