Handbook of Organizational Gender Consultation and Intervention

The Handbook of Organizational Gender Consultation and Intervention is based on the understanding that promoting gender equality is a process of representing, recognizing, and granting weight and power to women’s point of view on organizational practices. Organizational practices that have exclusionary ramifications for women are made possible by the exclusion of women’s point of view from the planning and decision-making processes that shape organizational practices and day-to-day realities. Hence, the long journey toward gender equality in organizations is also the journey of the perspectives of women working in the organization—from the margins of the organization’s “attention” to the organization’s power centers where decisions are made. Agents of gender equality, both women and men, are the “travel agents” of this perspective in the organization, and their actions are intended to accrue validity and power for it, recruiting allies in support and recognition of it, and making it a weighty consideration where and when decisions are made.

How can this journey be successfully managed? This handbook aims to answer this question on the basis of many years of research and practical experience. The authors offer a rich toolbox that includes knowledge, know-how, strategies, and organizational interventions to promote gender equality and social justice in organizations: from the process of hiring to work arrangements, from the processes of tracking to the prevention of sexual harassment, from remuneration to leadership in the organization. The handbook examines various aspects of organizational life in order to identify exclusionary gendered implications of organizational practices in each aspect, understand their ramifications for women, and to propose solutions in the form of inclusionary organizational practices that can be implemented and realized in the organization. The interventions presented in the handbook are divided into three sections: representation of women’s perspective, mobilizing action from this perspective, and proactive steps to change gendered organizational practices.

The handbook can be downloaded from the website as a PDF file in both Hebrew and English.

Hadass Ben Eliyahu is the director of Yoda’at—Israel Knowledge Center on Women and Gender at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She has an MA from New York University. She teaches in the Women and Gender Studies Program of Tel Aviv University. Her main areas of expertise are the sociology of gender and organizations and gender mainstreaming in organizations. She is a consultant to organizations and to women activists who promote gender equality, and she is developing and implementing strategies for promoting gender equality in organizations. She served as the head of the social research branch in the Behavioral Sciences Department of the IDF.

Dr. Zeev Lehrer is head of the sociology program in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the Peres Academic Center and teaches in the Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. He has a PhD in sociology from Tel Aviv University. He specializes in applied social research on ethnicity and gender in organizations; the psychology of decoding the other; the sociology of military and combat; and embodied cognition in soccer. He is a senior consultant on gender and occupational diversity to public and private sector organizations. Lehrer served as the head of the Women and Gender Knowledge Center in the chief of staff’s advisory unit on women’s issues.