Constructing Women’s Leadership Representation in the UK Press During a Time of Financial Crisis: Gender capitals and dialectical tensions

Introduction

Leadership is predominantly a masculinized role occupied by men (Ely, Ibarra, & Kolb, 2011; Fletcher, 2004; Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010). Although we witness growing numbers of women in senior positions, and the introduction of quota systems in several European countries to generate movement towards gender parity at board level, gender gaps in the labour market across the world persist. Women remain significantly less likely to achieve senior management positions, and despite the enactment of equal pay legislation women earn 15% less than men in OECD countries (OECD, 2016). Simultaneously we observe in the media how women have been positioned as an ethical alternative to styles of masculinist leadership that were deemed to lead to the global financial crisis (GFC).

Research that examines gendered leadership has focused largely within the organization, to examine organizational structures, practices, systems and processes that (re)produce a male model of leadership. Studies of glass ceilings (Powell & Butterfield, 1994, Powell, Butterfield, & Parent, 2002), glass cliffs (Ryan & Haslam, 2005, 2007) and firewalls (Bendl & Schmidt, 2010) reveal a gendered organizational landscape that women must negotiate to advance into leadership roles. The emphasis on the internal organization reveals how gender operates to maintain leadership as a male domain, for example through limited action to recruit women onto boards (Klettner, Clarke, & Boersma, 2016; Sealy, Doldor, & Vinnicombe, 2016). A well-documented reason for the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles is the resilience of gendered assumptions and the constructions of binaries that permeate organizations and shape understandings of who can and should be leaders (Ibarra, Ely, & Kolb, 2013; Kelan, 2010; Mavin & Grandy, 2012). Less is known, however, about the dynamics of the relationship between broader socio-cultural assumptions that circulate through popular culture and women’s progress or lack of it as leaders. In this article we look beyond the boundaries of rational-legal organization structures to examine this relationship to ask how women are constructed as leaders in the media and discuss what insight this can offer about the positioning of women as leaders.

While we recognize from popular culture that women leaders are increasingly more present in all forms of media, we have limited understanding of how and where progress is being made, including the extent to which women are recognized and identified as leaders. Research that has explored how the media informs organizational life recognizes ‘a reciprocal relationship’ where media constructions of leaders and leadership influence how individuals make sense of their roles in the workplace (Mavin, Bryans, & Cunningham, 2010, p. 556). The wider research puzzle relates to how the media constructs the representation of women leaders (Elliott, Stead, Mavin, & Williams 2016). The media represents and shapes the actual behaviour of people, not least in workplaces (Czarniawska & Rhodes, 2006) so is critical in influencing how individuals, and in turn organizations, business networks and communities make sense of and give sense to (Hellgren et al., 2002) women as leaders. Pullen and Taksa (2016), for example, illustrate how nicknames used to describe women (e.g. the Iron Lady, ascribed by the UK media to the first female British prime minister) become more widely disseminated across cultures and countries, so perpetuating ‘negative-gendered media constructions of women leaders’ (Elliott et al., 2016, p. 9).

The media offers a means through which to examine the relationship between socio-cultural assumptions and the position of women in leadership roles. To advance understandings of the socio-cultural assumptions sustaining the gendering of leadership, in this article we turn our gaze to the social phenomenon of the popular press to critically analyse how women’s leadership is represented in a selection of the UK business press during the GFC of 2008–2012. We situate our study in this context as a period when leadership was under scrutiny and women were being hailed as offering an alternative, more ethical approach.

We add to debates in the gender and leadership literature that highlight the dominance of binaries in constructions of leadership and the effects of those binaries on the identification of women as leaders (Ibarra et al., 2013; Kelan, 2013; Mavin & Grandy, 2012, 2016; Muhr, 2011). Drawing attention to the complexity of gendered power relations and how women may be simultaneously marginalized while being afforded gender capital, encourages examinations that move away from dualisms. A focus on the complexity of gendered power relations presents the opportunity to examine how power relations work through understandings of leadership as a dialectic process (Collinson, 2005, 2014; Fairhurst & Connaughton, 2014), a process which recognizes ‘how relationships emerge from the interplay of oppositional pairs’ (Putnam, 2015, p. 707). Adopting a relational dialectical perspective draws on Hegelian dialectics that alert us to dynamic struggles between opposite poles (Ford & Ford, 1994). Unlike binary understandings of gender which emphasize the oppositional, attention to the dialectics of the leadership construction process focuses our attention on how alternative perspectives interconnect in the production of leadership representations.

