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

Abstract

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

Keywords

Gender leadership development media public pedagogy women leaders

Introduction

This article focusses on extending understandings of media artefacts’ pedagogical force (Sandlin et al., 2011), by proposing their application in the women’s leadership development context. Extant literature largely examines media sources’ value in providing illustrative tools to enhance pedagogic impact on developmental programmes (Cummings, 2007; Tejeda, 2008). We argue that media outputs constitute an interactive educational source that simultaneously construct and circulate representations of women in leadership roles. Such media constructions reflect and reproduce social and cultural assumptions, positioning women as others to the male leadership norm (Liu, 2015), and reaffirm leadership as a masculine, heroic activity (Fletcher, 2004). As such, they offer potential as compelling pedagogic resources that illustrate informal learning’s role in leadership development. Gendered assumptions’ circulation through media artefacts comprise a significant sociocultural influence regarding the extent to which women are perceived as credible leaders, and can hinder women’s leadership development. Contributing to debates that advocate critical approaches to leadership development (Cunliffe, 2009; Edwards et al., 2013), we extend this literature by applying the cultural theoretical concept of public pedagogy that understands culture as a pedagogic site that (re)produces and shapes social norms and values (Giroux, 2003, 2004a, 2004b), to examine the phenomenon of media constructed women’s Power Lists. In doing so, we ask two principal questions: ‘How do such media artefacts constitute public pedagogy?’ and ‘How might we mobilise public pedagogy principles in the women’s leadership development context to interrogate normative gender representations that sustain leadership as a heroic, masculine site of activity?’.

Our study is set within the context of increased media attention to workplace gender equality, and recognition that women’s progression into senior roles remains slow. Women hold under 20 percent of executive committee positions in the top 100 UK companies (Sealy et al., 2016), and only 20 percent of board seats in the top 500 US companies (Catalyst, 2016). Women’s experiences of advancing to leadership positions differ to those of men (Lewis and Simpson, 2010). Specifically, research highlights the resilience of workplace structures and practices’ gendered nature, and cultural beliefs’ power to maintain invisible barriers that impede women’s career advancement (Ely et al., 2011). One explanation provided for the persistent challenge women face in progressing to senior roles is a perceived incongruity between expectations placed on women’s gender role and leadership roles (Eagly and Karau, 2002). This requires systemic change at organisational and societal levels to shift culturally embedded, gendered perceptions regarding who can aspire to, or who is deemed appropriate, as a leader (Mavin and Grandy, 2016). Increasing focus on media and popular culture’s role in shaping social perceptions and expectations of leadership (Bell and Sinclair, 2016) is deepening understandings of how gender bias is sustained. These inquiries include examinations of the ways in which media constructions and representations of women as leaders mask embedded systemic inequalities and occlude the complexity of gender bias faced by women in their everyday leadership experience (Elliott et al., 2016). A fundamental challenge for leadership development is to increase awareness of gendered social and cultural norms that influences how the workplace is organised and shapes attitudes towards, and perceptions of, women’s leadership (Ely et al., 2011).

Media artefacts, used in developmental programmes to illustrate equality and diversity issues (Tejeda, 2008), are a popular means to engage participants, combining accessibility with visual appeal (Champoux, 1999). We extend discussions that consider media outputs as educational resources to examine how they constitute a form of public pedagogy that have significant ‘educational force’ (Giroux, 2004b: 498) and (re)produce social norms and values (Giroux, 2004a,). Public pedagogy provides a theoretical framework to interrogate popular culture’s role in promoting particular discourses and shaping cultural identity (Garlen and Sandlin, 2016). Our primary concern is to address calls to extend the critical pedagogical repertoire available to women’s leadership development (Ely et al., 2011) by developing an analytic framework that takes gender into account. Our focus on women’s leadership development responds to a recognised need for women-only development programmes that enable women to exchange freely and interrogate their experiences of being women in leadership roles (Ely et al., 2011). Our study nonetheless has significance for management education more widely, acting as an exemplar that can be adopted to bring attention to gender dynamics across a range of leadership development programmes.

The proposed framework is distinctive by revealing how Power Lists, as illustrations of a media constructed cultural artefact, have ‘pedagogical force’ (Sandlin et al., 2011) in the way they expose audiences to embedded sociocultural and gendered norms about women’s leadership in society. As such, they reveal the informal ways in which we learn how women occupying influential roles are positioned in society, and encourage broader questions about women’s representation and the nature of leadership (Garlen and Sandlin, 2016). The framework simultaneously offers an analytical tool that asks critical questions about how women are constructed as leaders, acting as a pedagogic artefact to enable women to examine gendered power relations in their workplace.

We begin by situating our focus on women’s leadership development within the leader and leadership development literature, and discuss the significance of adopting a critical approach. We introduce the gender and media literature, including the more limited literature in organisation studies and management learning on media artefacts’ gendering of women’s leadership and its educational potential.

Next, we situate Power Lists as a pertinent example of broader media sources within the category of cultural artefacts that correspond to public pedagogy characteristics (Giroux, 2004a). We then introduce principles that underpin the concept of critical public pedagogy (Burdick and Sandlin, 2010; Sandlin and St Clair, 2004) and which inform our analytic framework. Following an introduction to two media-produced Power Lists, we describe the proposed framework. Finally, we discuss the implications of citing media artefacts as a pedagogic resource for leadership theory, development and practice.

