What does it take to make leadership gender equal? Studies of political leadership in a gender balanced context

In a wide variety of male-dominated political contexts, research has found evidence of gender stereotypes and masculine coded leadership ideals, which undermine women’s perceived suitability as well as their authority as top political leaders.

Yet, knowledge is lacking on how and under what conditions political leadership ideals become less masculine-coded, and how that would affect women leaders in practice.

Despite women’s increasing political representation worldwide, political leadership and gender has to date mostly been studied in heavily male-dominated contexts.

Knowledge thus needs to be updated on leadership ideals and the conditions facing women political leaders in more gender-balanced contexts.

The proposed four-year project contributes to filling this gap through a series of studies on leadership ideals and conditions for exercising leadership in Swedish politics, using interviews and surveys with politicians, a survey experiment with citizens, and quantitative text analysis of parliamentary instruments for scrutiny of ministers.

Taking existing theory as our starting point, we examine how leadership ideals are constructed in a gender balanced context and what implications that has for men’s and women’s chances to exercise leadership in practice.

The project contributes knowledge about a largely unstudied question of high relevance for democracy: to what extent do conditions for women improve as male dominance in politics decreases.