People Management and Gender Discrimination: A Teaching Case Report

Abstract

This article presents an original teaching case built from a real situation of people management and gender discrimination in a multinational company operating in Chile. The case has been used in the training of business administration students and final-year students from various disciplines in a school of economics and business, originally in the capstone examination of the People Management track. Its pedagogical value lies in allowing several dimensions of organizational life to be addressed simultaneously: the diagnosis of systems undergoing transformation, the gaps between espoused and actual culture, and decision-making in contexts of ambiguity and uncertainty. The article proposes a reading of the case that combines frameworks of organizational diagnosis —Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), Nadler and Tushman (1980), Schein (1985; 2010), Mintzberg (1979; 1983), and Beer (1972; 1985)— with approaches to structural gender discrimination in organizations —Kanter (2008) and Acker (1990). The hypothesis running through the analysis is that the discrimination the case recounts is not a problem of individual attitudes but a symptom of failures of design, integration, and culture that only a systemic diagnosis can reveal. Finally, the article includes the application of the case to developing ethical discernment competencies based on the method of Mifsud (2012).