(Not) just a girl: Reworking femininity through women’s leadership in Europe

Introduction

In this article I investigate womanhood, femininity and power through the prism of women’s leadership and explore the ‘messiness of gender in its reality’ (McCann, 2017: 17) within a critical femininities framework. Women’s leadership, whether used to designate a numerical mass, a model of leadership, or a social phenomenon, has been pointed to as an indicator of gender equality promotion across institutional spheres. This is evident in the proliferation of seminars, courses, institutes, and resources on the topic over the past two decades (O’Connor, 2010). However, using ‘women’s leadership’ as an equality marker risks creating something of an equality mirage whereby the mere presence of women in leadership positions is equated with substantive representation of the interests of the broader social category (Childs and Krook, 2008: 726). Although perhaps empowering in intent, current popular narratives of women in leadership are unified by a prescriptive instrumentalization of women as agents for productivity in the neoliberal market system. ¹ This is because relational leadership models are considered more appropriate to a digitalized global economy that relies on interdependence and collaboration. These models are based on skills such as nurturing, caring, cooperation, consultation and inclusivity (Chin et al., 2007: 26), skills which are typically ascribed to women. Thus, women become responsible for the care of co-workers which ‘benefits the bottom line’ (see Fletcher, 2002: 3). In this article I present empirical research on the experiences of young woman-identified leaders in European student organizations. It reveals both subversion of, and complicity with, the aforementioned concept of women’s leadership. I discuss the regulative ideal of women’s ‘feminine leadership’ (Due Billing and Alvesson, 2000: 147) as lived by young women who are negotiating the double bind of ‘their sex and their power’ (Coleman, 2003: 328).

I begin with a comparative account of significant trends in the conceptualization of leadership and women’s leadership. I then point to a historic deficit logic in the field of mainstream management literature which sees femininity as complementary to masculinity. I discuss the ‘feminine leadership advantage’ as an instrumentalization of normative femininity and outline the critical femininities perspective adopted in this work. Subsequently, I explore participants’ narratives about becoming leaders, defining women’s leadership, navigating their cultural contexts and embodied experiences, and locating themselves through different femininities. Lastly, I explore the significance of these findings in terms of contributing to work on female femininities (McCann, 2017) and ‘comparing notes on feminine matters’ (Dahl, 2012: 58).

Leadership, women’s leadership and femininity

Over the past 50 years, definitions (see Stogdill, 1974), classifications (Fleishman et al., 1991: 246) and practices of leadership in mainstream management literature have evolved: from authoritarian ‘great man theories’ (Chin, 2004: 3); to behavioural theories (see Fleishman, 1953); to a focus on transformational leadership (Downton, 1973); and more recently to post-transformational and post-charismatic leadership (Parry and Bryman, 2006; Storey, 2004). Broadly speaking these shifts move towards more relational understandings of leadership over time, although the view of leadership as a single-person activity persists (Crevani et al., 2007).

Chronologically parallel to mainstream leadership theory there has been an expansion of research on ‘women’s leadership’ in the fields of psychology, management and organizational theory. This has offered comparative analyses between the leadership of women and men based on psychological and interpersonal determinants of leader efficacy (Butterfield and Grinnell, 1999; Dobbins and Platz, 1986; Powell, 1990). The first research on female leaders in the 1950s was an attempt to ascertain whether women could, in fact, be managers (Bell and Nkomo, 1992). As more women entered management positions, the research of the 1970s and 1980s located them along dimensions of similarity and difference to their male counterparts (Bell and Nkomo, 1992; Butterfield and Grinnell, 1999). These comparisons indicate that leadership has been traditionally codified as masculine, carried in male bodies (Brewer, 2013; Due Billing and Alvesson, 2000; Eagly and Carli, 2003). Collison and Hearn (2000) argue that in this way men are at the same time explicit and implicit in management studies and that this permanent silent presence is indicative of a conflation of men, masculinity, power and authority. From the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s there was a move into meta-analytical reviews and replication of past studies in an attempt to provide definitive statements of difference between women and men (Eagly and Carli, 2003; Powell, 1990). During this time period feminist writing on sameness/difference debates critiqued organizational change approaches which failed to challenge power relations and structures (see Cockburn, 1991; Ely and Meyerson, 2000).

