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How does the suggested stigmatisation of ‘dirty work’ impact the psychological well-being of exotic dancers?

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By Lana Mughal (MSc 2018/19)

“Work only becomes dirty when society deems it so.” – Valtora et al., (2019).

Stigmatisation can impact any number of people from any group. Studies have shown that the impacts of stigmatisation can be have an extremely negative impact on the individual’s psychological wellbeing. In fact, some theorists (e.g. Miller & Kaiser, 2001) suggest that stigmatised individuals could experience negative psychological consequences as severe as low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression.

The term ‘dirty work’ was originally constructed by Everett Hughes in 1951, to denote tasks and occupations that were seen by society as disgusting or degrading (Hughes, 1951). However, placing connotations on an individual by suggesting their occupation in some way is degrading or disgusting automatically places a stigma onto them, for performing it.

This study explored the gap in the literature based around the psychological well-being (PWB) of one of the most highly stigmatised occupations (Ashforth & Kreiner, 2014), exotic dancers.

STIGMATISATION

Though we know from the literature and from psychology in general that stigmatisation can have incredibly negative impacts on the individual’s psychological well-being, none of the literature uncovered how stigma impacts those in occupations that are stigmatised. According to the literature, there are three types of ‘tainted work’ within ‘dirty’ occupations (Valtora et al., 2019);

  • Physical taint— i.e. garbage collectors
  • Social taint— i.e. waiters and pawnbrokers
  • Moral taint— i.e. exotic dancers

However, it is also possible for individuals to be in more than one stigmatised group (Bergman & Chalkley, 2007). For instance, exotic dancers are considered to be socially and morally tainted, due to the social nature of their job and the immorality of ‘their actions’ within their role.

PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING

Once more we find that although society places such a heavy stigma on occupation such as exotic dancers, none of the literature seeks to uncover the truth behind the impact this stigma has.

Much of the literature on stigma and dirty work seeks to explore other facets of dirty work such as coping mechanisms employed by exotic dancers (i.e. Miller & Kaiser, 2001; Schaubroeck et al., 2018; and Weitzer, 2018) or the influence of a ‘dirty’ stigma on identity (i.e. Quinn & Chaudoir, 2009).

However, this study sought to explore the specific impact that stigmatisation of exotic dance can have on the individual dancer’s psychological well-being.

FINDINGS

Semi-structured interviews were conducted and then analysed using thematic analysis, a form of analysis specifically used to derive themes from the data (Willig, 2013). Five key themes were identified using this method of analysis;

  • Stereotyping/Judgement— All of the dancers appeared to face being stereotyped based on assumptions and judgements of their occupation from all sides. Implicit judgement and explicit assumptions were made on the dancers, leading to fear and worry. Assumptions that strippers are ‘stupid’ or ‘uneducated’ and ‘sexually promiscuous’ appeared to be the most common assumption or judgement made, leading to a variety of emotional struggles for the dancers.
  • Resilience— this theme illustrated the degree to which the dancers are able to face adversity from colleagues, clients, family, management and society, and deal with and move on from it. Dancers also felt that in order to remain in their role and deal with the adversities from the stigma felt, they had to be ‘tough skinned’. They mentioned that girls often leave when they don’t have the ability to remain tough skinned, explaining that the verbal abuse received from customers, management and wider society can be extremely damaging without the ability to bounce back.
  • Safety— this theme illustrated strategies used to feel physically and psychologically safe; and the impact a lack of psychological and physical safety has on the dancers. Safety also had three direct sub-themes; anxiety, deception and energy. Anxiety referred to the impact of certain situations and strategies that are used to help deal with these situations. Deception referred to the ways in which dancers protect themselves from the challenges they face from customers and management, both on a psychological and physical level. Finally, energy related to the impact that energy (or a lack of) has on the dancer’s psychological well-being.
  • Other Dancers— this theme illustrated the impact that other dancers have on the psychological well-being of individuals. One of the coping mechanisms suggested in the literature was having a strong support network of other individuals within the stigmatised group (Koken, 2012). This was re-iterated by the dancers, who explained it was important to have a strong network of other dancer friends to disclose their issues to. However, they also mentioned that if they didn’t have a strong support network and girls were ‘bitchy’ or ‘cliquey’, they were more likely face issues such as anxiety and depression.
  • Dehumanisation— this theme illustrated the extent to which the dancers feel objectified and dehumanised by other dancers, customers, management and society in general. Dancers explained that they were often dehumanised, objectified and even animalised. These findings concurred with those of Valtora et al., (2019), who suggested ‘dirty workers’ may commonly experience this. Dehumanisation was clearly considered as an insult by the dancers, who explained that it wasn’t anyone else’s business how they made their money. Overall, being dehumanised by wider society and especially their customers, could have an extremely negative impact on them.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, these findings added interesting insight into the current literature and hopefully has opened the door to furthering our understanding the implications that psychological well-being can have on stigmatised occupations. The study sought to determine how stigma had a negative impact on exotic dancer’s psychological well-being, and many findings were revealed. As we in society attempt to move away from stigmas surrounding race, disability and ethnicity, so too should we move away from the stigmas we hold on certain occupations such as exotic dance.

