Women Elite Leaders Doing Respectable Business Femininity: How Privilege is Conferred, Contested and Defended through the Body

Early Career Leadership Advancement: Evidence of Incongruity Penalties toward Young, Single Women Professionals

We advance gender inequality scholarship by drawing attention to a growing but understudied group: young, single women professionals (without children). Our thesis is that for women, singlehood is deemed incongruent with role expectations of leadership – both with masculine expectations of men as “ideal leaders”, but also compared to feminine expectations of women leaders as communal, relational. We predict this incongruity to be most penalizing for analytically-talented, single professional women who are seen as gender incongruent for their masculine skills and for prioritizing their careers. Leveraging a multi-method approach, we present evidence in support of our thesis. In Study 1, a set of experiments, we observe participants evaluate single analytically-talented women as least suitable for a leadership promotion compared to identically-described single men, married men and women. Participant explanations for their negative evaluations support incongruity as the mechanism for the penalty toward single women, whom they describe as “too analytical”, lacking the people management skills needed for leadership. Study 2 adds external validity by examining early career promotions of MBA graduates, where single analytically-talented women prove the least likely to advance post-graduation compared to all other gender, marital status, and talent groupings. The combined studies unveil a novel penalty directed at young, single, analytically-talented women professionals in their early careers for their perceived incongruity with gendered expectations of masculine and feminine leadership.

Examining the gendered organizations: evidence of institutional discrimination

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to examine how a group of special companies, i.e. highly acknowledged and awarded ones operating in Brazil handle the gender issue.

Design/methodology/approach

This investigation relies on historical analysis by addressing essentially a surface-level indicator (i.e. gender preferences). Rather, this study is grounded on data from the companies that were awarded as one of the best organizations to work for in Brazil by Época-Great Place to Work® Institute and Guia Você S/A lists (between 2012 and 2016). As a result, four organizations were selected, that is, the most representative examples of gender doing.

Findings

Overall, it found that the glass ceiling is apparently breaking down within at least some germane Brazilian organizations. However, data suggest that other sorts of institutional discrimination may be taking place, i.e. the one in which a feminist mindset may be permeating an organization or even a whole business sector. Under such a scenario, male workers will likely have only a few opportunities.

Research limitations/implications

The sample size of this study does not permit that the results be generalized. In addition, data were elicited from only a specific cohort of companies.

Practical implications

It was found no substantial evidence that these organizations are making strides toward at least mitigating the effects of their gender unbalance, although gender equality and, broadly speaking, diversity does not constitute a new management topic anymore.

Originality/value

Unlike other investigations, it encompasses a larger sample of companies, draws exclusively upon gender-based organizations and is grounded on multiple sources of information. Additionally, data revealed that gendered organizations may encompass different levels of salience.

Swimming against the current: Negotiating leadership challenges for women in Iran

The representation and progression of women in leadership roles is a global issue, but research insights on the enactment of leadership by women stem from a predominantly Western perspective. As leadership is inherently context-dependent, we focus on a specific ‘place’ of leadership enactment and provide a more situated and contextual understanding of the challenges women in Iran face in entering and enacting leadership roles. This study contributes to the understanding of leadership and place by considering the dynamics of place as occurring at multiple levels – societal norms (including religion), organisational and physical (including geographical). For this in-depth inductive study 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed through Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Through the intersection of different spheres of place particular challenges for women arise. The women within our study had to negotiate the complex dynamics of doing gender well and being seen to act in line with the normative conceptions of femininity with dominant masculine expectations of what leadership and how it should be done. While also women Western contexts are constrained and / or supported by cultural (national, societal and organisation) factors as well as place in a physical and geographical sense, the specific nuances in national and societal cultural norms and the ‘harsh’ physical environment in our study provide additional challenges for women to negotiate. This study affords female leaders in Iran a voice and extends previous work on the lived experiences of women in the Middle East and North Africa Region in the under-researched context of Iran.

