Telling a supervisor about experiences of gendered dismissal: Problems of documentation, tellability, and failed authority

Abstract

Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video-recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, we examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a documentable issue. We describe the process by which the problem that the employee initially described as an organizational leadership issue became redefined as a personal matter, which was not the responsibility of the supervisor. We show how this happened by the supervisor refraining from treating the employee's problem as “tellable” on its own terms, which led to the employee repeatedly changing her storyline. We argue that the persistence of inequalities in organizational interactions may be due to documentation difficulties, which are anchored in cultural expectations that bias the tellability of events in ways that promote gender inequality.