MILLENNIALS AND THE MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR: HOW USEFUL DO THE YOUNGER WORKFORCE THINK THE MBTI IS?

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By Victoria Gosling (MSc 2018/19)

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, better known as the MBTI. You’ve all heard of it, and being used by 88% of Fortune 500 businesses worldwide, you’ve probably taken part in it. Hugely popular and just as controversial, how useful really is the MBTI for employee development in a changing workforce?

Interesting new research has set out to explore how useful Millennials think the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is today for their professional development, and the findings could have huge implications for organisations across the globe.

WHAT IS THE MBTI AND WHY IS IT USED?

The MBTI is a personality assessment that has been hugely popular in business as a professional development tool for decades (Myers, 1962). The underlying theory is that every individual’s personality can be categorised as one of 16 types across four ‘dichotomies’: introversion vs. extraversion, intuition vs. sensing, feeling vs. thinking, and judging vs. perceiving.

In business, it is used commonly as a group training tool with the aim of improving working relationships, communication and workplace behaviours.

The MBTI has a ‘marmite’ reputation in the field of business psychology. Despite its popularity, it is often criticised by researchers for being unscientific and invalid. However, its popularity is undying, and research suggests that to truly understand its usefulness, we need to look at how it is used in practice, and discover whether it is achieving what it aims to achieve (Pittenger, 1993).

THE RESEARCH

We have been looking at the usefulness of the MBTI in today’s increasingly Millennial workforce by studying Millennials who have taken part in MBTI training sessions through their employment and hearing their views and experiences.

12 Millennials from a range of employment industries were interviewed for their thoughts, and the results were interpreted to reveal some important and surprising new knowledge.

WHAT HAVE WE FOUND?

The research has revealed important new knowledge about the usefulness of the MBTI:

  • MBTI types are useful – employees find the MBTI useful to make sense of themselves and their personalities at work, but should be taken with a pinch of salt
  • MBTI improves relationships at work – employees feel that the MBTI can improve their relationships with their colleagues through helping them understand and accept each other’s differences
  • MBTI improves engagement and communication – employees like the MBTI because it is engaging, and encourages teams to communicate better with each other
  • MBTI is useful across generations – employees believe that the useful benefits of the MBTI are relevant across generations of employees

However, some issues with using the MBTI for professional development have also been revealed:

  • The effects of the MBTI are often only short-term – employees felt that with only one training session, the benefits of the MBTI are often short-lived
  • Some of the information is quite personal – some employees felt that their personality feedback was quite personal, and are not always comfortable sharing it
  • The MBTI is easy to fake – many employees feel that it is easy to manipulate your personality type through the questionnaire, and there may be pressure to have a certain personality type at work
  • The MBTI boxes people in – employees described that there are issues with the ‘boxing in’ nature of the MBTI as Millennials in particular prefer to be seen and trained as individuals, and they also worry that boxing people in could lead to discrimination at work

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOUR COMPANY?

