Abstract
This article examines how men negotiate the moral meanings of gender (in)equality in high-tech organizations that publicly promote gender equality while reproducing persistent inequality regimes. Based on 35 in-depth interviews, the analysis conceptualizes their accounts as contested hybrid moral repertoires: morally charged and contested ways of making sense of gender (in)equality in ostensibly egalitarian organizations. Three intertwined dynamics emerged. First, men challenge gender hierarchy by supporting gender equality and recognition of women’s exclusion. Second, they reinforce hierarchy through tensions between political correctness and authenticity, framing restraint as a burden and spontaneity as sincerity. Third, they preserve privilege through discourses of unfairness, reverse discrimination, and lost power. Drawing on the cultural sociology of morality, the article extends scholarship on hybrid masculinities by foregrounding moral sense-making and contributes to the sociology of gender and organizations by showing how moral evaluations and claims to legitimacy become mechanisms through which gender inequality is reproduced.
Keywords
The high-tech industry is widely perceived as a liberal work environment, marked by formal support of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). At the same time, it is deeply entrenched in regimes of inequality (Acker 2006; Neely et al. 2023). High-tech organizations are frequently characterized as hypermasculine and White (Alfrey and Twine 2017; Luhr 2025). Conversely, the growing visibility and institutionalization of feminist discourse—particularly in the wake of #MeToo—has made feminism increasingly central to many men’s moral self-conception (Carian 2024). These developments have been accompanied by a noticeable anti-feminist backlash, closely tied to the rise of right-wing populist governments worldwide (Daub 2024; Ely and Kimmel 2018; Knights and Pullen 2019).
The present article examines how these broader cultural tensions filter into organizational life and shape men’s moral understandings of gender (in)equality in high-tech organizations. It asks how men conceptualize gender (in)equality, negotiate workplace norms, and construct their moral worth. Morality is defined here operationally not as a fixed normative standard or as actors’ explicit judgments of right and wrong but as the evaluative cultural repertoires through which they interpret gender relations, draw symbolic boundaries, and justify positions, actions, and grievances in organizational life. Morality is thus approached in its “thick” sense as embedded in identities, cultural anxieties, and claims of worth (Abend 2011).
This article narrates a contemporary sociological drama: tension between men’s stated commitment to gender equality and their concurrent experience of moral threat in work environments. It demonstrates how moral imperatives both shape and constrain masculinities at work by tracing how men negotiate the meaning of gender (in)equality through what I conceptualize as “contested hybrid moral repertoires.” These repertoires refer to morally charged and partly conflicting ways of making sense of gender (in)equality in an ostensibly egalitarian workplace. Based on 35 in-depth interviews, I identify three analytically distinct yet co-present ways: (1) support for gender equality and recognition of hierarchy; (2) appeals to authenticity against political correctness (PC); and (3) moralized claims of unfairness through which privilege is defended. They are hybrid because they combine egalitarian and defensive claims and contested because they organize competing understandings of moral worth, legitimate harm, and deserved advantage.
This article integrates two complementary theoretical frameworks. The first, hybrid masculinities at work, illuminates how men construct, negotiate, and legitimate gender hierarchies at work (e.g., Bridges 2014; Bridges and Pascoe 2014, 2018; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Demetriou 2001; Wasserman et al. 2018). The second, the cultural sociology of morality, provides analytic tools for examining how actors interpret and justify (in)equality (e.g., Abend et al. 2025; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Cohen and Dromi 2018; Hitlin and Andersson 2015; Lamont 1992). Integrating these frameworks enables a sociological understanding of masculinity as both an organizational practice and a moral project, which grounds the article’s interrelated contributions.
The first contribution is to the scholarship on hybrid masculinities by showing how men preserve moral legitimacy in workplaces where gender equality is formally institutionalized as an organizational imperative. Whereas previous studies have shown that men selectively appropriate egalitarian ideals while maintaining masculine advantage (e.g., Carian 2024; Pascoe and Hollander 2016), this article demonstrates how these processes operate through moral repertoires such as authenticity, caution, and unfairness in organizations saturated with equality rhetoric. It thus refines the existing scholarship on hybrid masculinities by showing that, under ostensibly progressive conditions, gender hierarchy is reproduced not despite equality discourse but through the very moral vocabularies used to navigate it.
The second contribution is to the sociology of gender and organizations by addressing the “puzzle of persistence” (Ridgeway 2011), namely, how gender inequality endures despite women’s gains in status. While existing scholarships explain this persistence through structural, institutional, and cultural mechanisms (Acker 1990; England 2010; Risman 2004; Wynn 2020), this article identifies a missing link: moral sense-making. Drawing on the cultural sociology of morality tools, it shows how, in organizations permeated with equality rhetoric, actors translate equality into everyday judgments about worth, harm, and deservedness through moral repertoires. The article thus recasts morality not as a corrective to gender inequality but as a mechanism through which it is continuously reproduced.
Hybrid Masculinities at Work
Connell’s (1995) theory of hegemonic masculinity is foundational to understanding how men “do masculinity” in organizations (e.g., Dellinger 2004; Hinojosa 2010; Simpson 2011). It conceptualizes masculinity as a configuration of gendered practices that sustain men’s collective dominance. Subsequent elaborations (e.g., Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) emphasized that hegemonic masculinity is neither monolithic nor static; rather, it adapts to shifting organizational regimes, social practices, and cultural codes. Men’s structural advantage—the “patriarchal dividend” (Hamilton et al. 2019)—is maintained not solely through coercion but also through processes of legitimation that render inequality both “natural” and desirable.
