Chapter 4: Constructing the Double Bind: The Discursive Framing of Gendered Images of Leadership in The Chronicle of Higher Education

For decades, it has been argued that women are underrepresented in leadership positions because they are “crowded in dead-end jobs at the bottom and exposed as tokens at the top” (Acker, 1990, p. 143; see also Kanter, 1977; and Schull, Shaw, & Kihl, 2013). To understand this phenomenon, many scholars have shifted away from the premise that women’s gendered perceptions may be the source of their own leadership limitations, to argue instead that the organization is gendered, and the resulting patterns constrain women’s aspirations and possibilities for leadership (Acker, 2006; Eddy & Cox, 2008; Iverson, 2011). Acker (1990) defined a gendered organization as a place where “advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine” (p. 146). We argue that the ways in which leadership is commonly understood, and the lenses through which leaders are perceived, may shape understanding and performance of leadership, and could produce differential effects for leaders of all genders. In this paper, we illuminate the potential of discourse theory as an analytic lens to reveal the constitutive effects of dominant gender discourses. We assert that knowledge of leadership discourses and how they operate within higher education will not only provide educational leaders with understandings of how dominant discourses shape, and may constrain, possibilities for their performance of leadership, but additionally that our use of critical/feminist discourse analysis will provide scholars with an analytic tool for advancing theory on women and leadership.