This essay is part of a project between Södertörn University College and Stockholm Academic Forum. The focus of the project is gender equality in small- and medium sized companies. I have worked with a construction company called Activa . The majority of the employees at the company were male and I was interested in the consequences of gender construction in such an environment. I think that the basic condition for equality work is an understanding of gender and the male norm. The purpose was to investigate how these things worked out in the Activa organisation. I wanted to investigate the consequences of gender and illustrate how discrimination can work. The conclusions are supposed to be a base for the company’s future equality opportunities.

The methodology for this investigation were interviews. I have interviewed six persons, whom all worked at the company-office. The interviews were informal conversations based on a semi-structured methodology. The information I got was interpret by the hermeneutic tradition and analysed by gender theories.

The conclusions of this study are that gender indeed affected the organisation structure. The male and female employees experienced different working conditions. The male norm were in fact setting the agenda in the organisation. The male employees had better possibilities to affect the working conditions compared to the women. Both men and women maintained this structure. They were all acting in order of their expectations. The consequence of these structures, and the behaviour of both men and women at the company, creates an conception of the male norm as natural.