Experiences et strategies de femmes investies dans un “monde d’hommes”: le cas de la politique locale portugaise

Abstract

The article presents a research on the gender dynamics operating in a tokenism context: politics. Twenty-two Portuguese female politicians were interviewed. Their strategies to get a place in the masculine world of politics is mainly determined by the age: whereas the older women fight against gender discriminations and favor women’s skills, the younger value the superwoman profile that distance themselves from their socially dominated group, at the risk of denying the experienced discrimination, and are very attached to the meritocratic ideology threatened by the quotas.

Gender dynamics in elementary school teaching: The advantages of men

“…Nevertheless, the results clearly show how despite the gender imbalance in elementary education, where women are indeed a majority, the tokenism dynamics are conditioned by gender asymmetries as demonstrated by previous research on other professions (Santos et al, 2015, 2016).…”

“…As a result of symbolic asymmetry, token men are better placed than token women and therefore correspondingly experience fewer negative outcomes and gain greater advantages. Two studies carried out in Portugal within the scope of the same research project, with female politicians (Santos et al, 2016) and female and male medical specialists in 'masculine' and 'feminine' specialist fields, respectively (Santos et al, 2015), conclude that tokenism contributes to maintaining the gender social order (Connell, 2002). Such an order, which the gender symbolic asymmetry model defines as based on male individuation and female de-individuation in relation to a common system of values (Amâncio, 1993(Amâncio, , 1996(Amâncio, , 1997 that divides gender categories between men -as a universal point of reference -and women -as a gendered category limited to family care, education and the domestic sphere -gets reproduced in tokenism to the advantage of token men.…”

Gender Dynamics in a Masculine Professional Context: The Case of the Portuguese Air Force

“…Following the work of Kanter (1977Kanter ( , 1993, research on women and tokenism took place in various professional settings in the United States, such as in the Police Forces (Ott 1989), the medical field (Floge and Merrill 1986), firefighting (Yoder and McDonald 1998), law graduation programs (Spangler et al 1978), and in military ranks (Yoder et al 1983). In Portugal, the subject has also been a target of research, addressing female scien-tists (Amâncio 2005), female military professionals (Carreiras 2004), female police officers (Almeida 2006;Delgado 2016), female politicians (Santos et al 2016), and male and female doctors (Santos et al 2015). Some aspects of the first examples of research of women as tokens (e.g., Spangler et al 1978;Yoder et al 1983) backed Kanter's argument: Yoder et al (1983) described how the first women to join the West Point Military Academy expressed a perception of excessive visibility, certain social isolation, and the attribution of undervalued executive functions or were out of contention.…”

Women Mayors in Portugal: A Case Study in Political Representation and Citizenship

“…Recruitment is the main issue also in Brazil, where, despite a quota law since 1995, there are no sanctions for not applying it and women mayors are only 12 per cent in 2012 (Meireles & Andrade 2017). "Machismo" and paternalism are still prevalent in this South American country, as in Portugal (Santos, Roux & Amâncio 2016;. Therefore, the process for candidate selection depends mostly on party organisations which reflect this biased view of society (Costa, Bolognesi & Codato 2013; see also Krook & Zetterberg 2015).…”