Women & Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Change (review)

Women & Leadership is an edited volume consisting of 17 chapters authored by a wide range of authors, most of whom are academics, although a few represent the corporate world or the federal government. Classifying the chapters into four parts or main topics, the editors have chosen to present women and leadership in terms of (a) gender differences and stereotypes; (b) women leaders in the context of politics; (c) redefinitions of leadership in terms of authority, authenticity, and power; and (d) redefinitions of the problem of so few women leaders and the presentation of new solutions. The book takes a broad view of women’s leadership in all kinds of settings, including the corporate world, government, and, to a far lesser extent, academe. While most of the chapters focus on leadership within the United States, one chapter discusses women leaders in Iran and Afghanistan (Pippa Norris’s “Opening the Door: Women Leaders and Constitution Building in Iran and Afghanistan”) and another looks at the percentage of women in parliament in countries across the world (Drude Dahlerup’s “Will Gender Balance in Politics Come by Itself?”). Also, Anita Hill looks at women judges, both in Canada and in the United States in her chapter titled “What Difference Will Women Judges Make?”

The subtitle of this book immediately raises a question: What is meant by “the state of play”? The editors of the book provide an oblique answer to this question in their introduction. In this chapter Kellerman and Rhode start from the premise that the “underrepresentation” (p. 4) of women leaders is a problem in society, both in this country and in others. After documenting this underrep-resentation, they explore possible reasons for it, including women’s choice to focus on home and family rather than a career, at least one at a high level. Yet this “choice” is often influenced by gender stereotypes about women’s roles, gender bias in hiring, and workplaces and policies geared to worlds in which men work outside the home while women stay home as caregivers. Believing that these various “gender inequalities” (p. 16) are detrimental to society, the authors advocate for change “on the individual, institutional, and societal levels” (p. 20) and suggest various strategies on each of these levels. Interestingly, the first individual strategy they recommend is self-awareness, also very much advocated in Madsen’s (2008) book about women presidents of colleges and universities. In fact, much of the advice offered in this section is the same advice proffered by the 10 women presidents interviewed by Madsen. However, going beyond Madsen’s focus on what individual women can and should do to become leaders, Kellerman and Rhode also delineate some approaches organizations can take and some societal policy changes that need to be made. For example, education as an institution is challenged to increase its “efforts to address the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles” (p. 35). Because of its big picture look at the issue of women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles, this chapter provides an ideal introduction to the book’s 17 chapters.

One chapter of particular interest to me, given that I read this book during the 2008 Democratic primaries, was the chapter “She’s the Candidate! A Woman for President” by Ruth B. Mandel. Mandel traces the long history of women as presidential candidates, typically for third parties (e.g., Victoria Woohull in 1872), but occasionally and far more recently for the Democratic (e.g., Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and Carol Mosely Braun in 2000) and Republican (e.g., Elizabeth Dole in 2000) primaries. The likelihood of Hillary Clinton being nominated is raised, with the comment that “she does not run with the organization, structural, and financial disadvantages of the women who proceeded her” (p. 302).

Of particular interest to those in academe would be the documentation of the limited leadership roles women play in higher education...