Читать книгу Rural Women in Leadership - Lori Ann McVay - Страница 18

For many women, the exercise of entrenched organizational power has barred their access to positions of leadership. Barbara Pini (2005, p. 76) states: ‘Scholarship on gender and organizations has demonstrated that both in definition and practice, leadership is intricately connected to the construction and enactment of hegemonic masculinity.’⁵ In fact, Henig (1996) claims that, without the presence of women in leadership positions, even a significant number of women within an organization will not change the organization’s treatment of women. In part, this may be ascribed to wider power relations that inform the perpetuation of traditional gender identities (Bock, 2006). This takes place in spite of the broader conceptions of masculinity and femininity now available to women (as the result of an increase in women’s access to education and the labour market) (Brandth, 1994). In the language of discourse, women who attain leadership positions may be seen as resisting the dominant discourse by embracing an alternative discourse that flies in the face of hegemony (Bock, 2006). However, this does not put them outside dominant discourses and power relations (Jackson, 2004). On the contrary, occupations in which women are the dominant participants continue to be predominantly part-time, pay poorly and offer few opportunities for training and advancement (Kreimer, 2004). This often leads to a reproduction of traditional gender roles and identities in the workplace (i.e. few women in leadership positions), since organizational routines are not easily disrupted (Kreimer, 2004; West-enholz et al., 2006). Recent theoretical discussions surrounding the positive value of so-called feminine styles of leadership (i.e. dispersed leadership or willingness to share leadership among a group) have served in some ways to reinforce the stereotype of women as motherly caregivers (Elliott and Stead, 2008). In this way, leadership continues to be housed within a quite ‘narrow range of identities’ standardized by organizations who fail to critique gendered assumptions underlying the norms to which they require their leaders to aspire and adhere (Ford, 2005).