What You See Is What You Get: Popular Culture, Gender and Workplace Diversity

In this chapter, the role popular culture can play in limiting the realization of diversity within organizations is explored. Drawing on mainstream Hollywood cinema, we examine representations of gender and work in popular cultural texts that contribute to, and go some way towards explaining, the disparity between the spirit of diversity management and its manifestation. Masculinity continues to be privileged over femininity and shapes organizational practices and behaviours. In this chapter we argue that in order to enter and survive within many organizations, people who are seen to be too different from the privileged and notionally mainstream identity group must somehow camouflage their difference in order to 'pass' as being of the dominant group. As such, diversity is compromised rather than celebrated, and its benefits to organizations severely curtailed.