Gender, Culture, And Emotional Labor in Nonprofit Job Advertisements

Abstract Job advertisements are powerful discursive sites where organizations communicate a version of work and imagine qualities of the ideal worker. Here we study ads for roles in the nonprofit sector, which is characterized by a predominantly female workforce, low wages, and high demands for emotional labor. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, we identified three discursive constructions of the ideal worker across 105 online adverts: the passionate assistant, the lived-experience supporter, and the culturally competent leader. We discuss how expectations of emotional labor invoke gendered subjectivities and how bicultural leadership invokes cultural subjectivities. We argue that tacit expectations of emotional labor are key ways that organizations indicate subjectivities in a context where explicit identification of gender or culture is not permissible.