Get Back into that Kitchen, Woman: Management Conferences and the Making of the Female Professional Worker Jackie Ford* and Nancy Harding Conferences are a little studied aspect of working lives. In this article we explore how management conferences contribute to the continuing im- balance of power between men and women in management. We analyse data gathered from a reflexive ethnographic study of a management con- ference. We show that women arrive at conferences as knowing subjects, able easily to occupy the subject position of conference participant, but they are then subjected to processes of infantilization and seduction. They are made to feel scared and are given the order, as were their mothers and grandmothers: get back to the kitchen. We avoid using a theoretical expla- nation for these findings, preferring to offer them without much explana- tion, for we favour instead a political approach, and we use the findings as a way of making a call to arms to change the ways in which conferences are hostile to women. Keywords: conferences, domination, seduction, power, gendering manage- ment Introduction A ttendance at conferences has become part of the taken-for-granted tasks of managers, professional workers and academics; however, there has been no research into conferences as social or organizational sites. We became particularly interested in conferences as gendered experiences following an occasion when we were part of a group of women who registered their discomfort at a critical management studies conference several years ago. At that conference the aggressively macho culture felt so oppressive that women Address for correspondence: *Bradford University School of Management, e-mail: j.m.ford@ bradford.ac.uk Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 17 No. 5 September 2010 doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2009.00476.x © 2009 The Author(s) © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd