Gender and Sustainable Management Education: Exploring the Missing Link

The concept of sustainability has at its heart a sense of equity and social justice, which also encompasses aspects of gender equality. The chapter focuses on explaining gender integration in management education. Integrating gender in business school curricula is difficult, as it challenges the masculinist norms that have historically shaped conceptions of management and leadership. Through a framework of threshold concepts we review a teaching intervention with first year undergraduate students, which aimed to open up gender as a responsible, sustainable management concern. We suggest that gender is a key concept for management students’ engagement with sustainability and responsible management practice. Threshold concepts offers an approach to understanding how we might continue to develop interventions that enable us to work with students and facilitate their development and journey towards a transformed, irreversible understanding of their roles as future managers.