International Women’s Day, on 8 March, is marked around the world to raise awareness of the numerous barriers that women still face in pursuit of gender parity. Despite its radical origins there are growing critiques of the ‘co-option’ of the day and its associated language by corporate giants, marketing agencies, and neoliberal institutions who use it as an opportunity to ‘womenwash’ their policies and seek reputational gains and income. Yarrow and Johnston (2022) have termed this “institutional peacocking” – the virtue signalling that organisations engage in to demonstrate that they are active in equality work which serves to conceal gender pay gaps and gender inequality.

The use of language is something we have been thinking about in our own research on equality. One of the research aims of this project is to understand the interrelationship between rhetoric and policy development concerning equality and regulation at work and within organisations, and to outline key paradigm shifts leading to an engagement with equality and ways in which these are understood and responded to within the sphere of work and employment.

One of our first research outputs is conducting a bibliographic review of the extant literature related to equality at work, and use the data to present an intellectual map of this discourse which will enable us to permit observations of convergences and divergences across nations, timeframes, and disciplinary affiliations. So far, this has presented us with two significant challenges:

Problems of definition

When undertaking research, one of the first steps is to define the concept under study, and to clarify clear perimeters of the research. In this initial step problems of definition arise because the words associated with the notion of equality are evolving and constantly contested. Before definitive terms can be applied, there are considerations regarding the subjective nature of some interpretations, differing etymological approaches, as well as discursive trends – meaning that the way in which we discuss these concepts changes over time. For example, in a similar exercise conducted by Oswick and Noon (2014), on diversity, equality and inclusion they found that until 1987 little was written about ‘diversity’, but this began increasing and reached its academic peak in 1993, when it then appeared to drop off. They attribute this to the ’backlash’ of widening diversity approaches in the USA such as employment quotas for particular demographics. They then note the shift in the literature from ‘diversity’ to ‘inclusion’. This is important because as well as the etymological differences, this different conceptualisation also necessitates a different organisational approach – rather than ‘managing’ or ‘encouraging’ diversity, those diverse constituencies then also need to ‘belong’ or ‘feel at home’ within the organisation. Chavez and Weisinger (2008) see these concepts as co-dependent, whereas others argue inclusion necessitates a different focus and will thus have important policy and strategy implications.

The changing nature of the discourse around approaches to equality can thus present problems of definition when researching and trying to track the topic across time, because employer initiatives to do with equality may be being written about, researched, and discussed under different headings and keywords while still addressing essentially the same topic. This raises important questions for researchers: how can we pick up on the convergences and divergences between approaches when the language used to describe such approaches shifts and is constantly in flux? Do management or consultant trends obscure the real nature of what is happening at a policy or a workplace level? Does academic language and terminology do enough to acknowledge and reflect upon these conceptual differences and discursive formations and how these have changed across time? Do we simply echo these fashions in our research, or do we do enough to unpack and challenge their social development and rhetorical positionings?

Transnational considerations

The second difficulty is in the cross-country nature of our research. Our project aims to contrast the experiences and issues related to equality at work in terms of policy and regulation within the UK to other cases in Europe – France, the Netherlands, and Spain – which have made an explicit and concerted effort to engage with a more progressive and inclusive approach to equality albeit in different ways. The project aims to understand how equality policies have developed across time within different national, institutional, and political contexts. Research on equality at work exists within and across multiple disciplines and continues to be strongly embedded in nationally specific research cultures and traditions (Frege, 2005). The previous problem discussed presented a definitional problem within our own language. The issue becomes further complicated when taking a cross-national approach due to the evident linguistic barriers of conducting research in other languages. The countries will all have different approaches to equality and different traditions of political participation, all affecting the way in which specific dimensions of (in)equality are framed, understood, and defined. What terms do we include when conducting a search? Are there direct translations? Does the directly translated word have the same cultural and social understandings? What definitions are used in the different national debate to capture these dimensions? How can we provide a meaningful comparison with clear definitions while also allowing for context sensitivity? What are the implications of this for our capacity to be able to understand academic discourses in these countries?

Research implications and aims

In this preliminary stage of our research, we hope that the review and analysis of the recurrence and key terms related to equality within international and national academic journals will be able to contribute to determining and analysing the changing and contested nature of the debate and what ideas, intellectual bases, and trends predominate across country and time during the period under observation (1970s – present). While attempts have been made to define and classify diversity, equality, and inclusion as etymologically different anti-discriminatory approaches (Oswick and Noon, 2014), our research seeks to provide some conceptual clarity within and across nationally embedded linguistic and sociocultural understandings of key terms and practices. We hope that this provision of an intellectual map of the discourse related to equality at work will permit observations of convergences and divergences across nations, time, and disciplinary affiliations, and will allow us to reflect on the evolution of theories and paradigms, and thus support further analysis to identify if or how external forces and specific sociohistorical events have shaped the trajectory of the debate.

The terms equality, diversity, and inclusion carry a range of political departures and compromises: they reflect the ongoing possibilities and tensions within the project of equality and the way local meanings and specific moments frame them. The reality we must face in our research on equality at work is that we cannot enter the debate without a political and social sensitivity related to how the concepts are used and developed, and to reflect on these issues.