Current post-heroic models emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence and relational skills in leader efficacy (Higgs, 2003; Palmer et al., 2001). This has initiated, since the early 2000s, a debate about a ‘female’ or ‘women’s’ advantage in leadership. This is visible in examples from Anglophone print and digital media (see Williams, 2012; Zenger and Folkman, 2012) based on the argument that women are advantaged by a purported naturally female emotional intelligence and facility for collaboration and nurturing that increases organizational productivity and profit (Butterfield and Grinnell, 1999; Chin et al., 2007; Rowley et al., 2010). Instead, empirical research on the ‘female leadership advantage’ has revealed a complex reality of contextually specific gender-related advantage and disadvantage (Eagly, 2007; Eagly and Carli, 2003; Vecchio, 2002). An operationalization of feminine traits as market-valued competencies unique to women reiterates neatly circumscribed gender roles and patriarchal divisions of labour (Calás and Smircich, 1993; Fletcher, 2002; Fine, 2009) and covertly sustains existing gender regimes (Ely and Rhode, 2010; O’Connor, 2010). The findings presented here trouble the binding of feminine-woman-leader, and illustrate how a critical study of femininity which is attentive to multiplicity can move ‘beyond a simple story of subordination, sexualisation, objectification, and superficial narcissism’ (Dahl, 2012: 62).

Critical femininities and feminism

Women need to ‘lean in’ (Sandberg, 2013), ‘negotiate harder’ (Babcock and Laschever, 2003), conquer the ‘confidence gap’ (Kay and Shipman, 2014), and quell their ‘imposter syndrome’ (Young, 2011). These exhortations repeat tropes from books dating back to the 1970s which are dominated by a pattern of adapting naturally unfit women to corporate patriarchal contexts (Due Billing and Alvesson, 2000: 150). Most recently, the ‘advantage’ narrative transposes a traditionally private sphere of labour of the feminine (Skeggs, 2001: 297) into the public organizational sphere. This influences the relationship between women-identified individuals and the productive organization of capital (Smith, 1990: 121). The production and consumption of these texts contribute to the constitution of femininity as part of the ‘culturally constructed ensemble of attitudes, behaviours and subject positions generally associated with women’ (Scharff, 2013: 59).

I began this research with a feminist perspective in theorizing ‘women’s leadership’, which facilitates direct engagement with issues of power and knowledge through a disruption of the myth of the universal neutral subject (Alvesson and Due Billing, 2009; Coleman, 2003; Hearn and Padavic, 1992). As Young (1990: 9) argues, it is the work of feminism to ‘transform, specifically, the relations of power, representation and signification between men and women (the production and evaluation of masculinity and femininity as categories)’. As I talked with the participants and reflected on their stories I began to encounter the historical feminist trouble with femininity. That is, the avoidance of non-transgressive forms of femininity because these are implicated in the very subordination of women-identified individuals that feminist politics aim to transform. This has resulted in a study of femininities which coalesces around the repressive aspects of femininity (McCann, 2017; Sedgwick, 1997). Women’s leadership is an appropriate topic through which to explore this trouble because of the tension between the current commercialization of feminine traits and the deep frustration expressed by the participants at the association between feminine embodiment and incompetence (see Eagly and Carli, 2003; Eagly and Karau, 2002).

I use a critical femininities perspective to think through the contradictions and tensions present in these narratives. This approach is situated in relation to the extensive history, both normative and critical, of writing on femininity. This subject is an integral part of the construction of male and female in Western philosophical thought, based on a scission between male rationality and female body-bound emotionality, laced through class divisions and claims about Western civilizational supremacy. This unstable and misguided polarization is critiqued in feminist gender theory in multiple ways. For example, psychoanalytical perspectives place femininity as a central part of psychosexual development and gendered subjectivity (e.g. Alizade, 2003; Irigaray, 1985; Kristeva, 1981). Materialist theories emphasize the structural features and relational nature of femininities and masculinities (e.g. Hennessy, 1997; Young, 1990), while discursive theories point to language, texts and culture in the making of femininities (see Baxter, 2003; Smith, 1990). Queer theory scholars have developed performative accounts of gendered subjectivity and discussed the interrelation of heterosexism and femininities (e.g. Butler, 1999; Fryer, 2010; Jagose, 1996). Feminist postcolonial theorists write on racialized and sexualized femininities (e.g. Ali, 2007; Lewis and Mills, 2003; McClintock, 1995).

