Missing Subjects: Gender, Power, and Sexuality in Merchant Banking

The focus of this paper is the construction of subjectivity at work. We examine the ways in which sexuality and gendered power relations in everyday social practices in the workplace are important in the maintenance of occupational sex segregation in the labor market. While the days of the ungendered worker and of labor as an undifferentiated location factor are long past in economic geography, economic geographers in their work on occupational segregation have tended to neglect the significance of the social construction of gendered identities in the labor market and the reproduction of gender relations in everyday social interactions in the workplace. The paper draws on case studies from other disciplines, suggesting their geographic significance, and then reports initial results of an ongoing study of the gendering of a range of occupations in the financial services sector in the City of London in order to argue for an expansion of the type of questions geographers address in their work on gender and occupational segregation.