Our study is unique in that, through an examination of a sample of the media during a time of crisis, we interrogate how women’s leadership representation is constructed, highlighting three sets of gendered leadership dialectics. Employing Bourdieu’s ideas of capital, habitus and field enables us to examine these dialectics in depth with reference to contemporary media text, including the visual representations of women leaders. This analysis reveals the complexity and dialectical nature of the constructions of women as leaders and contributes specifically to research on gendered leadership in two principal ways. First, we extend Ross-Smith and Huppatz’s (2010) understanding of gender capital by illuminating three dialectics that demonstrate how gender capital attributed to women leaders is promoted yet subject to constraint and resistance. Second, we enrich understandings of women’s leadership as disruptive (Mavin et al., 2010; Stead & Elliott, 2013) by illustrating how dialectical constructions of women’s leadership in the popular press subject women’s leadership to a disruptive leadership habitus (Őzbilgin & Tatli, 2005, p. 866). This theorization has important practical implications for organization studies. Constructing women’s media representation as a dialectical process associated with different forms of gender capital reveals both pockets of resilience and change in how women are viewed as leaders. This has value in enabling organizations to understand the extent to which they develop a leadership discourse that can aid or hinder women’s advancement into leadership roles.

The Research Context

The period of our study corresponds with a time of global financial crisis, where ‘gender inequalities in the governance of the financial architecture’ (Walby, 2009, p. 3) are regarded as contributing to the cause of the crisis. Women, regarded as predominantly absent in this sector during this period, became positioned by politicians and commentators, and in media reports, as the antidote to the men in grey suits who led economies to the GFC. Analyses of the crisis’s antecedents attribute its causes to styles of leadership characterized by hubris (Coleman & Pinder, 2010; Weitzner & Darroch, 2009), greed (Hargie, Stapleton, & Tourish, 2010; Liu, 2015; Tett, 2009) and the symbolic violence of neo-liberal leadership in the global banking sector (Kerr & Robinson, 2012).

To counteract these leadership behaviours and styles, women’s leadership was characterized as risk averse, and presented as a steady pair of hands needed to arrest the rocking of the financial boat. Iceland, for example, has been described as the world’s ‘credit crunch lab’ with women, including the Icelandic Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, being positioned as an antidote to the ‘young men in black suits’ blamed for Iceland’s near economic collapse in 2008 (Guardian, 5 July 2011). Christine Lagarde, appointed as managing director of the IMF following Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s resignation, has been quoted as saying that if only it had been Lehman Sisters, there wouldn’t have been a crisis (Guardian, 9 February 2012). In the UK, the Davies report (2011) has garnered press attention where it represents a renewed focus and governmental interest in increasing women’s representation on UK boards (Guardian, 2012). While this might suggest a shift towards more positive representation of women leaders in general, Ibarra, Gratton and Maznevski in a letter to the Financial Times (10 March 2012) question the speculation ‘that the meltdown might have been averted had more women been running the business world’. They articulate a concern regarding claims that suggest women’s leadership is necessarily ‘inherently more risk-averse or cautious or prudent than men’, stating that such claims have no empirical foundation.

The GFC presents an interesting empirical context for an examination of the gendered nature of leadership as during this time women’s leadership was presented as an antidote to the male-dominated crisis (Liu, 2015). On the one hand the promotion of women’s leadership through media outlets suggests a reversal of masculine domination of the leadership sphere. On the other hand, feminist research on the forms of embodied cultural capital available to women in general (Huppatz, 2009; Skeggs, 1997), in senior roles specifically (Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010) and the gendered nature of leadership (Billing & Alvesson, 2000; Calás & Smircich, 1991; Fletcher, 2004; Mavin, 2008; Mavin & Grandy, 2016; Stead & Elliott, 2013) point to persistent gender inequality at senior organizational levels and the disruptiveness of women’s bodies when occupying leadership positions. Suspicions regarding the social acceptability of women in leadership roles is supported by statistics that illustrate minimal improvements in women’s representation on the boards of directors of FTSE 100 companies, the stubbornly low number of women CEOs (Sealy et al., 2016), a retreat towards heroic leadership models (Liu, 2015) and ‘a restoration of the traditional elite’ (Kerr & Robinson, 2012, p. 258).

We propose that questions regarding how leadership representations are constructed during the GFC provide a pertinent context for examining the resilience of gender binaries in organizations. Situating women’s leadership as a risk-averse alternative to men’s leadership ostensibly creates an opening for women leaders who are positioned as performing a more feminized form of leadership. We assert that an empirical focus on the business media is warranted due to the media’s powerful role in the promotion or otherwise of gender equality; media representations of women have great impact on how women are viewed and view themselves (Coleman, 2008; Elliott et al., 2016; Kelan, 2013; Liu, Cutcher, & Grant, 2015). Rhodes and Parker (2008) argue that popular culture, including printed media, can simultaneously represent different forms of working life while providing a creative response to, or informing, its conduct. Tienari, Holgersson, Meriläinen and Höök (2009) observe the media’s power to promote specific versions of social reality at the expense of others. Educational researchers working in the tradition of public pedagogy recognize the ‘educational force’ (Sandlin, O’Malley, & Burdick, 2011, p. 343) of the media in processes of ‘social domination’ (p. 343). We argue that the social position of women’s leadership is partly influenced by the media (Fairclough, 1995; Mavin & Grandy, 2012; Rhodes & Parker, 2008; Tienari et al., 2009; van Dijk, 1998). By examining how women’s leadership is represented in media outputs we can discern the different forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1984; Huppatz, 2009; Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010) allocated to women in the leadership field and how they are attributed. Situating our study within the context of the GFC, we are interested in exploring how the media portrayal of women’s leadership intersects with understandings about leadership as a gendered field of activity where different forms of capital come into play. Understanding how different forms of capital are mobilized can help to gain insight into socio-cultural assumptions that inform the ways in which women’s leadership is positioned.

