Under the Smokescreen of Horizontality: Gendered Leading Tasks within the Yellow Vest Movement

Abstract

There is little scholarship on how gender impacts the construction of leadership in supposedly leaderless, horizontal social movements. In this study, I expand the concept of leading tasks, to get at the ways in which gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements. Drawing on comparative data from 7 months of fieldwork conducted with two grassroots groups in the French Yellow Vest movement, I argue that horizontal organizing in the Yellow Vests (YVM) functions as a gendered structure which opens possibilities for women to take on important leading tasks: caring management, attentive listening, and superintendence. These analytically constructed, gendered leading tasks point to a tension inherent in horizontality: It creates leeway for women’s participation, while also functioning as a smokescreen for a process where group members reproduce traditional gendered expectations of women to do a “third shift” in organizing, characterized by nurturing and caring for participants and activist spaces. The study documents how women can be disadvantaged by this mode of organization. Thus, the concept of gendered leading tasks contributes to investigating how leadership is a gendered construct shaped by those who enact it, and the social structure that surrounds it.

Plain Language Summary

The leadership work demanded by women in social movements without leaders

In the last decade, there has been a wave of social movements that do not wish to have leadership. They strive for internal democracy and a flat structure. The movements claim that they make decisions by consensus and that important work tasks are rotated between movement members. This study investigates whether women are putting in the work that matters the most for the maintenance of activism in these movements. The researcher studied how activists in two groups in a French social movement called the Yellow Vests deal with the organizing of day-to-day movement activity. She interviewed many members from the two groups, participating in their meetings and attending protest events together with them. The researcher found that the movement has created an image of leaders as corrupted and authoritarian men. This makes it easier for women to take on more responsibility because they are seen as harmless in comparison to these frightful leaders. At the same time, the researcher found that it takes a lot of effort for the members to uphold the flat structure where everyone decides and partakes equally. It is especially the women who are expected to upkeep this environment. This study has shown that when groups say that they are egalitarian, they are not always so. The study reveals that it demands a lot of work for groups to be without leaders and that this work often falls on women.

The French Gilets Jaunes movement or Yellow Vests (YVM) is a social movement with horizontal organizing principles, meaning that it continuously challenges the centralization of power (Maeckelbergh 2011). Local groups organize themselves independently, refusing leadership and severely sanctioning those who try to take on the title of leader (Hayat 2022). Anecdotal evidence shows that, at the local level, women exercised leadership, succeeding because they took on leadership roles while also doing reproductive work, transforming the activist space into a private sphere (Bernard de Raymond and Bordiec 2020; Boncompagni 2021). However, little attention has been paid to the gendered dimensions of the YVM and particularly its relationship to internal organizing (Gaillard 2021).

Studies in the French and U.S. contexts show that, historically, women have been excluded from top leadership within social movements where gender has operated as a construct of exclusion that moved women into peripheral substructures of leadership at the grassroots (Barnett 1993; Fillieule and Roux 2009; McCammon et al. 2018; Payne 1990; Robnett 1996). Movements’ implementation of “structurelessness”—the idea that groups can function without any hierarchical or organizational structure—may give more leeway to women (Freeman 2013 [1972]). However, recent research on the U.S. Occupy movement suggests that horizontal organizations can perpetuate gender hierarchies by holding women leaders to gendered stereotypes (Hurwitz 2019). Despite being an egalitarian principle put into practice (Maeckelbergh 2011), horizontality may function as a smokescreen for underlying gendered hierarchies that marginalize (Acker 1990; Freeman 2013 [1972]).

In this article, I examine how gendered leadership is constructed within YVM, a horizontally organized social movement. The YVM is an informal movement that has no central organizational structure that delegates tasks and resources or coordinates a joint agenda or political demands. Lack of formality gives its grassroots groups the possibility to form their own political and organizational worlds, resulting in substantive differences within the movement.

Leadership in informal movements has been difficult to define (Earl 2007). Research on movements such as the French Nuit Debout or the Spanish Indignados has dealt partly with the dynamics of rotating leadership responsibilities (Dufour, Nez, and Ancelovici 2016; Felicetti and Della Porta 2018). But few studies have tried to theorize leadership formation in these specific settings that strive for nonhierarchical and egalitarian structures (Ganz and McKenna 2019; Hurwitz 2019). To describe and explain how gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements, I expand on Earl’s (2007) concept of leading tasks, which comprises the tasks considered salient by group members for the sustenance of the movement. Drawing on feminist scholarship (Robnett 1996; West and Zimmerman 1987), I establish the concept of “gendered leading tasks,” which allows for a concrete analysis of what goes on under the smokescreen of horizontality, by accentuating that leading tasks are enacted by people embedded in the hierarchies that already exist in society.

Thus, I integrate a gendered understanding of Earl’s (2007) interactional concept by indicating how gender impacts the construction and enactment of leading tasks in horizontal movements. The expanded concept allows me to inductively identify and typologize forms of leading tasks enacted by women, in data collected during fieldwork across two different local YVM groups in 2021–2022. The analysis contributes to the understanding of leadership in horizontal movements by unpacking the discourse of horizontality and demonstrating how gendered leading tasks are enacted and perceived by members in two groups that diverge politically and in ways of practically organizing.

The YVM

More than 300,000 people took to the streets in response to petitions on Facebook in November 2018. Initially, they contested the introduction of a green tax on petrol, before broadening their demands to the injustice of the French taxation system and the French government’s ignorance of common people’s economic problems (Hayat 2022; Morselli et al. 2023). The unique composition of working- and lower-middle-class participants in the YVM, primarily living outside large cities, and the action repertoire of Saturday demonstrations (with no set itinerary, spokespersons, or predetermined demands) and rural roundabout occupation distinguish the YVM from other contemporary movements such as Nuit Debout and Occupy, which mostly comprise the educated middles classes (Dormagen, Michel, and Reungoat 2022; Reungoat, Buton, and Jouhanneau 2022).

