‘Doing gender and gender equality’ through emotional expressions during a research interview. Views of highly educated Swedish young adults

Abstract

The aim of this article is to contribute to the knowledge on how concepts of gender and gender equality are constructed within research interviews, deepening our understanding of the underlying gender system in society. We focus on emotions and emotional processes expressed during interviews on work and family when specific questions originating in the World Value Survey were asked. Our study is based on interviews with highly educated women and men, in two metropolitan areas of Sweden. In this article, we seek to shed more light on how incorporating emotional expressions and the evaluation of these emotions can grasp the construction of gender and gender equality. We highlight the range of emotional expressions that appear during the interviews, differences in their usage by women and men and the links to the construction of gender and gender equality. We explore how the specific situation of the interview influences 'doing gender and gender equality' through emotions. Our results reveal that men and women use similar but also different emotional expressions in conforming to the gender equality norm. Men and women, interviewers and interviewees agreed on this norm, but the ways they 'performed' the norm are gender based.

Gendered views on parole: exploring how emotion and emotion management help to explain gender differences in the Australian public’s views on parole

“…A qualitative approach will allow me to move beyond questions of 'what' and 'how many', and instead explore 'why' men and women feel differently (or manage their feelings differently) with respect to the issue of parole release (Miles & Huberman, 1994). A qualitative approach with a focus on the emotional expressions appearing in research interviews with men and women will also provide me a greater opportunity to understand the complexity of how gender and emotion are constructed by individuals when discussing the release of prisoners on parole (Hellum & Oláh, 2018). The findings of the qualitative analysis of individual, in-depth interviews are presented in the following chapter.…”

“…Literature suggests that men will mostly conform to normative gendered rules for anger, feeling free to display this emotion. Although gendered feeling rules have historically meant that women who express or display anger may be punished or labelled as unmaternal or unladylike (Brescoll, 2016;Feldman Barrett, 2017;Sorial, 2019), a growing body of literature suggests that women are becoming increasingly expressive of their anger (Hellum & Oláh, 2018;Jaramillo-Sierra et al, 2017;Simon & Nath, 2004). Indeed, some scholars, like Ahmed and Bonis (2012), encourage more open expressions of feminine anger.…”

“…To explore these questions, I predicted parole attitudes using a MLR analysis and seven sets of variables. The specific research questions guiding this part of the analysis were as follows: Because both gender and emotion can be constructed by individuals through their survey responses in quantitative research (Hellum & Oláh, 2018), this analysis provides an opportunity to begin to explore how men and women enact their gendered identities and manage their expressions of emotion in the context of answering questions about parole and correctional processes more broadly. Guidance from the conceptual framework presented in Chapter 3 is particularly useful when attempting to understand some unexpected results in the analysis relating to the intersection between gender and emotion.…”