Purpose
This paper aims to present a model describing how women enact executive leadership, taking into account gendered organizational patterns that may constrain women to perform leadership in context-specific ways.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper discusses gendered organizations, role congruity theory and organizational culture and work context. These strands of theory are interwoven to construct a model describing ways in which executive-level women are constrained to self-monitor based on context.
Findings
The pressure on women to conform to an organization’s executive leadership culture is enormous. Executive women in strongly male-normed executive leadership contexts must exercise strong gendered self-constraint to break through the glass ceiling. Women in strongly male-normed contexts using lessened gendered self-constraint may encounter a glass cliff. Women in gender-diverse-normed contexts may still operate using strong gendered self-constraint due to internalized gender scripts. Only in gender-diverse-normed contexts with lessened gendered-self-restraint can executive women operate from their authentic selves.
Practical implications
Organizational leaders should examine their leadership culture to determine levels of pressure on women to act with gendered self-constraint and to work toward creating change. Women may use the model to make strategic choices regarding whether or how much to self-monitor based on their career aspirations and life goals.
Originality/value
Little has been written on male-normed and gender-diverse-normed contexts as a marker for how executive-level women perform leadership. This paper offers a model describing how different contexts constrain women to behave in specific, gendered ways.
This study considers the effects of electoral system structure on women's representation in national legislatures. Research done in Western Europe finds women's representation is positively affected by party magnitude; tests for similar effects in Costa Rica are done and confirm this hypothesis. The effects of electoral thresholds are also considered. The Costa Rican electoral threshold increases disproportionality and enhances the likelihood of producing parliamentary majorities, as expected. Moving beyond these traditional findings, the threshold also has a positive effect on the descriptive representativeness of the legislature by increasing party magnitudes and thereby increasing the representation of women. The study ends by suggesting the electoral studies field needs to expand its evaluation criteria to not only consider representativeness in terms of reflecting party support, but also consider representativeness in terms of accurately mirroring society at large, that is, descriptive representation.
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