Introduction: Critically interrogating inclusion in organisations

This Special Issue seeks to begin to map out the key issues and contours of the emerging stream of literature on critical studies of inclusion in organisations. We aim to generate and develop further debates on critically theorising the concept, rhetoric and practices of inclusion, how inclusion manifests in different organisational contexts, how it works for different social groups, and how it continues to be implicated and interwoven with the logic of exclusion and inequality in contemporary organisations. The term ‘inclusion’ seems to have augmented the term ‘diversity’, resulting in the emergence of ‘diversity and inclusion’ as a standing term, with other terms, such as ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ currently less frequently used. In this Special Issue we treat diversity and inclusion as analytically distinct and question how far the ‘inclusion turn’ is changing practices in organisations. The papers in this Special Issue discuss how organisations ‘do’ inclusion, explore the conditions on which minority groups are included, and seek to develop a more nuanced understanding of the concept of inclusion by situating it into the broader social context and questioning the inclusion-exclusion binary.

Unwanted appearances and self-objectification: The phenomenology of alterity for women in leadership

This paper introduces the concept of dys-appearance ( Leder, 1990 ) as a way of conceptualising the lived experience of alterity (or Otherness) of women’s bodies in leadership. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study (using interviews and photo-elicitation) it contributes towards growing bodies of literature that emphasise the corporeal and highlight the Othering of the female body in the masculine discourse of leadership. Contemporary leadership scholars have drawn on Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to conceptualise the fundamental reversibility of embodied perception between the leader and the follower, but this analysis has not extended to a consideration of the sexed and gendered body. By focusing on the subjective experiences of women leaders this paper demonstrates the phenomenon of dys-appearance ( Leder, 1990 ) in which the female body, which signifies a socially problematic presence in this context, appears to the subject in a disruptive or unwanted manner within their self-perception. The self-objectification and dys-appearance of the recalcitrant body exerts a telic demand upon the self to rectify its problematic presence and return it to a state of undisruptive normality. This analysis contributes novel insights on the unique or different experiences of leadership for women, and the impact of the problematizing of the female body on their self-perceptions.

Contextualizing privilege and disadvantage: Lessons from women expatriates in the Middle East

This article explores how the simultaneity of privilege and disadvantage shapes the experiences of women expatriates in the Middle East. The article problematizes the simultaneity of being an elite group (e.g. expatriates) and a disadvantaged group (e.g. women) within the context of Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Drawing on the literature about women and work expatriation, the article analyses the narratives of women expatriates to highlight the complexity and multidimensionality of their experiences, positioning the discussion within the framework of gendered institutions. The article concludes that privilege and disadvantage are inseparable to the way the experiences of women expatriates unfold in the Middle East, and that institutional settings articulate this inseparability in order to regulate and help to maintain the gender social order. The article contributes a nuanced understanding of the experiences of women expatriates, challenging dominant views that present this group as generally privileged by virtue of their skilled and mobile status.

The hegemonic gender order in politics

Purpose

Despite the ongoing increase of women in the top positions, they are still underrepresented in politics. The studies that primarily focus on women’s underrepresentation in politics neglect the role of gender as a category that structures and makes sense of social practices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary gender order in politics through discourse analysis and the contribution of the critical feminist perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on 30 biographical interviews with Italian politicians and focuses on the account of their political experiences and on the meanings attributed to these.

Findings

The results of this paper underline the tendency to either absolve or blame women for gender inequality in politics through different interpretative repertoires: “Women’s disinterest toward politics,” “Politics as masculine context” and “Politics–family unbalance.” The analysis allowed to unravel the way in which the discursive practices create and reproduce the hegemonic gender order in politics.

Research limitations/implications

The research is limited to 30 qualitative interviews, and so results cannot be generalized.

Practical implications

The findings of this paper highlight the importance of exploring issues relating to the gender gap in politics and stress the need to implement actions to promote gender equality in politics.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to an understanding of women’s underrepresentation in politics and offers causes for reflection on a phenomenon that has profound implications for our society.

Pedagogies of power: Media artefacts as public pedagogy for women’s leadership development

This article extends the idea of media artefacts as educational resources by examining web-based materials, specifically women’s ‘Power Lists’, to deepen understandings regarding media artefacts’ role in informing women’s leadership learning and development. Women’s underrepresentation in senior leadership roles places leadership development under scrutiny to develop theoretically informed frameworks that draw attention to gendered power relations in organisations. This article addresses this concern by drawing on cultural theory to theorise media artefacts as forms of public pedagogy. The pedagogic framework proposed presents a distinctive addition to leadership education methods that attend to the sociocultural and recognise the significance of informal learning to leadership learning. Recognising media artefacts’ pedagogic role enables individuals to examine in more detail the gendered nature of the social values and norms that inform leadership discourse, and how these values and norms are promoted, reproduced and sustained through media artefacts.