Disrupting the rigid boundaries of dominant gender/productivity narratives

While the relation between gender and productivity has been predominantly explored in management and organisation studies literature along the rigid boundaries of the gender binary, the perspectives of transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) workers have received little attention. Moreover, whereas studies have illustrated how productivity is a gendered construct that favours binary, cis-gender men over binary, cis-gender women at work, alternative conceptualisations of productivity have rarely been explored.

Aiming to come to a more flexible and gender-minority-inclusive understanding of the gender/productivity relation, this study analyses 19 interviews with TGNC workers in the UK and develops an alternative notion of productivity based on Queer Theory. The findings illustrate how TGNC workers produce narratives in which they portray working environments that lack queer productivity as hampering their hegemonic job productivity, because they place an additional workload on them in the form of queer and emotional labour.

In contrast, organisations in which cisnormativity has been challenged are presented as facilitating their hegemonic job productivity. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a novel conceptualisation of the gender/productivity relation in which productivity is approached as a multiplicity to be studied holistically. Moreover, it provides the theoretical equipment to not only capture the hard work that goes into being a minoritised gender at work but also to illustrate how it relates to hegemonic productivity. Lastly, it provides recommendations for challenging cisnormativity in practice.