"The Gender Dynamics of Industry"

This paper analyzes how gender dynamics have played out across the histories of three different industries: (1) textiles/apparel (2) oil (3) beauty/fashion/creative. The choice of industries reflects an effort to re-frame the different histories by showing how gender mattered to the shaping and shifting of industry identities, cultures, and outcomes over time. It is designed to demonstrate that greater attention to an industry’s social environment can sharpen an understanding of the processes and practices associated with industry patterns of change, persistence, and resistance. The paper’s strength is its synthesis of multiple streams of literature and its crafting of new narratives about these particular industries. A final, brief, section uses Google and telecommunications to push history forward and reposition business history in debates about “the declining or rising significance of gender.