Taking on power: Women leaders in evangelical mission organizations

Abstract

Women leaders are scarce in evangelical mission organizations. Part of the reason may be gender-role stereotypes, which function very strongly in much of evangelicalism. This article presents the stories of two women who worked at executive-level leadership positions in evangelical mission organizations. Using narrative analysis and a critical feminist lens, I examine their stories to understand how these women describe their leadership and how they portray their use of power. The strength of gender-role stereotypes and evangelical gender roles appeared to define and limit the power they were able to use. As long as they stayed within prescribed norms, they experienced some success. Deviations from the gender-role stereotypes led to sanctions from their organizations. Conclusions and implications are that the stereotypes may limit women's leadership and that both women and organizations need to become aware of how these unspoken assumptions may be functioning. Recommendations for women leaders and for organizations seeking to incorporate women into leadership are offered.

Making the Invisible Visible: A Cross‐Sector Analysis of Gender‐Based Leadership Barriers

“…This may be due to gendered organizational structures (Acker, ; Ely, Foldy, & Scully, ) and essentialist views of gender embedded in the evangelical faith (Bendroth, ). The combination of organizational and religious pressure to comply with gender stereotypes may lead women to hold themselves personally responsible for organizational problems (Dzubinski, ; Scholz, ).…”

“…The evangelical mission industry has such low levels of executive women (less than 5%; W. Wilson, personal communication, September 12, 2012) that women who do lead are hard‐pressed to find women mentors. Outside their own organizations, there is little in the way of networking, mentoring, and other types of support; within their own organizations, they are typically the only woman (Dzubinski, ). In addition, the religious requirements of moral purity make it easy, even acceptable, to keep women and men strictly segregated (Dzubinski, ).…”

“…She sought to understand the types of adversity women in leadership positions in the academy faced and the meaning they made of those experiences. In the second study, Dzubinski () interviewed 12 women at executive levels of leadership in mission organizations, asking how they achieved positions of leadership and how they learned to lead. These organizations are religious nonprofit institutions based on evangelicalism, a conservative branch of protestant Christianity whose beliefs include the authority of the Bible, the centrality of Jesus, a need for personal conversion, and a desire to share the faith with others (Bendroth, ; Emerson & Smith, ).…”

“…Using Diehl's () gender‐based leadership barriers as the starting framework, we employed Patton's () content analysis methodology to examine Dzubinski's () data. Using an inductive approach, we created a classification system consisting of labels that corresponded to the a priori identified gender‐based leadership barriers and to new barriers not previously identified.…”

Portrayal vs. practice: Contemporary women’s contributions to Christian mission

“…Arrington (2010) argued that one expectation of single women missionaries was to uphold the highly gendered role expectations of their sending countries. And still today within the evangelical tradition a woman's spiritual status is often closely tied to her gendered social role, which includes being supportive of men (Dzubinski, 2015). So for single women as well as married ones, fulfilling a support-worker role rather than a direct-worker one may be the unspoken expectation from her sending organization and her colleagues.…”