Visualising Women’s Leadership: Stereotypes and metaphors

In Chapter 1 we discussed how in spite of growing numbers of women in leading positions and leadership roles, much of the leadership and leadership development literature largely fails to reflect women’s experience and practice of leadership. Chapter 1 highlighted that much of the literature is based on studies of men leaders in hierarchical organisations. We argued that as a result of this narrow research base, dominant ideas and approaches to leadership continue to promote individualised and gendered conceptions that ignore women’s experience. Furthermore, we argued that approaches to leadership development mirror the predominant tendencies in the leadership literature and take little account of gender. Approaches are therefore presented as ‘gender neutral’, that is leadership and leadership development are promoted as being unaffected by gender (Acker, 1995). Yet, as Wajcman (1995) and Swan (2006a) argue, leadership development theorising and practice continues to promote individualistic, largely masculine and heroic understandings of leadership. In this chapter we turn our attention to the depiction of women’s leadership. We are especially interested in bringing attention to a hitherto relatively little explored area, namely what do images of women leaders – be these visual images (e.g. photographs or pictures).