Leadership as a Gendered Activity

Research on women’s leadership has tended to focus on the differences between men and women leaders (Eagly & Johansen-Schmidt, 2001; Kanter, 1977; Ryan & Haslam, 2009), including studies of leadership styles (Alimo-Metcalfe, 2010; Eagly & Johnson, 1990; Hegelsen, 1995; Rosener, 1990) and behaviours (Ryan & Haslam, 2007; Ryan, Haslam, Hersby, & Bongiorno, 2011). The focus on styles and behaviours reinforces the conceptualization of gender as something that individuals have, or are, rather than what they do (Liu et al., 2015) leading to the perpetuation of gender binaries (Askehave & Zethsen, 2014) that reify existing power relations (Lämsä & Sintonen, 2001; Stead & Elliott, 2009). Post-heroic leadership models heralded new ways of performing leadership deemed to be more feminine, but they too are underpinned by a difference perspective that continues to stereotype women leaders (Billing & Alvesson, 2000; Fletcher, 2004). While men leaders who perform femininity and enact qualities associated with transformational leadership are rewarded, women’s association with feminine behaviours renders them invisible as leaders (Lewis & Simpson, 2010; Stead, 2013).

Understanding leadership as a gendered activity therefore draws attention to how women and men are positioned as leaders by socio-cultural assumptions and how they position themselves in response to such assumptions. Leadership and management are recognized as incongruent with femininity, resulting in the understanding of leadership as masculinized (Billing & Alvesson, 2000; Muhr, 2011). There is an intricate interplay between women’s formal positioning as leaders and the complexity of their agency due to their embodied status as women in traditionally masculine roles. Women leaders are recognized as needing to negotiate their leadership legitimacy from a boundary position (Lewis & Simpson, 2010; Mavin & Grandy, 2016).

Recognizing that leadership is shaped by fundamental organizing practices such as gender goes some way to explain the persistence of understanding leadership issues in binary terms (Collinson, 2005). Reducing complex interactions into binary oppositions, including male/female, masculine/feminine, reifies social relationships into concrete ‘ontological representations of reality’ (Collinson, 2005, p. 1421), as women leaders may hold formal power yet still be viewed as ‘out of place’ (Mavin & Grandy, 2016, p. 1096). As Mantale, Ishiguro and McCann (2014) observe in a study of working women’s representation in Japanese Manga, popular culture plays a role in processes of ontological commitment that reproduce gender inequality in the workplace. Muhr (2011) notes the difficulty when interrogating women’s leadership of escaping ‘the essentialism underlying binary thinking’, and suggests the need to think ‘in terms of multiplicity’ (p. 349).

To understand in finer detail the gendering of women’s leadership in media outputs and to move beyond binary thinking to attend to the multiplicity of representations of women leaders, we suggest that feminist interpretations of Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘embodied cultural capital’, habitus and ‘field’ provide an interpretive lens that draws attention to how gender becomes mobilized in the broader leadership context, and what forms of capital women’s leadership accrues. As Ȍzbilgin and Tatli (2005, p. 855) observe, Bourdieusian concepts have the potential to advance multilevel and relational research practice, and feminist scholars propose that Bourdieu’s concepts present ‘a powerfully elaborate conceptual framework for understanding the role of gender in the social relations of modern, capitalist society’ (McCall, 1992, p. 382). Media scholars have also drawn on Bourdieu’s concepts in different ways, including to position the media as a form of ‘meta capital’ (Couldry, 2003), and to understand how capital is ‘constructed for the audience of women’s magazines by way of representations, orientations and resources for action’ (Törrönen & Simonen, 2015, p. 1140).

Capital, habitus and field are three of Bourdieu’s principal concepts. In this article we regard leadership as situated in a field of social relations within which individuals seek to acquire capital (Everett, 2002). The gendered nature of leadership, including its representation in the wider social field, positions men as the dominant players who shape the field of play (Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010). Women leaders who have entered the leadership field attract media attention and this research seeks to examine the forms of capital it attributes to women. Bourdieu’s concept of embodied cultural capital has been developed by feminist scholars through the concept of gender capital (Lovell, 2000; McCall, 1992; Skeggs, 1997). Further fine-tuning of gender capital (Huppatz, 2009; McNay, 2000; Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010) proposes femaleness and femininity as forms of embodied cultural capital as a means to recognize the active role played by individual agents in identity construction (McNay, 2000). The habitus concept is Bourdieu’s way of theorizing how the self is socially produced and ‘how social relations become constituted within the self’, cutting across ‘mind/body splits’ (Lawler, 2004, p. 111). In other words, habitus describes how we position ourselves, how we are positioned and how others position us. The relational nature of the habitus presents a means through which to examine how differences and inequalities can circulate culturally (Lawler, 2004). Viewed through a gendered lens, the habitus provides us with a tool to confront and problematize implicit assumptions about the gendered ‘division of labour between the genders’ (Krais, 2006, p. 121) including which bodies are perceived to be most suited to perform leadership according to representations in the media.