At the national level, no entity organizes activities or directs their development (André et al. 2019). Many have pointed out the movement’s lack of traditional organizational resources, elected representatives and formal leadership (Bernard de Raymond and Bordiec 2020; Grossman 2019; Hayat 2022). Some link the challenges to leadership in the movement with participants’ contempt for elites and political institutions such as political parties, unions, and interest groups (Dormagen, Michel, and Reungoat 2022; Hayat 2022). At the local level, conflicts seem to revolve around forms of representation and hierarchy and not leadership per se. Thus, “organizers” or “leaders” are tolerated on the roundabout only if they are seen as simultaneously inoffensive and sincere in their engagement (Boncompagni 2021).

Aside from large-scale street protests, during which so-called leading figures took on symbolic importance, the movement exists predominantly in the form of small groups that organize protest actions on a local scale (such as blocking fuel depots and hypermarket logistics’ hubs; see Reungoat, Buton, and Jouhanneau 2022). During the movement’s first weekend, 788 points of protest were registered (Boyer et al. 2020). These groups developed through the occupation of roundabouts and parking lots where permanent encampments were established. They can be profoundly different in terms of action repertoires and political viewpoints because they do not report to any centralized organization (André et al. 2019; Dormagen, Michel, and Reungoat 2022). Diverging political opinions cohabitate in activist spaces because certain political topics, such as immigration, were avoided to maintain unity (André et al. 2019; Reungoat, Buton, and Jouhanneau 2022). These activist spaces became “informal organizations” for deliberation and decision-making (Bernard de Raymond and Bordiec 2020; Morselli et al. 2023) in which participants could promote solidarity and egality (Boncompagni 2021).

Gender and Social Movement Leadership

To grasp the leadership work that goes on under the smokescreen of horizontality in the YVM, I extend on Earl’s (2007) concept of leading tasks. The concept, established by Earl to capture the content of leadership in contexts where leaders are not identified, is defined as the sets of tasks viewed as salient by group members for sustaining the movement. Distinguishing between “leaders” and the critical work of organizing, the concept identifies what leadership is and how it is acted out within leaderless social movements. Recognizing that these tasks can vary over time and across space, it can allow for a deeper understanding of the organizing work of maintaining horizontal, not only leaderless, movements by lending focus to contextual and structural dynamics that make certain tasks important (Earl 2007: 1328–29).

Influenced by feminist scholars’ (Hurwitz 2019; Robnett 1996) use of gender to reconceptualize leadership, I argue that we must expand the concept of leading tasks to grasp what is going in inside horizontal movements. My extension of “leading tasks” is grounded in the understanding that leadership is inherently gendered, meaning that who does the tasks, and how they are done, is a gendered, interactional process (West and Zimmerman 1987). Although tasks can be separated from the notion of leaders, as Earl (2007) states, these are still enacted by people, who are embedded in the hierarchies that already exist in society. Who is deemed fitted to do what tasks, and in what way, is subjected to continuous gendered assessments (Hurwitz 2019; Robnett 1996; West and Zimmerman 1987). The assessments happen not only in more hierarchical movements but also in horizontal movements such as the U.S. Occupy movement, where members exercised discriminatory resistance against women leaders, holding them accountable according to gendered and racialized stereotypes (Hurwitz 2019).

Within scholarship on social movements, the concept of leadership remains undertheorized (Barker, Johnson and Lavalette 2001; Earl 2007; Ganz and McKenna 2019; Reger 2007). Historically, social movement leadership has been defined as attributes, titles, top positions, or decision-making power by way of authority (Rucht 2012; Sutherland, Land, and Böhm 2014), perhaps because the concept originates from studies conducted outside movements that commonly confirm these conceptions, indicating that “magic men” occupy formal leadership roles in the public sphere (Barnett 1993; Ganz and McKenna 2019, 188; Herda-Rapp 1998; Robnett 1996; Stall and Stoecker 1998).

The broader literature on gender and leadership deals with the constructions and perceptions of women’s participation in leadership, defined as a position of authority established through appointment (Agadjanian 2015). Even though more women have access to leadership in these formal structures, they are often restricted by unofficial, subordinating practices upheld by a gender hierarchy that constructs women as inferior and limits their power to “soft matters” at the periphery while men’s presence at the center is naturalized (Adams 2007; Agadjanian 2015; Bryan, Pope, and Rankin-Wright 2021; Pape 2020; Skalli 2011).

We know that movements have often excluded women from top positions, confined them to informal leadership roles, or been unwilling to recognize women’s leadership (McCammon et al. 2018). At grassroots level in formal social movements, women have held more prominent positions in day-to-day activities (Herda-Rapp 1998; McCammon et al. 2018). Less inclined to think of themselves as public sphere actors, women also reportedly prefer the roles of community organizers (Barnett 1993; Robnett 1996; Stall and Stoecker 1998). To analyze these types of informal gendered leadership, scholars have moved behind the scenes and applied grounded analyses to identify new substructures of leadership (Barnett 1993; Robnett 1996; Sacks 1988). Studies show that care work reminiscent of “the third shift” (Hochschild 1997) is demanded of women in informal leadership positions within grassroots movements. The third shift, different from the first and second shifts of work and domestic life, consists of relational work of noticing and understanding, applicable to the work of building community (Hochschild 1997). In the context of grassroots movements, where “organizing community” is key (Stall and Stoecker 1998), tasks enacted by women have centered around nurturing and uplifting, connecting with people’s needs, and strengthening social bonds, especially in periods of movement decline or strain (Barnett 1993; Herd and Meyer 2002; Robnett 1996; Sacks 1988).

