Differences for the changing of organizations Reflections on organizational learning and training in gender mainstreaming processes through the concept of intersectionality

Abstract

This paper aims to build some conceptual bridges in order to cross-link different disciplines. Its main tenet is the assumption that studies on gender mainstreaming, which mainly generated within the academic field of political studies, have mainly focused on policy design/implementation processes, thus overlooking the organizational and learning dimensions of mainstreaming
processes. I argue that in order to practice and analyze a gender approach as a crosscutting framework it is necessary to take into serious account the organizational and institutional contexts and to read them through the lenses of feminist critics to theories of organizational learning and studies on gender in organizations. By highlighting and isolating conceptual tools at the crossroads of these disciplines, I pose some crucial research questions
and argue for the need of building a gendered ‘formative’ theory. The analysis shows how most of the critical literature in the aforementioned disciplines shares the refusal of a reductionist and binary logic and proposes a view on gender as intertwined with other differences and axis of discrimination—being that the case of the theories on intersectionality. I maintain that some of questions revealed by such interdisciplinary encounters allow us to
improve the empirical research on gender mainstreaming and eventually contribute to begin and shape a gendered ‘formative’ theory.