GOP IWD Session 3 - Prof Kate Kenny Her Fearless Speech Gender and Speaking Out

How can we assess the landscape of gender, protest and voice? Debates about speaking up, including fearless speech, parrhesia and whistleblowing, tend to ignore gender. Yet gender shapes scenes of speech in complex ways that are subtle, multi-faceted and have effects across macro, micro and meso levels. In this talk, I outline a tentative mapping of the landscape of gender and disclosure. Attention to ‘points of condensation’ of power and domination is instructive; these include cultural norms around gender, regulatory aspects that determine the ways in which people disclose, and normative systems shaping standards of behaviour. Bringing these ideas together, I propose a conceptual lens for understanding how power and domination work in and through gender and speech, focusing particularly on workers’ disclosures of wrongdoing and recent research in this area. In many countries and locales, speaking up is becoming more difficult, not least relating to feminist research, practice and activism. It is critical that we examine more closely the affordances and obstacles for those who speak out.
Kate Kenny is full Professor of Business and Society at University of Galway Ireland. She has held research fellowships at Cambridge University's Judge Business School, and the Edmond J. Safra Lab at Harvard University. Her research centres on the contribution of psychosocial and feminist theory to the study of organizations. Books include Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory (Harvard University Press, 2019), The Whistleblowing Guide (Wiley Business, 2019, with W. Vandekerckhove and M. Fotaki), Understanding Identity and Organizations (Sage 2011, with A. Whittle and H. Willmott), and Affect at Work: The Psychosocial and Organization Studies (Palgrave 2014, with M. Fotaki). Her work has been cited in the UK House of Commons, and in EU policy documents. She has written and contributed to articles in the Financial Times, the Irish Times, the Guardian and contributed to programmes on Ireland’s RTÉ (radio and television) and TG4.