WE ARE NOT “The Company's Moms”!
This article, focusing on the anthropology of work, contends that HR professionals interpret and represent the gendered nature of human resources management in accordance with gender relations that permeate the entire social field. Employing an ethnographic and historical perspective, it demonstrates the ways in which the HR world reproduces and sustains a system, both symbolic and social, that divides the masculine from the feminine principles, and sets one above the other. Two facets of gender hierarchization, both arising in HR experts' identity discourse, are explored: one is the differential value granted to the “feminine” character of the profession, and the other is the role gender categorization plays in promoting a liberal concept of the individual. The author suggests that citing presumed natural gender differences as an explanation for the subordinate status of HR careers in the business world is in fact a mechanism for revealing, solidifying and replicating gender relations.