These are theoretical positions in a broad field of conversations and conflicts which bring to light different facets of femininities. First, femininities are ‘socially created kinds’ (Alsop et al., 2002: 18), constituted through the interplay between discourses and non-discursive factors. They exist in plurality, manifesting differently across ages and contexts, and in intersection with other axes of identity; they are sociohistorically relative (Scharff, 2013: 59). Second, femininities may act as positive forces to challenge and resist phallocentrism (see Vachhani, 2012). Third, femininities are relational in nature, not only to masculinities but also to one another (see Lundström, 2014; Skeggs, 1997). A critical femininities approach is a way to pursue some of the questions raised through these different disciplinary perspectives.

Berlant (2008) sees femininity as a genre, which makes it possible to track the stretching and fracturing that occurs because the intelligibility of the genre remains permanent through a structure of conventional expectation. This structure is made up of ‘the behaviors, mannerisms, interests, and ways of presenting oneself that are typically associated with those who are female’ (Serrano, 2007: 320). However, while femininity might be made of expectations as Berlant (2008) suggests, it is not simply a norm. A critical femininities perspective facilitates an exploration of the increasingly complex ‘lived experience of femininity’ (Budgeon, 2011: 279). This kind of analysis involves seeking out locations, movements, relations and manifestations of femininity, which are not neatly guided by dichotomies of gender. This approach aims to facilitate a view of ‘differentiated relations of power between femininities in all their forms and features’ (Dahl, 2012: 62). I tackle the feminist trouble with femininity directly by applying this analysis to the normative concept of women’s leadership. A critical femininities perspective fractures the monolith of femininity and unbinds the sequence female-bodied/woman-gendered/feminine-performing, it serves to begin to untangle a complex picture of subversion and complicity.

The narratives of the participants in this study were collected in 2015 through in-depth semi-structured interviews. This choice is consistent with self-report and biography methods, which have been used in other studies to access the experiences of women leaders (Barsh et al., 2012; Bell and Nkomo, 1992; Coleman, 2003). There was a total of 18 participants, from countries within the European region (Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, France). Each of the participants held a transnational leadership position in a Europe-wide student organization, self-identified as women and were between the ages of 20 and 30 years. In order to access this geographically dispersed sample, the majority of the interviews were conducted online through voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology.

Becoming a leader: Personal journeys and making a difference

The overarching trajectory shared by the participants was that of the process of becoming a leader, the personal journeys spanned a considerable time frame from childhood experiences up to progression through different organizational roles. A common theme was the development of a personal vision about social responsibility. Reflecting back on this trajectory, Kate said, ‘I was leading people because the organization was going well … and at that moment, I thought, ok I might be a leader.’ The participants drew together experiences from family environments and role models of different genders, which continued to influence their personal leadership philosophies over time. They mentioned peer group contexts and their organizational involvement, to describe an organic process of leadership development similar to that detailed by Hopkins et al. (2008) – one that occurs on individual, interpersonal and organizational levels. The moments of ‘impact’, as described by Kate, are pivot points in the narratives of the participants.

The concept of growing into leadership finds a parallel in theorizations of leadership which emphasize the trainability of these skills (Chin, 2004; Northouse, 2012; Rhode, 2003). There is a wealth of self-help books designed to develop women’s leadership capacity (Ely and Rhode, 2010). Eagly and Carli (2003) found that the idea of women as leaders has travelled from feminist trade books on management to the mainstream press, into popular culture through best-selling books such as Sandberg’s (2013) text Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, or Barsh et al.’s (2012) How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life.

These texts carry a dominant narrative of women needing to strategically employ their femininity in short, useful bursts while simultaneously endeavouring to approximate masculine ideals such as assertiveness. This story is not congruent with the trajectories that the participants in this research built, which emphasizes iteration and reflection as key elements. Emilia said:

That you talk there and what you share there, how you challenge your perspective, that helped me a lot with understanding the differences, um, and really like deeply analysing the situations and trying to find the way how to do things.

