Gender and management across boundaries

Issues facing women managers may involve a rethinking of debates around work and gender to new ways of managing the boundaries between self, work and life. This research attempts to enlist these promising new directions and explore the contemporary experiences of women in management in both Australia and China. In the process the new gender directions in organisational cultures characterised by the information technology revolution and interdependence with global markets is chartered. The paper acknowledges both individual difference but also looks at how class, gender and ethnicity are mediated by power. The absence of power from the post structuralist and the neo liberal approaches does a major disservice to both positions by seriously constraining the analysis. A focus on gender interest advances the business case for women managers wishing to achieve equal pay with men and gain equal access to senior and executive positions but may also want their distinctive contribution to management to be acknowledged and re-evaluated. This apparent ambiguity leads to a paradoxical gender identity of the Chinese women managers in the research, how they treat themselves, and how they are treated in and outside of the workplace. The Australian experience is similar and yet different, different due to the role of women's organizations, women in the bureaucracy promoting an equity agenda and women's growing participation in paid employment.