Leadership development

Leadership development debates differentiate between leader development that focusses on individual skills and leadership development that recognises the social and organisational context in which leadership practice occurs (Day, 2000; Schyns et al., 2015). Central to our argument is the understanding of leadership development as both a formal (specifically developed programmes), and informal activity (leaders learn about leadership everyday). In this sense, leadership learning is not just confined to the classroom but draws on, and is shaped by, everyday social experience (Kempster, 2006). In addition to exploring tools and practices to build interpersonal competence, (e.g., 360°degree feedback, mentoring), a fundamental component of formal leadership development programmes is the development of social awareness and skills, including the interaction between the individual and their organisational environment (Day, 2000). Proponents of a critical focus towards leadership (Bolden, 2011; Hawkins and Edwards, 2015), include appeals for leadership development to attend to sociocultural constructions of leadership, and the value systems that inform them (Edwards et al., 2013; Reynolds and Vince, 2004). In so doing, formal leadership development programmes can draw attention to how power is exercised and resisted (Collinson and Tourish, 2015) and how the exercise of power reflects and reproduces social and cultural norms about who has the potential or authority to be a leader (Mavin et al., 2014). This article focusses on how representations of leadership circulated through media artefacts constitute a form of public pedagogy that can be accessed as a leadership development resource.

Our specific interest is women’s leadership development in response to research that illustrates how gendered assumptions circulating through popular culture influence ideas regarding women’s suitability as leaders (Elliott and Stead, 2018). Our aim is to theorise media artefacts as public pedagogy, to contribute to a limited methodological repertoire for women’s leadership development (Ely et al., 2011). This contribution encompasses a refined understanding of leadership development as a process which involves making sense of how social constructions and representations of leadership influence and impact leadership practice. Specifically, we contribute to leadership development understandings by demonstrating how formal leadership development pedagogies necessarily exist in tension with informal ‘public pedagogies’ to illuminate assumptions that influence and shape everyday leadership practice. Our study reveals how critical and reflective approaches can enhance formal education’s mobilisation of informal ‘public pedagogies’ through the development of an analytical framework.

Women’s leadership development

Leadership development is recognised as crucial in tackling issues of gender inequality (World Economic Forum, 2016), and research demonstrates a need for development programmes to be conscious of gender in their design (Kelan and Jones, 2010) including its importance for women’s leadership development (Ely et al., 2011). Research presents the importance of providing a safe environment where women can reflect on their own and others’ leadership assumptions (Vinnicombe and Singh, 2002), and consider how to negotiate the challenges that such assumptions present in their organisational context (Sugiyama et al., 2016). Thus, women’s leadership development is typically differentiated from general leadership development in its attention to specific challenges that women face due to gendered expectations in their advancement to leadership roles. These challenges are problematic for the management educator. For example, research documents the dearth of role models and appropriate mentors for women aspiring for leadership positions within organisations, and how this may be particularly acute for women of colour (Ely et al., 2011; Sherman, 2005). While recognising that this is significant if you ‘cannot be what you cannot see’ (Mavin et al., 2010: 315) in the popular culture landscape (French and Webster, 2016), role models such as ‘superstar’ women celebrity executives who receive media attention encourage an individualist focus to attaining leadership success rather than challenging management systems that maintain a gendered status quo (Adamson and Kelan, 2018).

An important objective for women’s leadership development is therefore to address gender bias by engaging learning processes and frameworks that illuminate embedded gendered assumptions that impede women’s progress and practice as leaders (Ely et al., 2011; Gherardi and Poggio, 2007). Examples include action-oriented methods to illustrate how women can use group work processes to ‘story’ themselves as leaders (Gherardi and Poggio, 2007), and the use of epistemic objects, such as conceptual typologies, as the basis for critical engagements with systems of classification (Stead and Elliott, 2013). Specific management learning tools and methods, such as coaching, are proposed as adaptive to the facilitation of increasing gender consciousness (Ely et al., 2011). However, few pedagogical frameworks are available that address and surface the gap between mediated imaginaries of women leaders and the gendered nature of leadership. Women’s leadership development is often critiqued as premised on ideas of ‘fix the woman’ (Ely et al., 2011). For example, coaching may typically focus on success strategies that women can adopt to be successful rather than enabling women to understand their positioning in wider gendered systems that can hinder their advancement. If we lack theoretically based, ‘actionable frameworks’ (Ely et al., 2011: 475), we risk delivering programmes that perpetuate the view that women need to be ‘fixed’ and that the lack of women in senior positions is a consequence of their inability to compete with men (Mavin, 2008).

To date, women’s leadership development programmes have largely not dealt with the significance of gender as a social category that shapes leadership experiences (Ely et al., 2011). Reasons for this include a lack of attention to pedagogical processes and content that enables a focus on how gender operates. Learning models and theories’ gender neutrality (Swan et al., 2009) assume men and women have equal access to resources and are treated equitably irrespective of gender. We emphasise the importance of recognising gender as a social category that is constructed in everyday practice, including management and organisational practices and structures (Calás and Smircich, 2009) and popular culture. This brings attention to how macro power relations are played out in organisations and their impact on women leaders’ development. Without frameworks that make the connection between individual experience and the power relations that shape these experiences, it can be difficult for women leaders to recognise (1) the connection of their own experience to broader social relations and (2) how individual women can negotiate gendered power relations in organisations.