Our paper seeks to contribute to the gender and leadership literature by illustrating how in relation to the leadership field women’s gender capital is a double-edged sword that reminds us about the embodied nature of this form of capital. Femaleness and femininity are embedded within dialectical constructions of women’s leadership, operating in a tense relationship which subjects women’s leadership to a disruptive leadership habitus. Our research question is: How does the media portray women’s leadership during the GFC and what can that tell us about how women are positioned as leaders?

Research Design

To investigate our research question we carried out a multimodal discourse analysis. Multimodal discourse analysis recognizes that the meaning of texts, such as newspaper reports that contain text and images, is realized through more than one semiotic mode (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). We collected the data from the business pages of three UK newspapers, the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Mail, during the period 1 January 2009 to 31 October 2012 (see Table 1) to undertake a snapshot in time of the media’s representation of women’s leadership.

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Table 1.

Articles and images.

	Daily Mail	Guardian	The Times	Mirror
Articles	27	32	39	0
Photos	22	9	24	0
Other		1 cartoon	1 video	0

We also conducted a search of articles in the Mirror for examples of women’s business leadership during this time period, but this search yielded no results. These newspapers were chosen because they are national newspapers that are widely read, have an online presence, and so their readership is not confined to a specialist audience. They also act as representatives of an ideological range (Mendes, 2012) and differences in political and target audiences. ¹ Texts and images were collected online using the newspapers’ own search engines and we used a range of different search terms including women leaders, women and leadership, female leaders, and female leadership. In contrast to studies that engage search engines such as Lexus Nexis to identify media text and images, we adopted the innovative approach of using the newspapers’ own search engines. In keeping with our intention to explore how women’s leadership is constructed by the media, the use of the newspapers’ own search engines was a deliberate strategy as our intention was to seek out their categorization of women’s leadership. According to feminist media studies, how leaders are constructed in the media will impact audiences (Ange, 1996; Ang & Hermes, 1996; Kelan, 2013) and influence women’s ‘acceptance’ (Mavin & Williams, 2015, p. 347) as leaders. Aspiring women leaders curious to learn more about women’s leadership through the media are unlikely to use search engines such as Lexus Nexis, so this also influenced our decision to use the newspapers’ own search engines. Our search resulted in a total of 98 articles and 57 images in relation to women leaders and women’s leadership (see Table 1).

Understanding the construction of women’s leadership representation during a time of crisis is important as the media reflects dominant social views of women (Mavin & Williams, 2015; Tuchman, 1978) and sheds ‘light on how gender is constructed, performed, referenced and indexed’ (Angouri, 2011, p. 387). Our discursive analytic framework is informed by examinations of gender and management in the media (Tienari et al., 2009) and media, gender and communications analysis (Carter & Steiner, 2003), but additionally recognizes the power of visual images to enact gendered bodily performance of leaders (Liu et al., 2015; Sinclair, 2012). We understand discourse in a relational way, ‘a focus on relations between linguistic/semiotic elements of the social and other (including material elements)’, as a means to gain insight into how discourse reflects wider social relations (Fairclough, 2005, p. 916). Discourse is therefore a social practice (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 258); socially constitutive in that it may both reproduce and transform social norms and socially conditioned in that it is shaped by the situation and by the social and cultural context. Our focus in this study is the construction of the social phenomenon of women’s leadership; specifically our concern is to gain insight into how the media through text and images shapes and influences women’s leadership representation. Different media, such as newspapers, construct representations of the social through articles and visual imagery. These are, in turn, interpreted by different audiences including individuals and more broadly organizations within particular socio-cultural frames or contexts such as a period of financial crisis. Here we are interested in how different forms of gender capital are attributed to women in the leadership field.

Tienari et al. (2009, p. 506) point out the difficulties of conducting analyses simultaneously at three levels of ‘text (micro-level textual elements), discursive practice (the production and interpretation of texts) and social practice (the situational and institutional context)’ as advocated by Fairclough (1995) when working with small pieces of text. We adopt their suggestion of following organization scholars who revert to less in-depth analyses than linguists when undertaking critical discourse analysis (Tienari et al., 2009, p. 507). Our analysis followed three stages outlined below and focused on argumentation in text and composition of visual imagery, summarized in Table 2. This focus enables us to explore how the media draw on social norms and stereotypes to interact with the audience to construct women as leaders. Following guidance by Tienari et al. (2009), both researchers carried out stages 1 and 2, the textual and visual analyses, independently. The researchers then met, at stage 3, to compare their independent interpretations, and to compare similarities and differences in the different researchers’ interpretations.

