My positionality in regards to the research on “A Study on Leadership of Women in Professions Dominated by Males.”
Rowe (2014) describes positioning as the stance that is adopted by a researcher concerning the socio-political context of their study, such as the community or participant group involved. It entails the way the research problem or questions are constructed, to how the participants are invited to the study to the way the outcomes are published. Positionality usually refers to the researcher’s insider or outsider relationship to the community or group under research. According to Herr and Anderson (2005), an insider is a researcher who either works for, is a member of or lives with the participant group while an outsider is a non-member, such as academic researchers who collect data about a group who are usually the objectified research subjects. My research title is “A Study on Leadership of Women in Professions Dominated by Males.” This paper will discuss the extent to which my positionalities as a person relate to my research topic, if the research can be objective and whether I can conduct a study on my topic objectively.
Several factors come into play when it comes to how the researcher does their study. They include gender, race, background, culture, religion, sexual orientation, class of life, political stand, among others. Herr and Anderson (2005) listed the positions of researchers along six continuums. They consist of an insider, an insider collaborating with other insiders, an insider working with outsiders, Reciprocal collaboration, which entails equivalent insider and outsider groups, an outsider partnering with insiders and, outsider research. My position, according to Herr et al., is outsider studies, being that I conducted this research as part of my school project. I am a female student at York University in Canada. My family, a somewhat middle class one, is of Chinese descent, and most of our life, we lived in China. I have three brothers and one sister.
The idea of feminism and campaigns for women’s rights in China was not a welcome thought for quite a while. Feminism in my mother country is believed to have started in the late 20th century. Before that and in the 1900s, women in China were actually to be of a lower hierarchy in the universe than men. They were supposed to be submissive and obedient to men and were not allowed to participate in leadership, government, military, or organizational positions (Croll, 2012). Johnson (2009) says that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, some few women and men revolted against these chauvinistic ideologies but to no avail as the Provisional Government of the Republic of China disbanded those groups. It is only at the beginning of the 21st century that things began changing for women in China as the government and other feminist movements campaigned and implemented laws favoring them.
For instance, the government amended the marriage law to include abuse as a ground for divorce in 2001. I used to see women being beaten, but nobody spoke up, and this usually irked me, I remember I asked one of my elder cousins why no women ever reported to the police. The answer still shocks me to date as Zhuang, my cousin told me that it was normal for a husband to “discipline” his wife when she was wrong, and the police did not consider it as a crime back then. My cousin, a traditionalist, asked me not to probe into other people’s private affairs. Appalling, right? In fact, in 2011, I remember reading on Shanghaiist.com about Kim Lee, who posted pictures of her injured face after a beating from her husband. The husband admitted to it and told her not to discuss their private affairs in public. My sister and I also fell victim to these chauvinist views once when we were about to join a local junior school. After the interviews, all the boys, including my brothers, were picked, and we were not selected, yet we had the top performance. In 2015, the government jailed five feminist activists for 37 days because they had planned to hand out flyers against sexual harassment on buses and subways (theguardian.com).
Further, in 2017, the Sin a Weibo account of Feminist Voices, Nuquan Zhisheng, got suspended for a month after posting that the planned women strike in the US on International Women’s Day and more shocking is that the account was deleted in 2018 (theguardian.com). I also remember a scene where one of our neighbor’s wives vied to become a village elder, but she was shunned and told that her position was in the kitchen. As late as the 20th century, educational institutions and workplaces had a specific preference for men in some fields such as engineering, aviation, finance, and medicine, among others. The position is reiterated by Walker & Bopp (2011), who I have quoted in my bibliography and who discuss the inadequacy of women in the sports workplace.
In the 21st century, China has implemented laws on gender discrimination and gender violence. The government even issued a directive banning employers from advertising with terms such as “men preferred” and banned them from asking issues to do with a woman’s childbearing and marriage plans. A critical field that was presented in the Global Report that has been male-dominated in China is journalism. Women are the most number in Chinese news organizations; they are still underrepresented in management positions. They are less trained and protected from harm, remunerated lower, and usually relegated to part-time. In fact, in my bibliography, Elsesser & Lever (2011) discussed the persistence of bias against women in managerial positions.
Therefore, I am well-acquainted with my research topic because I have seen and experienced it first-hand. I am a lady who grew up in a country that was mostly chauvinistic till the late 21st century and is still is because they again censor and ban women movements that try to change traditional views even when it comes to male-dominated positions. Having seen and experienced the plight of women owing to my background and status as a woman myself, I feel that I am well familiarized with my research topic. I believe that women’s voices and rights deserve a place in the world and that governments and institutions need to embrace women in leadership positions. There is an adage that people say jokingly “what a man can do, a woman can do better.” Therefore, we need to abandon the backward views of having male-dominated jobs because women are also capable of handling them.
With the knowledge and experience that I have acquired, I can handle my research questions and objective on the performance of women as leaders in traditional male-defined and dominated occupations meticulously. Honestly, as regards my feelings to this topic, I feel irked as to the performance of women in male-dominated fields because of how my country has treated the matter since time immemorial. I am ashamed of how to date the plight of women in areas such as engineering, and journalism can still be a topic under discussion back in China. Ironically, I am happy to handle the research topic because it means I will be more conversant with the study. Furthermore, I am elated because I will gain knowledge that I will use to campaign against the backward and chauvinistic views regarding professional work. I am thrilled that in the future, my research paper will be used as a source of knowledge when it comes to enlightening others on the performance of women in male-dominated jobs.
To quote Braude, “…a conscious, ethical neutrality must be adopted and embraced, so the work remains objective and contributory to the other related research” (Thorne, 2012). Braude summarizes my answer to whether research can be objective in his quote. However, research studies and papers are not objective because the author takes a stand and recommends their ideas towards the subject at hand. Nevertheless, research should be objective to offer a broad spectrum of knowledge on the topic being discussed. In as much as I may have feelings of shame, happiness, or anger towards the subject as relates to my motherland, I would still exercise a modicum of objectivity when researching on the topic. The idea is to be well-enlightened on the topic and to discuss the correct position of the performance of women in male-dominated jobs.
References
Croll, E. (2012). Feminism and socialism in China. Routledge.
Elsesser, K. M., & Lever, J. (2011). Does gender bias against female leaders persist? Quantitative and qualitative data from a large-scale survey. Human Relations, 64(12), 1555-1578.
Fanhuang. (2018, May 5). Li Yang of Crazy English accused of domestic violence by laowai wife. Shanghaiist.com. Retrieved from http://shanghaiist.com/2011/09/05/li_yang_of_crazy_english_accused_of/
Fincher, Hong L. (2019, March 7). China’s women’s movement has not only survived an intense crackdown, it’s grown. Guardian.com. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/chinas-womens-movement-has-not-only-survived-an-intense-crackdown-its-grown
Herr, K., & Anderson, G. (2005). The action research dissertation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Johnson, K. A. (2009). Women, the family, and peasant revolution in China. University of Chicago Press.
Rowe, W. E. (2014). Positionality. The SAGE encyclopaedia of action research, 16, 628-629. Throne, R. (2012). Positionality. In Practitioner research in doctoral education. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt. Retrieved from ResearchGate
Walker, N. A., & Bopp, T. (2011). The underrepresentation of women in the male-dominated sport workplace: Perspectives of female coaches. Journal of Workplace Rights, 15(1).