Leadership development as a critical project

Debates in this journal illustrate the value of critical approaches in exposing sociocultural assumptions and power relations that influence how we think about and practice leadership (Cunliffe, 2009; Edwards et al., 2013; Stead and Elliott, 2013). An important goal for leadership development becomes how to find ways to help leaders identify and interrogate underpinning values that inform and shape their and others’ leadership practice. In this respect, leadership development can be viewed as a critical project. It is concerned with connecting the individual, encompassing the internalisation and positive reinforcement of their leader identity (DeRue and Ashford, 2010), with the social, including recognition of the sociocultural norms that are agentic in values and individual identity formation. Taking a critical perspective reveals issues of marginalisation and privilege that shape organisational inequalities which individuals negotiate in their everyday leadership practice (Broadbridge and Simpson, 2011). Adopting a critical perspective has value for women’s leadership development programmes, as a means to identify how gendered norms operate in the organisational context to prevent women’s career advancement.

We extend critical approaches to women’s leadership development by employing media artefacts to make explicit the relationship between individual women’s experiences and broader power relations. Developing a framework that utilises media artefacts acknowledges the value of drawing on everyday phenomena as pedagogical tools. Recognising media artefacts’ pedagogic role enables individuals to examine the relationship between their leadership identity and practice, alongside the contemporary social values and norms that are promoted and reproduced through media sources.

Gender and media

The media is recognised as a global power, influencing how we understand the social world (Mazza and Alvarez, 2000). Representing and circulating social norms, media artefacts are central in shaping how we view ourselves and others (Coleman, 2008). Recent debates highlight a discourse reflecting a postfeminist sensibility (Gill et al., 2016). This emphasises individual women’s empowerment, encouraging representations of women that stress ‘self-transformation rather than social transformation’ (Rhode, 1995: 703), so neglecting deeply embedded structural inequalities.

Yet while research recognises the importance of women leaders’ representations in advancing women’s careers and challenging stereotypical preconceptions of women leaders (Mavin and Williams, 2015), media artefacts can reinforce gendered assumptions that question women’s ability to take on and succeed in senior roles (Kelan, 2013). During the Global Financial Crisis, for example, research highlights women leaders’ ‘disruptive’ positioning (Elliott and Stead, 2018). Promoted as an ethical alternative to masculine forms of leadership, their identification is subverted by a persistent focus on characteristics that have been adopted previously to exclude them from élite roles (Elliott and Stead, 2018; Liu, 2015). The media’s dichotomous positioning of women as leaders frames a discourse for audience that places women in conflict with the leadership norm, compromising audiences’ perception and identification of women as leaders. The media thus exerts significant power in challenging and reinforcing gendered assumptions embedded in understandings of women’s leadership (Liu et al., 2015). The contradictions and tensions inherent in the media’s representation of women leaders offer untapped potential as a pedagogical resource for leadership development.

The phenomenon of media Power Lists is illustrative, including those produced by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio 4 Woman’s Hour programme and Forbes magazine’s ‘100 most powerful women’ list where women leaders’ representations are connected by a ‘have it all’ and ‘do it all’ narrative. Women leaders are depicted as glamorous, characterised as powerful ‘female hero’ role models (Adamson and Kelan, 2018), juggling business and family life while maintaining a model like appearance (Kelan, 2013). While presenting an imaginary of women leaders that portrays leadership as something that can be accomplished if performed in specific ways, or by following certain rules, these representations ignore the micro-practices (Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011) of everyday leadership including the tensions and negotiations involved in being and becoming a woman leader. For example, women’s experiences in male-dominated professions such as engineering and construction show how women must work to fit into a male environment, including regulating their emotions (Miller, 2004) and dealing with sexual jokes and language (Watts, 2009). The disconnect between women leaders’ representation, and the everyday practice of being a woman who does leadership, masks complex gendered power relations, which conventional development programmes largely ignore (Collinson and Tourish, 2015; Ely et al., 2011). This reinforces a postfeminist sensibility that assumes women can succeed by adopting a confident ‘can-do’ attitude (Gill and Orgad, 2016). This disparity between representations and women leaders’ everyday practice offers an abundant source of pedagogical material for women’s leadership development.

