Drawing on Joan Acker’s notion of the ideal worker (1990) and Karen Ashcraft’s notion of the ‘glass slipper’ (2013), this paper investigates the organising practices that gender the occupation of artist manager and the music industry, and how women artist managers construct an identity in an occupation that is tailored on a male ideal manager, made to fit a man’s shoe. Empirically, we draw on thirteen semi-structured interviews with nine women artist managers, two women former artist managers, and two women former students of Music Management. In line with existing literature, our findings show that the Flemish music industry is organised around practices that reflect hegemonic masculinity, and that women managers mimic many of these practices to fit the ideal manager, and, although they see the gender inequality, they do not challenge it. At the same time, they construct an occupational identity by reframing stereotypical feminine competences as indispensable for being a good manager. By making a business case for these competences, they, however, paradoxically also reproduce those same notions of gender that they aim to overcome.

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In 2019, Femma Wereldvrouwen, a Belgian women’s organization experimented with a 30-hour workweek on organizational level. All full-time employees reduced their weekly working hours from 36, 34, or 32 (depending on their age) to 30. The experiment lasted one calendar year. By integrating a sociological temporal lens and considering the different levels in the organization, this study investigates how the organization has adapted their work to a shorter workweek based on 20 in-depth interviews and 4 focus-group interviews with employees. We find that Femma Wereldvrouwen combined structural changes on organizational and team level in a formalized way, with room for individual employees to find their own new temporal strategies in a shorter workweek. These strategies relate to focused work and consciousness of time. Although this combined responsibility of making a shorter workweek work was fairly successful, Femma Wereldvrouwen also faced some challenges, such as the lack of “fun” interaction through breaks, and time for “white space” in work.

This paper investigates why non-attendees of museums in Flanders (Belgium) do not visit and how these reasons for not attending are related to gender. The hierarchical constraints framework is applied to non-attendees using the 2014 Participation Survey (N = 2707). Both interested and non-interested non-attendees are included in the analyses. Findings reveal that interest constraints are the greatest barrier for museum visits for both women and men. However, men do report this type of constraint more than women. Women, on the other hand, report more interpersonal and structural constraints. Older women seem doubly disadvantaged regarding interpersonal constraints, and women with a lower subjective income are doubly disadvantaged for both interpersonal and structural constraints. This paper explains discrepancies in the experiences of constraints between different groups by the hierarchy of social privilege, referring to the role of socialization and culture in influencing people's preferences. Evaluating the constraint model in research regarding cultural participation, the paper proposes a clarification based on Parsons' action theory framework.

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