Lauren Alyssa Hayes

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: Global workplace transformations are often negotiated through logics of gender— systemically through divisions of labor and culturally through ideas about gendered skill, or types of work at which different genders are believed to excel. In the contemporary workplace, certain behaviors, ideologically linked to women, like communication, building rapport, or helping, are increasingly valued. Scholars suggest that the feminization of these skills may have gendered effects, particularly in fields like manufacturing, where women are under-represented. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at an auto-parts plant in Appalachian Kentucky, where factories offer higher-paid options for women entering waged work as primary breadwinners amidst coal’s decline, this project explores how these workplace changes are negotiated. The manuscript explores the gendered implications of the shift in how local structural conditions contribute to gendered patterns of work opportunity, how new styles of communication and leadership intersect with systems of lean manufacturing and everyday factory floor interactions, and how line workers and administrative staff use creative strategies to navigate hierarchy and new work culture norms.