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Table 2.

A framework for studying the representation of women leaders in the press.

Research Stage	Focus	Method	Outcome
Data Collection	UK recession following financial crisis to interrogate the construction of the representation of women leaders 2009–2012Site: UK newspapers’ business pages The Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, Mirror	Criteria:National UK non-specialist newspapers with business pages. Online presence to enable searches.Online search through newspaper search engines.Search terms: women leaders, women and leadership, female leaders, female leadership	Articles and any accompanying images
Overall approach to data analysis	A process for researchers to explore the construction of representation	Tienari et al. (2009) 1. Researchers independently conduct textual and visual analyses2. Researchers meet to compare their interpretations3. Researchers identify similarities and differences	Process to guide the identification of recurring representations using textual and visual analysis methods
Data analysis, textual and visual analysis	To explore the construction of the representation of women leaders in text and images of 3 UK newspapers	Stage 1: Analysis of text:Content analysis examining argumentation (drawing on Hellgren et al., 2002)1. What are the arguments, viewpoints and interests to which articles lay claim? What is the initial argument presented? Are there differing or competing arguments as the article progresses?2. How do the articles use text to convince the audience of these arguments, viewpoints and interests? Including objectivity/subjectivity of language, coverage of particular arguments, whose voices are heard?Stage 2: Analysis of images:Framework drawing on visual semiotic techniques (Kress & Van Leuwen, 2006) and with reference to gendered nature of imagery (Goffman, 1979)1. Representational meaning; how the image has been constructed2. Modality; credibility of the image3. Composition; how elements are arranged4. Interactive meaning; relationship of image with the viewer. Stage 3: Compare and contrast analyses: 1. What representations of women’s leadership does the content analysis of the text produce?2. What representations of women’s leadership does the visual analysis reveal?3. How do the visual and textual analyses compare?	An innovative analytic tool that can be applied to interrogate both visual and verbal imageryIdentification of recurring representations. Illustrates a dialectical relationship in women’s leadership representationThree sets of dialectics identified:• women as leaders and women as feminine;• women as credible leaders and women as lacking in credibility;• women as victims and women as their own worst enemies

Stage 3

Third, we compared and contrasted text of articles and accompanying images. Liu et al. (2015) observe how visual imagery and text together provide a framing that can ‘heighten’ responses to messages. In this stage we focused on the extent to which text and imagery were congruent and were in tension, reinforced, negated or contradicted each other. Important in understanding how text and imagery work together as an entity to capture the readers’ attention (Liu et al., 2015), this stage helped to identify convergences and divergences in constructions of women leaders. During this stage we observed how textual argumentation for women’s suitability for leadership was undermined by imagery that focused on the glamour of women’s appearance or reaffirmed by composition of images that showed women in business attire. Table 3 provides an illustration of a textual and visual analysis following the three-stage process.

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Table 3.

Sample textual and visual analysis.

Article with accompanying image: ‘35 women under 35: They came, saw and conquered’ (The Times, 8 July 2012)
Text analysis	Visual analysis	Representations from the textual analysis	Representations from the visual analysis	Comparison of visual and textual analyses
This article features the ‘35 women under 35’ list published annually by Management Today magazine.Viewpoints: While the headline of the article suggests that the emphasis is on the women as leaders, it also points to a particular viewpoint that women are coming to the UK from abroad to take on leading roles. The primary viewpoint in the article text is political, with an initial focus on the issue of migration policy, as illustrated in the first line of the article; ‘If ever there was an advertisement for migration this year’s 35 Women Under 35 from Management Today magazine would be it.’Argumentation : The article goes on to lay claim to an interest in diversity and internationalization by listing the nationalities of the women and stating: ‘Fourteen are from overseas or have a foreign parent’. The argumentation in the article goes on to discuss how the UK government at the time view immigration and then to put forward a business case for the need to attract an international outlook.	The article is accompanied by an image of five of the women from the list.Composition: The composition of the photo positions the women physically close to each other.Modality: Low in modality. The women are dressed in glamorous clothes and jewellery that would be out of place in a workplace or office environment and more in keeping for a formal dinner or evening out.Representation: All are standing and have been arranged in height order, tallest behind and smallest in front.Interactive meaning: Their interaction is primarily with the viewer as they look directly at us through the camera’s lens. The women are therefore photographed collectively but seen as independent and strong individuals.	Women as role modelsWomen as conquering heroesWomen representing diversity and internationalismWomen coming from abroad to take on leadership rolesWomen as exoticWomen as glamorous ‘cover stars’Women’s youth	Women visually positioned as independent, individual, confidentFocus on appearance, glamorous clothes, make-up and jewelleryWomen as exotic, different	The list of 35 women, while seemingly promoting women as leaders, places its initial focus on the argument for internationalization and frames the women’s achievements within this argument. Their leadership status and their success are presented from the fourth paragraph of the article and the women listed.The accompanying image shows the women in glamorous clothes and jewellery. Described as ‘cover stars’, and an ‘advertisement for immigration’ in the accompanying text, the image’s modality, i.e. the congruence between what the viewer sees in the visual image and what she sees in reality, is unsettling. The image is suggestive of windowdressing to draw the reader in to a discussion that promotes migration. The image and text ostensibly ‘celebrate’ these women’s success, but analysis of the image and text reveals the women as subject to an individualzsation and ‘exoticization’ process that positions them as ‘other’ to the male leadership norm.
Use of text to convince: The emphasis on internationalization is further developed by highlighting how only two of those photographed, ‘our five cover stars’, are from the UK. The women are highlighted as glamorous, exotic and youthful (a focus on the under 35s). The main use of the text however is to put forward the business case for internationalization by arguing its value and the (risky) investment of individuals to advance UK business, e.g. ‘UK business would be much less international in its outlook, and less energetic, without the people who have taken a gamble on coming here’. Also use of quotations from formal organizations to demonstrate the importance of taking an international perspective, e.g. ‘Ministers want to reduce net immigration to the “tens of thousands”, but the rules “give the impression that we aren’t open for business”, the City of London corporation says.’Individual women are mentioned from the fourth paragraph onwards where five women (those in the accompanying image), their roles and country of origin are presented with short quotations from each of the women including about making the move and their achievements.Under the heading of rising stars, a short paragraph introducing each of the 35 women is followed by a further list of five women to watch.

