"Jag har faktiskt aldrig lidit av att vara kvinna"

Abstract

Where g e n d e r and equality at work are concerned, one cannot always trust one's senses or one's speech as a female worker. It is o lien very unclear whether events are "actually" discrimination or just accidents, or perhaps due to personal shortcomings in oneself. Discursive domination niay make an u n d e r s t a n d i n g of events in terms of subordination processes less likely to prevail for a woman, in spite of r e p e a t e d occurrences of these events and temporary interpretations. A dominant frame of r e f e r e n c e - the "normal" or g e n d e r neutral - may be stronger because of its support in language, struetures and social surroundings. This affects the stories women tell about life at work, in that these different frames of i n t e r p r e t a t i o n can be seen to give rise to competing and oscillating personal interpretations of situations a n d events. Using a discursive psychological approach, interview talk by female civil servants was in this artiele analyzed for inconsistencies and contradictions concerning gender equality in the workplace. The pattern which was discovered was i n t e r p r e t e d in terms of ludden gender strueturing of organizations and the way such processes become represented in language.