Intersections of gender, age and occupational group in the Finnish defence forces

Addressing the challenges expressed by organization researchers and Leslie McCall with her conceptual framework of intercategorical analysis, this paper contributes to the methodological debate on intersectionality. The purpose of this paper is to explore intersectionality on the organizational level in the Finnish defence forces (FDF). In the paper, the authors explore how the interactions between categories of gender, age, and position in the organization explain the concerns of employees in the changing military organization. Furthermore, the authors also investigate the types of intersectional mechanisms behind the empirical observations.

The logistic regression analysis is based on a survey addressed to the whole salaried personnel in the FDF in 2011 (n=8,093, response rate being 54 per cent).

In line with McCall’s (2005) intercategorical approach, the analysis shows that the plain examination of main effects of the variables will not suffice, but the interaction effects of the variables must also be examined. The analysis indicates that even though women in general experienced more concerns, gender does not alone explain the concerns expressed by the members of the FDF, but age and especially personnel group are significant in understanding configurations of positions in relation to the organizational change process.

The methodological limitation of the study is that although the data were large, it was not possible to conduct three-ways analysis, because of the size of some groups.

The study offers a noteworthy addition to the rare research of practising intersectionality in the conceptual framework using quantitative methods.