Popular culture, the media as public pedagogy and media artefacts

As a theoretical construct public pedagogy has a well-established tradition in educational research, gaining significant traction among feminist scholars in the 1990s when researchers became interested in the ‘educational force of popular culture’ (Sandlin et al., 2011: 343). The categorisation of popular culture and everyday life as public pedagogy offered cultural studies a lens through which ‘to link cultural and media artefacts to processes of social domination’ (Sandlin et al., 2011). We draw on Giroux’s specific use of public pedagogy that focusses on the media. Giroux’s (2004a, 2004b) analyses of media sources’ power to influence individual identities conceptualise culture as a pedagogic site that shapes, reflects and reproduces norms, identities and social values. Giroux (2004b: 498) claims that ‘the larger culture’ has greater influence than formal education; it is superseding ‘institutionalized education as the most important educational force in the developed societies’. For example, Tejeda’s (2008) examination of resources to identify film media for diversity education recognises how visual culture is dominant in society, facilitating an ease and familiarity in its use with students. Scholars working to develop a critical public pedagogy literature emphasise media and popular culture artefacts’ potential to act as sites of contestation. That is, the media is not hegemonic. Individuals have agency and can resist the messages communicated by media outlets. Informal learning that ensues from engagement with media artefacts and occurs in everyday life can therefore act to oppress, but can also be resisted (Luke, 1996). Research on the impact of women viewers’ identity development is illustrative, revealing how audiences identify their own resistance with that of TV characters (Wright and Sandlin, 2009). The public pedagogy concept reveals popular cultural artefacts’ potential to act as sites of informal learning that highlight the relationship between individuals’ experiences and socially reproduced ideas and preconceptions of what it is to be a woman leader.

Media artefacts as public pedagogy: a critically reflexive approach to leadership development

In positioning media artefacts as public pedagogy for women’s leadership development we are proposing a critical approach that reveals gender bias and power. Giroux’s (2003, 2004a) public pedagogy ideas foreground the sociohistorical-cultural context of knowledge production and have particular relevance for interrogating women leaders’ representation through media artefacts. We outline four ways in which public pedagogy illuminates the relationship between power, politics and culture.

First public pedagogy foregrounds knowledge production’s sociocultural context, including which knowledge attains prominence. This is important if leadership development aims to provide a frame of contemporary, cultural reference for individuals to address social challenges that affect them. Students and educators can critically analyse and challenge media artefacts regarding how knowledge about leadership is constructed and disseminated. This public pedagogy principle forms the basis for the first analytical questions: How is knowledge categorised or classified and which forms of knowledge are seen as most authoritative? Alerting us to forms of knowledge that are deemed of greatest importance, this question can be employed to understand the values that underpin women’s Power Lists’ classifications, and to reveal which forms of knowledge are employed as indicators of success in a particular form of media. Leadership developers can encourage individuals to examine what is recognised as authoritative knowledge in their organisations and the extent to which the implied success indicators have relevance for their workplace.

Second, Giroux argues that pedagogy’s role is not solely concerned with knowledge as socially constructed. Rather, pedagogy itself is a performative practice with political importance ‘embodied in the lived interactions among educators, audiences, texts and institutional formations’ (Giroux, 2004a: 61). How we understand knowledge is connected to particular values and beliefs, offering a resource through which to make sense of how power and politics shape everyday life. Pedagogy, therefore, transcends educational institutions’ boundaries. The media artefacts we examine represent a means of cultural production and a form of cultural criticism, ‘questioning the conditions under which knowledge is produced, values affirmed, affective investments engaged and subject positions put into place, negotiated, taken up, or refused’ (Giroux, 2004a: 63). From this principle, we derive a second critical question: What assumptions and values about women leaders, women’s leadership and the development needs of women leaders underpin the power lists? Illuminating the assumptions and values that underpin women leaders’ representation facilitates discussions concerning how individuals experience their workplace positioning, including how organisational understandings of leadership facilitate or hinder women’s entry into leadership roles.

Third, public pedagogy understands pedagogy as a moral and political practice. The educator’s role assumes primary importance in enabling students to reflect on, and make sense of, what they see in relation to their experience within broader social and cultural relationships. Recognizing leadership and management as value laden means ‘it is possible to have a conversation about what those values should be’ (Grey, 2004: 180). Media artefacts constitute a resource from which leadership educators can interrogate how women leaders’ representations are constructed. This provides stimulus for discussions about gendered power relations including the kind of political and cultural influence that is being promoted (Garlen and Sandlin, 2016). A focus on politics directs us to examine how the media reflects socially acceptable ways for women to gain influence and power. This principle leads to our third critical question: What morals and politics are reflected in this form of media in relation to women leaders? While leadership contests played out on the public stage offer examples we can use to illustrate the morals that different constituencies find acceptable, we can also use this question to interrogate leadership practice in any organisational setting.

Fourth, the sociocultural awareness provoked by public pedagogy principles relates power, politics and culture to specific contestations. Making these connections explicit can provide insights into how media artefacts come into being. This principle underpins our final critical questions: What are the problems attributed to women leaders which prompt media artefacts and what solutions are suggested? Developing responses to these questions can enable women leaders to gain greater understanding of what constitutes a dominant leadership discourse. This includes understanding how gender bias is embedded within that discourse and operates in relation to their context.

We adopt these ideas to form an analytic framework of critical questions in Table 1.

Table 1.

A critical analytic framework for women’s leadership development.