Leadership is honed through a process of engaging in leadership tasks, self-reflection and implementation. The emphasis that participants put on the learning aspect of their leadership identity challenges essentializing narratives of women as possessing naturally high emotional intelligence which gives them an advantage (Trinidad and Normore, 2005). From a critical femininities perspective this holds the potential for a continued mapping of feminine traits over time and in evolution.

Although they described different and multifaceted journeys, each of the participants mentioned the input of their communities, both in establishing their self-identification as leaders and in policing the ‘feminine’ associated with their female bodies. Azra described an acutely embodied experience in these terms: ‘like, for example, when I first got that position I knew that I had to gain authority … and I think what is very important actually is a technical issue is to control your voice’. These participants are aware of the fact that they are subject as women to ‘higher standards and greater constraints’ than male leaders (Ely and Rhode, 2010: 388) and that their strengths are likely to be undervalued and their weaknesses inflated (Eagly and Carli, 2003; Eagly and Karau, 2002; Van den Brink et al., 2016). This results in a close self-management, as Flora describes: ‘when I am speaking I have the attitude and this self-confidence then they stop seeing me as a girl and they just see me as an equal person. But I am conscious of [how] I want them to consider me.’ In these cases, markers of femininity are cast as undesirable and oppressive, mediated by complex dynamics of embodiment.

There is a dissonance within the narratives of Elise, Eva, Lena, Lia, Flora and Louise between the knowledge of the underestimation of feminine women leaders and their description of women’s leadership as a specific, and valuable, type of leadership characterized by support, nurturing and collaboration. This speaks to the tension between hegemonic ideals of femininity and the authority associated with leadership. Femininity is both a resource and a limitation (Skeggs, 2001). There is a schism between physical markers of femininity and ‘feminine’ skills in the specific context of leadership. The former is negative affective relation and the latter is positive affective relation to an idealized form of femininity. This relation appeared again in at least a third of the participants stories as they recounted moments of harassment within their organizations as a result of the feminine reading of their bodies. An additional perspective is that described by Agata, who also saw the sexualization of her femininity as an opportunity for self-assertion. Taking a conspiratorial tone and leaning forward, she said to me:

There is some difficult Balkan mentality in some boys, but it is not in general, so I don’t have many problems … I mean except when they are hitting on you or something like that, but I mean, come on, we can deal with it.

Here a variety of experiences have been presented, reflecting the fact that across the stories the relationship between power and femininity was often ambiguous, and cannot be neatly classified into camps of disempowerment and empowerment. An attempt to do this would miss ‘the broader picture of oppression and the mechanisms employed by individuals to negotiate this terrain’ (McCann, 2017: 4). Acknowledging these different affective relations is a way to attend to ‘both pleasure and pain’ (Dahl, 2012: 63) within and across the genre of femininity and explore how they relate to one another.

Searching for definition: Women’s leadership, difference and gender equality

In order to understand how the participants interpreted the concept of women’s leadership, I asked them what definition, if any, they would give to the phrase ‘women’s leadership’. Several differing views emerged: it was deemed beneficial for raising awareness around inequality and descriptive of a true gendered difference, or seen as a divisive and misleading chimera. For Alina, Azra and Chiara, women’s leadership is a useful term – not so much to talk about objective difference, but to challenge existing inequalities. Women’s leadership represents the ability of women to lead; it talks about women’s competency in a world where they are often defined as too emotional and not authoritative enough. For Azra women’s leadership was ‘more valuable than a man’s because it is more complex how you achieve it’. At least eight of the participants defined women’s leadership in terms of the specific skills that women provide in juxtaposition to how men typically lead and a third of the participants describe women’s leadership in terms of support, nurturing and collaboration. They saw women’s leadership as a distinct set of traits or ways of interacting with team members that focus on leveraging individual potential and providing emotional support, which echoes existing research (Eagly, 2007; Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001).

