Through the Labyrinth: The Truth about How Women Become Leaders

Citation

Murphy, A. (2009), "Through the Labyrinth: The Truth about How Women Become Leaders", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 167-182. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730910935800

In the preface, the authors describe the book as the outcome of a long intellectual journey around the topics of gender and leadership, and around women's access to powerful positions in organisations. They describe themselves as psychologists who draw on the perspectives of economics, sociology, anthropology, social science and organisational management, with an underpinning commitment to promote gender equality and improvement in the status of women.

The authors claim to have worked hard at making the book accessible and interesting to readers from context other that the socials sciences, and indeed the one‐hundred pages of notes, references and indices in very small font leave the earlier eleven chapters free to be accessible for reading without clutter. Indeed it is a very readable book, especially if you work in the US or in a very similar western style context of economic development, technological work patterns and cultural orientation. Books such as this, which are rooted in local worldviews and local contexts, using local examples and references, do not always travel well across the globe. Nonetheless, this book is of sufficient depth and breadth in its content to be a considerable contribution to the field generally and to scholars interested in cross‐cultural and global comparisons.

The metaphor of the labyrinth is drawn upon to shape both the themes and the chapter content with its use as a term justified early on as a better and more contemporary term than concrete walls or glass ceilings. It is a good term and a useful motif.

The 11 chapters are structured as responses to the question in the title of each. Some of the more generic chapters interested me as a European reader more that the chapters that concentrate on US contexts and US data. The third chapter asks if men are natural leaders and then answers the question in relation to the question, and by inference the question about women as natural leaders. The section on the meta theory of big personality types and their impact on achieving power and leadership in relation to gender is both engaging and provocative. Chapter eight asks if women lead differently to men, with chapter nine focusing on how organisations compromise the potential of women to achieve power positions and become powerful leaders. The book promises meta theory and meta analysis in its approach to the content of the chapters, and it delivers. Perhaps the most intriguing chapter is the one that answers the question: how do women find their way out of the labyrinth? In response it offers two main principles:

1. 1.

   Blend agency with communion.

2. 2.

   Build social capital.

It seems obvious, but is it easy to do?

The final chapter looks at the future for women in organisations in relation to their promotion to powerful positions using further meta analysis on a continuum from the psychology of prejudice, through more social acceptability, towards gender equality.

This very readable and entertaining book is interesting to read against the backdrop of events in the US since its publication in 2007, especially in the context of the economic downturn, the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the race for nomination as a presidency candidate, and the unexpected nomination of Sarah Palin as a vice‐presidency candidate. The juxtaposition of these two very different women in a power race would have given the authors considerable data for analysis in relation to conceptualisations of labyrinths, walls and ceilings, worldviews and value systems, as well as considerable data in relation to casting gender as a unitary concept that unites females biologically. As a reader I did not find the book particularly feminist, though it does distinguish data along gender lines among others. Perhaps this is an aspect of the book which will intrigue readers and that will add to its durability as a work of scholarship that is of its time and of its place written by female psychologists in the US. The term labyrinth used in this way is also likely to endure and to be found again in follow‐on meta analytical frameworks in different contexts. A definite good read to be recommended.