Constructing Women’s Leadership Representation in the UK Press During a Time of Financial Crisis: Gender capitals and dialectical tensions

Abstract

A continuing challenge for organizations is the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior roles, which gained a particular prominence during the global financial crisis (GFC).The GFC has raised questions regarding the forms of leadership that allowed the crisis to happen and alternative proposals regarding how future crises might be avoided. Within this context women's leadership has been positioned as an ethical alternative to styles of masculinist leadership that led to the crisis in the first place Through a multimodal discursive analysis this article examines the socio-cultural assumptions sustaining the gendering of leadership in the popular press to critically analyse how women's leadership is represented during the GFC of 2008-2012. Highlighting the media's portrayal of women's leadership as a gendered field of activity where different forms of gender capital come into play, we identify three sets of dialectics: women as leaders and women as feminine, women as credible leaders and women as lacking in credibility, and women as victims and women as their own worst enemies. Together, the dialectics work together to form a discursive pattern framed by a male leadership model that narrates the promise of women leaders, yet the disappointment that they are not men. Our study extends understandings regarding how female and feminine forms of gender capital operate dialectically, where the media employs feminine capital to promote women's positioning as leaders yet also leverages female capital as a constraint. We propose this understanding can be of value to organizations to understand the impact and influence of discourse on efforts to promote women into leadership roles

Economies of visibility as a moderator of feminism: ‘Never mind Brexit. Who won Legs‐it!’

“…We illustrate how the British media insist upon femininity from women leaders, demonstrated through their appearance; how they are sexualized and infantilized; how their power and potential for feminism is diffused and moderated; and how women leaders are set up in competition and opposition with each other. In doing so we also advance research into how UK media constructs women as out of place as political leaders (e.g., Mavin, Bryans, & Cunningham, ; Elliott & Stead, ; Pullen & Taska, ).…”

“…Media constructions of UK women political leaders have been reported as gendered and powerful in messaging ‘women's (un)acceptability as leaders against embedded stereotypes … trivializing their contribution and detracting from their credibility as leaders’ (Mavin, Bryans, & Cunningham, , p. 550). This type of research is fairly recent in Gender and Organization Studies (GOS) (see Elliott & Stead, ) but the literature examining women's representation more broadly in the media (e.g., Gill, ; Tuchman, ), including representations of feminism (Gill, ; Jaworska & Krishnamurthy, ), are more extensive. The relative invisibility of women leaders featured in the media and the biased reporting of women's role in public life (e.g., Global Media Monitoring Project, ; Women's Media Center, ), takes place in a context where those women who feature in the media are hyper‐visible; their bodies are seen as commodities and they face personal criticism and sexist and gendered representations, rather than a focus on legitimacy and credibility.…”

“…We apply Elliott & Stead's () methodological framework to analyse economies of visibility and how this moderates feminism through a discursive event. The analysis encompasses responses (communicated through traditional and social media) to the original text's representation of the ‘Sturgeon–May’ meeting.…”

“…In stage one, we examined the arguments, viewpoints and interests (Hellgren et al, ; Elliott & Stead, ) in media reports of the ‘Sturgeon–May’ meeting. Studying how a text lays claim to different representations helps to make explicit the reproduction of discourses, including representations of feminism in the media.…”

“…The analysis focuses upon media reporting of, and audience responses to, the meeting between the political leaders. A multimodal media discourse analytic approach is adopted to recognize the media's role in influencing how individuals, and in turn organizations, make sense of and give sense to women as leaders (Elliott & Stead, ; Hellgren et al, ).…”