Four sets of critical and reflective questioning	PURPOSE of questioning
Critical Question 1: How is knowledge categorised or classified and which forms of knowledge are seen as most authoritative? Reflective Questioning How do media success indicators compare with indicators in individuals’ organisations, and how are these put into practice?	To reveal which forms of knowledge/values are deemed of greatest importance. Which forms of knowledge are employed as indicators of success in a particular form of media? To illuminate how organisations classify knowledge and their indicators for success. To what extent does this classification privilege or marginalise?
Critical Question 2: What assumptions and values about women leaders, women’s leadership, and the development needs of women leaders underpin the power lists? Reflective Questioning What are prevalent assumptions about women leaders, leadership and development in the individual’s organisation?	To identify values and assumptions reflected by and disseminated through media artefacts. What assumptions are revealed about women leaders and their development needs in this particular social context? To illuminate assumptions and values organisations hold about women leaders and their development.
Critical Question 3: What morals and politics are reflected in this form of media in relation to women leaders? Reflective Questioning What are socially accepted behaviours and routes to power in individuals’ organisations?	To understand the sociocultural context in which leadership occurs. What are deemed socially acceptable codes of behaviour for women leaders; appropriate ways to gain influence and power? To enable women to become more attuned to morals and political beliefs that influence who is considered leadership material in their organisational context. To sensitise aspiring women leaders to potential barriers.
Critical Question 4: What are the problems related to women leaders to which this form of media responds and what solutions are suggested? Reflective Questioning How do organisational practices respond to these broader social problems?	To problematise women’s leadership by interrogating the problem that stimulates the formation of the Power Lists. To consider how organisations’ discourse, processes and practice reflect and respond to tensions and complexities in the relationship between women and leadership.

Women’s Power Lists: an exemplar of public pedagogy for women’s leadership development

As media artefacts that constitute a form of public pedagogy, web-based Women’s Power Lists have explicit and implicit aims. They perform as explicit classificatory tools that rank, in order of ‘power’, women in senior positions. As cultural sites of knowledge production, they implicitly act as sites of informal learning in constructing representations of women leaders and women’s leadership. In classifying which women hold power, and how they achieved it, they more implicitly act as sites of instruction regarding how to perform women’s leadership in acceptable ways (Mavin and Grandy, 2016) that conform to postfeminist understandings of women’s leadership (Alvesson and Billing, 2000). Power Lists’ classificatory nature combined with tips, strategies and how-to lists constitute typical examples of popular artefacts found across media platforms. The Power Lists we use as exemplars to propose an analytical pedagogical framework are as follows: Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful women, published by Forbes (2016), a US media and publishing company, and BBC Radio’s (2015) Women’s Hour Power List, produced by BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour programme. We selected these Power Lists for three reasons. First, they are widely accessible and produced by known sources that have public credibility and international recognition. Second, they target a female audience, specifically those who might aspire to attaining positions of power by offering well-known women as potential role models with career-oriented information, resources, strategies and tips. Third, they articulate a rationale of their categorisations to provide insight into what is deemed important and relevant for women leaders and their development. Both sites are multimodal, including text, images, videos and graphics. Further details of the sites and their resources are summarised in Table 2.

Table 2.

Summary of features, Forbes and BBC woman’s hour Power Lists.

Power List	Description	Accompanying features
Forbes ‘The World’s Most Powerful 100 Women’ (2016)	Ranks top 100 women: name, age, country, industry. Links to statistics, role description, achievements and accompanying features. References position of each woman to previous power list. Images gallery	For each woman, links to: • Forbes’ articles related to the woman’s areas of expertise • Twitter and Facebook feeds • A list of up to six connections, example, men and women in related businesses Other features: Short videos featuring advice from women on the Power List: 25 inspirational quotes by powerful women Further categories detailed including: World’s most powerful women billionaires in 2016; The world’s most powerful women in politics 2016; Women who rule the world; The 26 most powerful female political leaders of 2016. Info graphic showing the number of women in the different categories of finance, business, media etc. Other Forbes lists: Power women; 9 women shaking our world, 2014 power list, videos and resources
BBC Woman’s Hour 2015* Power List; Influencers * The 2016 Power List was not published during time of writing.	The Power List homepage includes different sections with links including Our panel of judges in 2015 Who are the 2015 Power List Influencers Power List Influencers on air; How to Be a Powerful Woman Power List Programme Interviews Other Links: The Power List Winners Collection Five Life Lessons with Power List judges Interviews from Woman’s Hour Power List 2016 Woman’s Hour Power List 2016 The 2014 Game Changers The 2013 Power List	Our panel of judges in 2015 Explains the process of identifying the power list with contact details. Profiles judges including role, achievements, brief biography, an image of the woman and a quotation. Links to; • the Woman’s Hour programme • ‘Power List on air’ featuring debates and interviews with women from the Power List • ‘How to Be a Powerful Woman’ featuring selected women’s experiences. Who are the 2015 power list; Influencers This section links to • Listing of top 10 women ‘influencers’, description of 2015 list aim, and page profiling the judges. • Names and roles of the 10 women, with role description, brief biography, image of the woman and a quotation from one of the judges about the woman. • Link to more details about the judges and link to terms and conditions. Power List influencers on air Archive of 95 debates and interviews including women from the 2015, 2014 and 2013 Power Lists. Debates include the deliberations of the lists’ judging panels. How to be a powerful woman Links to short video clips of six women from the 2013 Power List entitled: Be Ambitious, Be in Balance, Be Resilient, Be Connected, Be Yourself, Be a Leader.