The expectation that women should be emotional laborers who do “mothering work” can undermine their authority and standing (Cutcher 2021), and such work is typically associated with femininity (Billing and Alvesson 2000). Although recent research on women in leadership shows that one can successfully pair expression of authority and expression of care in a more directive leadership style (Ispa-Landa and Thomas 2019), authority is most often associated with masculinity (Billing and Alvesson 2000). These gendered associations reinforce the traditional notions of what constitutes women’s work, which is not valued as important for the functioning of organizations (Acker 1990; Cutcher 2021; West and Zimmerman 1987).

In summary, we see that formal, organizational structures framed to be egalitarian, gender-neutral sites produce gender inequalities (Acker 1990; Pape 2020; Schull, Shaw, and Kihl 2013; Worthen 2015). Some scholars argue that horizontal or informal structuring could provide an opportunity to change the organizational logic that marginalizes women (Agadjanian 2015; Fonow 1998; Stainback, Kleiner, and Skaggs 2016, 110). Although there are gendered, interactional constraints governing the types of leadership that can be enacted by women and minority groups in horizontal structures (Hurwitz 2019), we may assume that informal and horizontal ways of organizing can open up space for women to do leadership. After all, horizontality is viewed by many activists as a practice that counters hierarchy and centralized control, and a momentary experience that “another world is possible” (Graeber 2002, 72). However, there is limited knowledge about how the practice of horizontality plays into this process of constructing gendered leadership.

Building on these insights, I argue that we should apply the concept of gendered leading tasks to typologize the critical organizational work that goes on under the presupposed egalitarian and gender-neutral smokescreen of horizontality.

The Study

Data for this article come from a larger ethnographic study on the YVM. Here, I draw on 51 in-depth interviews with 47 participants, written meeting reports, and observation data from longitudinal fieldwork with two movement groups across three periods totaling 7 months between April 2021 and May 2022. The project follows the guidelines of the National Research Ethics Committee and has received formal approval.

Rucht (2012) argues that the leadership needed varies according to the movement types and their political beliefs. For this ethnographic study, I purposely selected two YVM grassroots groups that have differing political worldviews and ways of organizing. ¹ Contact with the first group, the Northern group, was established by reaching out to individuals in my extended personal network. The YVM group is in an urban environment in the northern-central area of France, with a population of around 60,000. It was established in December 2018 by those with experience from left-wing parties and community organizations. The group has seen growth and degrowth in numbers and modes of participation, from more than 100 participants at general assemblies in early 2019, to the active participation of 15 to 20 individuals during fieldwork in 2021 to 2022. The group members were 25 to 80 years old; most were in their 40s and 50s. Twenty-six individuals were interviewed, across a total of 31 interviews. Most work in the public sector. Certain individuals are in long-term unemployment; 13 are women and 13 are men. The participants have a variety of backgrounds; approximately one-third have parents who immigrated to France from Algeria, Morocco, or other countries in Europe, or have themselves migrated from South America. Two-thirds of the interviewees identified as White. The group’s core weekly activities consist of a general assembly and an informal Saturday gathering, where members discuss and plan events, often focusing on demands for workers’ rights, social security, or democratic reform. In addition, local public protests are attended weekly, with slogans such as “Government of the people, for the people, by the people.”

The fieldwork took place over 4 months from April 2021 to June 2021 (42 days in the field), November 2021 (3 days), and March 2022 (8 days). In addition to individual and group interviews, I participated in formal and informal meetings, protest marches (initiated by YVs, or others), strikes, and the YVM Saturday demonstrations. I have compiled written reports from the weekly assemblies for the period December 2018 to September 2021.

The second site, called the Southern group, is situated in a south-eastern municipality, with a population of around 50,000 and was established in November 2018, as people gathered at a toll station accessing the highway, shouting slogans such as “Macron, resign!” and “France belongs to us.” The group saw an increase in participation in the first months, until participants were banned from the toll station by the police, leaving around 30 individuals to relocate to a nearby parking lot. A small cabin was built there, called the HQ (headquarters), to accommodate participants, recruit, and organize more regular weekly meetings. Activity decreased by mid-2019. By the time of fieldwork in 2021, around 12 individuals were active in the group.

I partook in daily activities, including interviewing, and traveled with informants to nearby demonstrations and meetings in June 2021 (20 days in the field). The second round of fieldwork in April 2022 (16 days) consisted primarily of interviewing as group activity at the HQ had come to an end. I have archived written reports comprising the weekly meeting activity for the period January 2019 to June 2019.

Twenty-one individuals, 13 women and eight men, were interviewed across a total of 20 interviews. In June 2021, five of the informants were still active in the group either by manning the HQ daily or undertaking bi-weekly trips to nearby YV-occupied sites. The other participants interviewed had left between 2019 and 2022. The ages ranged from 28 to 72 years; most participants were in their 50s and 60s and were either retirees or in precarious employment. Almost all participants identified as white, whereas a minority were of North African descent. Some had prior experience of workers’ unions or left-wing or far right-wing political parties. Most active members held political views linked with the far-right party, National Rally.

The move between field sites revealed the impact of my positionality on data production. Shared political affinities with participants from the Northern group created blind spots, in that I did not initially investigate or question the substantial meaning of participants’ understanding and practice of what some of them called horizontality. Arriving in the Southern group, I was faced with their different and similar ways of doing horizontality. To ameliorate the blind spots, I systematically analyzed the meeting reports from both groups, which described their theoretical understanding of how to organize horizontally without leaders. The reading allowed for more detailed questions about their practice in repeated interviews with participants from both groups in 2022.

