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Record W144616233

Fashioning Gender: A Case Study of the Fashion Industry

2013· dissertation· en· W144616233 on OpenAlex
Allyson Stokes

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueMacSphere (McMaster University) · 2013
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicFashion and Cultural Textiles
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFashion industryGender studiesSociologyPolitical scienceClothingLaw
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This dissertation uses the case of the fashion industry to explore gender inequality in creative cultural work. Data come from 63 in-depth interviews, media texts, labor market statistics, and observation at Toronto's fashion week. The three articles comprising this sandwich thesis address: (1) processes through which femininity and feminized labor are devalued; (2) the gendered distribution of symbolic capital among fashion designers; and (3) the gendered organization of the fashion industry and the “ideal creative worker.” In chapter two, I apply devaluation theory to the fashion industry in Canada. This chapter makes two contributions to literature on the devaluation of femininity and “women's work.” First, while devaluation is typically used to explain the gender wage gap, I also address symbolic aspects of devaluation related to respect, prestige, and interpretations of worth. Second, this paper shows that processes of devaluation vary and are heavily shaped by the context in which work is performed. I address five processes of devaluation in fashion: (1) trivialization, (2) the privileging of men and masculinity, (3) the production of a smokescreen of glamour, (4) the use of free labor and “free stuff,” and (5) the construction of symbolic boundaries between “work horses” and “show ponies.” In chapter three, I use media analysis to investigate male advantage in the predominantly female field of fashion design. I find that the “glass escalator” concept typically used to explain male advantage in feminized work, is insufficient when applied to a cultural field. The glass escalator illustrates movement upward in well-defined organizational hierarchies where success is measured by pay and promotion. But success in cultural fields is also measured by symbolic capital (celebrity, cultural consecration, prestige). I find that male designers are attributed more symbolic capital by prestigious industry sources and the fashion media. In order to illustrate these advantages I make use of the concept of a “glass runway,” whereby designers are pushed forward into the spotlight, rather than upward within a single workplace or organization. I also take note of how these advantages are structured by the intersection of gender and sexuality. In chapter four I investigate the gendered organization of creative cultural work in the fashion industry. Literature suggests that these types of work are characterized by: (1) the need to mitigate risk through entrepreneurial labor and (2) an ideology of passion. I find that these organizing logics create a gendered conception of the “ideal creative worker.” Men more easily conform to this ideal since they have lower family responsibilities, are offered more flexible working arrangements, and since it is more culturally acceptable for men to put work before intimate life. Findings also suggest that gender intersects with age and class. The gendered organization of fashion not only reinforces inequalities between women and men, but also different groups of women. Women who are younger, childless, and have independent financial support can more easily conform to the “ideal creative worker.” Still, even women who closely match this ideal are questioned and criticized in ways that men are not.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.181
Threshold uncertainty score0.989

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.1810.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.041
GPT teacher head0.222
Teacher spread0.181 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it