The dominance of this ‘caring and sharing’ theme (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007: 13) was referred to by Flora, Eva and Louise as the ‘mothering’ aspect of women’s leadership. This points to a wider issue, where the symbolic power of the nurturing role is exploited in service of a patriarchal value system, by recreating a man/woman, public/private, rationality/emotion divide within organizational spaces (Fletcher, 2002; Ortner, 1974). Women become responsible for the emotional well-being of their teams and of the organization as a whole, yoking them to reproductive and community management labour (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007: 14). This results in a kind of collapsing where woman, feminine and mother become equivalent (Young, 1990). In contrast to the perspectives detailed above, Emilia, Mathilde, Sofie and Stela talk about the unnecessary division that the term women’s leadership creates and the unfounded nature of the concept. Sofie states her position, ‘I actually doubt this. I don’t think that it means anything. I don’t think that there is a leadership that is different because it is a woman or a man.’

In further complication, all of the participants pointed out that the ‘feminine part of leadership’, as Eva calls it, is not seen as the sole domain of women. They emphasized the fact that men can take up these styles of leading too. Qualities of interpersonal sensitivity, collaboration and empowerment should not be understood as the product of an inner essence of the feminine expressed by female leaders, rather these should be seen as markers of positive and effective leadership irrespective of gender. In order to effect this disruption Emilia said, ‘basically it will take time, it is a mental change in a psychological way’. I interpret the conflicts, both within and between these narratives, as variations within the genre of femininity. The female bodied feminine and the feminine as a possibility for every body: both offer positive attachments to femininity but they also play into the labour and consumption of femininity.

The participants draw on dominant discourses and also develop their own counter-discourses. In recounting the macro-level and micro-level threads of their narratives, they are both complicit and subversive. Some of these findings actively problematize the taken-for-granted association between femininity and female and the naturalization of emotional care to women. Others reiterate a dichotomy masculinity/femininity, relying on an established polarity of idealized traits. The contradictions and inconsistencies that emerge from these accounts speak to the power of normative femininity but also to the elasticity of the genre of femininity and the desire to engage with a positive affective attachment to femininity. This speaks to the possibility of a reparative reading of femininity (Sedgwick, 1997) as a part of a critical femininities approach, one which does not, in McCann’s (2017: 4) formulation, make ‘recourse to the language of empowerment or neo-liberal individual “choice” ’.

Women’s leadership in context: Body and culture

The themes of culture and embodiment that follow here extend the disruption of a singular femininity, as defined in relation to masculinity. Being a woman and a leader meets the material constraints and challenges of specific social locations, as the participants discuss how different variations of femininity inform social relations and self-perception (Aapola et al., 2005). Agata, who studied in the field of technology in Serbia, spoke about the challenges of negotiating a ‘Balkan mentality’ where men are eager to assert their supremacy, and Alina from Romania talked about fighting with boyfriends about women in decision-making positions. Dora cast a critical eye on intergenerational gendered socialization in her Serbian context: ‘my mother is always telling me, like, “you are too old get married” etcetera. This is the standard as long as we live in those environments, our environmental pushings.’ Although the participants are inhabiting different cultural spaces, there are unifying strands between idealized femininities across these cultural contexts. Flora, speaking from the Hungarian cultural context, explained how similar gendered expectations result in her being demonized for not wanting to have children: as though ‘I am some kind of monster or something’.

The fact that women are associated with reproductive and care roles, and policed to conform to these norms across the life-span, is framed by the participants as a society-wide phenomenon. This is reflected globally in the gap between the number of women in middle management positions and the number in senior executive positions (Butterfield and Grinnell, 1999; Ryan and Haslam, 2005). European Commission figures put the percentage of women on boards of EU listed companies at 16.6% (European Commission, 2013: 37). Indeed, women’s reproductive capacity and the contrasting gender-neutral language of the universal (male) worker are at odds (Acker, 1990). The participants explained that they were acutely aware of the internalization of social norms, as encapsulated in their examples of ‘just a girl’ discourse. For Alina, her leadership position became an opportunity to fight for gender equality in Romania: ‘I think that women should start seeing their own power and their own abilities and not permitting men to put them in a lower position because they can be just as good as men or even better.’ Flora explained that becoming a leader as a woman requires one to eschew traditional passive scripts of femininity in Hungarian society:

It is not that men just push us down. It is more that ‘Oh I am just a girl’ you know, that it is just this attitude of girls. If you want to be a leader as a woman then you have to get rid of this.