The sociology of gender and organizations frequently depicts men as obstructing women’s advancement and shaping their sense of worth (Cockburn 1991; Ely and Kimmel 2018; Martin 2006; Pullen and Simpson 2009). Men respond to social and organizational pressures in ways that push them toward “bad but bold” behaviors (Glick et al. 2004), including sexual harassment (Bonnes 2022), physical aggressiveness (Woodward and Jenkings 2011), and overwork (Cooper 2014). Other studies have revealed a more ambivalent picture, underscoring the coexistence of traditional and emerging masculinities and their intersection with race, class, and sexuality (Hamilton et al. 2019). Research on doing and undoing masculinity (Kelan 2007; Pullen and Simpson 2009) has demonstrated how masculinities are constantly reconstituted. For example, Wasserman et al. (2018) showed how dominant groups of men in the Israeli military strategically degender organizational discourse to appear progressive while simultaneously regendering it in ways that reinforce existing gender hierarchies (see also Ashcraft 2005).
Within this field, the theory of hybrid masculinities (Bridges 2014, 2021; Bridges and Pascoe 2014, 2018; Demetriou 2001) marks a conceptual shift from analyzing overt domination to examining how masculine privilege is legitimized. Demetriou (2001) identified hybridity as a process through which hegemonic masculinities selectively absorb elements from subordinated masculinities, such as emotional openness or egalitarian rhetoric, to renew their cultural authority. Bridges and Pascoe (2014, 2018) elaborated that these incorporations operate through discursive distancing: men disavow explicit sexism while adopting traits coded as progressive or inclusive. Rather than dismantling patriarchy, this produces new legitimizing repertoires that reconcile privilege with liberal ideals.
These processes of legitimation unfold within a broader crisis-centered understanding of contemporary masculinity, marked by instability, loss, and the search for rehabilitation (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Knights and Pullen 2019). The erosion of men’s breadwinner role, alongside intensified moral scrutiny associated with #MeToo, cancel culture, and PC, has heightened many men’s sense of moral threat both in the workplace and in public life (Carian 2024; Daub 2024; Hammer 2023). While populist movements mobilize this precarity to relegitimize patriarchal authority (Lamont et al. 2017; Schwarz 2023), middle- and upper-class men in liberal settings more often adopt hybrid repertoires that combine hegemonic attachments with egalitarian commitments (Hunter et al. 2017). This is the pattern examined in the present study.
Carian’s (2024) work revealed the moral dimension of hybrid masculinities by showing how both feminist and anti-feminist men renegotiate privilege in ways that preserve a positive moral self-concept. Her interviewees used privilege renegotiation strategies to perform egalitarianism as moral worth, even as they left assumptions of masculine supremacy largely unchallenged. A related insight appears in Pascoe and Hollander’s (2016) analysis of young men who position themselves as “good guys” who do not rape. They showed that this disavowal does not stand outside inequality. By distancing themselves from a stigmatized masculine other, men can reject sexual violence discursively while still symbolically mobilizing rape to reaffirm normative masculinity and gendered domination. In this sense, the “good guy” stance may reproduce inequality through selective disidentification from its most visibly condemned forms. By extending analyses of hybrid masculinities, the present article shifts attention to organizational settings, where gender equality is encountered as a managerial discourse and institutional imperative. This context is analytically significant because it exposes how men maintain moral legitimacy within workplaces that officially endorse equality while continuing to reproduce inequality regimes.
The Moral Dimension of Gendered (In)Equality in Organizations
The cultural sociology of morality examines how moral frameworks shape cultural action, construct social identities, and delineate symbolic boundaries, ultimately mediating notions of worth (Abend 2011; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Lamont 1992; Schwarz 2016). Central to this perspective is the notion of moral logics as a cultural toolbox composed of meaning structures and discursive strategies (Cohen and Dromi 2018; Hitlin and Andersson 2015). This literature explores how individuals respond to social criticism, stigmatization, and moral devaluation by reaffirming their own worth or emphasizing the societal value of their actions (Schwarz 2016, 2019). For example, Lamont (1992) compared perceptions of moral worth among individuals from the upper-middle and working classes in France and the United States, showing them to be shaped by cultural repertoires and expressed through symbolic boundaries that, in turn, produced social boundaries.
Another key discursive resource within this literature is the invocation of authenticity (Bernasconi 2010). For example, Karazi-Presler (2021) examined women positioning themselves as morally authentic in contrast to their male peers and commanders in a military organization. The women’s narratives drew on the organization’s gendered moral order and reflected its hypermasculine logic. In this sense, authenticity is seen to function not only as a strategic discursive resource but also as a moral repertoire through which actors legitimize their positions and practices within highly gendered organizations.
Cultural sociologists have emphasized the moral dimension of durable inequality. Lamont (2012) and Lamont et al. (2014) showed that routine, often implicit processes shape unequal trajectories through distinctions of worth, dignity, and legitimacy. Similarly, Sherman (2017) demonstrated how affluent liberal New Yorkers used narratives of restraint, hard work, and modest consumption to manage moral unease while leaving structural inequalities intact. These narratives do not simply normalize inequality; they also help sustain class domination. Extending this line of work, Spillman (2023) argued that inequality is reproduced through moral classification, while Abend et al. (2025) sharpened this point by explaining that analyses of inequality should also attend to classification, causal attribution, responsibility, and deservingness.
