Gender paradoxes emerge from tensions embedded in organizations, where competing expectations generate not only managerial challenges but also fundamental ethical questions about inclusion, equality, and responsibility. While prior research has examined barriers such as the glass ceiling and pay inequality, less attention has been paid to how gender paradoxes subtly yet systematically shape organizational experiences and allocate moral responsibilities among actors.
Gender is approached as an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting people as two significantly different categories, men and women, and organizing social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference. At the same time, the special issue recognizes the lived realities of intersex, non-binary, genderfluid, and other gender-diverse individuals who navigate structures grounded in binary norms.
Paradoxes, defined as contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time, are central to many tensions related to gender in organizations. These include the double bind women leaders face in balancing agentic and communal expectations, the difficulties gender-diverse individuals encounter when resisting dominant norms of professionalism, and the strain between care responsibilities and workplace demands for emotional detachment.
Gender paradoxes raise critical ethical questions: Whose interests are prioritized? Who bears moral and emotional burdens? What responsibilities do organizations, and specifically those organizational members unaffected by exclusion, hold in addressing these tensions? And when do such tensions call for institutional reform rather than individual adaptation? This Special Issue seeks to foreground the ethical dimensions of gender paradoxes in organizations.
The special issue welcomes original contributions that examine gender paradoxes not only analytically but also through ethically grounded normative arguments about how individuals and organizations can and should respond. Submissions should critically engage with ethical questions posed by gender paradoxes such as how moral responsibility is distributed, what burden visibility imposes, and how organizational actions with moral intent may reproduce inequality.
Submissions may tap into a range of theoretical traditions, including paradox, identity, institutional, practice, and discourse theory – as well as normative frameworks such as feminist ethics, ethics of care, virtue ethics, deontological approaches to ethics, and critical management studies. The special issue explicitly welcomes theoretically and methodologically diverse submissions that offer distinct insights into the empirical phenomenon of gender paradoxes, examining how related tensions are generated, navigated, and contested in organizational life.