Magister Artium - MA / This study explores the nuances around gendered dynamics, attitudes, ideologies, values and knowledge that exist within astronomy and astrophysics institutions paying specific attention to the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) as study site. This study investigated implicit and explicit ways in which SAAO spaces and practices are gendered and hierarchized, and the extent to which 'astronomy as a specific discipline within science' remains highly masculinized. By focusing on studies on power, feminist critiques of science and institutional culture in other South African sectors, especially higher education, the study deconstructs a field that has been relatively neglected in South African feminist studies of gendered institutional culture. This thesis makes use of feminist qualitative methodological approaches and fuses mixed methods to collect data. The use of participant observation enabled a broader understanding of the context and to gain an understanding of how gendered, classed and raced subjects construct and navigate social meanings in the hierarchized and symbolically marked space of the SAAO. / National Research Foundation (NRF)

The aim of this following study is to clarify the Swedish Government´s as well as the European Union's ideological starting point in gender equality work. The study is limited to the gender equality objective of men's violence against women. It addresses the respective strategies of the institutions to combat gender based violence. The approaches of the institutions are compared to show similarities and differences in its approach to the gender equality problem.   This study is a text analysis which aims to examine feminist expressions in the strategic frameworks of the institutions with the use of ideal types. Radical feminism and liberal feminism represent the two ideal types. The purpose of these two ideal types is to enable an estimate of how far or close the institutions are in relation to the ideal types.   The governmental strategies of Sweden are ideologically closer to radical feminism than liberal feminism meanwhile the strategies of the European union are closer to liberal feminism. The discernable similarity between the institutions is that they both wish to make public reforms. However, it is reasonable that Sweden complements those with social changes with focus on structures and gender norms. The government of Sweden therefore includes a wider variety of actors in their gender equality work. The study concludes with a discussion about the result in relation to the feminist theory approach and gendered institutions.

This thesis investigates the factors that affect women's bargaining power within the household, in India. The first chapter introduces the literature on household bargaining mostly by describing how household outcomes like children's health indicators and expenditure pattern change with increase in resources under women's control. The second chapter describes the conceptual framework for intra-household bargaining. It discusses the two broad topics – household bargaining models and gendered institutions, that can be used to identify avenues for increasing women's bargaining power within the household. In chapters three and four, I analyze the factors that determine women's power position, using data on women's involvement in household decision making from a nationally representative longitudinal household survey (India Human Development Survey). The survey was conducted in over 40,000 Indian households, which covers over 200,000 individuals. In the third chapter, I investigate the effect of women's labor force participation on her involvement in household decision making. After addressing the issues of endogeneity using a fixed effects model, I find that her labor market participation significantly increases her involvement in decision making process, which can be seen as a direct outcome of her increased bargaining power. In my fourth chapter I analyze whether the women's bargaining power within the household increases with the presence of female politicians at both state and local level. Studying the causal impact of a variable like female political representation is generally riddled with concerns of endogeneity for existence of voter preference. Using share of seats won by women in man-woman close elections as an instrument for overall female representation in in a fixed effect model, I show that an increase in number of female state legislators can actually lead to an increase in the bargaining power of women. This chapter further shows that increase in women's involvement in decision making process in the household is also associated with the female political representation at local level. The fifth chapter concludes the dissertation by making policy recommendation for strengthening women's bargaining position within the household. / Ph. D. / This thesis investigates the factors affecting women’s bargaining power within the household, in India. The first chapter introduces the literature on household bargaining mostly by discussing papers which find that more resources under the control of women within the household translates into lower fertility, better child health and education outcomes, thus establishing the significance of female bargaining power for overall economic development of countries like India which have poor social indicators. I also discuss some papers which contradict such findings. The second chapter describes the conceptual framework for the topic of intra-household bargaining. The first part of the chapter discusses the theoretical models of intra-household bargaining. While it is important to understand the theoretical models, it is also important to understand what form household bargaining takes in real life. To understand the power dynamics better, I conducted four Focus Group Discussion (FGD) in the state of West Bengal, India, in 2015. The participants were mostly married women of age 18-50. One of the main observations from the FGDs was that the deep-rooted gender roles for men and women in the society play an important role in determining their positions within the family. Drawing briefly on the observations from the FGD and existing literature on the topic, the second part of chapter two discusses how these gender roles can play a role in determining power position within the household. In the next two chapters, I analyze the factors that determine women’s power position using data on women’s involvement in the household decision making. This can be seen as a direct outcome of her bargaining power. The data used has been taken from a nationally representative longitudinal household survey (India Human Development Survey) of over 40,000 Indian households covering more than 200,000 individuals. The survey was conducted in two waves in the years 2004-05 and 2011-12. In my third chapter I investigate the effect of women’s labor force participation on her involvement in household decision making. After addressing the issues of endogeneity using a fixed effects model, I find that her labor market participation significantly increases her involvement in household decision making process. In my fourth chapter I analyze whether the women’s bargaining power within the household increases with the presence of female politicians at both state and local level. Studies, which use female representation in politics to explain various outcome variables, have often pointed out that due to the presence of voter preference it is difficult to estimate the actual causal effect. Hence for state elections, I use the existence of close elections as an instrument in a fixed effect model to show that an increase in number of female state legislators can actually lead to an increase in the bargaining power of women. To instrument for local level female representation, I use mandatory reservation for women in local elections and find a positive association between presence of a female village head and increase in women’s involvement in household decision making. On the basis of the results obtained in this study the fifth chapter concludes the dissertation by making policy recommendation for strengthening women’s bargaining position within the household.