One of the enduring open questions in the sociology of gender and organizations that may benefit from the cultural sociology of morality is Ridgeway’s (2011) “puzzle of persistence,” which asks how gender remains a powerful basis of inequality despite advances in women’s status. Existing studies have offered often overlapping structural, institutional, and cultural explanations. Structural accounts locate this persistence in the architecture of work: ostensibly gender-neutral jobs, hierarchies, and merit standards are organized around an implicitly male “ideal worker,” reproducing gendered divisions of labor, authority, and evaluation through routine processes (Acker 1990); labor-market dynamics, such as stalled desegregation and devaluation in feminizing occupations, further sustain segregation and pay inequality (England 2010; England and Li 2006; Levanon et al. 2009). Institutional accounts emphasize field-level diffusion and legitimacy pressures through which organizations adopt equality templates (including DEI) which can become isomorphic and weakly coupled to core structures (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Mogilski et al. 2025; Rajasekar et al. 2025). They are consistent with evidence that executives’ ideologies shape how gender change initiatives are interpreted and enacted in ways that privilege individualized solutions over structural redesign (Wynn 2020). Cultural accounts highlight persistent gender frames and status beliefs that are reactivated in everyday interaction, shaping judgments of competence and deservingness even as formal rules shift (Ridgeway 2011; Risman 2004) and note that cultural change can stall and reorganize through frames such as “egalitarian essentialism” (Cotter et al. 2011). Building on these accounts, the present study draws on the cultural sociology of morality to specify a missing link in the “puzzle of persistence” debate, namely, how workers’ moral evaluations mediate equality as a field-level imperative. In organizational fields saturated with equality rhetoric, actors mobilize moral categories—through caution, authenticity claims, risk management, and moral self-presentation—to translate commitments to equality into everyday judgments that can legitimize exclusion and reproduce gender hierarchy.
High-Tech as a Gendered Organizational Context
Culturally, the high-tech industry boasts an image of openness and informality. However, in-depth examination reveals persistent patterns of gender exclusion (Alegria and Banerjee 2024; Luhr 2025; Neely et al. 2023). For example, in global high-tech corporations, technological skills are constitutive elements of men’s identities (Kelan 2007), while studies of gender inequality in STEM areas document a climate that excludes women (Alegria and Banerjee 2024). This exclusion is reinforced by work environments that reproduce a masculine “brogrammer” culture, signaling who belongs and alienating women (Wynn and Correll 2018). The broader masculine climate of this industry operates as an inequality regime (Acker 2006), rooted in a geeky, predominantly White subculture (Alfrey and Twine 2017).
The empirical context of this study is Israel, a country that prides itself on being a “Start-Up Nation” (Maggor and Frenkel 2022). Although its high-tech industry is closely tied to its American counterpart, it is also shaped by a distinctive local feature: the military’s influence on both employability and its masculine culture. This results in a sector that is comparatively less politically correct than its US equivalent (Kotliar 2025). This local feature is essential for understanding the findings of this article: participants’ accounts of authenticity, hierarchy, and gender are shaped not only by global high-tech norms but also by Israeli ideals of informality and masculine legitimacy, partly rooted in the close ties between the military and the high-tech sector. Indeed, in the Israeli high-tech industry, women comprise only 22.6 percent of management and less than 10 percent of startup managers (Soroker and Nayar 2022). The gender wage gap is around 20 percent (Israel Innovation Authority 2024). Despite various programs to increase the participation of diverse populations, the industry remains Jewish, secular, masculine, and young (Wasserman and Frenkel 2020), with a culture of long working hours and high employee availability.
The ongoing underrepresentation of diverse populations in Israeli high-tech underscores the durability of the industry’s inequality regimes (Acker 2006). Yet, in Israel, as in other high-tech centers, the sector continues to present itself as committed to DEI. The diffusion of PC culture and DEI policies across contemporary workplaces, including high-tech, has made equality increasingly salient as both a moral language and an organizational framework, even where implementation remains uneven (Mogilski et al. 2025; Rajasekar et al. 2025). This helps explain why global technology firms can project a progressive public image while organizational practices remain shaped by instrumental and profit-driven logics (Luhr 2025; see also Wynn 2020). This contradiction positions the high-tech industry as a key site for examining contemporary gender dynamics. It has been further intensified by a broader political shift in Silicon Valley, evident in the alignment of leading tech executives with Donald Trump (Lewis 2025). The related dismantling of DEI programs at Meta, Google, and Apple alongside the erosion of content moderation and misinformation countermeasures marks a retreat from progressive commitments. This trend raises urgent sociological questions about the cultural and political forces shaping the high-tech industry.
Methodology
This article drew on in-depth interviews (90–180 minutes) with 35 Israeli men aged 30–50 in mid-level management positions in established global corporations or local startups. While this distinction is relevant due to the stricter gender regulations in multinationals, no notable differences emerged in the participants’ perceptions of gender imperatives, suggesting a shared normative field. This makes mid-level managers especially important analytic sites as they interpret, mediate, and translate organizational policies, values, and moral expectations into everyday practices (Gjerde and Alvesson 2020). Sampling was guided by gender, rank, and organizational context and combined snowball and purposeful sampling. Participants were recruited via social media platforms such as LinkedIn, and all self-identified as Jewish, secular, and White, reflecting both the impact of snowball sampling and the industry’s broader intersectional inequality regimes.
The interviews were conducted as part of a broader project on gender inequality in high-tech organizations and not designed specifically around the questions addressed in this article. Data were analyzed using MAXQDA, beginning with open coding and proceeding to focused abductive analysis (Timmermans and Tavory 2022). During the analysis, the participants’ engagement in moral boundary-work and their claims to authenticity emerged as recurring patterns, which prompted me to examine their accounts through the lens of moral repertoires. Their discussions of (un)fairness revealed tensions between liberal ideals, organizational norms, and moral integrity. To analyze these dynamics, I drew on the cultural sociology of morality and scholarship on hybrid masculinities. I developed “contested hybrid moral repertoires” as a conceptual lens for examining how the participants justified their attitudes toward gender (in)equality. This lens revealed an intertwining of moral sense-making and legitimation as these men constructed themselves as moral subjects within organizations that both endorse equality and sustain inequality.
