Navigating Gender Microaggressions: Coping Practices and Organizational Dynamics in Gendered Higher Education Institutions

Le résumé fourni par la source

ABSTRACT Despite sustained policy efforts to address gender inequality, women academics continue to encounter subtle and often normalized forms of discrimination within higher education institutions (HEIs). While prior research has documented these dynamics through concepts such as chilly climate, misrecognition, and (in)visibility, less attention has been paid to how they are enacted in everyday interpersonal interactions and how those targeted by them respond. Drawing on the microaggressions framework and the gendered organizations perspective, this study examines how everyday academic encounters reproduce gendered organizational norms and how women navigate these experiences through coping. Microaggressions are conceptualized as interactional manifestations of gendered organizational logics, and coping is theorized not as individual psychological adaptation but as an interactional practice shaped by organizational hierarchies. To examine these dynamics, we draw on 24 semi‐structured interviews and 5 focus groups with women and men in social sciences and business and management disciplines at a Belgian university. The analysis identifies a range of gender microaggressions, from more overt microassaults to subtler microinsults and microinvalidations, and shows how these interactions make organizational norms experientially salient. We further examine problem‐focused and emotion‐focused coping strategies and show how they are enabled and constrained by the organizational context. While coping may support persistence, it can simultaneously stabilize existing gendered norms, raising important questions about where responsibility for addressing inequality is located. By foregrounding interaction as a site where gendered organizational dynamics are both enacted and managed, this study bridges microaggression research and the gendered organizations perspective in a way that prior studies have not fully developed.

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