After sixteen intensive months, I quit my employed position as a security guard at a local hospital. By drawing on my autoethnographic experiences in the form of “ethnographic fiction writing”, as well as eight interviews with my former male colleagues, I explore how the guards’ constructions of masculinity intersect with their security assessment and subsequent application of force, chemical incarceration, and other coercive security tactics on involuntarily-committed mental health patients. The narratives are framed by the available literature on gender and masculinity within the security, police, prison and military institutions, as well as the theoretical notions of gendered institutions (Acker), hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt), doing gender (West & Zimmerman), and Dave Holmes’s application of Foucauldian biopolitical power to forensic healthcare settings. These concepts are used in tandem with a creative methodological tool to reveal the “messy”, “bloody” and “gendered” ways in which hospital life unfolds between the guard, the nurse, and the patient prisoner. By escaping more traditional forms of academic writing, I am able to weave raw, sensitive and reflexive thoughts and emotions into the research design and analysis. The analysis is divided into two narratives: “Us” and “Them”. “Us” emphasizes the gendered ways in which the hospital guard learns, reproduces, resists, lives up, or fails to live up to the masculine codes of the profession. Here, the guard must confront cultural demands to demonstrate physical prowess, authority and heroism during a patient battle. “Them” explores how hegemonic masculinity shapes the hierarchical and coercive relations between the guard, the nurse, and the patient, and reinforces psychiatrized discourses that promote punishment, pain, bureaucracy and control. Overall, these findings call for the abolition of physical restraint, chemical incarceration and other coercive security measures within our healthcare institutions, and encourage future research to give voice to the lived experiences of women guards and security management teams.

After sixteen intensive months, I quit my employed position as a security guard at a local hospital. By drawing on my autoethnographic experiences in the form of “ethnographic fiction writing”, as well as eight interviews with my former male colleagues, I explore how the guards’ constructions of masculinity intersect with their security assessment and subsequent application of force, chemical incarceration, and other coercive security tactics on involuntarily-committed mental health patients. The narratives are framed by the available literature on gender and masculinity within the security, police, prison and military institutions, as well as the theoretical notions of gendered institutions (Acker), hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt), doing gender (West & Zimmerman), and Dave Holmes’s application of Foucauldian biopolitical power to forensic healthcare settings. These concepts are used in tandem with a creative methodological tool to reveal the “messy”, “bloody” and “gendered” ways in which hospital life unfolds between the guard, the nurse, and the patient prisoner. By escaping more traditional forms of academic writing, I am able to weave raw, sensitive and reflexive thoughts and emotions into the research design and analysis. The analysis is divided into two narratives: “Us” and “Them”. “Us” emphasizes the gendered ways in which the hospital guard learns, reproduces, resists, lives up, or fails to live up to the masculine codes of the profession. Here, the guard must confront cultural demands to demonstrate physical prowess, authority and heroism during a patient battle. “Them” explores how hegemonic masculinity shapes the hierarchical and coercive relations between the guard, the nurse, and the patient, and reinforces psychiatrized discourses that promote punishment, pain, bureaucracy and control. Overall, these findings call for the abolition of physical restraint, chemical incarceration and other coercive security measures within our healthcare institutions, and encourage future research to give voice to the lived experiences of women guards and security management teams.

After sixteen intensive months, I quit my employed position as a security guard at a local hospital. By drawing on my autoethnographic experiences in the form of “ethnographic fiction writing”, as well as eight interviews with my former male colleagues, I explore how the guards’ constructions of masculinity intersect with their security assessment and subsequent application of force, chemical incarceration, and other coercive security tactics on involuntarily-committed mental health patients. The narratives are framed by the available literature on gender and masculinity within the security, police, prison and military institutions, as well as the theoretical notions of gendered institutions (Acker), hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt), doing gender (West & Zimmerman), and Dave Holmes’s application of Foucauldian biopolitical power to forensic healthcare settings. These concepts are used in tandem with a creative methodological tool to reveal the “messy”, “bloody” and “gendered” ways in which hospital life unfolds between the guard, the nurse, and the patient prisoner. By escaping more traditional forms of academic writing, I am able to weave raw, sensitive and reflexive thoughts and emotions into the research design and analysis. The analysis is divided into two narratives: “Us” and “Them”. “Us” emphasizes the gendered ways in which the hospital guard learns, reproduces, resists, lives up, or fails to live up to the masculine codes of the profession. Here, the guard must confront cultural demands to demonstrate physical prowess, authority and heroism during a patient battle. “Them” explores how hegemonic masculinity shapes the hierarchical and coercive relations between the guard, the nurse, and the patient, and reinforces psychiatrized discourses that promote punishment, pain, bureaucracy and control. Overall, these findings call for the abolition of physical restraint, chemical incarceration and other coercive security measures within our healthcare institutions, and encourage future research to give voice to the lived experiences of women guards and security management teams.

Gendered organizational conditions create the context for persisting differences between men and women in the workplace. Within, higher education, this manifests as a salary gap between male and female faculty members. The academic capitalistic policy environment creates the conditions for increasing competition for external funding, especially in the areas of research and science and engineering. The change in the academic climate may sustain or intensify the gendering of universities as organizations. Universities with the highest level of research activity were chosen for this study and formed the 130 public institution sample. This study used fixed effects panel regression analysis to explore the relationship between the faculty gender salary gap and institutional emphasis on research as well as science and engineering. In addition, the relationship between institutional emphasis and the faculty gender salary gap was explored over time with the inclusion of a time trend and temporal interaction terms. Results showed that the higher the percentage of female faculty members, the greater the faculty gender salary gap for assistant professors. In addition, science and engineering emphasis over time had a significant impact on the professor salary gap with a decreasing effect both at the mean and one standard deviation above the mean, but with an increasing effect on the salary gap for institutions one standard deviation below the mean. When taking action to increase gender equity, it is important for universities to recognize that the faculty gender salary gap occurs in an organizational context impacted by institutional-level conditions.