‘I was completely oblivious to gender’: an exploration of how women in STEMM navigate leadership in a neoliberal, post-feminist context

ABSTRACT

Women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) fields worldwide, particularly in leadership positions. We explore this phenomenon by examining the leadership experiences of 25 women who were actively seeking to enhance their leadership capacities in STEMM fields from five countries in the Global North. We argue that women in this study seemed to be caught in an ‘ideological dilemma’ between recognizing sexism and gender bias in their organizational contexts and seeing their organizations as gender neutral. We argue that a post-feminist climate and a neoliberal ethic of meritocracy in science render inequality difficult to articulate and address. Considering this dilemma through the lens of ‘cruel optimism’, we suggest that women are problematically bound to a fantasy of success in STEMM in which leadership is attainable through arduous effort.

Abbreviation: STEMM; Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine

KEYWORDS:

• Cruel optimism
• gender
• leadership
• neoliberalism
• post-feminism
• sexism
• STEMM

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meredith Nash

Meredith Nash is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania in Australia. Her research broadly examines the depth and character of gender-based inequalities. She is the author of Making Postmodern Mothers: Pregnant Embodiment, Baby Bumps, and Body Image (2012, Palgrave), the editor of Reframing Reproduction: Conceiving Gendered Experiences (2014, Palgrave) and the co-editor of Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls: Feminism, Postfeminism, Authenticity and Gendered Performance in Contemporary Television (2017, Palgrave).

Robyn Moore

Robyn Moore is a researcher in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. Robyn employs an intersectional lens to examine normalized privilege and disadvantage, particularly in regard to race and gender.