Centre for Organisations and Society Seminar with Dr Suze Wilson (Massey University, New Zealand)

Women’s leadership and the problem of misogyny: mapping the terrain

An extensive literature has developed over many decades charting various barriers to women’s leadership, but only rarely does this address the problem of misogyny (for exceptions see[1]). Yet women in public life face a constant barrage of gendered abuse, harassment and threats, which for women of colour is further compounded by racism. There is also growing evidence linking misogyny to violent extremism[2]. To help advance our understanding of how misogyny affects women’s leadership, and how women leaders resist such efforts, in this presentation I report on the findings emerging from 2 projects that are exploring these issues.

Both draw on Kate Manne’s[3] recent re-thinking of misogyny. She rejects its traditional conception as a generalised hatred of women and instead conceives of it as a policing function of patriarchy. Misogyny by this account constitutes the motive force for hostile actions that seek to ensure women comply with patriarchal expectations or are punished if they fail to do so. It is therefore mobilized to ensure women give what patriarchy expects of them and cannot have or take that which patriarchy deems unsuitable for them. Leadership, and the power and status that typically confers, is something which patriarchy seeks to preserve for men, hence women leaders are strategically important targets for misogynistic efforts. 

The presentation will discuss, firstly, a case study examining the misogyny that targeted Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of Aotearoa. My collaborator Dr Danielle Selman-Jones and I trace how hostility toward Ardern’s leadership started from a foundation in which ‘everyday sexism’ was both pervasive and normalized, while contemptuous, hateful and aggressive misogyny, both online and offline, became increasingly influential over time, gradually undermining her leadership. From this we advance the novel concept of a ‘glass cage’ to characterize a dynamic whereby sexism and misogyny animate sustained intensive surveillance, hostile evaluation and efforts to impede a woman leader’s exercise of agency, the intent and effect of which is to incrementally and cumulatively erode her authority, credibility and capacity to lead. We identify the strategies, tropes and tactics that were deployed to construct these effects and suggest other ‘glass cage’ examples, to illustrate the explanatory reach and potential of this concept.

Secondly, I report the findings emerging from a Marsden Fund[4] project that is mapping the affective and embodied experiences of misogyny reported to us by women exercising formal or informal leadership in politics, journalism and academia. Undertaken in collaboration with Professors Sarah Riley, Rochelle Stewart-Withers and Dr Tracey Nicholls, we are tracing how misogynistic power works in and through the body, and how embodied and affective practices can resist and ameliorate the ongoing effects of such incursions if otherwise left unchallenged. We report on the affective experience of misogyny, and resistance to it, locating how and where it imposes its hostile force in the bodies and feelings of those its targets, so as to better explain the ‘cultural politics’ of the ‘sticky’ emotions it elicits[5]. We also, more prosaically, identify how employers of these women act, or fail to act, in ways that often enable the continuation of misogynistic abuse and harassment, which we conceptualise as institutionalised misogyny by act and omission.  

About the presenter:

Suze Wilson, PhD, Fellow and Director of the International Leadership Association, is an Associate Professor at Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa, Massey University, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she researches leadership and teaches on this topic and issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Her research examines issues of power, identity, gender, ethics, discourse, practice/s, context, character, communication, embodiment, affect and crisis as they pertain to leadership and its development, as well as the history of leadership thought, informed by Foucauldian, feminist, historiographic and arts-based methods of inquiry. Her doctoral thesis won the Jablin Dissertation Award in 2014, awarded by the International Leadership Association and the Jepson School of Leadership Studies and was also joint winner of the 2014 Best Critical Thesis Award, given by the Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management. Her books include Thinking differently about leadership (2016); Revitalising leadership: Putting theory and practice into context (2018), co-written with Stephen Cummings, Brad Jackson and Sarah Proctor-Thomson; After leadership (2019), co-edited with Brigid Carroll and Josh Firth; and, The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies (2024), co-edited with David Knights, Helena Liu and Owain Smolović-Jones. Her work has appeared in journals such as Organizational Dynamics, Organization, the Journal of Business Ethics, Leadership, Political Science, the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies and Culture and Organization. She also regularly publishes op-ed analyses with The Conversation. She is an Associate Editor for the journal Leadership, co-lead of a project which won a prestigious Marsden Fund grant in 2023, and the recipient of a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham, UK, to be taken in 2025.

References

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

Every-Palmer, S., Hansby, O., & Barry-Walsh, J. (2024). Stalking, harassment, gendered abuse, and violence towards politicians in the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery era. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1357907 

Gilmore, S., Harding, N., & Ford, J. (2024) Fifty years of fighting sex discrimination: Undermining entrenched misogynies through recognition and everyday resistance. Human Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267241279216 

Jankowicz, N., Gomez-O'Keefe, I., Hoffman, L., & Vidal Becker, A. (2024). It's everyone's problem: Mainstreaming responses to technology-facilitated gender-based violence.

Jankowicz, N., Hunchak, J., Pavliuc, A., Davies, C., Pierson, S., & Kaufmann, Z. (2021). Malign creativity: How gender, sex, and lies are weaponized against women online. The Wilson Center.

Madden, S., Janoske, M., Briones Winkler, R., & Edgar, A. N. (2018). Mediated misogynoir: Intersecting race and gender in online harassment. In J. R. Vickery & T. Everbach (Eds.), Mediating misogyny: Gender, technology, and harassment (pp. 71-90). Springer https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72917-6_4 

Manne, K. (2018). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press.

McCarthy, L., & Taylor, S. (2024). Misogyny and organization studies. Organization Studies, 45(3), 457-473. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406231213964 

O’Hanlon, R., Altice, F. L., Kumar, N., Lee, R. K. W., LaViolette, J., Mark, G., Papakyriakopoulos, O., Saha, K., & De Choudhury, M. (2024). Misogynistic extremism: A scoping review. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 25(2), 1219-1234-1234. https://doi.org/10.1177/152483802311760 

Posetti, J., Aboulez, N., Bontcheva, K., Harrison, J., & Waisbord, S. (2020). Online violence against women journalists: A global snapshot of incidence and impacts.

Posetti, J., & Shabbir, N. (2022). The chilling: A global study of online violence against women journalists

[1] McCarthy & Taylor, 2024; Gilmore, Harding & Ford, 2024

[2] Every-Palmer et al, 2024; Jankowicz et al, 2021, 2024; Madden et al, 2018; O’Hanlon et al, 2024; Posetti et al, 2020; Posetti & Shabbir, 2022

[3] Manne (2018)

[4] https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/ 

[5] Ahmed, 2004