Informants from the Southern group spoke very differently of their engagement, many treating me more explicitly as an outsider than did the Northern participants, who were more accustomed to interacting with journalists and researchers. This again unveiled analytical assumptions about the Northern group, which spurred me to be more careful about analyzing the sequencing of themes that participants brought up in interviews, as described below. Repeated interviews and observation helped correct initial assumptions about organizing dynamics in the Northern group because I asked participants to give more concrete examples and to give their interpretation of events that I had observed previously (specifically entailing leading tasks).

Interviews began with an explorative question regarding the participants’ entrance into the movement (Donegani, Michelat, and Simon 1980). As the interviewees sketched out the local group’s history, I prompted questions about the repartition of responsibilities and work within the group (such as initiation, decision-making, and implementation) and the development of participation over time. This facilitated questions to ascertain which actors were protagonists in the sustainability of the groups, as did Robnett (1996, 18), who used “the women’s understandings of who the leaders were and their own definitions of what they felt constituted leadership.”

The material has been coded thematically using empirical categories across several rounds. I followed the sequencing of themes taken up by the interviewees to explore their interconnection (Donegani, Michelat, and Simon 1980). The first round of inductive coding in NVivo identified what participants called horizontality as a central category, also apparent in written reports dating back to the groups’ establishment. The category was tied with gender-coded perceptions of poor leadership, elites, and hierarchy. The participants’ view of their own work efforts and their position in the group was strongly connected to their ideals of horizontality. In the observations, the work of horizontal organizing seemed conflictual, and was at variance with the participants’ positive depictions of it.

The basis for the construction of the three leading tasks was formed during several rounds of fieldwork through direct observation of work that appeared to be critical for the daily sustenance of the group. From there, I did an inductive analysis of the interviews, tracking the ways in which the participants perceived themselves or other members doing day-to-day activities in the groups. Comparing observations and participants’ stories, I determined the salience of the tasks (Earl 2007). I then searched for disconfirming evidence across the archival, interview, and observational data. This led to insights into what leading tasks were exercised during which periods and spaces in the groups, revealing reasons why traditional management tasks were much less prevalent in the Southern group.

Findings

How is the understanding and practice of leading tasks a gendered process, constructed within a horizontally organized social movement? I first describe how horizontality is a construction deeply influenced by gendered expectations of what leaders are and what they do. Second, I analyze how this horizontal space is upheld by gendered leading tasks, different from the leading tasks conceptualized in previous scholarship, primarily done by women. These analytically constructed gendered leading tasks point to a tension inherent in horizontality, which is discussed throughout the section.

Behind the Smokescreen of Horizontality

The written reports and interviews with participants indicate an intention to construct horizontality through the rotation of leading tasks. Both groups established guiding principles in charters, aimed at achieving a flat structure through collective deliberation during meetings, decision-making by consensus and the rotation of defined leadership roles, such as general meeting facilitator, regulator, and spokesperson. Meeting reports construct the notion of horizontality as the only honest way of organizing. Participants from both groups informed me that the implementation of horizontality was a concrete means of rejecting hierarchy and forceful leaders. This is in line with previous findings that portray the movement’s general claim of unrepresentativeness as a countering response to the disdained political elites of the public sphere (Hayat 2022).

The rejection of hierarchy and leaders was given different motivations in the two groups, in a large part due to variations in political experience among participants and their overall political worldviews. Most Southern group members told me that they rejected the structure resembling formal political organizing that some participants tried to implement in the movement’s initial period. Adam, a white 45-year-old former member with longtime political experience, argues that the rejection of any formal organization stems from the core of the movement’s demands:

The YVs was established as a fight against political organizations. It was the organization that had brought them to that point. When you come proposing to organize, you become the pariah; it was very divisive at one point, because y’know, the YVs weren’t ready for that . . . .they’re always so skeptical, resistant, to what you do or suggest.

Adam refers to the group members’ resistance to the government and its immoral and power-hungry political leaders. During interviews, many contrasted the group with organizations led by military chiefs, bosses who do not listen to their employees, or President Macron as “a king who rules over his people.” Although general imagery of power-hungry leaders were men, both women and men from the group could be seen with suspicion, especially if they had experience with political parties. Josie, a white 50-year-old former member, draws on the example of a few men who tried to give direction while the group was occupying the Southern toll station in early 2019: “it was just ego, e-g-o, it wasn’t for the good cause, it wasn’t coming from their heart and their gut, it wasn’t the, the movement’s causes that motivated them, them, they’re bad.” She was certain that power would ultimately centralize to an individual hungry for prestige and recognition.

In the North, many participants had longtime experience of political organizing in parties and associations. They used their experiences as a contrast to how they would like to organize differently. Most spoke positively of the egalitarian structure of the weekly meetings, characterizing it as predominantly “feminine” as opposed to “virile.” This was linked with the fact that women were in the majority at the meetings, which comprised participants with various ethnicities and class backgrounds, representing women as different—capable of ensuring that everyone took turns to speak, without shouting or monopolizing time.

The characteristics echo previous research on perceived masculine traits in leaders, who use certain styles to maintain order and command, often to the detriment of the collective, in contrast to women’s feminine subordinating and consensus-seeking nature (Billing and Alvesson 2000). Thus, a binary-gendered logic structures the groups and the way in which they are organized (Acker 1990). Comparing the two groups makes it clear that the movement has created an image of leaders as corrupted and authoritarian men. This makes it easier for women to take on more responsibility because they are seen as harmless compared with these frightful leaders. Integrated into their resistance is a particularly pointed binary understanding of femininity and masculinity, of men as “doing dominance” and women as “doing deference” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 146). Horizontality becomes the negation of formal ways of organizing and the traditional leader, who seeks out positions of power to control. Here, the gendering of leading tasks is outlined, as one must uphold this gendered space.