Conceptualising the Power Lists as public pedagogy draws attention to their capacity to reflect contemporary power relations in relation to women leaders (women hold positions of power, but are still rare enough to warrant a separate power list), what is recognised as socially acceptable (women require distinct and targeted career advice), and what is open to change (encouraging more women to aspire to leadership roles). Power Lists act as public pedagogy by promoting particular knowledge about individual women leaders through written text and imagery including a contemporary postfeminist mind-set on how women leaders should be. This influences individuals’ understanding of their positioning in relation to others and to a broader population of women in leadership roles. Here, pedagogy is contextual and relational; it is embedded in, and reflective of, particular sociocultural, economic and historical conditions (Giroux, 2004a). Conceptualising media sources as public pedagogy encourages us to recognise their ‘pedagogical force’ (Sandlin et al., 2011: 339), and their location within a broader social system of power relations (Vince, 1996).

A critical analytic framework for women’s leadership development

As public pedagogy, media outputs afford the possibility to construct an analytic framework that can be used in formal leadership development settings. We propose using the framework in executive education and postgraduate programmes where participants have work experience and who, in our UK and US teaching experience, bring a critical awareness and readiness to question to the classroom setting (Sutherland et al., 2015). We build this framework, (Table 1), on a set of four critical questions that work within the spirit of cultural theories’ concern to unveil power relationships inherent to cultural artefacts (Giroux, 2003, 2004a, 2004b). Aligned with public pedagogy’s contextual focus, the framework acknowledges learning as situated and emerging from the everyday (Kempster and Stewart, 2010). We therefore include reflective questions that stimulate participants to examine their experience and organisational context. The framework suggests a process that moves from interrogation of the social to highlight values and beliefs that shape how we view leadership and women leaders, to reflection on how these values are manifested through organisational practice, and the implications for individuals in their particular leadership context.

The following summary analysis illustrates the framework’s potential to reveal how media artefacts are influential in (re)producing normative gender representations that sustain leadership as a masculine activity.

Applying this framework to examine the Power Lists reveals a dominant neo-liberal postfeminist master narrative exemplified through four major themes outlined below.

1. The media’s reproduction of normative leadership understandings

Applying the public pedagogy lens reveals how normative understandings of leadership are represented by media artefacts. Examining the categorisation and ranking of women on the Power Lists reveals a predominant focus on money and media influence. This is demonstrated through the ‘power bases’ Forbes uses to identify women using finance and media as specific ranking criteria. While the BBC list does not use finance as a category, media influence is key. The controlling of financial resources and the extent of individual’s media influence reflect normative leadership understandings located within the context of a neoliberal market economy and postfeminist ideology. Forbes cites Sheryl Sandberg as the ‘ideal example’ in the tech industry due to her influence within multiple contexts. This gives her celebrity role model status, which Forbes equates to ‘how actively and successfully the women wield power’. This normative classification reflects organisational hierarchies where formal positions of power often equate to control of resources and individuals are attributed charismatic power. However, while the ranking implies women hold significant influence through access to financial resources, this is not mirrored in organisational life where few Boards of Directors have equal numbers of women and men, and women of colour are particularly underrepresented (Catalyst, 2016).

Leadership development programmes can encourage critique of what is recognised as most authoritative knowledge in their organisations including the extent to which the Power Lists’ success indicators are manifest in their workplace. Recognising the forms of knowledge or success afforded legitimacy in organisations provides women with insights concerning where influence lies and how it might be accessed.

2. An individualist empowerment discourse

Both websites suggest that women face particular barriers that need to be addressed, and to which women must respond in order to be leaders. Forbes website’s introduction to their Power List presents the women’s accomplishments as ‘formidable on their own, and even more so given how hard it can be to establish inroads into industries and job titles traditionally dominated by men’. The videos on the BBC’s ‘How to be a Powerful Woman’ website collectively suggest that women must address issues of self-belief, credibility and authenticity. Other assumptions shared by the Power Lists include the view that women are powerful and have agency and influence. This is demonstrated by a postfeminist empowerment discourse made manifest through videos providing advice on how to be a powerful woman, and tips and tactics that women can adopt. Through an emphasis on strategies and tactics, the Power Lists reflect a view that if women simply adopt particular behaviours, they may be recognised as credible leaders and be as successful as the featured women. Individual agency is assumed to be independent from social and cultural context, which is largely used in the Power Lists to add interest and inspiration to narratives through ‘feel-good’ stories and inspiring quotes by women. This suggests leadership can become available to those who, like the women presented by the Power Lists as role models, possess certain qualities and can mobilise appropriate strategies, invoking a postfeminist ‘double entanglement’ (McRobbie, 2009: 12), whereby women leaders’ presence is equated with feminism, but their femininity positions them outside the masculine norm.

While both Power Lists are dominated by a focus on how women should behave to be recognised as leaders, there are exceptions. An interview with Christine Lagarde, Director of the International Monetary Fund, on the Forbes website discusses the need for infrastructures that enable women’s access to the workplace, and cultural issues that need to be tackled to recognise women’s contribution to the economy. However, the headline that provides access to the interview retains a focus on individual agency in the style of a ‘how to guide’: ‘Christine Lagarde’s advice to women: grit your teeth and smile’. While there is attention to social and structural barriers to women’s leadership, their presentation places them in the role of subtext. The dominant message advocates women’s success and failure as individual women’s responsibility.

