[ecrea] Gendering the creative: creative work, creative industries, creative identities - GWO 2014

Gender, Work & Organization 8th Biennial International Interdisciplinary 
conference, 24th – 26th June, 2014

Keele University, UK



Call for abstracts

Gendering the creative: creative work, creative industries, creative 
identities



Deborah Jones, Victoria University of Wellington, NEW ZEALAND

Kate Sang, Heriot Watt University, SCOTLAND

Naomi Stead, The University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA

Dimi Stoyanova, University of Warwick, ENGLAND

Rebecca Finkel, Queen Margaret University, SCOTLAND



‘Creativity’ is the engine of post-industrial ‘creative economies’. This 
rhetoric encompasses not only specifically designated ‘creative 
industries’ and ‘creatives’, but also a much wider idea of the 
‘creative’ at work in all kinds of organisations and occupations. 
Contemporary policies – national, regional, industry-driven – have set 
out to extend, evaluate and monetise the creative. While some of these 
government initiatives also attempt to address social diversity – 
including gender - in terms of equal access to work, and of cultural 
inclusion and exclusion, others do not. Ways of conceptualising 
creativity may take a wide range of forms, in which both traditional and 
newer are spliced together. For instance, a romantic framing of ‘arts’ 
and ‘artists’, based on a distinction between the creative and the 
industrial, is linked with ideas of art as a vocation, and of the artist 
as a distinctive kind of individualised genius. A more recent, 21st 
century vision is linked with the idea of innovation as the key to 
economic success, and so to workplaces specifically designed to attract 
and affirm creative talent. Here the ideal ‘creative’ may be imagined as 
a smoothly-functioning team of passionate and diverse talents.



The construction of gender takes varying forms in relation to the 
creative. In this stream call, we are approaching both as forms of 
identity intertwined in specific settings and historical contexts. The 
‘creative’ is typically constructed so that women do not become the 
creative stars or geniuses, do not have equal access to creative work, 
are not equally rewarded, and are subject to various forms of 
occupational segregation that reinforce these inequalities in both 
recognition and reward. Processes of gendering the creative are inherent 
in theories and representations of creativity itself and its relation to 
the masculine and feminine, and in the industrial, occupation and 
creative community practices whereby gender influences who has access to 
which work, and to recognition as creatively successful. Intersecting 
with gender are constructions of class, race, age and sexuality that 
complicate and extend privilege and inequality.



In response to the emergence of policy-driven frameworks for mapping the 
‘creative economy’, creative work has increasingly been recognised as 
‘work’, collapsing creative subjects – artists, technicians, 
entrepreneurs – into data sets where earnings and occupations can be 
surveyed. In oppositional mode, critical scholars have increasingly paid 
attention to forms of creative work, or ‘cultural labour’ as aspects of 
the labour process, and raised questions about the forms of exploitation 
with which it is associated. Debates about creative work seek to frame 
it in relation to other kinds of exploitative or precarious work, while 
maintaining a focus on distinctive features of the ‘creative’. In 
particular, such research recognises that creative work is not only a 
type of work of developing economic and political importance, but that 
struggles over the creative are also struggles over the control of 
cultural production. However people working in many creative fields 
often refuse or ignore such analyses, rejecting the notion of creativity 
as a job. Identifying in various ways as artists with a vocation, they 
often work in what they see as non-creative jobs, perhaps part-time or 
intermittent, to fund their creative practice. The distinctions between 
paid and unpaid work is blurred, and unpaid positions such as 
‘internships’ may be institutionalised as a way to get a foot in the 
door of a creative industry. Or, even if in paid creative work, they may 
accept low pay, extremely demanding working conditions, and precarious 
employment. Such patterns are also seen within established professions 
such as architecture where members often reflect on architecture as a 
‘lifestyle’ rather than as a job or career. The language of workplace 
rights is frequently marginalised or silenced altogether, and forms of 
collective organising such as unionisation are often unavailable or 
rejected. In such a context, it is very difficult for women to find a 
forum or space to raise issues of creative work and gender equality, 
such as pay, status, recognition, or acknowledgment of family 
responsibilities.



