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Essay on Reaction Paper to Gendered Verbal Communication
The inspiration that managerial politics and experience are gendered is not new. Nor is it groundbreaking to quarrel that organizational cultures tend to be male dominated, based on patriarchal structures, and directed by traditionally masculine values and worldviews. Feminist theorists, standpoint theorists and muted group theorists have made important contributions to our understanding of the alternatives to and possibilities for equity-based organizational realities, which have yet to be fully realized. Because our foundations of organization are gendered in such a way that "the experiences and perspectives of women as a group are distinguished from, and usually subordinated to, the experiences and perspectives of men as a group", it takes no great inferential leap to conclude that workplace gender bias exists. As such, and given that gender bias is communicatively constituted, it seems that scholars of business communication ought to be able to agree on this: Gender bias does in fact exist in the workplace and, further, it is prevalent.
An exploration of business communication that is motivated by a concern for enriching the lives of those who work within an organization requires a careful examination of the discourses that create and sustain organizational reality. One of the most scripted forms of organizational discourse is employment interviewing.
As such, examining employment interviews can provide us with insights into the complexity that is organizational culture and how employees are socialized into it. Employment interviewing is an important gateway into organizations: They function as a kind of test case about "how things are done here," laying the groundwork for and giving the job candidate a sense of how employees will be treated when hired. Likewise, employees provide information about how they expect to be treated and how they will fit into the current mode of "how things are done." The employment interview is therefore a "critical contact" though which applicants and employers................
