Women’s Leadership

This book is about women’s leadership. It has developed as a response to some broad areas of interest. What are women’s experiences of becoming leaders? How do these experiences inform how we understand leadership? What do women’s experiences of becoming leaders tell us about how women learn leadership? What implications does this have for the development of women leaders? More specifically however, this book has developed as a result of one particular question. In developing our research around women’s leadership, in presenting ideas at conferences, in talking to groups of students we were more often than not asked the question; why focus on women and leadership? While we often queried why we were asked this question when our male colleagues were not asked similar questions about their studies that focused on male leaders, we came to use this question as a keystone in our discussions. Before anyone else during our presentations could ask the question, we began to start by saying, ‘why focus on women and leadership?’ So while our short answer is ‘why not’ and to thereby invite discussion, our long answer is that this focus is indeed purposeful and important for the following reasons: a paucity of critical work on women’s leadership;

In this chapter we have two main aims. First, we aim to highlight the limited empirical base upon which our understanding of women’s leadership is formed, particularly how they become leading women. Second, we aim to show how conceptions of leadership and leadership development are defined from a relatively narrow research base. This chapter seeks to meet these aims by providing an overview of the major trends in leadership and leadership development research.

In Chapter 1 we discussed how in spite of growing numbers of women in leading positions and leadership roles, much of the leadership and leadership development literature largely fails to reflect women’s experience and practice of leadership. Chapter 1 highlighted that much of the literature is based on studies of men leaders in hierarchical organisations. We argued that as a result of this narrow research base, dominant ideas and approaches to leadership continue to promote individualised and gendered conceptions that ignore women’s experience. Furthermore, we argued that approaches to leadership development mirror the predominant tendencies in the leadership literature and take little account of gender. Approaches are therefore presented as ‘gender neutral’, that is leadership and leadership development are promoted as being unaffected by gender (Acker, 1995). Yet, as Wajcman (1995) and Swan (2006a) argue, leadership development theorising and practice continues to promote individualistic, largely masculine and heroic understandings of leadership. In this chapter we turn our attention to the depiction of women’s leadership. We are especially interested in bringing attention to a hitherto relatively little explored area, namely what do images of women leaders – be these visual images (e.g. photographs or pictures).

This quotation from our interview with Baroness Betty Boothroyd, first woman Speaker of the House of Commons highlights the theme of this chapter: what are women’s experiences of becoming leaders? In this quotation Betty Boothroyd indicates that becoming an MP is not something that is done in isolation. In this account she describes the context to this achievement as the culmination of different experiences, and she also points out that there are relationships that support this role including contact with others. We concluded the previous chapter by proposing that we need more critical studies to explore women’s experiences of leading, so that we can gain a deeper insight into what enables women to become leaders. In this chapter therefore, we want to examine women’s accounts of their experiences of leadership. What influences women in their practice of leadership? How do they develop their leadership role and how do they maintain it?

Here Jackie Fisher describes being in the minority as a woman leader. She goes on to say that this can bring with it challenges. In this chapter we want to discuss the extent to which gender matters in women’s leadership. Does it matter if you are female and how does it matter? The women’s accounts described in Chapter 3 led us to observe that much of their experience is shaped by being female in terms of social perceptions of them and of how women are positioned in the workplace. This then raises questions around the extent to which gender is significant in the practice of women’s leadership.

Our focus in this chapter is to draw on the analyses we presented in previous chapters and consider the implications these raise for women’s leadership identity. We explore why women are not readily identified as leaders particularly when, as the quote from Sayeeda Khan above illustrates, your appearance contrasts with received understandings of what leaders look like and can elicit negative responses. Drawing on Ashcraft and Mumby’s (2004) framework the chapter’s objective is to consider how discourse organises identity. That is, we will examine the relationship between broader societal narratives of gender and dominant discourses in organisations and work towards making sense of how certain discourses of leadership identity come to be privileged. We recognise that the topic of identity is a much contested and debated field. Alvesson, Ashcraft and Thomas (2008) note that within organisation studies identity can be associated with a range of organisational processes and intervention, from company mergers and project teams through to motivation and politics. Collinson (2003) examines the influence of organisations.

This quote from May Blood, of her time working in a linen mill and as a union representative, exemplifies the focus of this chapter; how women learn leadership. In particular it indicates the significance of learning as being informal and emerging from the doing of leadership and we explore this in more detail later. The quote also points to the significance of gender, how she was often the only woman, and how women were not asking for enough. Through women leaders’ accounts Chapter 4’s analysis illustrated how gender is reproduced through social interaction and through organisational processes. This analysis demonstrated that women have to negotiate gendered processes in order to achieve and maintain leadership roles. Furthermore, it foregrounded that women leaders had limited learning opportunities from social networks to help them do this.

In earlier chapters we have articulated the observations and experiences that have been influential in convincing us that a study of women leaders can provide fresh insights into understandings of leadership. These formed a series of questions that guided the development of this book including: