Understanding Gender Microaggressions in Organizational Contexts: An Ethnographic Study of Nordic Bank

Gender microaggressions, a context-specific context, can help us deepen our understanding of the ways in which gender-based inequalities in organizations are (re)produced from a different angle. Drawing on a 26-month long ethnographic study in Nordic Bank, as a rather neglected approach to study this phenomenon, in this article I contextualize gender microaggressions as a symptom intrinsic to gendered organizational culture in a male dominated organization. Through this approach, in this study I identified three patterns of gender microaggressions manifestations: Gender microaggressions as (1) coping mechanism, (2) freezing out, (3) reinforcement of existing, formal hierarchies.