It takes a lot of effort for the members to uphold the flat structure where everyone decides and partakes equally. Based on traditional, binary understandings of gender, it is especially the women that are expected to maintain this environment. During meetings, I observed that the intentions to construct horizontality fell short because the rotation of tasks did not work in practice. Every week, the same women took on the same responsibilities of managing meetings and making sure that the group was organized. By observing the groups’ activity, it became apparent that horizontality creates a void in which no responsibilities are assigned, and no decisions can be made without consensus. For the groups to function, decisions must still be made and implemented.

The groups’ gendered understanding of horizontality and of leaders provides the opportunity for new leadership to emerge, more available to women. Robnett (1996) maintains that although the U.S. civil rights movement excluded women from formal top positions because of their gender, the exclusion helped them develop strong leadership at local levels. In the YVM, there are no formal leadership positions from which women can be excluded; instead, they are “tolerated” and sought after as practitioners of certain forms of masked leadership, because they are perceived as different and nonthreatening and expected to create activist spaces that the participants wanted.

In the following section, building on Earl’s (2007) concept, I present the gendered leading tasks, which are constructed in the frictional context of the groups’ perceptions of masculine leaders and their struggle to uphold horizontal organizing principles.

The Care Work of Leadership

Caring Management

Caring management comprises the leading tasks of calling in and facilitating meetings and proposing and planning protest actions. These tasks are gendered because group members expect them to be done in a caring manner and by people whose gender is associated with “feminine” qualities, thus adhering to their idea of horizontality. Because the work is understood to be innate to women, it goes unrecognized.

These tasks were key at the beginning of the movement in 2019, when the Northern group was first established, and were enacted by both men and women, but most systematically by women who had professional experience in public and civil sectors. Manon, a 40-year-old former Northern member of North African descent, explains how she took on a more prominent role: “We were lots of people, we needed rules to moderate the discussions. I already knew these kinds of rules from work—time is delegated, two minutes per person, prioritizing those who haven’t spoken.” Manon’s description echoes the leading tasks of internal management in more formalized movements (Barnett 1993; Earl 2007).

However, the ways in which gendered expectations of care work intersect with management tasks in the attempts of doing horizontality is displayed in other members’ portrayal of Manon. Nicolas, a 65-year-old white long-term member, describes Manon as “very active, a great organizer. But she never claimed to be the boss . . . .no one wanted to chop her head off because she made stuff happen.” Nicolas references that the YVM saw itself in line with the French Revolution, which beheaded its souverains. Manon managed to keep her head down, staying clear of decapitation because she was perceived to be leading differently from the despotic, most often men leaders of the past and present.

Previous member Lucia, a 40-year-old woman from South America, describes Manon’s ability to “make people feel seen” by sending individual text messages to members before and after meetings. The text messages, despite entailing a request, would be articulated and understood by the members as general questions about their well-being, never as instructions. Thus, to demonstrate caring management, one must perform a complex character that is femininely acceptable, upholding managerial control while simultaneously being viewed as harmless. Contrary to previous scholarship that identifies how women are hindered as leaders because they are not associated with power and authority (Ispa-Landa and Thomas 2019), Manon’s practice of caring management shows how gendered expectations can open up room for women who lean into traditional feminized qualities.

Julie, a white long-time member in her late 30s, believed that the caring management practiced by Manon was welcomed and accepted by the other members because “they want to be reminded that someone is organizing the meetings; they want to be told when and where to show up.” However, this had to be done in a certain way, says Julie, according to what I interpret as participants’ gendered expectations of Manon as a mothering figure: “people want to be hugged and put to bed . . . .and you are taking people under your wing like you’re their mother.” The above descriptions show that the leading tasks become something more than the sum of their parts, gendered because, inside the horizontal organization, one must adopt an easygoing discourse of care to motivate the members to partake in group activities. Manon becomes an emotional laborer but still is capable of maintaining de facto authority. Nicolas and other participants followed Manon’s lead because she represented a caring figure who could organize people without offending or giving orders. She avoided conflict surrounding leadership because the members did not believe that she sought any power or prestige.

Southern participants were more distrustful of members’ former political or civic competence. Many recounted attempts by men to lead by organizing and facilitating weekly meetings at the HQ. These men were, however, dismissed because people assumed that they sought political gains and prestige. Chloe, a former member in her late 60s of North African descent, provided an example of participants’ suspicion of such individuals:

“Me, I always said, when we attended the meetings, “there’s someone here that wants the power,” because even in this movement, y’know, I said, “there’s someone here, you’re not here primarily because you need to, yeah well it’s very nice of you to come help us, but some of you are here solely for the power.”

For Chloe, distrust of hierarchical leaders was strong, and her belief was that if one sought to take on leading tasks such as setting meeting agendas, thus giving direction to the group, one should be called out.

Therefore, the traditional leading tasks of internal management were less present in the Southern group because they were primarily performed by men, suspected to seek power and control. In the North, they were enacted in a caring manner by women, who complied with the Northern participants’ perception of how horizontality should be maintained.

Superintendence

The leading tasks of superintendence, taking care of and maintaining respectability at the HQ, are found in the Southern group and relate to the integration of a vision of the movement that grounds the group in a concrete local space (the HQ), rejecting formal political organizing. Superintendence is a gendered practice because members expected women to take on these tasks, as they were associated with “women’s work.” Constructed at the bottom of a gendered hierarchy, the work of superintendence was seen as subordinate, thus masking the fact that those that did the work could also establish respectability rules in the space.

The Southern group is based in a cabin on a parking lot, which is painted yellow, decorated with neon yellow flags and has a fire burning outside. It is visible to cars on the nearby highway. Former member Elodie, a 65-year-old white woman, told me that “the place had to be respectable,” so that establishments nearby would not complain to the authorities and force them to leave. Grounding the struggle in the groups’ local environment has been key for the YVM (Bendali and Rubert 2020); there, the movement was created and continues to be supported. Concerns related to public display of respectability at the roundabouts—keeping the space clean and presentable—have also been pointed out by other studies of movement encampments, indicating the importance of these efforts for sustainability (Challier 2021).