This three-stage process resulted in the identification of a set of dialectical constructions which we discuss in the following section.

The Construction of Women’s Leadership Media Representation as a Dialectical Relationship

Comparing the visual and textual analyses of the media’s construction of women’s leadership affirms a prevailing gendered discourse that positions women’s leadership dichotomously, revealing dynamic tension and interplay between seemingly oppositional binaries (Fairhurst, 2001). We identified three sets of dialectics: women as leaders and women as feminine; women as credible leaders and women as lacking in credibility; women as victims and women as their own worst enemies. Analysing and interpreting these dialectical relationships draws attention to the interconnections between seemingly opposite poles (Mumby, 2005) so conforms to the tradition of relational dialectics (Collinson, 2014; Poole & Van de Ven, 1989; Putnam, 2015) which explores how paradox and contradiction (Hargrave & Van de Van, 2016) can advance theory development. Many of the articles and accompanying images we reviewed contained features of each of these dialectics. The Appendix provides illustrations for each dialectic. In this section we explore the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that characterize these dialectics and the forms of gender capital attributed to women leaders that inform this dynamic interplay.

Discussion

Our multimodal discursive analysis of how the media constructs women’s leadership representation during the GFC shows how women’s leadership is positioned within the leadership field. The valorization of women’s leadership as a positive alternative to that practised by men during the GFC ostensibly indicates a recognition of the shortcomings of masculinist heroic leadership. Blame for the financial crisis is placed at the feet of powerful, hubristic male leaders to articulate societal demands for challenges to the forms of leadership they represent. One response is to incorporate leadership into the female body. Women’s leadership becomes visible during this period through appeals for its growth, but is scrutinized and evaluated within dichotomized leadership understandings (Collinson, 2014).

Women’s leadership habitus, that is, how women leaders’ identity is socially produced, becomes a sign of distinction and marked as an alternative to the male leadership habitus. Our analysis reveals a valorization of women’s leadership during the GFC where it is applauded, lauded and present, yet with a continued focus on characteristics that have previously been used to condemn, trivialize and exclude women’s public presence. In identifying three dialectics our analysis surfaces paradoxes (Collinson, 2014) and disturbances in the field of leadership, drawing attention to the dynamic interplay between binary positions and dualities and how they form ‘a unity of dynamic contradictions’ (Ford & Ford, 1994, p. 757). The tensions in the relationship inherent to the dialectics we identify illustrate a growth in women’s leadership visibility, that sits within a field of cultural production that finds it difficult to resist the imposition of gendered binaries in understandings of leadership.

