Conducted as part of a doctoral project, this study aims to develop an in-depth understanding of how women leaders experience and interpret their daily leadership practices. By illuminating women leaders' experiences, the study seeks to advance knowledge of the conditions that shape leadership and thereby contribute to a more equal and sustainable working life.
Research on women’s leadership has often employed a problem-based stance to address issues of inequality and gendered norms in organisations. However, extant leadership literature shows that a less common positioning involves enquiring into how women enact and make sense of leadership—on their own terms. Giving analytic priority and voice to women leaders’ first-person experiences matters for moving beyond disadvantage alone, and for surfacing subjective dimensions of reflexivity and meaning-making, thus furthering a more holistic and ‘experience-near’ understanding of women’s leadership.
Project period: 2026-03-01 – 2028-06-15
Umeå School of Business, Economics and Statistics, Faculty of Social Sciences
Project members
Research on women’s leadership has often employed a barrier-oriented or problem-based stance as its primary framing, addressing issues of inequality and gendered norms in organisational life. However, extant women’s leadership literature shows that a less common positioning involves explicitly enquiring into how women enact and make sense of their everyday leadership practices—on their own terms. Giving analytic priority and voice to women leaders’ first-person experiences matters for moving beyond women’s disadvantage alone, and for surfacing (inter)subjective dimensions of reflexivity and meaning-making, thus furthering a more holistic and ‘experience-near’ understanding of women’s leadership.
Corporate organisations are naturally rife with pressures of expectation and status, set against a steady backdrop of explicitly and implicitly enacted gendered norms and power dynamics. Given the demands and performance goals embedded in leadership in the business world, the corporate context provides a relevant setting for adopting a richly nuanced approach to studying how women lead in real life.
Drawing on theories of practice and identity work, the study examines how leadership and leader identities, as relationally conditioned, are continuously (re)constructed amid the myriad ambiguities and contradictory demands integral to gendered organisational work. Through in-depth interviews and a phenomenological exploration of women in senior leadership, the ways in which they reflexively manage relational tensions are analysed, including the challenges and opportunities involved, and how this work influences their leadership practices.