Elodie informed me that she and her husband built the cabin and would keep the place in order, chopping up wood and keeping the rats at bay. Johanna, a 62-year-old white long-term Southern member, told me that she links her efforts with the place rather than the group and its members:

I participate together with [her husband] to maintain and superintend the HQ . . . .to take care of it, to take care of the spirit of the YVs. I’m not invested politically but organizationally . . . .I maintain and supervise; I do not have any real responsibilities.

Johanna’s description of her work and why she does it shows that politics is something she wishes to distance herself from. The spirit of the movement, as she sees it, relates to the concrete occupation of roundabouts and parking lots, which has been symbolically important since the movement’s establishment (Bernard de Raymond and Bordiec 2020). At the HQ, most members aim to ground their struggle in the locality.

For those that do the tasks of superintendence, the space that is taken care of does not include a place for political meetings. Based in the YVM’s profound contempt for political elites, superintendence is a concrete rejection of the formal ways of doing politics, establishing a horizontal place where people can re-energize and socialize before attending new protest actions, most often initiated by other YVs in the region. The daily sustenance of contention, a responsibility historically placed with women, is equally important for its success as strategizing (Fonow 1998; Stall and Stoecker 1998).

Superintendence gives authority by proxy because the tasks are intrinsically linked with members’ traditional understanding of a gendered hierarchy of work. The policing of members’ and their overconsumption of alcohol is one example of how members use superintendence to exercise influence over the group. The time and effort Elodie put into the HQ became a means to obtain legitimacy, which is not unusual in groups with less cultural and economic capital (Rasera and Renahy 2013). Legitimized by her care for the HQ, she was able to tell others how to behave:

I said, “I’m fine with the fact that you want to make a movement, but you gotta respect the environment, respect the people,” because. . . .in the beginning, another group used to spend the night here, it wasn’t a decent group of YVs, there was alcohol, drugs, loud music and a huge fire. Then, during a meeting I said, “there’s a problem, we’ll be kicked out, it won’t last long. . . .” after all it was us that cut the wood, and they burned it all. After that we took charge, “yeah, we think that you guys should do it,” it was voted through, after that the drunkards didn’t come back y’know?

In her story of “taking charge,” Elodie mobilized imagery of ordering rank and file, disciplining the crowd of younger people that gathered at night, to implement a display of morality to the outside public. Much like Rhina, another long-term white member in her late 60s, who said she must “embody a man’s character in order to be a leader” when discussing standing up for herself and establishing order by suppressing others. They adhered to a traditional leadership style reminiscent of “forceful masculinity” (Stall and Stoecker 1998). Although many deemed that this was the only way to gain authority, participants did not respond well to such efforts, given the horizontal logic to which the group subscribed. My interpretation is that, as a result, Elodie had no other way of obtaining the legitimacy to give orders than through the mundane tasks of superintendence. She was able to establish order as a motherly figure, morally policing members by questioning their decency or banishing those who did not behave according to her vision for the movement. She took on the responsibility for these tasks, thus making visible a hierarchical structure in the Southern group despite its adherence to a horizontal ethos. The “shitwork” of superintendence (Thorne 1975) was not only carried out at the bottom of a gendered hierarchy of labor, by women who were associated with having less authority (West and Zimmerman 1987), but it created the possibility to give direction to the group. Thus, the women were able to successfully pair authority and concern for the HQ (Ispa-Landa and Thomas 2019), moving them away from leadership periphery (Bryan, Pope, and Rankin-Wright 2021).

Legitimacy to conduct the traditionally masculine leading tasks is not necessarily something that is granted or withdrawn because of one’s gender (Worthen 2015), but the gendered leading task of superintendence shows that it can be earned through acts of feminized labor. Elodie interrupted the gendered order by reconstructing leading tasks which were gender-marked and had to account for this by referring to her maintenance work (West and Zimmerman 1987). The ordering is contested but accepted because the work that Elodie does at the HQ is deemed to accord with the appropriate division of labor.

The women view the work as mundane, while being convinced that leadership is something bad, naming themselves “the maid” or “the governess.” A muted resistance to superintendence also became evident in interviews with other participants, especially among members endowed with political and cultural capital. Cathy, a white woman in her 70s and a former member with experience from political parties, said that the efforts “hardly existed.” It shows that activism directed toward the local, private sphere (Stall and Stoecker 1998) was less valued by a share of the participants—paradoxically so, given that a majority of members adhered to an understanding that the establishment of the movement was a rejection of traditional political organization.

The importance of superintendence became apparent to all when the women left the group. By the end of 2021, activity stopped, and the group died out. There is little evidence that leaderless groups can be maintained over longer time periods (Rucht 2012). In the case of the Southern group, this striking parallel indicates that superintending—grounding activism in the local through women’s work of maintaining activist space—ensured the group’s existence by upholding and mobilizing support among members.

Attentive Listening

Attentive listening is a leading task that entails paying attention to, recognizing and validating group members’ experiences. The task aims to create trust, ensure consensus, and maintain group cohesion, and was primarily used in meeting settings in the movement’s later stages, in contrast to caring management, which was more salient in the initial stages of mass mobilization. Observing members turning toward certain individuals to feel listened to, uncovers that attentive listening is a gendered leading task: women are viewed as consensus-seeking listeners, more prone to uphold work that was an essential part of horizontal organizing in the two groups despite their differing ideological underpinnings.