Revealing assumptions and values that underpin women leaders’ representation can stimulate learning discussions about the interplay between individual agency and organisational responsibility. This includes the extent to which women position themselves and ‘step forward’ for leadership in contrast to how they are positioned. What forms of organisational facilitation and sponsorship are in place to effectively challenge normative views?

3. Competing and contested evaluations of women

Analysis of the Power Lists highlights contradictory assessments of women’s categorisation as leaders. A focus on women in influential roles disseminates women’s ability to achieve positions of power. Equally emphatic in the representation of the women is women’s difference to men. This affirms a view that difference lies with women’s biology, putting women’s bodies on centre stage, simultaneously ignoring or masking inequalities. Video resources on the BBC website under the category ‘Be yourself’ are illustrative. One features Joanna Shields, CEO and Chair of Tech City Investment Organisation. Dress is presented as a complex moral code related to power that women must negotiate, but not requiring the same consideration by men.

In the clip, Shields discusses how dressing in a feminine way can be compromising, yet dressing in suits similar to men does not ‘feel good’. A move to Silicon Valley enabled Shields to dress as she wanted, and she attributes this to a sense of creative freedom. Yet questioning the values and moral codes that underpin views of how we should or should not dress in the workplace highlights how women continue to be evaluated in relation to their appearance, and the significance of status. As CEO, Shields may not be subject to the same evaluation as women in lesser roles. This evaluation is complex. If women are to dress in feminine ways, they risk drawing attention to their gender and being under-estimated. Their appearance and gender do not fit the traditional view of what a leader looks like. If women choose to dress like men, they may take on a traditional leadership appearance yet risk being evaluated as inauthentic.

In a leadership development setting, examining what the media represents as socially acceptable provides the stimulus to consider everyday organisational practices, including dress code, that often go unquestioned. This reveals how the media reflects and reproduces deeply embedded practices that sustain inequalities. As participants become more attuned to the morals and political beliefs that influence who is considered leadership material, this can facilitate a sensitivity towards barriers faced by aspiring women leaders, including expectations of how they should present and perform as leaders.

4. The homogenisation of women’s relation to leadership

Presenting women as a separate category facing particular barriers foregrounds debates around women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles. The Power Lists reference these debates, including acknowledging surveys which demonstrate gender imbalances in senior roles. However, this broader social issue is superseded by the dominant emphasis on women’s agency, and self-empowerment as the primary solution to hasten women’s accession to leadership. While the materials offer women resources to reflect on their experiences, the Power Lists provide limited discussion of individual cases. This risks homogenising women and their relation to leadership regardless of women’s different identities and sociocultural context. Individual agency is assumed to be available to overcome the sociocultural context, which is largely used in the Power Lists to add interest to narratives through success stories. This postfeminist empowerment discourse reinforces the view that this is a task for all women to complete: leadership is available to those who possess certain qualities and can mobilise appropriate strategies.

Asking participants to question the motivation behind the construction of media artefacts such as Power Lists creates a space for debates attuned to mediated understandings of the relationship between women and leadership. This can help participants reflect on how their organisation responds to wider issues of gender inequality through policy, and how participants experience that policy in practice.

Conclusions and implications for leadership development

Cultural theory recognises popular culture’s role in influencing understandings of social norms and appropriate behaviours. It makes judgments on the acceptability of role holders’ identities, yet management and leadership learning has largely ignored media artefacts’ influence. Recognition of leadership learning’s informal nature (Waldman et al., 2006) and the importance of context to leadership development practice (Jepson, 2009) nevertheless combine to acknowledge implicitly the significance of the sociocultural in leadership practice and understandings. This provides a theoretical foundation to extend interpretations of leadership that recognise media outputs’ influence in sustaining leadership representations that equate leadership with the male body and masculinity. Public pedagogy operates as a critical concept which connects cultural and media artefacts to processes of social domination (Garlen and Sandlin, 2016), offering researchers examining informal learning processes a lens through which to examine media artefacts’ ideological influences. Giroux’s work extends feminist understandings of popular culture’s contribution to everyday learning (Dentith and Brady, 1999; Luke, 1996), to recognise the politics of popular culture, its role as a pedagogic site in the ‘struggle over identities’ (Sandlin et al., 2011: 345) and as powerfully educationally as formal education.

Women’s Power Lists that classify and rank women who hold positions of authority are a contemporary exemplar of media artefacts. They act as pedagogic sites that construct women leaders’ representations, implicitly communicating visions of how women might achieve acceptability as leaders. Applying cultural theory principles, we illustrate how such media artefacts offer a resource for unravelling the complexity of gendered relations. Our analysis demonstrates public pedagogy’s value in leadership development to understand more deeply how media artefacts reproduce normative gender representations that sustain leadership as a heroic, masculine activity where women stand out because of their difference and deviation from the norm. Illustrative are both websites’ allusions to structural inequalities, yet limited attention is given to how these affect women differently and how organisations can effect change. This reinforces individualised notions of leadership, placing women’s advancement as their personal responsibility. This postfeminist empowerment discourse implies that barriers to women’s progression are due to women’s failings rather than structural inequalities.

