Women Doing Leadership

Abstract

Although women in the United States make up about half of the workforce, only 14.6% of executive officer positions in the Fortune 500 and 16.9% of Fortune 500 board of director seats in 2013 were held by women, numbers that have remained flat for the past decade. Decades after the so-called “feminist revolution,” women are still struggling to be seen as leaders within organizations even though many have put in place hiring and recruitment policies to help eliminate this problem. Our study examines this disparity by observing how leadership emerges and is negotiated in discourse among male and female participants in decision-making groups in a masculine organizational culture. First, it identifies whether female participants randomly assigned to mixed-gender groups emerge as leaders. Second, it analyzes the discourse of those competing for leadership positions in mixed groups to identify the effects of leadership style on leader attribution by others. Of the 22 mixed-gender groups (N = 110) that took part in our study, no woman emerged as the unanimously chosen leader, even though women were identified as leaders by transcript coders. This article uses a case study approach to analyze leadership emergence in two mixed groups in which women were recognized by some members as demonstrating leadership. It then looks at a third case that demonstrates how some discourse behaviors that have been recognized as leadership may not be viewed as such in a masculine organizational culture. Study results illustrate how organizational culture can define accepted ways of “doing” leadership and affect who is and who is not recognized as a leader, particularly in terms of gender.