In the Southern group, members were concerned about the validation and empowerment of first-time participants. Former Southern member, Josie, explains: “we understood after a while that not everyone dared to speak up.” It’s like they didn’t feel legitimate. We spent time making them feel comfortable about talking, encouraging them. Josie, referring to her job as a high school teacher, regarded the task of uplifting people as important, because in the Southern group, people were more fearful of proposing ideas in meetings.

Through professional training in her job as a public sector social worker, long-term Northern member Julie told me that she learned how to implement the technique of “nonviolent communication” in meetings. This means to establish group trust and confidence and to “give people time to reformulate and unfold their thoughts.” During our conversations, Julie described the implementation of attentive listening:

Previously, a few people—activists, just told us about weekly political developments. It was automatized. . . . .I contribute by making everyone share something about themselves and their experiences, “how do you experience what’s happening?” “how does it make you feel inside?” We’re not just there to vote on different propositions. I try to apply active listening and to reformulate in an empathic way, so that the person feels listened to, it’s major because people like the YVs have never been heard. . . . .we’re not there to say “no, not that” and to invalidate someone’s viewpoint. That’s it, we’re not in reaction, we’re in reflection!

The horizontal focus on listening to others’ experiences within and outside politics and linking political aspects to personal problems, rather than discussing politics more generally, is similar to the women-centered organizing model that concentrates less on immediate action in the public sphere (Stall and Stoecker 1998). When the groups shifted their focus from action strategizing to the cultivation of internal group solidarity, the validation of personal grievances became even more focal and demanded, to reconnect the public sphere of the movement claims and the private sphere of the lives of the participants (Robnett 1996). During times of uncertainty, activists will need to promote more solidarity and person-to-person interaction as material incentives and outside support will dwindle (Baker 1982). In the North, many members told me that they stayed because they felt listened to and had a forum in which they could form friendships and talk about their day-to-day struggles. However, they rarely reflected on the work that was needed to uphold it. It was taken for granted as an inherent part of horizontality. Applying the concept of “gendered leading tasks” allows us to uncover who typically does this work and how it is done, and it shows how attentive listening creates an environment of individual empowerment in a private sphere-like space where members turn to women to establish such “feminine” environments.

However, there is also considerable power inherent to attentive listening. During assemblies in the Northern group, I observed that members with less political experience would voice their opinions and make suggestions that would be completely ignored. When discussing this dynamic, members Colin and Thomas, white men in their mid-30s, maintained:

Speaking of benevolence, or of nonviolent communication . . . .it has this sort of duality. When discussions go their way, it’s fine, but when it rubs them the wrong way, then the violence goes the other way, without them being aware of it.

Thus, attentive listening sets a premise for what can be expressed. The premise would most often go uncommented during meetings because those who enacted it were not recognized as leaders.

The use of gendered leading tasks gives light to the unintended consequences in the construction of this space. Creating a space for others often comes at the expense of one’s own engagement. An example is given by Josie, who left the Southern group in 2019 because of burnout when she explains:

We spent so much time calming people down, tidying up their mess, like in a kindergarten, people fight over banalities, insult each other . . . .problems that have nothing to do with the movement—it’s like doing HR, we should not be bothered.

The care work integrated into the task is only recognized by Josie herself as kindergarten or HR work. Northern group member Julie, when discussing the facilitation of meetings, tells me she feels “invisible. I give myself this role, I don’t know why I do it, but it is not me who is important, but the Yellow Vests.” She wants to pass unnoticed, echoing a similar process of men becoming leaders, while women fade into the background, as “nonpersons” (Thorne 1975). Within the horizontal structure of the groups, self-effacement is put forward as a virtue.

The Gendered Expectations within Horizontality

Previous research on gender and social movements shows that gender structures produce expectations of which actors should do what tasks in what ways (Robnett 1996; Stall and Stoecker 1998). By establishing the concept of gendered leading tasks, this article shows the critical work that horizontally organized movements, less formalized and supposedly structureless, demand and expect from women. The application of the concept has resulted in the inductive construction of three new types of gendered leading tasks found in the YVM: Caring management comprises care work when organizing the group, giving directives by applying an easygoing discourse without demands. It is found in the Northern group, where the women use professional competence gained from community organizing, which is more accepted because of the group’s familiarity with political organizing. Superintendence relates to caregiving in the material space, central to the Southern group, whose HQ is where it is constructed and maintained. Concern for respectability legitimizes the establishment of rules in the camp, abolishing traditional political organizing. Attentive listening centers on the format of meetings and assemblies, accentuating the importance of acknowledging individuals and their personal stories of hardship. It minimizes one’s own role to that of a listener, but it comes with power to choose whom to listen to. Across all tasks, I find that members expect women to behave according to gendered stereotypes of nurture and care, perceived as innate practices that correspond with their idealization of what horizontality should be. Participants’ strong belief in horizontality, a flat egalitarian structure with no leadership, creates a smokescreen that masks the leadership work demanded by women to uphold this environment because of their perceived feminine qualities.

The three tasks, analytically constructed, paradoxically confirm that leadership can be “structurally grounded in the vertical divide” (Acker 1990; Rucht 2012, 101): the YVM “chops off the heads” of traditional leading figures perceived to be at the top of hierarchy, while in practice, leadership in the YVM exists at the bottom of a traditional gendered hierarchy of labor. Thus, it may seem that women’s leadership is placed “at the periphery” (Pape 2020), because it consists of what many consider as “shitwork” (Thorne 1975), and masked by those who do it; but the tasks are enacted at the center of the informal organization, shown in their ability to steer the groups forward through managerial control, establishment of camp rules, or attentiveness.