The good news is that the research shows the MBTI is a useful and effective personality tool for maximising the individual and team potential of your employees. Employees believe the communicative and sociable nature of the MBTI improves team engagement and awareness, enabling them to thrive.

However, one of the most important things to understand about the research is that the implementation of MBTI training sessions makes all the difference as to how useful it will be for your team.

The research has provided guidelines for how the MBTI should be used in practice to maximise its usefulness:

 GUIDELINES FOR EFFECTIVE USE OF THE MBTI

In summary, the research provides new understandings of the usefulness of the MBTI for professional development with important implications for how your company can use the personality tool.

By studying the people at the heart of your business, the employees themselves, and putting psychological theory into practice, we can see that the MBTI is useful for personal and team development, fostering great relationships and boosting team morale. However, to allow these benefits to shine through, the research has revealed key guidelines developed through the voices of the employees themselves, which must be put into practice.

The Experiences of black women in UK Boardrooms: many benefits mixed with a myriad of challenges

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By Blessing Theophilus-Israel

A new study conducted at City, University of London, sheds light on the experiences of black women in UK boardrooms. The first of its kind, the study reveals that although over half of the black women who sit on the boards of some of the most prestigious public and private companies in the UK have had positive experiences, their experiences were also mixed with a myriad of challenges related to both their ethnicity and gender. The study, carried out between May and October 2019, interviewed 15 black women in the UK who sit on public and private company boards.

The study included participants from FTSE 100 companies as well as government boards. Nine of the participants were of Caribbean descent, five were of African descent, and one was of mixed-race origin. The participants were drawn from boards from the following sectors: technology, business, private, government, law enforcement, education, law, media, arts, retail, sports, religion and charity boards. All of the participants were highly educated with some having gone to Russell Group universities, all of them were senior executives within their sector, and had board experiences spanning between 3 to 40 years.

This study was carried out with the aim of finding out the experiences of black women in UK boardrooms, and what we could learn from them, about how to increase diversity on public and private boards.

The study found that over half of the participants had positive experiences of being a board member. Being a board member gave the participants the opportunity to make a difference and give back to their communities, provided exposure and the opportunity for self-development, as well as the prospect to network with high calibre individuals.

Nevertheless, the positive experiences were also mixed with challenges which they experienced as a result of both their colour and their gender. Some felt stereotyped, imposture syndrome which was “compounded by our blackness”, loneliness, unconscious bias and micro-aggression which were issues that did not just begin in the boardroom but in the school system. Samantha, with seven years’ experience on private, public and arts board recalls how lonely it can feel being the only person of colour around the table:

“Everybody’s experience is different. For me, you are not part of the mainstream culture. And there are things that go with that, whether it is micro aggression, or sort of minor or major reminders that you are a bit of an outsider…. there have been times when either the language or the debates are raised in a way which reminds you whether you are ever going to be quite on the inner inner circle”.

The fact that over half of the women said they had not experience challenges in being a board member by virtue of being black is an interesting finding and indicates that being a board member can be very rewarding.

It was insightful that some of the women had experienced more challenges due to their colour in their working lives than in their role as a board member. This may help us to understand the reasons there are so few BAME managers at the top (Beech et al., 2017). An important discovery with the findings was the role that the personality attributes and mindset of a person affects their ability to become a successful board member, in line with the human capital theory proposed by Becker, (1960).

In line with the Kakabadse et al, (2015) study, the women interviewed all had a) good resources in terms of good education, b) they were senior executives in their day jobs, c) almost all of them got their first board positions through networks and relationships, d) being a board member gave them exposure and was a tool for self-development, e) and they also had mixed feelings around quotas and targets, in particular about the Parker Review recommendations.

