Chapter 1: Overview: Feminist Theories of Leadership

Lisa Pace Vetter

Overview: Feminist theories of leadership It might seem odd to begin an encyclopedia about gender and leadership by claiming that there are no feminist theories of leadership. Yet an extensive study of feminist theory scholarship reveals an alarming dearth of theoretical analysis of women as leaders. What appears instead is a substantive amount of work on feminist theories of power, autonomy, citizenship, representation, and ethics, which are related to but not simply synonymous with feminist leadership. The field of women and politics, which is dominated primarily by political scientists, has produced a large body of scholarship on women leaders, but these studies approach their subjects from a largely empirical or observational point of view. Popular sources on female leaders abound, but they are primarily autobiographical or biographical in nature. As such, these entertaining and often illuminating works are filled with anecdotal and historical detail but are relatively theory-thin. Leadership theory ...

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