As a feminist sociologist interviewing men about gender inequality, listening to some of their views was not easy. Yet rather than dismissing their contested accounts as mere hypocrisy, I treated the interviews not as transparent windows into participants’ “true” beliefs but as justificatory discourse. Drawing on Vaisey (2014), I analyzed how actors render themselves intelligible through available moral schemas and normative expectations. From this perspective, even expressions shaped by social desirability or by my positionality as a woman interviewer remain analytically consequential: they reveal what was difficult for the participants to claim, where anxiety accumulated, and which cultural dilemmas they were trying to resolve. In line with Pugh (2013), I read contradictions and shifts in these narratives not simply as signs of insincerity but as evidence of meaningful cultural tension. The interviews therefore do not provide unmediated access to inner moral truth; rather, they illuminate the justificatory pressures, moral vocabularies, and emotional tensions through which men defend gender (in)equality.
Findings: Contested Hybrid Moral Repertoires
The three emerging themes develop the concept of contested hybrid moral repertoires, meaning morally charged ways of talking about gender (in)equality that men are expected to navigate in the high-tech industry as an ostensibly egalitarian work environment. These repertoires are hybrid because they are produced through the simultaneous mobilization of three co-present strands, which I distinguish only analytically: support for gender equality and awareness of hierarchy; appeals to authenticity against PC; and discourses of unfairness through which privilege is defended. These strands are treated as moral repertoires, while the term legitimation is used to refer to the process through which such claims make men, their judgments, and unequal arrangements appear acceptable. They are contested because these repertoires do not simply coexist but compete over what counts as moral worth, legitimate harm, and deserved advantage.
Challenging Existing Gender Hierarchies: Awareness and Support of Gender Equality
Most of the interviewees expressed support for gender equality, presented gender-equality discourse as integral to their moral worth, and described promoting it as part of their managerial role. They framed organizational equality as a kind of imperative that prompted them to attend to gender relations and learn what counts as appropriate awareness and response.
Daniel, a manager at a large high-tech company, explained: “I really believe in equality. In places I’ve worked [in tech], people pointed out the gender issue to me, what women deal with. And once you notice it, you kind of internalize all sorts of things like that.” Daniel thus frames gender-equality discourse as an industry-wide common sense that men learn to adopt as part of moral professional competence.
This moral endorsement also carried evaluative implications: many went beyond supporting equality in principle and explicitly framed women’s managerial abilities as equal or superior to men’s. When asked to describe the ideal high-tech worker, Aviv, a manager at a startup, responded: For me, the ideal worker is a woman. Women have abilities I wish I had. Women employees have far superior interpersonal skills to men. Teamwork isn’t just about being the most technically skilled; the ideal worker isn’t just the best in their field—they also know how to work as part of a team.…I even prefer mothers because for them, the distinction between what’s important and what’s trivial is much clearer. Time is a significant factor for them. Men—including me—don’t talk; we lecture. I think women are better at actual dialogue.
In contrast to the traditional concept of the ideal worker associated with White men (Acker 1990), Aviv described women as better workers. However, closer examination revealed a paternalistic emphasis on the “soft” aspects of work. While seemingly complimentary, the stereotypes he used reinforce exclusionary practices.
Ori, another startup manager, expressed a similar attitude: I think there’s currently a preference for women in high-tech. Their ability to multitask, communicate, influence—I personally believe women are better than men. I think it’s easier for me to be managed by a woman…there’s a certain kind of power that works for me with women that maybe doesn’t work as well with men. I don’t have that issue where women with power are seen as “bitchy” while men with power are considered assertive.
Ori’s morally progressive self-positioning involves moral boundary-work: he draws a symbolic line between himself, and other imagined men cast as less enlightened and uses that contrast to present his comfort with women managers as evidence of his moral worth (Karazi-Presler 2021). This echoes hybrid masculinity dynamics of discursive distancing from hegemonic masculinity (Bridges and Pascoe 2014).
Eitan, a manager at a large high-tech company, also described himself as inclusive of women and focused on his emotional experience of being managed by them: I felt good working under a strong woman—being her number two but in a positive way. The women I consider good and successful managers have a very strong human understanding of their social environment. They manage to be both sensitive and assertive. Men, on the other hand, seem to lack the ability to do things in a pleasant way. It’s easier for men to be assertive, especially in a professional setting where they think they’re the kings of their castle.…It’s about their control and their ego. If I need help from another team, I must make sure I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes. Doing this with women is usually easier—there’s a certain empathy women have toward others.
Eitan constructs a similar moral self-image as a man who feels positive about being supervised by a woman. He engages in moral boundary-work by casting certain masculine styles as failures. Like Ori and others, he distances himself from ego-driven or politically manipulative men. This echoes a central mechanism of hybrid masculinity: disavowing hegemonic masculinity through differentiation (Bridges and Pascoe 2014) while securing a claim to moral distinction.
Avishai, a manager at a large high-tech company, reflected on the significance of understanding women’s workplace experiences: I’m against any kind of social discrimination. I have a very close colleague at work, and we often talk about how she views the situation for women and what it’s like to be a woman in our industry. If I didn’t talk to her regularly, I’d probably think everything was fine. But the truth is, there are far too few women in tech, and I’m horrified by the stories I hear from her.
Unlike other interviewees’ more essentialist justifications for equality, Avishai frames opposition to discrimination as central to his moral work. He emphasizes dialogue with women colleagues as a key source of awareness and learning. Yet his account also reveals distance: without these conversations, he admits, he would have assumed everything was fine.
