A Tendency to Essentialism? Discourses about Women’s Leadership

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to identify the women’s leadership model diffused through management literature in order to determine if there is a pre-eminence of essentialist and exclusionary principles in its sense. Through the Appraisal Theory and by analyzing a recent management literature sample, the values associated with the women’s leadership model are identified, and a conclusion about their essentialist character is reached. The initial hypothesis is that the women’s leadership model, disseminated to professional women through management literature, contains an essentialist character that reproduces gender dichotomies and the rational homo oeconomicus model by hindering gender equality and the development of egalitarian leadership models from being accomplished.