The analysis contributes to the gendered leadership literature by illuminating how femaleness and femininity, as forms of embodied cultural capital, are attributed to women’s leadership (Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010). This illustrates a subtle shift in women’s social positioning as leaders, one which is precariously balanced on a double-edged sword. The attribution of leadership to women in the context of the GFC is based upon their femaleness; this gives them the capital to gain a certain legitimacy to operate within a leadership field that is seeking out difference. Concurrently, judgements about women’s leadership operate within a binary divide that evaluates women’s leadership against normative feminine characteristics and behaviours with implicit comparisons to masculine leadership, which remains leadership’s default habitus (Muhr, 2011). This is demonstrated by the dissonance in text and imagery that simultaneously promotes women as leaders yet evaluates their appeal as women with a focus on appearance. Mavin & Grandy (2016) draw our attention to how gender’s socially constructed nature allows for the possibility of multiple interpretations and perceptions which shift over time. Our analysis has shown that while media constructions of women leaders during the GFC present a greater acceptability of femininity and feminine capital, this is not significant enough to challenge the association of masculinity and masculine capital with leadership and the male body. Feminine capital and leadership remain fixed to women’s bodies, irrespective of feminine leadership’s association with post-heroic leadership to alleviate a time of crisis. Female capital and feminine capital are attributed to women’s leadership forming a dialectic that challenges binary thinking, illustrating how women’s leadership habitus unsettles leader stereotypes (Mavin et al., 2010) and is always already disruptive (Stead & Elliott, 2013). Analysis reveals how capital attributed to women draw women leaders into being positioned as a risk-averse ethical alternative and as embodying, through their femaleness, a visible antidote to the men in grey suits. Within the context of the GFC this oppositional characterization of women to men, while seemingly awarding leadership status to women, nevertheless positions them as usurpers to traditional visions of who inhabits leadership roles. Calls for women’s leadership during the GFC make women leaders highly visible, but the dialectical nature of their representation reveals that men are regarded as the natural inhabitants of the leadership habitus; their representation as leaders therefore is largely invisible whereas women leaders as ‘unnatural’ inhabitants are highly visible (Lewis & Simpson, 2010). This is illustrated by the portrayal of Cynthia Carroll, represented in the press as demonstrating masculine ‘authoritative’ leadership yet simultaneously being labelled in emotional terms, as ‘feisty’, a term that ties women into established gender stereotypes (Mavin et al., 2010). The feminine capital women might accrue as saviours is diminished by their female capital, the capital tied to their biological sex. The advantage attributed to their gender such as a tendency towards risk adversity is also invoked as disadvantageous; if women are risk averse they cannot fulfil the leadership ideal of being a risk-taker because they are not biologically wired to do so. The very attributes used to position women as leaders are invoked to exclude them (Billing & Alvesson, 2000; Fletcher, 2004), so reinforcing binaries that continue to position women as subordinate to men. This dialectical relationship evidenced through our analysis affirms Ross-Smith and Huppatz’s (2010) conclusions regarding the limited use value of feminine and female forms of capital. While female and feminine capital are ‘real and tangible’ (p. 562), women may more easily employ these forms of gender capital tactically (as a means to get things done, for example offering a different risk-averse perspective) rather than strategically (as a means to advance into leadership roles).

Our contribution is to reveal the movement between feminine and female capital and how this plays out dialectically through popular culture. In addition, we identify the significance of how the three dialectics operate together, offering an alternative to feminist media research that focuses on media representations’ dichotomous nature (van Zoonen, 1995, 1998). Adopting a relational form of dialectics alerts us to a ‘unity’ of dynamic struggles (Ford & Ford, 1994) that operate to simultaneously challenge dualistic thinking and reinforce its existence. Feminine capital is employed to position women as possessing appropriate attributes that enable them to enact leadership. Implicit to this positioning is the recognition that by enacting leadership women face distinct barriers in the form of gender stereotyping and gendered organizational processes and practices they must negotiate. Simultaneously, the qualities deemed appropriate for leadership within the context of the GFC are nonetheless contrary to traditionally accepted leadership attributes. This tension, further emphasized through the embodiment of leadership in the female body, destabilizes women’s positioning and marginalizes their credibility as leaders. By not conforming to the male leadership norm, either in the feminine capital they accrue or the female capital they embody, women do not fit in. By not fitting in they are seen as the instrument of their own downfall, their own worst enemies. This can be seen in the portrayal of Erin Callan in the third dialectic. The analysis shows how the dialectics work together to form a discursive pattern framed by a male leadership model that narrates the promise of women leaders, yet the disappointment that they are not men.

Articulating the dialectical dynamics revealed in women leaders’ representation in the media draws attention to differing perspectives that are difficult to resolve. As competing struggles these differing perspectives create, in relation to Hegel’s dialectics, a ‘new synthesis’ (Ford & Ford, 1994, p. 763) that contributes to understandings regarding the relationship between structure and agency; how women are both (re)positioned in the media and also reposition themselves in relation to the media and leadership fields to take account of changes in the forms of capital within the context of the GFC. The articles and images highlight this complex relationship and point to the synthesis brought about by the pressures of competing perspectives by indicating how women both mobilize their rarity value as women in leadership roles to gain representation in the press yet also mobilize their femininity, their ‘womanliness’, as a resource (Stead, 2013, p. 71), for instance by being photographed in glamorous clothes. In doing so however they simultaneously highlight the media’s power to reinforce and to dictate what counts as an appropriate form of symbolic capital, and contribute to the perpetuation of a binary divide that leads to a focus on them as women rather than leaders. This complex interaction points to how shifts in women’s positioning as leaders affects their symbolic capital in the media and leadership fields; on the one hand it affords women symbolic capital and at the same time the extent to which they can employ that capital is compromised by the resilience of the male leadership norm.

Conclusions

The questions we pose in this paper are how are women’s leadership representations constructed in the business pages of three national UK newspapers during the GFC, and what insight this can offer about the positioning of women as leaders. In answering these questions, we contribute to studies of gender and leadership that highlight the dominance of binaries in constructions of leadership and the effects of those binaries on the identification and acceptability of women as leaders (Ibarra et al., 2013; Kelan, 2013; Mavin & Grandy, 2012, 2016; Muhr, 2011).

