This 53-page working paper details the research and conclusions of Ely, Ibarra & Kolb, professors from Insead Business School. It begins like the Kings College London paper with a review of the current barriers and facilitators to women’s careers. The researchers then provide recommendations for designing and delivering Women’s Leadership Programmes (WLPs). It unpacks the shortfalls of programme design that reflect patriarchal systems and uses over a decade of insights to suggest how WLPs should be conducted to achieve success for women and their employers.
This paper explores how Second Generation Bias (SGB) impacts the identity of women leaders. It reviews traditional leadership topics like leading change and negotiating, as well as more recent 360 feedback, networking and reframing these subjects in the context of women becoming senior leaders. It makes a case for women-only WLPs based on the researcher’s experience designing and delivering 50+ programmes over ten years. The approach is grounded in gender and leadership theory, which avoids victimising and blaming women and instead focuses on cultivating a sense of agency in women.
Women are underrepresented in senior leadership positions across the globe and continue to face SGB. Failed approaches to leadership programmes for women include those that avoid unpacking the implications of gender on leadership and condense women into existing leadership programmes that have already been delivered to men. The ‘fix the women’ approach (Ely & Meyerson, 2000) also fails despite using a gendered lens, as it assumes women not having ‘male skills’ is the problem.
Developing leadership skills is intrinsically linked to constructing a leader identity, for example, confidently conveying a sense of purpose to others so that they view you as a leader and avoid the Double Bind. Women of Asian, Latin and African American heritage are all subject to racial stereotypes on top of gender, further distancing from leadership (Giscombe & Mattis, 2002) (Bell & Nkomo, 2001).
To find out more about the key concepts referenced in this summary, visit:
Second Generational Bias (SGB)
To read more research summaries on women’s development in the workplace, visit:
Women’s Progression in the Workplace Summary
Click here to learn more about Women’s Development Programmes: 6 Lessons from Designing Women’s Development Programmes
Click here to learn more about Inclusive Leadership: Intro to Developing Inclusive Leaders