A continued tendency to promote ‘fix the women’ attitudes (Mavin, 2008) suggests that scholarly insights have yet to penetrate popular discourse. Gender bias remains embedded in sociocultural beliefs that impede women’s leadership development (Ely et al., 2011). Drawing on informal and critical learning literatures, media artefacts offer a powerful mechanism to reveal a ‘master’ neoliberal and postfeminist narrative that shapes our thinking about leadership. As such, media artefacts offer educators the means not only to critique but to bridge the gap between individualist discourses and the evidenced need for organisations to develop awareness of, and attend to, structural barriers that hinder women’s career progression.

We propose a critical analytic framework based on public pedagogy principles to interrogate media artefacts as the basis for an epistemic framework ‘from which to problematize’ (Stead and Elliott, 2013: 383) women leaders’ construction and representation. This can be used to question media artefacts’ relevance to women’s everyday leadership practice, providing educators with an epistemic tool that can be applied within development interventions to interrogate and connect women’s experiences to broader social and organisational issues. Other sources include media profiles and interviews with leaders.

Theorising media artefacts as sites of public pedagogy has created a critical leadership development framework which has implications for leadership development theory and practice. We advance theory in two ways. First, we contribute to debates regarding the need to address sociocultural influences in leadership development (Ely et al., 2011; Reynolds and Vince, 2004) and practice by recognising informal learning’s significance. Responding to calls for theoretically informed pedagogic frameworks that take gender into account, we extend the women’s leadership and executive development literature (Ely et al., 2011; Gherardi and Poggio, 2007; Kelan, 2013; Stead and Elliott, 2013) by theorising the pedagogic significance of media artefacts through the public pedagogy lens. Although focused on women’s leadership development, our study has wider application for management education. It enhances debates that advocate greater attention to leadership’s sociocultural constructions and the value systems that inform them (Edwards et al., 2013; Reynolds and Vince, 2004). The Power Lists alert us to a ‘master narrative’ (Garlen and Sandlin, 2016: 143), a dominant neo-liberal ‘empowerment’ discourse in women’s leadership that privileges individual agency and postfeminist interpretations of gender equality. Adopting a public pedagogy lens reveals the complexities of women leaders’ sociocultural positioning in including how media outputs shape social perceptions of women leaders. Conceived as public pedagogy, media artefacts provide knowledge about what is promoted as a credible response to persistent gender inequality in positions of power. It brings awareness to ‘difficult knowledge’ (Garlen and Sandlin, 2016), including gender bias issues that remain difficult to discuss.

Second, the article contributes to leadership development literature that debates the relationship between formal and informal learning (Kempster and Stewart, 2010; Reynolds and Vince, 2004) by drawing attention to how media artefacts are forms of public pedagogy mirroring contemporary norms and power dynamics. Specifically, we demonstrate how formal leadership development pedagogies exist in tension with informal ‘public pedagogies’. Our proposed framework offers a means through which informal ‘public pedagogies’ can be mobilised as pedagogical resources, providing insight into assumptions and power asymmetries that shape everyday leadership practice. We have focused specifically on theorising media artefacts as public pedagogy to attend to the sociocultural in women’s leadership development. However, this study has wider relevance for management education, for example as a means to examine representations of ethnicity and leadership.

Power lists, as illustrative exemplars of media artefacts, form the foundation for an analytic frame that encourages critical reflexivity in the classroom. The proposed framework reveals the ‘tacit nature of situated learning’ (Kempster and Stewart, 2010: 217) that influences leadership practice. This reveals the complexities of women’s leadership. The Power Lists recognise women’s achievements and provide potential role models. Yet, they communicate a postfeminist leadership understanding that circumscribes the potential for women’s equality. This is particularly problematic for women of colour or women who are not able bodied.

As a critical analytical tool the public pedagogy framework requires careful consideration in its application. Educators need to create a learning environment where participants reflect on, and make sense of, observations on their experience and broader sociocultural relations. Critical scholars observe the challenging nature of working with critical theory in the classroom (Sandlin and St Clair, 2004; Sinclair, 2007). The process we propose requires critically reflexive teaching methods that encourage critique and examine how roles and relationships must necessarily take into account sociocultural contexts (Elliott, 2008; Gray, 2007). Mindful of these concerns, we suggest a group work approach and graduated structured discussion employing questions that enable critical dialogue (Stead and Elliott, 2013) and the development of a critical mind-set. This approach helps to develop a reflexive classroom culture that enables the questioning of assumptions that underpin media artefacts, illuminating how they reflect and reinforce power relations and inequalities (Sinclair, 2007).

Theorising media artefacts as a form of public pedagogy brings together an appreciation of informal learning and critical approaches to promote a critically reflexive learning and development approach. This extends a pedagogical repertoire that has struggled to find a means for women to connect their individual experience to sociocultural contexts. An epistemic framework that assists the analysis of gendered power enables recognition of the contextual nature of gender bias and how leadership is socially and culturally situated. This can be adapted to different learning contexts to develop sensitivity towards other power relationships including intersectional power asymmetries.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article has resulted from the ESRC funded seminar series (ES/M001792/1) ‘Challenging Gendered Mis(s)representations of women leaders and professionals.’

ORCID iD

Valerie Stead

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