Overcoming barriers to women's workplace leadership: insights from the interaction of formal and informal support mechanisms in trade unions

• Author: Robert Perrett,Mark Dean
• Date: 01 May 2020
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12287

Overcoming barriers to women’s workplace

leadership: insights from the interaction of

formal and informal support mechanisms in

trade unions

Mark Dean*and Robert Perrett

ABSTRACT

Women face gendered barriers to union leadership. In-depth interviews with UK and

Australian female senior trade union leaders investigated how mentoring strategies

can help women overcome barriers to leadership. Formal mentoring is most impor-

tant, but the interaction of mentoring and informal support networks bolsters gender

equality and workplace democracy.

1 INTRODUCTION

Women experience a disproportionate share of power in the workplace despite signif-

icant historical gains. Eagly and Carli (2003a) have noted recent instances of social

and cultural progressions that improve the position of women in the workplace, sug-

gesting that organisations capture symbols of progress by appointing women in key

leadership positions. But what is meant by leadership and how can we understand

its role in driving social and cultural progress? Gallos and Heifetz (2008: 3–4) define

leadership as an ongoing process of building and sustaining relationships in the work-

place through a range of multidimensional skills, as a process that is successful when a

leadership style is characterised by a deep knowledge of how to relate to people, orga-

nisations, tasks and processes, their selves and others. Ostensibly, the goal of leader-

ship is to direct the development and growth of an organisation and its business.

However, scholars note that women are disadvantaged as leaders because despite

deploying these traits in ‘feminine’leadership styles that is advantageous to equitable

workplace changes, established gender biases often limit the leadership efficacy of

women (Eagly and Carli, 2003b). Entrenched favouritism of masculine traits in lead-

ership must be addressed and overcome, but a systemic approach is needed.

This article investigates strategies women in two public sector trade unions, one in

Wales and one in South Australia (SA), employ to overcome gendered barriers to

women’s leadership in the workplace and embed notions of organisational leadership.

These regions were chosen because they share a range of structural economic

❒Mark Dean, Research Associate, Australian Industrial Transformation Institute, Flinders University of

South Australia, Adelaide, SA Australia and Robert Perrett, CEO at HR Consultancy and Performance

Research, London, UK. Correspondence should be addressed to Mark Dean, Research Associate,

Australian Industrial Transformation Institute, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA,

Australia.

Email: mark.bernard.dean@gmail.com

Industrial Relations Journal 51:3, 169–184

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

similarities, including postwar legacies of heavy industry and subsequent

deindustrialisation in the global era with growth in services employment. Both re-

gions have a history of ‘traditional’(i.e. ‘masculine’) work, likely to have influenced

local social–institutional norms and shaped the experiences of women in their unions.

Trade unions are, nominally, institutions of participatory democracy. Peetz and

Pocock (2009: 625) state that employees ‘cannot have true power in the workplace

if they do not also have power and effective voice in the union’. Hence, unions em-

body potential for positive structural change manifested in collective forms of action

to democratise power in organisations. Union leadership should reflect the gains

made by women in the workplace given unions’position at the forefront of

campaigning for gender equality and the removal of broader societal barriers that

hinder women’s development into positions of power (Ledwith, 2012). Action in the

collective political sense is an important function of trade unions, and strategies to en-

hance the leadership of women within these democratic organisations can help to

bring fairness to gendered workplaces. We conceptualise leadership as an

organisational trait and an institutional capacity rather than a set of traits possessed

by an individual (O’Toole in Gallos and Heifetz, 2008: 53). This presents an alterna-

tive approach to a narrow view of merit-based attempts to create progressive change

that do not address the systemic disadvantages women experience.

Our research question asks how formal mentoring mechanisms interact with sup-

port networks within unions to help women overcome gendered barriers to leadership

and subsequently to development of collectivised participation in decision-making.

Although we focus on organisations at the forefront of democratically driven change,

the dominant culture within organisations throughout society must be understood as

the expression of forms of institutionalised power that often disadvantage women.

Given clear differences between the mechanisms exhibited in each case-study, we ex-

plore whether combining ‘formal’mentoring and ‘informal’support networks within

unions produces successful strategies for developing gender-based leadership propor-

tionality within workplaces.

The article is organised into five parts. First, we review the broader literature on

barriers to women’s workplace leadership. Within this literature, we situate more spe-

cifically the barriers women face to leadership in trade unions. Second, we detail our

methodological approach to a comparative case-study that asks how the interaction

of formal and informal support networks increases women’s leadership in trade

unions. Third, we present key findings from interviews relating to the case studies;

and fourth, we discuss our gained insights into the relationship between formal

mentoring and informal networks. Part five concludes with reflections and research

directions beyond unions to investigate strategies for overcoming barriers to women’s

leadership.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

Masculinised culture is embedded in many organisational settings, producing barriers

to women’s presence in positions of leadership. A review of recent literature identifies

barriers stemming from masculine leadership traits like risk-taking, arrogance and

dominance across a range of industries, including in higher education (Carvalho

and Diogo, 2018; Fitzgerald, 2018), in hospitality and tourism management (Reming-

ton and Kitterlin-Lynch, 2018), in the not-for-profit sector (Xie and Pang, 2018) and

in healthcare, academia and business sectors (Kalaitzi et al., 2017). Even in industries

170 Mark Dean and Robert Perrett

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd