A continuing challenge for organizations is the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior roles, which gained a particular prominence during the global financial crisis (GFC).The GFC has raised questions regarding the forms of leadership that allowed the crisis to happen and alternative proposals regarding how future crises might be avoided. Within this context women's leadership has been positioned as an ethical alternative to styles of masculinist leadership that led to the crisis in the first place Through a multimodal discursive analysis this article examines the socio-cultural assumptions sustaining the gendering of leadership in the popular press to critically analyse how women's leadership is represented during the GFC of 2008-2012. Highlighting the media's portrayal of women's leadership as a gendered field of activity where different forms of gender capital come into play, we identify three sets of dialectics: women as leaders and women as feminine, women as credible leaders and women as lacking in credibility, and women as victims and women as their own worst enemies. Together, the dialectics work together to form a discursive pattern framed by a male leadership model that narrates the promise of women leaders, yet the disappointment that they are not men. Our study extends understandings regarding how female and feminine forms of gender capital operate dialectically, where the media employs feminine capital to promote women's positioning as leaders yet also leverages female capital as a constraint. We propose this understanding can be of value to organizations to understand the impact and influence of discourse on efforts to promote women into leadership roles

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This article contributes to understandings of the experiential nature of leadership learning by drawing attention to the role of disruption as an organizing influence on women's leadership learning, and by generating insights for leadership teaching. Examining leadership learning as an experiential process, we present the development of a typology intended to act as a summary of literature focusing on women's experiences of leadership learning. Informed by our experiences of developing and using the typology as a teaching aid in two leadership development interventions we progress through a cycle of critical reflections to present a reflexive analysis of the typology's performative effect and how it brings into being representations of women's leadership. Moving from initial observations to deeper reflections the analysis draws attention to how disrupting pervades women's learning of leadership, thus extending our understanding of gender's influence on organizing learning experiences. The article considers how we, as educators, might forefront disrupting as a process in leadership learning interventions by re-positioning instruments, such as the typology, to problematize and deconstruct leadership learning. We conclude by proposing a reflexive process in the classroom that takes the form of a critical dialogue to enable educators and participants to de-construct their experience.