For this stream, we invite empirical, theoretical or methodological 
papers that explore the ways that creative work is gendered. The 
gendered construction of ‘creativity’ can be seen in analyses of women’s 
employment within creative industries, and of ways that creativity is 
imagined or represented in a range of occupations and practices. 
Although the stream is open to any discussion of gender and creativity 
or creative work, we particularly welcome explorations of specific 
employment settings or contexts, for example, architecture, film and 
television, comedy, literature (including poetry) and design. We also 
call for speculative papers which propose innovative theoretical or 
methodological perspectives that can further open up studies of how the 
creative is gendered. We encourage writers to specify their own local 
contexts in which various versions of gender and creativity play out. We 
also encourage an interdisciplinary approach, acknowledging that the 
literatures of work in the creative industries, like the sector itself, 
have developed in and across a range of disciplines, including cultural 
studies, sociology and geography, as well as organisational studies. The 
following list is indicative, although not exhaustive, of likely topics 
in the stream:

·         Distinctive forms of gendering the creative in different 
creative sectors: How is gender distinctively constructed in different 
creative sectors? What are the traditions and organising processes that 
enable or constrain women in different ways? How are roles within a 
given sector gendered in terms of status and specific skills? Are there 
government policies that set goals for gender participation and measure 
the workforce accordingly?

·         Exceptionalist discourses: How do some creative professions 
frame themselves as unlike any other profession, as entirely unique and 
incomparable? What are the gendered consequences of this framing? How 
does this exceptionalism deflect critique?

·         Embodying the creative: How is creativity is embodied as 
gendered? How is creativity performed through dress and demeanour, 
bodily comportment, and body art such as tattoos, as markers of 
belonging to a ‘creative’ sub-culture, of creativity and hipsterism. 
This question could be addressed by visual methodologies, and other 
interdisciplinary approaches such s fashion studies and the sociology of 
clothing.

·         Theorising creativity as gendered: How is the subject of the 
artist/ creative gendered? How does the (female) muse relate to the 
(male) genius? How are inspiration, aspiration and the sources of 
creative ideas gendered?

·         Methodologies for studying gendered creativity: How can we 
explore innovative methods for studying and understanding the creative 
industries and creative labour? What methods are most appropriate, for 
example, visual, aesthetic, ethnographic?

·         Claiming the creative: How are ‘creative’ identities allocated 
and recognised? How is the ‘super-creative core’ constituted in relation 
to the ‘below the line’ people, i.e. the ‘crew’, support workers, and 
administrators? What systems are there of awards, grants, training, and 
networks and how are they gendered? Who are the gatekeepers to these 
resources and who receives them? Who in a profession or occupation 
actually gets to be creative at all, and why?

·         Authorship, attribution and credit in collaborative work: What 
are the gendered implications and effects of these practices? What is 
the effect of publications, awards and organisations insisting on a 
single creative figurehead?

·         Intersectionality: How does gender intersect with class, 
ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation for those working in the 
sector? When and how does ‘diversity’ signal ‘creative difference’ as 
opposed to marginalisation?

·         Against management: What are the gendered effects of 
tendencies in creative professions to actually and actively resist 
management and perceived managerialism, including any kind of equity 
initiatives? How is the rhetoric of egalitarian sociality exploited to 
foreclose questions of personal patronage and uneven access to resources?

·         The creative profession as cult: What are the gendered effects 
of some creative industries scenarios of intensive work where your 
colleagues become your only friends, your romantic and business 
partners, and your family?

·         Creativity and vocation: What are the effects of the ‘calling’ 
to the creative professions? How does gender intersect with vocation to 
intensify sacrifice on the part of women in terms of pay, conditions, 
status?

·         Imagining and organising gender equality in creative work: 
What would decent work in the creative sector look like for women? How 
do women organise in guilds, professional groups, unions or lobby groups 
to raise issues of gender equality in this sector? How do women organise 
creative projects with men or other women that open up new opportunities 
for women to lead, collaborate and develop skills in spaces of great 
equality?



Abstracts of approximately 500 words (ONE page, Word document NOT PDF, 
single spaced, excluding references, no header, footers or track 
changes) are invited by 1st November 2013 with decisions on acceptance 
to be made by stream leaders within one month. All abstracts will be 
peer reviewed. New and young scholars with 'work in progress' papers are 
welcomed. Papers can be theoretical or theoretically informed empirical 
work. In the case of co-authored papers, ONE person should be identified 
as the corresponding author. Due to restrictions of space on the 
conference schedule, multiple submissions by the same author will not be 
timetabled. Abstracts should be emailed to: Kate Sang (k.sang /at/ hw.ac.uk)

Abstracts should include FULL contact details, including your name, 
department, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail 
address. State the title of the stream to which you are submitting your 
abstract. Note that no funding, fee waiver, travel or other bursaries 
are offered for attendance at GWO2014.



For more information about the conference, including venue, 
accommodation and registration, see  the GWO2014 Call for Abstracts - 
All Streams on the Gender, Work & Organization site, 
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1468-0432













Deborah Jones, School of Management, Victoria University of Wellington, 
P.O. Box 600, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND

Te Whare Wananga o te Upoko o te Ika a Maui,  Pouaka Poutapeta 600, Te 
Whanganui-a-Tara, AOTEAROA

RH930, Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Wellington 64-4-463-5731



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