‘Female Heroes’: Celebrity Executives as Postfeminist Role Models

Abstract

This paper explores the significance of contemporary celebrity businesswomen as role models for women aspiring to leadership in business. We explore the kind of gendered ideals they model and promote to women through their autobiographical narratives, and analyse how these ideals map against a contemporary postfeminist sensibility to further understand the potential of these role models to redress the under-representation of women in management and leadership. Our findings show that celebrity businesswomen present a role model that we call the 'female hero', a figure characterized by 3Cs: confidence to jump over gendered barriers; control in managing these barriers; and courage to push through them. We argue that the 'female hero' role model is deeply embedded in the contemporary postfeminist sensibility; it offers exclusively individualized solutions to inequality by calling on women to change themselves to succeed, and therefore has limited capacity to challenge the current gendered status quo in management and leadership. The paper contributes to current literature on role models by generating a more differentiated and socially situated understanding of distant female role models in business and extending our understanding of their potential to generate sustainable and long-term change in advancing gendered change in management and leadership.

The ‘new industrial man’ as unhero: Doing postfeminist masculinities in an Italian pharmacological research centre

“…Critical scholars (e.g., Adamson & Kelan, ; Gill, ) argue that postfeminist discourses, in advocating empowerment, individualism, choice and self‐discipline, tend to silence structural inequalities and cultural influence and ‘[depoliticize] many of the fundamental issues advanced by […] feminism’ (Rosenfelt & Stacey, , p. 78). The analysis that follows builds on this critique and shows how postfeminist discourses that embed tensions associated to patriarchal expectations, entangled with current cultural changes (e.g., men as new fathers, non‐winners — neither breadwinners etc.…”

“…Critical scholars (e.g., Adamson & Kelan, 2018;Gill, 2017) argue that postfeminist discourses, in advocating empowerment, individualism, choice and self-discipline, tend to silence structural inequalities and cultural influence and '[depoliticize] many of the fundamental issues advanced by […] feminism' (Rosenfelt & Stacey, 1987, p. 78).…”

Transnational business feminism: Exporting feminism in the global economy

“…For instance, Gill and Orgad () critique the so‐called confidence culture of business feminism for the ways it obscures structural inequalities by framing male dominance as a problem of women's self‐regulation. Similarly, Adamson and Kelan () critique the elevation of contemporary women CEOs as postfeminist role models equipped with the requisite confidence, control and courage to overcome any barrier. Absent from these constructions of the source of inequality are any references to institutional transformation or social justice (Farris & Rottenberg, ).…”

Introduction to special issue: Exploring the emergence of moderate feminism(s) in contemporary organizations

“…These have given conceptual shape to the scholarly work that has investigated gendered inequalities within organizations over the past 40 years (Calás Smircich, & Holvino, ). However, engagement with the notion of postfeminism (e.g., Adamson, ; Adamson & Kelan, ; Kelan, ; Lewis, ; Lewis & Simpson, ; Lewis et al, ) within the field of Gender and Organization Studies has made clear that it should not be treated as a theoretical identification. Instead, approaching postfeminism as a critical concept understood in terms of a discursive formation, allows us to explore the persistence of gendered disparities within organizational contexts while also continually interrogating and tracking its changing form (Gill, ; Gill, Kelan, & Scharff, ; Lewis, ; Lewis, Benschop, & Simpson, ).…”