The identification of three dialectic relationships illustrates a complex relationship between women’s leadership and the media; in communicating a business case for women’s leadership the media gives exposure to it and women leaders make tentative steps towards a greater public presence. Situating our study within the context of the GFC illuminates the extent to which calls for scrutiny on taken-for-granted leadership stereotypes during a time of disruption are sustainable. Our analysis has shown the resilience of masculinist models of leadership in spite of moves towards greater acceptability of the feminine. The positioning of women’s leadership as a corrective to perceived unethical practices of men’s leadership can be viewed largely as a rhetorical device symbolic of understandings of leadership rooted in gendered binaries.

Our key theoretical contribution is to advance research on gendered leadership. We contribute in two principal ways. First, by theorizing media constructions of women leaders as dialectical we contribute specifically to research on gender capital. Extant research demonstrates how female and feminine capital might be attributed to women and how women are agentic in their use of this capital (Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010). Our study extends these understandings by illustrating how forms of gender capital operate dialectically. We witness the media employing feminine capital to promote women as leaders yet leveraging female capital as a constraint. We reveal how the three dialectics work together to form a discursive pattern that is riven with contradiction and remains rooted in gendered assumptions tied to the female body. While women may draw on feminine capital to be identified as leaders they continue to be marginalized through the attribution of female capital. Our contribution draws attention to the relationship between broader socio-cultural assumptions that circulate through popular culture and women’s progress, or lack of it, to leadership positions by showing how gendered capital operates to create the illusion of women’s progression while constraining its advance.

Second, we enrich understandings of the relationship between agency and structure in women’s leadership. Specifically, we add to debates in the gender and leadership literature that show how women’s leadership is disruptive by illustrating how dialectical constructions of women’s leadership in the popular press subject women’s leadership to a disruptive leadership habitus (Őzbilgin & Tatli, 2005, p. 866). Research has shown how women leaders are often regarded or presented as breaking traditional stereotypes (Furst & Reeves, 2008), yet how their difference and challenge to stereotypical assumptions can be disadvantageous (Billing & Alvesson, 2000; Fletcher, 2004; Mavin & Grandy, 2016). Women are identified as disruptive because they are women (Mavin et al., 2010; Stead & Elliott, 2013). Our study extends these debates by showing how media constructions of women leaders are active in positioning women as disruptive, and thereby placing constraints on their agency and on how they are perceived as leaders. Revealing the subjection of women to a disruptive habitus may be valuable in explaining the difficulties women encounter in being identified as leaders and in identifying themselves as leaders (Ely et al., 2011). Tied to this positioning, women remain framed within a discourse that is seen in conflict with the leadership norm. This theorization has practical implications for organization studies. Our study has shown how broader socio-cultural assumptions are leveraged to form constructions of women leaders that are circulated through the media and have popular currency. Revealing the dialectical nature of these constructions may help to explain why women’s progress into leadership roles is painfully slow; while the GFC has seen a symbolic shift that promotes women as potential leaders they are simultaneously constrained by being assessed against a resilient model of leadership tied to masculine attributes and to the male body. This understanding of the dialectical nature of women’s leadership representation in the media can be useful in enabling organizations to consider the textual and visual discourses they employ to promote what it is to be a leader, and to evaluate its impact upon the advancement of women into leadership roles.

In addition, our methodological contribution is to extend the limited repertoire of multimodal analyses to interrogate visual and verbal imagery. Analyses have largely hitherto focused either on text or imagery. The approach we adopt, based on argumentation (Hellgren et al., 2002) and representation (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006) adds to a developing strand of research (Elliott & Robinson, 2012; Liu et al., 2015) that is concerned to understand how visual and verbal imagery combine to draw attention to tensions and contradictions in leadership discourse that may be difficult to tease out through textual or visual analysis alone. We have shown how images serve to reinforce text, how images can also operate to signal inherent values and beliefs that are implied but not made explicit in text, and how images are used to reflect normative standards and views that may offer stark contradiction to accompanying text. Visual imagery therefore is revealed as playing an important role in exposing dissonance between the potential for alternative and positive representations of women leaders and deeply embedded gendered assumptions that play out in popular culture.

Finally, our study signals fruitful avenues for further research. The study has drawn our attention to the resilience of leadership’s gendered embodiment and the prevalence of ageist assumptions in the media regarding women’s leadership. We note a tendency to focus on young women in both text and imagery that merits further investigation in relation to how representations might construct ideas of who are, and who can be, leaders. More broadly, adopting a multimodal discourse analysis approach to textual and visual media representations offers a foundation for studies examining how women’s leadership is represented across multiple media sites and forms. With the rise in use of multimedia platforms by individuals and organizations, this strand of research has significant potential to chart and identify the collective impact and effect on women’s progression to positions of influence in organizations.