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I began my doctoral studies in management and organizational behavior at the University of Massachusetts during the 1970s. A women's liberation movement that arose during the decade in nations such as the United Kingdom (Binard, 2017), the United States (Yelton-Stanley & Howard, 2000), and Australia (Magarey, 2018) had a major impact on women's attitudes, and indirectly men's attitudes, about their proper vis-à-vis preferred roles as well as on organizational and societal practices. To cite a few examples, pressure from this movement led to a greater awareness of and reduced emphasis on gender stereotypes in children's books, the elimination of separate advertising for “women's jobs” and “men's jobs” in newspapers, the passage of laws in many nations that banned discrimination on the basis of gender and other personal characteristics, and the appearance of women's studies (later called “gender studies”) courses in many universities. Also during the 1970s, the proportion of women in managerial and professional occupations significantly increased (Powell, 1988). In short, it was a decade of considerable turmoil and change around gender issues.

I was influenced by these developments and sought to explore them in my research and teaching. My first research study on gender and leadership (Powell & Butterfield, 1979), to be described in Chapter 2, was conducted with Tony Butterfield, my former dissertation supervisor who became my life-long collaborator, colleague, mentor, and friend. At about the same time, early in my career at the University of Connecticut, I was given the opportunity to teach a graduate elective on any topic I wanted. I decided to teach a course with a unique title, “Women and Men in Management.” The title was chosen to legitimize the course's having a male instructor (me), increase its appeal to male as well as female students, and call attention to the fact that people typically said “men and women” in that order rather than the order in the course title. To make a long story short, the course's first offering drew enough students for it to be offered on a regular basis; further, the course won the AACSB Committee on Equal Opportunity for Women Innovation Award, which inspired me to write a scholarly book with the same title “based on the award-winning course” (Sage, the publisher, was impressed).

What came to be the first edition of Women and Men in Management (Powell, 1988) chronicled the major transformations in the nature of female and male roles that had occurred in the workplace in recent years and looked ahead to what changes might be yet to come. It presented two diametrically opposed scenarios for the roles that women vis-à-vis men would play in the workplace of the future. In the positive scenario, all employees are treated according to the human capital they bring to the job – knowledge, skills, abilities, education, relevant work experience, past performance, and so on (Stumpf & London, 1981) – and given the chance to reach their leadership potential regardless of their gender. In the negative scenario, gender stereotypes and roles are the primary basis for treating others, predicting their behavior, and evaluating how they behave regardless of their human capital. The book concluded by basically saying “it's up to all of us” as to which scenario would be more likely to prevail in the future (Powell, 1988). However, given all the workplace changes that had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, the overall message of the book was hopeful.

Since then, subsequent editions of Women and Men in Management (Powell, 1993, 2011, 2019; Powell & Graves, 2003) as well as subsequent articles in what came to be my research program on issues regarding gender and leadership have offered regular assessments of the state of affairs regarding these issues. However, as I have researched and written about this topic for over four decades, my perspective on these issues has gradually evolved from being more optimistic (e.g., “Sex discrimination in leadership positions favoring men has traditionally existed. However, there has recently been considerable growth in the proportion of women in management, a positive sign.”) to being more pessimistic (e.g., “Sex discrimination in leadership positions favoring men persists, although its nature has evolved. Further, growth in the proportion of women in management, including in top management positions, has stalled.”) If the social goal of research on the linkage between gender and leadership is to eliminate the need for such research (i.e., to foster achievement of the positive scenario described above), I do not anticipate that this goal will be attained anytime in the foreseeable future.

Hence, this book. I believe that we still need to talk about the linkage between gender and leadership. Something troubling and problematic is still going on regarding this linkage that calls for our unwavering attention as scholars.