The Language of Female Leadership

Citation

Holmes, J. (2010), "The Language of Female Leadership", Gender in Management, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 261-264. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542411011036446

This is an extremely readable book, and a welcome contribution to research in the areas of language, gender and leadership. While acknowledging that its centrality to my research interests may have played a part, I think that others will also find it accessible and thought‐provoking.

The book's goals are stated clearly at the outset: first, to assess whether there is in fact a distinct language of female leadership; and second, to consider how female leaders can utilise language as effectively as possible to achieve their business objectives. These goals suggest that the book has been written with two rather different audiences in mind – on the one hand, students and scholars of sociolinguists and especially language and gender, and on the other, business communication and leadership scholars and students. This results in occasional inconsistencies where the expectations and preferred framework of one audience are incompatible with those of the other, but on the whole Baxter brings off this challenging task successfully.

The book is structured around three different theoretical approaches to the analysis of language and gender which will be very familiar to sociolinguists, namely dominance, difference and discourse theories. These are applied in turn to the analysis of three different types of business organisation, each of which appears to offer a “fit” with one of the theoretical models. Two case studies provide the opportunity to examine how the discourse of different organisations plays out the underlying assumptions exposed by the analysis. And finally, Baxter provides advice for those who wish to increase the representation of female leaders in business contexts.

Throughout the first three chapters, the different theoretical positions are laid out clearly, with valuable summary tables and bullet‐pointed lists of key points. Most of the remaining chapters include interesting examples from interviews and excerpts from meetings, Similarly, helpful diagrams regularly summarise Baxter's perception of the relationship between different concepts and theoretical dimensions – though I confess to finding the pervasive triangle overly simplistic as a device at times.

As for the content, in Chapter 1, Baxter maps out her view of the field, including the economic and linguistic background to the issues she is addressing. The promise of a discussion of “culture” seems to get sidetracked and narrowed down to gender issues. She introduces key terms and concepts, and outlines the features of the male‐dominated, gender‐divided (males and females are equal but different) and gender‐multiple (gender is an important but not all‐defining feature) corporations that provide her theoretical framework. These are useful and original contributions to the discussion of research on the discourse of gender and leadership, although the latter seems impossibly utopian in the light of our New Zealand research in this area – an impression supported by Baxter's tendency to use hypothetical constructions in describing the characteristics of gender‐multiple corporations (e.g. p. 115).

Chapters 2‐4 explore each of these types of organisation in turn. Each chapter offers interesting and varied insights into the relationship between the workplace culture and the language which sustains it. For example, the negative impact of sexist language, including the power of war and sport metaphors in the workplace is discussed in Chapter 2. Potential areas of miscommunication are assessed in Chapter 3, along with the value of the concept of a gendered community of practice, while Chapter 4 provides captivating examples of the claims of some male leaders about the importance of “caring” and “open” management alongside transcripts illustrating the impressive discourse performance of some competent women leaders. In these chapters, in particular, Baxter threads her way through a wide range of disparate research with implications for the discourse of female leadership, stitching it together to present a convincing argument for the advantages that the gender‐multiple type of corporation offers as a context for nurturing able women leaders.

The two case studies draw on Baxter's own research. The first, outlined in Chapter 5, involved interviews with 20 business leaders from UK multi‐national companies. Baxter explores the relevance of Bakhtin's concept of “double‐voiced discourse”, which has been applied to language and gender research by Sheldon (1992). Baxter argues that senior women need to pay more attention to their talk at work than men do because they are constantly contending with negative stereotypes and expectations. In addition to the demands that all business leaders face in juggling transactional and relational goals, they also have to undertake a kind of “interactional shitwork” (Fishman, 1978, p. 113), i.e. additional conversational work “to sustain a credible identity as a leader”. She identifies a range of interesting “pre‐emptive linguistic strategies” which serve this purpose. This is a convincing analysis which is supported by the research of others in this area, as Baxter notes (e.g. West, 1998; Holmes, 2006; Mullany, 2007; Schnurr, 2008, though a surprising omission is Kendall, 2003).