Overall, this theme shows that although support for gender equality is central to these men’s moral self-understanding at work, it often remains individualized and paternalistic, thus limiting its capacity to meaningfully disrupt gender inequality as a persistent organizational structure.
Reinforcing Gender Hierarchies: Moral Tension Between PC and Authenticity
Authenticity serves as a foundation for claims of moral worth, positioning individuals as socially valued when they remain true to their “natural” selves (Schwarz 2019; Taylor 1992). The imperative to “be yourself” has permeated the workplace, particularly in the neoliberal high-tech industry (Fleming 2009). In the accounts analyzed here, authenticity does not reflect an essential or inner truth but rather a socially constructed ideal that the interviewees invoke to frame their moral selves. Authenticity thereby functions as a moral repertoire through which men negotiate integrity and self-worth under what they perceive as the cultural-organizational pressures of PC. This theme reveals a moral tension between socially mediated authenticity and PC framed as a collective duty (Montgomery 2017; Schwarz 2023).
Within contemporary high-tech organizations, PC culture increasingly operates as a normative organizational imperative that encourages employees to question practices that were once taken for granted. David, a startup manager and entrepreneur, explained: I think the growing intolerance in high-tech of toxic behaviors toward women is a positive development. People in this industry are becoming more aware and are starting to question practices that were once taken for granted. In many ways, PC pushes people to rethink what is acceptable in the workplace and where the boundaries should be.
This account reflects a broader organizational climate in high-tech, where sensitivity to gender inequality and adherence to PC norms increasingly function as both a moral and professional expectation. Yet, as David further explained, this institutionalized imperative can also generate tensions between what he perceives as instinctive reactions and the moral demands of the contemporary high-tech workplace: I think PC is a kind of a barrier that curbs our instincts. I admit that not all my natural instincts are commendable. So, I choose not to act on instinct but according to overarching moral imperatives. The question I wrestle with is whether this is sometimes driven by fear of being judged. For example, seeing a woman advance to a senior position and instinctively thinking, “What’s wrong with this picture?” It’s legitimate to have such an instinct, but it’s equally important to resist it as part of today’s PC. You remind yourself, “I’m only thinking this because I’ve been conditioned to, because it reflects values that are pervasive in our society.” On the other hand, there are moments when you think, “I believe this to be true, but I won’t say it out loud to avoid paying a social price.” … I feel a conflict, which affects my ability to act freely.
David frames his experience as a moral struggle between PC and authenticity. Rather than revealing an inner truth, he mobilizes authenticity as a moral vocabulary to reconcile the contradiction between his egalitarian beliefs and ingrained habits. By labeling his habits “instincts,” he naturalizes socially learned dispositions and reclaims a sense of moral integrity despite acknowledging their discriminatory nature. Crucially, David perceives this tension as a moral problem not because he doubts the value of equality but because he believes that acting according to one’s instincts is a manifestation of moral sincerity. The repertoire of authenticity renders such impulses morally legitimate (Schwarz 2023), and self-restraint thus appears not as discipline but as a loss of freedom: an affective manifestation of the moral burden of being a “good man” in a politically correct work environment.
Tal, a manager at a large high-tech company, engaged in moral impression management, navigating the shifting expectations across social contexts: I’m naturally a playful, emotional person with a lot of humor and silliness, and I don’t want to suppress that side of myself. But, at some point, I realized that I need to hold back because there are things I just can’t say today. I’m not someone who would hurt anyone intentionally. There are social settings where I can be 100% myself, and there are others where I can’t. I take these transitions very seriously so now I stop myself before speaking.
Tal’s negotiation of restraint and spontaneity sits at the meeting point of Hochschild’s (1983) notion of feeling rules and Schwarz’s (2023) theorization of late-modern authenticity. Drawing on Hochschild, Tal’s regulation of his emotions reflects conformity to the moral order of the workplace. Nevertheless, as Schwarz shows, in contemporary moral culture shaped by Trumpian anti-PC discourse, spontaneity has become a marker of moral truth, while restraint is framed as artificial and morally suspect. Within this clash of moral imperatives, Tal constructs himself as both conscientious and emotionally constrained: a man whose compliance with workplace rules is experienced not as moral discipline but as a loss of authenticity.
While other interviewees who approached feminist knowledge spaces with some curiosity, Itai, a manager at a large global company, perceived women’s groups cynically as internal forums from which confidential information is occasionally leaked: By nature, I’m somewhat sarcastic and tactless so I occasionally have issues with women who bring the feminist element strongly into play. There are so many women’s forums in high-tech…. a lot of my women colleagues are members, and they sometimes share with me. One of their biggest debates is whether it’s appropriate to address them as “girls” because “girls” is a diminutive term. When the conversation gets to that level, it becomes a bit of a joke. The people I work closely with, the women I know well, they know I’m OK.… I won’t refrain from joking with a woman I know won’t get me into trouble.
By ridiculing feminist discussions as overblown, Itai positions himself as the reasonable moral actor who sees through ideological rigidity. His humor becomes a means of reclaiming moral legitimacy: joking “naturally” with women who know he is “OK” allows him to perform authenticity while protecting his self-image. The moral focus thus shifts from the potential harm to women to the social risk he faces as a man whose spontaneity might be misinterpreted. This theme resurfaced in Avishai’s account: The first time I had to interview someone, I sat down with my boss and another woman. I explained my usual approach to job interviews: I start by introducing myself…in the end, if she’s good-looking, I hire her. It slipped out as a joke, and I immediately regretted it. I glanced at the woman sitting with us to gauge her reaction. Luckily, she burst out laughing and said, “I do the same thing.” Looking back, I realized I said it in a setting where I trusted the people around me. I’d never say anything like that in a group of people I didn’t know.