Scholarship on social movement leadership states that movements with different ideological underpinnings demand different types of leadership (Rucht 2012). The two groups under study have different political worldviews, due to the differing political capital of their participants: the Northern group adheres to more formalized ways of organizing, whose “feminine” qualities they believe will counter the negatively viewed traditional “masculine” ways of doing politics. The Southern group refuses the political organization more categorically due to their disdain for the political system and their distance from formal politics. Following Rucht (2012), the groups should demand different types of leading tasks. However, attentive listening is practiced in both groups, despite differing in their political ideology and their ways of organizing. Gendered leading tasks can be considered salient for studies on leadership outside the YVM case.

The difference in gendered leading tasks, according to context in the YVM, supports and expands Earl’s (2007) argument that leadership in social movements is a fleeting concept and must be adapted and concretized as leading tasks that are shaped by context and time. However, despite the apparent differences between the two groups and the leading tasks demanded, they share a common belief in horizontality, and with it comes gendered expectations of who should do which tasks and how they should be done, in addition to the burden of masking the leadership work to avoid sanctions. The expanded concept of gendered leading tasks allows for an analysis of this leadership work. The application of the concept reveals that leadership work comes with unintended consequences, where creating space for others comes at the cost of one’s own participation. Given the findings from both groups, I argue that the assumption that horizontality is an egalitarian form of organizing (Maeckelbergh 2011) needs to be revised. The study shows that horizontality demands specific gendered leading tasks that are more often expected to be done, and permitted to be done, by women, because femininity is both understood as lack of authority and capability of maintaining egalitarian, horizontal spaces.

Conclusion

The YVM holds the belief that leadership tasks should rotate and be performed by different members at different times in order to uphold a consensus-driven flat structure, confirming similar findings from previous research on horizontal movements (Felicetti and Della Porta 2018; Maeckelbergh 2011; Rucht 2012). Drawing on Freeman (2013 [1972]), who argues that the rotation of tasks seldom occurs in “structureless groups,” this study goes under the smokescreen of horizontality to analyze what work is demanded to uphold this principle of equality in practice (Maeckelbergh 2011). My intention is not to underplay the potential concentration of power within political groups, stated by Freeman (2013 [1972]), but to emphasize the gendered practices that can emerge in spaces where the idealization of horizontality is coupled with an understanding of leaders as masculine, authoritarian figures.

The conceptualization of gendered leading tasks—viewing critical tasks as enacted by people who are embedded in the hierarchies that already exist in society and subjected to continuous gendered assessments—brings with it a need to revise the concept of horizontality in itself: I argue that horizontal movements are far from leaderless, and as far as they contain structures that are put in place to secure equality and consensus, they are highly gendered, as participants will be more prone to expect feminized, less-threatening ways of doing critical organizing work. Women leaders are then not “moved to the periphery” (Bryan, Pope, and Rankin-Wright 2021) but act at the center of the groups without any leadership recognition, where, according to a traditional, binary view of gender, they are expected to fulfill certain tasks. These expectations are, however, seldom explicitly expressed. Thus, activists in both movements and other organizations should be more aware of the work that goes into upholding a horizontal, supposedly structureless, and nonhierarchical structure, and that horizontal organizing could entail traditional, often binary, hierarchical expectations that women do the tasks of caring management, attentive listening, and superintendence. Activists must consider how members explicitly and implicitly express cultural beliefs about leaders’ identities (Hurwitz 2019, 172).

This article contributes to the discussion on how organizations produce gender and shows how possible changes to gender inequality in organizations can take place (Acker 1990). The underlying work that comes with the attempts of maintaining horizontality is an unintended consequence found underneath the smokescreen of “structurelessness” (Freeman 2013 [1972]), although it is well known that the work of sustaining relationships is intrinsic to grassroots activist groups (Blee 2012). The importance of attentive listening, a “third shift” (Hochschild 1997) in organizational work, is shown in all participants’ descriptions of the internal functioning of the groups, where members must “see and listen” to one another.

Feminist scholars (Barnett 1993; Robnett 1996; Stall and Stoecker 1998) have shown us how gender constructs exclude women from top leadership, which in turn help create new “women-centered” ways of organizing at grassroots level (Payne 1990). The YVM’s ways of organizing resemble these “communal and participatory organizations” (Barnett 1995). But the study points to a friction between the refusal to accept leaders and a horizontal demand for a figure that organizes the group, recognizes each member, and maintains activist spaces. The groups’ contempt for leaders causes distress for those who try to sustain and push the movement forward. When going beyond discourse into considering what participants do, it becomes clear that the maintenance of a horizontal group comes with amounts of work that are not accounted for. The work is obscured because it is seen as a part of what women are not what women do (West and Zimmerman 1987). This lack of recognition masks the care work of “the third shift” (Hochschild 1997) demanded by the horizontal way of organizing.

The masking of leadership is done both explicitly—by members placing themselves outside the center of attention as listeners—and seemingly implicitly by their stories of battling ambivalent feelings of guilt in taking up too much space or suffering from burnout because of their efforts. The workload becomes too great for many to bear, causing physical and psychological distress and resulting in many exiting the movement. The search to undo a gendered organization by rejecting forceful, masculine leaders does not take into consideration the burden of a horizontal “third shift” on women, nor the considerable work of masking leadership, convincing themselves and others that they are not doing important leadership work and thus upholding the smokescreen of horizontality. This study documents how women can be disadvantaged by this mode of organization. The ultimate consequence can be continuing unequal gender participation and representation in social movements.

Today, many movements adhere explicitly to “structureless,” horizontal ways of organizing that open opportunities for previously marginalized groups to partake in leadership (Hurwitz 2019). I suggest that future research apply the concept of gendered leading tasks in a review of recent scholarship on the rotation of leadership and organizing in horizontal or leaderless movements such as the Indignados, Nuit Debout, or the Alterglobalization movement. In line with Hurwitz (2019), this study points out that these egalitarian, prefigurative contexts are highly gendered.