This paper is based on qualitative research on commuting and women's everyday lives. In the project 'Re-reading time-geography from a feminist perspective', labour force mobility is an important way of analysing women's time-space use and identifying the constraints experienced when organising everyday life. We claim that time-geography provides a useful set of analytical tools that successfully collaborate with social science theory such as gender studies. Timegeography has been questioned by feminists as well as others. However, we argue that timegeography could provide gender studies with a close, empathic and micro-levelled interventional approach that makes obstacles and constraints due to spatio-temporal conditions visible and thereby changeable. In this paper we use results from previous research to prove that timegeography is an approach with several sets of useful concepts that describe and analyse women's everyday struggles and possibilities in an era in which mobility and transport have become undisputed factors of everyday life. In order to do this, time-geography needs to be read from a gendered standpoint. Although we are still in the formative stages of this re-reading of original texts and the formation of additional sets of concepts, the indications are that this work is worth pursuing and expanding.
Purpose
This paper aims to reveal gendered leadership constructs that hinder a competency-based view of leadership in Swedish-based global companies and the implications for leadership recruitment and development to top management positions.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews, which have been analyzed using a gender analytic framework to identify how senior management, Human resource management and leadership trainees are discussing leadership and career development.
Findings
Three themes were identified as clouding the issue of gender-equal leadership practices thereby creating an opaque gendered lens of who is defined as eligible for leadership positions. The three themes were: symbols as gendered images, counting heads – preserving the existing system and illusive gender inclusion.
Research limitations/implications
Recruitment practices were identified as contributors to homosocial practices that perpetuate male-dominated leadership representation. However, specific recruitment practices were not fully explored.
Practical implications
The potential use of gender equality as a sustainable management practice for competitive organizations to recruit and develop talented people.
Social implications
To create resilient and gender-equal recruitment and leadership development practices.
Originality/value
This research offers an original perspective on gender representation at the senior management level in global companies by revealing gendered leadership constructs in the leadership recruitment and development process as antecedents to unequal gender representation in senior management positions.
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