Lia, from Greece, uses the same phrase:

The strategy is to believe in yourself … if somebody is telling to you that you are not good enough and you are just a girl and you are not able to do that and so on, then you should not believe that.

Kate echoed Flora’s and Lia’s words, talking about a process of consciousness raising: ‘You learn also that you can make your own reality and that it doesn’t have to be the only one that they made for you … it doesn’t have to be family, society, and other things like school.’ The ‘just a girl’ figure provides a point of resistance against which alternative models of femininity can be explored and practised, creating fractures in the femininity gendering process through which women ‘become specific sorts of women’ (Skeggs, 2001: 297).

These young women explain that the structures of inequality and culture are their biggest obstacles; they also position their experiences comparatively within a wider geopolitical context. Geographic location is key. For example, Kate and Alina mention the differences that they perceive in openness to change between urban and rural areas, contrasting their experiences in large Greek and Romanian cities respectively, to those in smaller towns and villages. In addition to these references to internal differences, many of the participants described their cultural contexts through contrast, sketching a global gender equality landscape in the process. Emilia says: ‘Of course it has a lot to do with the country you are living in, when we are talking about women’s leadership, and what are the rights of females, what is expected of them.’ Participants living in Northern Europe, such as Signe and Emilia in Sweden and Finland, experience Northern Europe as ‘equalist’, in contrast to other European countries where social norms supporting gender inequality were considered more pervasive. Kate, Chiara, Mathilde and Elise — from Greece, Italy, and France — particularly talked about Southern Europe as a space where patriarchal power relations and gender norms are strongly policed. Mathilde says: ‘I don’t know how it is in other countries, but in France it is really like rigid … you are rewarding child when she is quiet … when you are quiet whereas a guy it is not the same.’ Kate expressed her frustration in having to constantly fight against these norms. Referencing Spain and Portugal as possible parallels to Greece, she states: ‘Stop believing in everything that others are saying, because if you’re raised up in a society like the one that exists in Greece, society knows better, your family knows better, everybody else knows better.’ Stela, who is from Hungary and was working in Belgium, related her perceptions of differences between Western and Eastern European countries. She spoke about how women from Eastern European countries are ‘raised within the box’, restricted in leadership by cultural norms around socially acceptable behaviour for women.

Broadening the map, participants located themselves and their conceptualizations of women’s leadership in terms of a developed/developing country dichotomy. Eight participants drew on discourses of a cohesive European cultural bloc, located in the global metropole cluster of developed countries such as North America and Australia. Lena, from Poland, talked about how the particular sociohistorical context of the European Union and the associated mobility and educational possibilities that this allows young women is key in spreading cultures of equality and developing leadership potential. This image of an enlightened Europe characterized by the implementation of gender equality frameworks, and thus supportive of women’s leadership, was contrasted with that of developing nations. These accounts of what Stela calls the ‘older democracies of Europe’ draw on a West–Rest conceptual framework where culture is seen as a much more oppressive force outside of the global metropole hegemon. These stories illustrate that a strong influence in the preservation and commercialization of idealized femininity is predicated on Eurocentric, colonial logics. These logics have been elucidated and critiqued in the well-established field of postcolonial, feminist and Southern theory scholarship and activism (for example Connell, 2007; Lundström, 2014). The self-positioning of these participants illustrates a concept of equality that also brings its own exclusions. This reflects how Scharff (2013: 63) describes the relationship between power and femininity in neoliberalism, contrasting ‘intelligible (normative, acceptable) and abjected (outside the normative realm, unacceptable) subjectivities’ which create lines of inclusion and exclusion through femininities.

Roughly the other half of the participants spoke about how travelling and being exposed to other cultures and the experiences of other women disrupted their ideas about a homogenously equality-oriented global metropole. Emilia, reflecting on her experiences of Finnish and Swedish cultural clashes, said: ‘diversity brings the sharing and also the learning’. This contrast between feminine subjectivities may also work in a different way, where abject feminine subjectivities act as a foil. Louise, who describes herself as an ecofeminist, talked about a trip she took to Pakistan and the conversations that she had had with women there which shifted her perspective, ‘they said stop focusing on the East when you need it in the West too, I was like “No. What? We don’t need it…” and then I kind of realized that we have a lot of sexism in Belgium’. A critical femininities framework which tracks the locations and relations of femininities needs to incorporate these insights even, or perhaps especially, in the analysis of mainstream market-oriented constructs such as leadership.

