Introduction to special issue: Gender, knowledge production and knowledge work

This special issue explores diverse forms of knowledge work that reconfigure and or reproduce gender relations and gender ideologies in organizations whose central mandate includes knowledge production. Knowledge about gender is produced by women's organizations, public bodies, corporations and international institutions as they engage in efforts to shape discourses, policies and practices on gender equality. We focus on the institutions whose special purpose is to produce knowledge in a usable form for others. These include universities and academic disciplines, but also new and old media, cultural and policy ‐ centred networks and profit ‐ making information managers. Our contributors analyse the implicit gender knowledge underpinning human action as well as the specific, explicit, new knowledge about gender often called gender expertise (Cavaghan, 2017; Ferguson, 2018). In the former case, gender slips silently into organizational knowledge production practices, where labour is recognized, divided and commodified, usually to the detriment of women in the system. In the latter, gender relations are brought to the surface of organizational knowledge work. Here, contestations over expertise engage ideas about gender inequality and interpretations of women's presence, roles, action, interests, needs, rights and capacity for voice. As gender knowledge becomes more explicit, women's authority over naming, describing and interpreting evidence of inequality is itself articulated, contested, co ‐ opted and resisted. Since knowledge about gendered knowledge work is so fundamental to the operation of institutions like media, corporations and universities, it is not surprising to find that the struggles over implicit and explicit gendered knowledge practices engage political authorities who at times support and at times undermine the work of gender experts.