Avishai’s account exposes the backstage of moral work through humor. His “slip” illustrates how joking operates as a test of social boundaries: an attempt to preserve old masculine ease while avoiding moral censure. The woman’s laughter serves as a moral endorsement, instantaneously restoring his sense of legitimacy. Humor thus becomes a negotiated space where some of these men seek reassurance that their spontaneity remains permissible within the new moral order.
The same underlying concern was articulated more directly by Gur, a manager at a startup recently acquired by a large American high-tech company, who emphasized the imposition of PC by corporate America: I’ve worked with quite a few women managers and, honestly, working with them is very challenging. First, how do you speak to them? With men, you allow yourself to talk more freely. I’ve been in corporate America for four years now, and they’ve straightened me out….I’ve become very cautious about how I interact with women and how politically correct I am. Corporate America teaches you to protect yourself, to walk on eggshells, and, eventually, it becomes ingrained in you. As a man, if you want to be part of this industry, you must be very cautious.
Gur presents his transformation as an imposed moral discipline rather than a voluntary choice. The requirement to “walk on eggshells” stands in sharp contrast to the Israeli ideal of unfiltered authenticity, which valorizes directness and spontaneity (Kotliar 2025). His account also reflects the normative imperative of the global high-tech field, where PC norms and sensitivity to gender (in)equality function as institutional expectations. For Israeli managers socialized into a culture that prizes unfiltered authenticity, these expectations may therefore be experienced less as an internal moral commitment than as an externally imposed discipline. In this context, self-restraint becomes a practical condition for maintaining legitimacy and belonging within global high-tech organizations.
Ori’s account further shows how the tension between authenticity and PC moves from speech to managerial practice. Reflecting on a past workplace relationship and its professional consequences, he explained: For a very long time, I did not want any woman to report directly to me. Even today, if I have to interview a woman—or, in the past, dismiss a woman—there will always be someone else in the room. I protect myself from all sides in these situations.
Like Gur, Ori presents caution as the price of remaining morally and professionally legitimate within high-tech PC norms. Nevertheless, his account also shows how such caution may reinforce inequality in practice: when they involve women, direct supervisory relations, interviews, and dismissal situations become interactions requiring protection and procedural distance. Women thus appear not simply as colleagues or employees but as potential sources of moral and professional risk. In this sense, the tension between authenticity and PC does not remain at the level of self-presentation but shapes everyday managerial relations through which trust, proximity, and legitimacy are unevenly organized.
Ori then broadens this experience of caution into a more explicit critique of PC as cultural control: It’s hard to explain just how dangerous this is—how fascism today comes not from the right but from the left. I’m not afraid of the far right; I’m more afraid of PC censorship and of my high-tech friends who say, “this is the culture of truth.” These days, I can have a conversation with a friend, and I’ll be reading from my script, and they’ll be reading from theirs, and we’ll both be convinced that we’re expressing our true opinions. We don’t even know what our authentic opinions are anymore because it’s too scary to reveal them at work. Yet we’re so confident that we’re critical thinkers and the other side is stupid, rude, and immoral. I’m really struggling with this.
Ori shifts between reflecting on the high-tech industry and criticizing contemporary culture and between conforming to PC norms and retaining an authentic voice. For Ori, PC operates as a social mechanism of control. His discourse draws on a populist narrative according to which authenticity becomes a mode of resistance to “coercive” progressive norms (Montgomery 2017; Schwarz 2023) while implicitly referencing the industry expectation he attributes to his high-tech peers, who are convinced they are speaking “the truth.”
Among the men interviewed, the moral tension between PC and authenticity becomes a justificatory moral frame through which gender inequality may be sustained. Because PC is institutionalized as an organizational imperative, these men learn to voice commitment to equality while carefully managing what they disclose in frontstage settings and how they conduct cross-gender interactions. This management matters not because moral evaluation shifts away from organizational practices altogether but because practices such as hiring, dismissal, supervision, mentoring, and everyday authority are reinterpreted through men’s moral self-presentation: authentic versus censored, sincere versus performative, and careful versus exposed. This dynamic may be especially consequential for men in managerial positions since their everyday moral judgments can also inform evaluations of competence, fit, trust, proximity, and legitimacy within the organization. According to Abend et al. (2025), morality “scales up” through classificatory judgments about who deserves trust and which causal story counts, and these everyday evaluations feed back into patterned inequality (Spillman 2023). Authenticity then operates as a moral repertoire that can legitimize what men frame as “instincts,” cast restraint as a moral burden, and render distance from women as responsible conduct rather than exclusion. These justificatory strategies align with hybrid masculinity: men distance themselves from overt sexism by endorsing equality yet protect advantage (Bridges and Pascoe 2014) by relocating sexist evaluation to safer backstage or procedurally mediated spaces (e.g., humor, selective candor, documented or witnessed encounters), where it is harder to challenge and more likely to shape who is seen as competent, promotable, trustworthy, and legitimate.
Preserving Privilege: Discourses of Unfairness
The recurring sentiment that “we’ve gone too far” exemplifies a common masculine response to gender-equality demands, which is not limited to the present context (see Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Carian 2024). And yet, the interviewees’ perceptions depart from previous accounts by foregrounding the moral tensions embedded in their sense-making. Ori, whom we encountered previously as both a supporter of gender equality and a critic of PC, shares his perspective on men’s moral vulnerability: Society is undergoing a revolution. It’s good for all of us. But anyone who values their sanity should steer clear of it because there are going to be a lot of casualties. It’s unjust; there’s an unfairness toward men. I think the revolution is justified, and I want it to succeed, but as someone who has been injured by this weapon, I can tell you it’s disproportionate and unfair. I think it’s right to eliminate toxic behaviors from the workplace, but I also think we’ve gone too far…. There’s an attempt to rewrite the relationships between people in the workplace.