The second case study, outlined in Chapter 6, draws on observations and recordings of a two‐day senior management meeting. As this is the only extensive example of the analysis of recorded workplace interaction in the book, it bears a lot of rhetorical weight in illustrating her claim that the gender‐multiple corporations provide a more supportive context for female leaders. After a careful description of her methodology, which draws on a range of analytical approaches, she describes and evaluates four different aspects of leadership illustrated from interactions involving one female leader, pseudonymed Jan. Though restricted to large meeting data, the analysis provides interesting material illustrating both what Baxter considers that Jan does well and where she fails to manage interactions so effectively.

This chapter concludes with a significant response to the book's first goal:

Does Jan's experience suggest there is a distinctive language of leadership? The answer is “no” to the extent that both male and female leaders skillfully integrate transactional and relational goals according to contextual factors (a finding well supported by the work of Holmes, 2006; Mullany, 2007; Schnurr, 2008).

“But in the end perhaps the answer is ‘yes’. If Jan's experience is anything to go by, then the language of female leadership is both a more proscribed and self‐regulated version of men's, but in many ways a more linguistically expert, diverse and nuanced version, finely tuned to colleagues and context” (p. 146), designed “to preempt negative evaluation in a business world that continues to be male‐dominated” (p. 169).

Thus, one could say that Baxter has her cake and eats it too, in more ways than one. Despite her earlier trenchant criticisms of the inadequacies of essentialist approaches, for instance, we are here presented with a very clear‐cut dichotomy describing what men do and what women do. This is one example where attempting to meet the needs of different audiences seems to lead to inconsistency: the analysis must not only illustrate the linguistic skill of at least this one female leader in one specific workplace context, but it must also provide the groundwork for Chapter 7, where Baxter provides advice on how to help women succeed in business.

The advice is provided both at the individual and the corporation level in a chapter which may strike some sociolinguists as overly prescriptive, and possibly too redolent of the “how to” manuals and handbooks condemned in earlier chapters. However, Baxter manages to avoid the excesses of over‐simplified accounts of gender differences, and addresses more complex and sophisticated issues, providing a number of intelligent ideas for improving the work context for able women leaders. Some seem a little idealistic in the light of my own observations (e.g. challenging unpalatably masculinist metaphors), and some could seem unacceptably defeatist or appeasing (using humour and irony to manage sexist behaviours). But, the chapter also includes insightful comment on the value of enacting authority, being polite, and using humour in “cold” and “warm” ways in order to thread an acceptable path as an effective woman leader working in an inhospitable business climate.

Baxter writes clearly and critically. There is evidence throughout that she has sifted her material carefully, and she consistently indicates what she finds useful and credible compared to claims that she considers “over the top” (p. 39), or unhelpful reinforcement of negative stereotypes (p. 33), or even evidence of unwarranted paranoia (p. 168). And while some may feel irritated that research they undertook in a different era and within different research parameters is critically analysed as if it accurately represented their current theoretical position, on the whole Baxter is fair and generous in representing and acknowledging the work of others.

The focus throughout this book is on white professional middle class workplaces, though this is not explicitly stated anywhere. As a result, it is interesting to speculate how much of what Baxter discusses would apply to blue collar contexts, an area she has herself broached elsewhere (Baxter and Wallace, 2009), or to different cultural contexts. Certainly, her gender‐multiple, rather utopian scenario resembles one of our Maori workplaces more closely that anything we have encountered in culturally mainstream organisations (Holmes et al., 2010).

Finally, I noted only one typo in this nicely produced book; but a point for publishers to take into account is the inelegant solution to the problem of accurately type‐setting transcribed excerpts. Clearly, the excerpts supplied by the author over‐ran the standard line length. Instead of being re‐numbered, however, the transcripts have been left with some “lines” stretching almost to two, which does not make for easy reading.

Overall, however, for those interested in gender and leadership, this book provides an exhilarating and rewarding excursus into a range of relevant research. Baxter provides persuasive evidence in support of her contention that the language of female leadership is distinctive, along with some very stimulating suggestions for those concerned to make current business contexts more hospitable places for women at work.