Introduction

This book is about women’s leadership. It has developed as a response to some broad areas of interest. What are women’s experiences of becoming leaders? How do these experiences inform how we understand leadership? What do women’s experiences of becoming leaders tell us about how women learn leadership? What implications does this have for the development of women leaders? More specifically however, this book has developed as a result of one particular question. In developing our research around women’s leadership, in presenting ideas at conferences, in talking to groups of students we were more often than not asked the question; why focus on women and leadership? While we often queried why we were asked this question when our male colleagues were not asked similar questions about their studies that focused on male leaders, we came to use this question as a keystone in our discussions. Before anyone else during our presentations could ask the question, we began to start by saying, ‘why focus on women and leadership?’ So while our short answer is ‘why not’ and to thereby invite discussion, our long answer is that this focus is indeed purposeful and important for the following reasons: a paucity of critical work on women’s leadership;