Ori’s account can be read as “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) because it is not merely an expression of opinion but an interactional accomplishment through which he presents himself as a reasonable, egalitarian man who has nevertheless been unfairly harmed. By endorsing equality in principle while casting its implementation as excessive, he preserves masculine legitimacy and reclaims the authority to judge the proper limits of change. Martin’s (2003) notion of “saying and doing” sharpens this interpretation: Ori’s talk is not simply a commentary on workplace transformation but part of the very practice through which gendered relations are reconstituted. Diminished male ease is thus reframed as moral injury and organizational accountability as unfairness toward men.
Itai expressed frustration with the sociocultural discourse’s preoccupation with “small” details: I think the focus on microaggressions shows that our society has reached a point of boredom. Seriously, enough! You’re creating this kind of demon that can’t be defeated instead of saying that we can negotiate the existing dynamics in the workplace. Look, sexual harassment, of course, I’d never do anything like that. But seriously, you’ve made the discourse way too sterile, and that’s not good for anyone. And it’s not fun being the guy who says these things, especially in high-tech, where this kind of politically correct mindset has become the norm.
Itai views the focus on micro practices as creating an artificial discourse. He perceives the effort to challenge ingrained social routines as excessive and futile and as an unfair organizational imperative that polices everyday talk and interaction. Itai’s call to normalize the current reality, accepting its flaws rather than striving for constant improvement, underscores his resistance to what he perceives as overreach: reverse unfair discrimination in which PC operates as a workplace norm that makes him the one who is sanctioned for speaking.
Daniel, on the other hand, does not entirely reject PC discourse; he acknowledges the power of language to shape reality while expressing moral inconvenience reminiscent of other interviewees: I voted for Merav Michaeli, but she represents a kind of discourse that, in my opinion, is exhausting. I’ll give you an example. Once, in a team meeting, I used a metaphor about a male pilot and a female flight attendant. Someone next to me said, “Why not a female pilot and a male flight attendant?” It’s not that I think it’s impossible, I’m sure it happens….I laughed about it. On the one hand, she’s right, and I even told her she’s 100% correct. But, on the other hand, I laughed because we all know that in 90% of cases, it’s the opposite. Will the language I use change this reality? I do believe that language creates reality. But, for me, it’s already gone too far.
Michaeli, former leader of the Labor Party, is a prominent public figure in Israel, widely recognized for her advocacy of gender-inclusive language. Among opponents of feminist discourse in Israel, she often serves as a prototype of feminist fastidiousness. The narrative reveals a tension between Daniel’s belief that language has the power to shape reality and his skepticism about the tangible impact of such changes.
In discussing what “looks good” in the high-tech industry, Yossi, a startup manager, explained why his company felt compelled to add a woman to its advisory board: “We hadn’t hired any women—our company was entirely male—and that became a problem with venture capital funds. So, we added one woman because of PC….We needed a woman so no one could say we had no women.” Yossi’s account shows how gender inclusion can be translated into organizational optics and investor-facing legitimacy. The absence of women becomes recognizable as a problem only when it threatens the company’s reputation and fundraising prospects; adding a woman to the advisory board then appears as a strategic response to external scrutiny rather than as a challenge to the gendered structure of the organization.
Yossi later highlighted another dimension of perceived unfairness, namely, the perception that men were losing opportunities or resources to affirmative action: There aren’t many women entrepreneurs. I have a joke about it, but it’s not exactly politically correct to share in public. It’s called “pussy money.” It refers to investors who put their money in just because she’s a woman.…it’s like sustainability; it’s socially trendy now. Interviewer: Isn’t that affirmative action? Yes. I’m not against affirmative action. But we joke about it. You work hard, you break your back developing a startup, then some woman comes along, and you think, they’re going to throw her out with her idea—it’s a waste of her time and theirs. And then, suddenly, she gets funded.
Yossi argues that the social shift toward gender equality bends the rules of economic competition through reverse discrimination. Unlike other interviewees who stressed symbolic or discursive threats, he foregrounds material stakes—funding, recognition, and status—casting gender-oriented investment as an illegitimate reallocation of resources away from men. He draws on a high-tech anti-PC idiom in which “pussy” marks feminization and frames inclusion as “softening” the field, legitimizing an “anti-pussy” posture of blunt toughness (Lewis 2025). His aside that the joke is “not exactly politically correct” and his “sustainability” analogy further recode women’s funding as a fashionable signal rather than merit. The result is not simply resentment toward women entrepreneurs but a classificatory judgment about deservingness: gender-conscious investment becomes suspect, while men’s position in existing circuits of capital is preserved as neutral and fair.
Men’s “we’ve gone too far” rhetoric thus operates as a moral repertoire through which organizational inequality may be protected. One possible reading of some of the more resentful accounts is that they move beyond discomfort with changing gender norms and may crystallize into an anti-feminist backlash in which claims to victimhood, reverse discrimination, and lost entitlement recast feminist gains as illegitimate advantages (Carian 2024). Yet the accounts analyzed here are not organized simply through opposition to equality. By endorsing gender equality in principle while construing PC as an unfair organizational demand and affirmative action as reverse discrimination, the interviewees adopt a hybrid masculine posture that sustains an egalitarian self-presentation even as it authorizes resistance (Bridges and Pascoe 2014). Routine workplace corrections, board-level representational concerns, and funding decisions are thus reinterpreted as causing disproportionate harm to men. These situational frictions are translated into classificatory judgments about deservingness and legitimate harm through which women’s inclusion may be cast as tokenistic, excessive, or unfair while men’s continued access to opportunities is defended as rightful (Abend et al. 2025; Spillman 2023). The organizational significance of this repertoire lies in the evaluative categories through which symbolic and material effects become intelligible: representation becomes optics, redistribution becomes unfairness, and existing inequalities in access to opportunity are recoded as neutral and fair. In this way, discourses of unfairness become organizationally consequential by shaping how managers interpret inclusion, merit, legitimacy, and deservingness within organizations that formally endorse equality.