Conclusion

In the foregoing discussion I outlined research terms and concepts around women’s leadership and findings from this study centring around femininity, care embodiment and cultural positioning. I pursued the problematization of normative femininity associated with ‘women’s leadership’ by applying a critical femininities perspective. Through the narratives of the participants’ experiences of leadership I have explored variations within the genre of femininity, detailing intra-categorical fractures, locations, affective relations and attachments to different manifestations of femininities. I have drawn out plural accounts of femininity and the relations between different models of femininity in the lived experience of the participants. What emerges is a polyvalence and complexity, where there are multiple configurations of femininity that the participants affirm and resist in different ways at different points in their narratives.

The experiences and perceptions of the participants regarding women’s leadership as a prominent public discourse illustrate the complexity of working with femininity. They are caught between transgression and affirmation, battling notions of ‘difference’, deficit logics of femininity, essentialist rhetoric, discrimination, and a desire for equality. I have argued that claims of ‘women’s leadership advantage’ relies on an essentialization of typical feminine traits. This fixed constellation of traits, and the idea of an essence of femininity, collapses womanhood and motherhood. It is both contested and celebrated in the participants’ accounts.

The personal leadership trajectories described by the participants challenge the masculine/feminine duality in mainstream leadership theory. Assumed natural feminine qualities of relational engagement are thrown into dispute by the self-reflexive and incremental process of building leadership skills and identity that the participants describe. As Smith (1990: 121) observes, ‘women are not just the passive products of socialization; they are active; they create themselves’. In defining women’s leadership the participants juggle competing understandings of femininity, masculinity and difference. Their voices are unified, however, in advocating for the decoupling of feminine/woman/female by emphasizing that feminine characteristics can be embodied by any person. The valorization of traits which are typically considered feminine, even if this is market driven, also opens the possibility of alternative versions of femininity which are not defined by deficit. However, the constraints of cultural norms and female bodies make the exploration of feminine possibilities difficult, and complicate the development of positive affective relationships. The participants carved themselves feminine positions against what they see as oppressive models of femininity and patriarchal power relations. This is a fine balance but it is a fragmentation of an exclusively passive and supportive femininity that offers possibilities for resistance and change in female femininities.

Gender, intersecting at times with cultural context, emerged as the dominant theme in participants’ analyses of their experiences. This is potentially a function of the research topic ‘women’s leadership’, and may have obscured other mediators of leadership practice such as age, race, education, personality and socioeconomic status (Due Billing and Alvesson, 2000; Powell, 1990). Given the relatively singular focus of these findings, a first step for further research would be to explore the intersectional subjectivities which may have gone unspoken in the interviews.

This article contributes to what I see as the destabilization work of a critical femininities perspective. I explored how femininity even in highly normative spaces such as those of ‘leadership’ may be bound more tightly to, or decoupled from, womanhood and female bodies. Through this possibilities and challenges arose around developing dialogue around femininity, which is not configured exclusively through deficit or in relation to masculinity. In the analysis presented here femininity is understood as a process (Skeggs, 2001), where those who engage with it do so as active and creative subjects (Smith, 1990: 121). It is clear that this is a complex and contested process, marked both by moments of complicity and acts of resistance which are ‘a matter of social positioning, access to texts, and different forms of capital’ (Skeggs, 2001: 297). Reworking femininities as delineated here is valuable because it creates space. It does so by progressing the discussion of gender equality and leadership beyond simple numeric parity and conformity, or non-conformity, with hegemonic femininity. This view facilitates a more complete understanding of the relationships between femininities, emotional labour and inequalities. It provides insight into the dynamics of social location and geopolitical context in the practice of women’s leadership as a tool for gender equality. A next step in the critical femininity studies engagement with women’s leadership involves further exploration relations of power between femininities within and between different cultural contexts. As Louise describes it, ‘we are basically all suffering from not being a white man’. This entails conceptualizing the relations between different femininities, differentiated by ethnicity and class, ‘as themselves gender relations’ (Lewis, 2006: 93).