Similar to the Report by the Government Equalities Office (Sealy, Doldor, & Vinnicombe, (2009), this study also found that there were a number of barriers preventing black women becoming board members due to closed networks. Some of the participants were of the opinion that it was “almost impossible” to become a board member on a FTSE 100 board if you are a black woman, unless you had “Honours” after your name.

The report also confirms the findings from the Beech et al., 2017 study, in that its participants also advocated for the need 1) to learn from the gender agenda and report publicly on Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME), 2) for better data to drive progress on race and ethnicity, 3) for influential sponsors to support BAME leaders, 4) the need for role models and mentors. This study goes beyond the past studies in that it outlines the important role that personality attributes and mindset can play in becoming a black board member because it is “tough”.

This study makes an important contribution to the literature around boardroom leadership because it shows the importance of diversity, not just from the gender perspective, but from the ethnicity dimension, it took an “intersectional approach”. The report shows there are unique challenges that black women face in the boardroom which policy makers and organisations should be aware of.

One of the most common reasons to explain the small number of female board membership is that they lack the required skills and experience for directorships of large companies (Rhode & Packel, 2014). It was called “deficit model” by one of our participants, however, according to most participants, there are many capable black women who are boardroom ready, but the problem is that they are “invisible”, because they are not on the radar of the top search firms. This study therefore confirms what Singh et al., (2007) found in their analysis, which is that black women are highly educated and many of them have senior executive positions.

Another common reason cited for the under-representation of black women on UK boards is unconscious bias. This is where people only recruit board members or directors who look just like them (Stewart, 2016). Indeed, this study confirms this phenomenon.

Many lessons can be learned from these women about how to increase diversity. Firstly, the study highlights the importance of having the right personality attributes and mindset such as a “can do attitude”, being “resilient” and “positive”.  Secondly it confirms the importance of networks and building relationships. Thirdly it highlights the need for changing recruitment practices and finally the need for developing strategies for increasing the pipeline.

The findings of this study have practical implications for policy makers, companies, and black women. For ethnic diversity to increase, some participants called for the “government [to] actually put together a working committee” and to get “publicly behind this [Parker Review] and pushing this agenda forward”.

Likewise, companies and search firms could consider changing their recruitment practices to make it more “inclusive” and “diverse” although, it would require an “influential sponsor” to champion. For a black woman to get onto a FTSE 100, FTSE 250 or government boards, a good education, having a senior executive role, and the skills needed is the minimum requirement.

What black women have to work on if they wish to become successful in this space, is to intentionally develop their networks and relationships as well as the personality attributes and mindset which were identified as being important for board roles. Future research could explore the important role that personality attributes and mindset plays in the success of board members. The study  was carried out within the Organisational Psychology department of the University, by Blessing Theophilus-Israel, under the supervision of Dr Julia Yates.

References

Beech, N., Cornelius, N., Gordon, L., Healy, G., Ogbonna, E., Sanghera, G., et al. (2017). Delivering diversity: Race and ethnicity in the management pipeline. https://0-www-magonlinelibrary-com.wam.city.ac.uk/doi/full/10.12968/bjha.2017.11.8.399

Becker, G. S. (1960). Underinvestment in college education? The American Economic Review, , 346-354.

Kakabadse, N. K., Figueira, C., Nicolopoulou, K., Hong Yang, J., Kakabadse, A. P., & Özbilgin, M. F. (2015). Gender diversity and board performance: Women’s experiences and perspectives. Human Resource Management, 54(2), 265-281.

Sealy, R., Doldor, E., & Vinnicombe, S. (2009b). Increasing diversity on public and private sector boards-part 2 what is being done to improve diversity on boards and how effective is this? Cranfield University.

Rhode, D. L., & Packel, A. K. (2014). Diversity on corporate boards: How much difference does difference make. Del.J.Corp.L., 39, 377.

Singh, V. (2007). Ethnic diversity on top corporate boards: A resource dependency perspective. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 18(12), 2128-2146. Stewart, C. (2016). How diverse is your pipeline? developing the talent pipeline for women and black and ethnic minority employees. Industrial and Commercial Training, 48(2), 61-66.