Discussion
I think masculine energy is good…and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really…trying to get away from it…that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing. (Zuckerberg 2025)
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent statement encapsulates the gendered tensions at the core of this article. As one of the most visible and influential figures in global high-tech, Zuckerberg functions here as an ideal-typical figure through whom broader cultural anxieties within the high-tech industry become especially legible. What appears on the surface as a complaint about organizational style is, more fundamentally, a moral claim about the costs of gender progress: traditional masculinity is threatened, constrained, and stripped of legitimacy. Progressive organizational culture is thus framed not as an egalitarian achievement but as an overcorrection that weakens spontaneity, suppresses authenticity, and renders masculine conduct morally suspect.
The findings identified three intertwined dynamics of contested hybrid moral repertoires: men challenged inequality through expressions of awareness and support for gender equality, reproduced hierarchy through the moral tension between PC and authenticity, and preserved privilege through discourses of unfairness and lost power. Together, they show how progressive commitments and gendered hierarchical attachments were managed simultaneously.
This study offers two interrelated contributions to hybrid masculinities and to the sociology of gender and organizations. First, it extends scholarship on hybrid masculinities (e.g., Bridges 2014; Bridges and Pascoe 2014, 2018; Demetriou 2001) by specifying how men’s moral sense-making operates in workplaces where gender equality is institutionalized and endorsed. Earlier studies found that men embrace moral ideals that preserve masculine advantage (Carian 2024; Pascoe and Hollander 2016). I extend this insight by showing how this process unfolds under organizational conditions in which equality is an official imperative. Drawing on the cultural sociology of morality, I show that men maintain moral legitimacy not only by distancing themselves from overt sexism but also by mobilizing repertoires of authenticity, caution, fairness, harm, and deservedness to make continued privilege defensible. This refines existing analyses of hybrid masculinities by specifying how, in equality-saturated organizations, men reproduce gender hierarchy through moral vocabularies that preserve an egalitarian self-presentation. The argument is not that organizational equality efforts inevitably produce defensive masculinities but that men may appropriate equality-saturated vocabularies in ways that protect their moral positioning while leaving masculine advantage largely intact.
Second, this study contributes to the broader sociology of gender and organizations by drawing on the cultural sociology of morality to show that gender inequality persists not only through the structural, institutional, and cultural processes previously emphasized (e.g., England 2010; England and Li 2006; Ridgeway 2011; Risman 2004) but also through moral sense-making (Abend et al. 2025; Lamont 2012; Lamont et al. 2014; Spillman 2023). The findings show that commitments to equality can coexist with and, at times, help sustain exclusion when translated through repertoires of caution, authenticity, risk management, and moral self-presentation. In this context, moral discourse shapes judgments of worth, legitimacy, and deservingness in ways that protect masculine privilege under egalitarian conditions. Authenticity is especially revealing as a regressive force: although it appears as a liberal ideal of openness and sincerity, men mobilize it to recast organizational accountability as a problem of sincerity, constraint, caution, and moral exposure, allowing hierarchy to be defended in the language of virtue. Similarly, claims that “we’ve gone too far” recast equality measures as unfair harm, turning questions of representation and redistribution into moral claims about injury and deservedness. In both cases, especially when articulated by managers with organizational authority, these repertoires may feed back into gender inequality by making exclusion appear reasonable, women’s advancement suspect, and men’s continued advantage legitimate. Thus, rather than treating morality as a corrective to gender inequality, this study shows that moral sense-making can become a mechanism in the reproduction of gendered hierarchy in ostensibly progressive organizations.
More broadly, contested hybrid moral repertoires foreground how men justify their positions while experiencing and navigating moral tension. The concept shows how liberal moral commitments such as gender equality and authenticity may foster reflexivity while simultaneously enabling the reproduction of gender hierarchy. This duality resonates with Daub’s (2024) analysis of cancel culture as a hybrid moral formation that combines impulses toward critique and disruption with a simultaneous investment in continuity and preservation. Similarly, the men in this study mobilized moral language not simply to reject change but to contain, reinterpret, and render it compatible with existing forms of masculine privilege. In this sense, moral discourse may operate as a conservative force precisely when articulated through the language of progress.
As such, contested hybrid moral repertoires offer an analytical lens for examining how moral tensions are lived, narrated, and managed within organizations. Their analytical reach extends beyond the workplace and beyond masculinities by illuminating how actors who support equality negotiate competing moral grammars in everyday life. More specifically, the concept helps explain how progressive values may be enacted, contested, and emotionally managed in ways that stop short of structural change. Attending these dynamics may help shift organizational interventions away from moral performance and toward more substantive forms of accountability, including those that challenge the liberal comfort zones in which inequality persists.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ori Schwarz, Edna Lomsky-Feder, Dan Kotliar, Gilly Hartal, and Shai Dromi for reading earlier versions of this article and for offering insightful comments that contributed to its development. I am especially grateful to the journal editor, Tristan Bridges, for an unusually constructive, generative, and encouraging review process. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous and precise comments, which greatly strengthened the current version of the article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I confirm that I have no potential conflicts of interest related to the authorship or publication of this article. Additionally, I affirm my adherence to ethical principles in conducting research involving human participants.